FOOTNOTES:
[1] This was pure prophecy. Captain, as he was then, Alexander was credited with a taste for strange and Muscovitish headgear, which he possibly gratified later as a general commanding weird armies in Poland during the spasms of reconstruction that followed the Armistice.
[2] In those peaceful days when the Division was “fattening” for the fight, Greer had kept a sympathetic eye on Sassoon, who had gone down very sick some time before Greer came to command the 2nd Battalion, and was convalescing in the Entrenching Battalion where his heart was not. Greer, who had a keen eye for good officers, said of him: “He writes me pitiful letters protesting that he is now completely fit, and asking that he should be allowed to come up to this Battalion.... He is a stout-hearted savage, and a life-sentence with the Entrenching Battalion would certainly be an awful prospect.” So Sassoon was rescued, and Greer’s faith in his “stout-hearted savage” abundantly justified.
[3] On this basis, as is noted in the history of the 1st Battalion, a Fourth Brigade of the Guards Division was created by the lopped off battalions: viz., the 4th Grenadiers, 3rd Coldstream, and 2nd Irish Guards, which as a brigade was attached to the thirty-first Division, Thirteenth Corps (Major-General Sir Charles Fergusson).
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences within the text and consultation of external sources.
Some hyphens in words have been silently removed, some added, when a predominant preference was found in the original book.
Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text, and inconsistent or archaic usage, have been retained.
[Pg 14]: ‘Sailly-Lebourse’ replaced by ‘Sailly-Labourse’.
[Pg 107]: ‘the Divison returned’ replaced by ‘the Division returned’.
[Pg 224]: ‘10.6.29’ replaced by ‘10.6.19’.
[Pg 239]: ‘5110, Pte., d. in w.’ replaced by ‘5110, Pte., d. of w.’.
[Pg 247]: ‘Kapanagh, Patrick, 3509’ replaced by ‘Kavanagh, Patrick, 3509’.
[Pg 274]: ‘9253’ occurs twice; one perhaps should be 9258.