Fourth Impression, March 1917.
All rights reserved.
TO
ALL COMRADES OF MINE
WHO LIE DEAD IN FOREIGN FIELDS
FOR LOVE OF ENGLAND,
OR WHO LIVE TO PROSECUTE THE WAR
FOR ANOTHER ENGLAND
PREFACE
Most of these poems were written at the Front, and appeared in the Fifth Gloucester Gazette—the first paper ever published from the trenches.
The author was then a Lance-Corporal in the 5th Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment, and as such gained the Distinguished Conduct Medal in August, 1915.
The award appears as follows in the London Gazette—
F. W. Harvey.—“For conspicuous gallantry on the night of the 3rd-4th August, 1915, near Hebuterne, when, with a patrol, he and another Non-Commissioned Officer went out to reconnoitre in the direction of a suspected listening post. In advancing they encountered the hostile post evidently covering a working party in the rear. Corporal Knight at once shot one of the enemy, and, with Lance-Corporal Harvey, rushed the post, shooting two others, and assistance arriving the enemy fled. Lance-Corporal Harvey pursued, felling one of the retreating Germans with a bludgeon. He seized him, but finding his revolver empty and the enemy having opened fire, he was called back by Corporal Knight, and the prisoner escaped. Three Germans were killed and their rifles and a Mauser pistol were brought in. The patrol had no loss.”
The poems are written by a soldier and reflect a soldier’s outlook. Mud, blood and khaki are rather conspicuously absent. They are, in fact, the last things a soldier wishes to think or talk about.
What he does think of is his home.