1 vol. Demy 8vo. 10s. 6d. net.
This book contains a full measure of adventure and excitement. The author, who is a Captain in the Indian Cavalry, was serving in the Air Force in Mesopotamia in 1915, and was captured through an accident to the aeroplane while engaged in a hazardous and successful attempt to cut the Turkish telegraph lines north and west of Baghdad, just before the Battle of Ctesiphon. Then came the horrors of the journey to Constantinople, during which the "terrible Turk" showed himself in his worst colours; but it was in Constantinople that the most thrilling episodes of his captivity had their origin. The story of the Author's first attempt to escape (which did not succeed) and of his subsequent lucky dash for freedom, is one of intense interest, and is told in a most vivid and dramatic way.
JOHN HUGH ALLEN
OF THE GALLANT COMPANY
A Memoir by his Sister INA MONTGOMERY.
With Portrait. 1 vol. Demy 8vo. 10s. 6d. net.
This book is the life-story of a young New Zealander who was killed in action at the Dardanelles in June, 1915. It is told mainly in his own letters and diaries—which have been supplemented, so far as was needful, with the utmost tact and discretion by his sister—and falls naturally into three principal stages. Allen spent four very strenuous years, 1907-1911, at Cambridge, where he occupied a prominent position among his contemporaries as an active member, and eventually President of the Union. Though undergraduate politics are not usually taken very seriously by the outside world, yet this side of Allen's Cambridge career has an interest far transcending the merely personal one. Possessed, as he was, of remarkable gifts, which he had cultivated by assiduous practice as a speaker and writer, and passionately interested in all that concerns the British Empire, and the present and future relations between the United Kingdom and the Overseas Dominions, his record may well stand as representative of the attitude of the élite of the New Zealand youth towards these vital matters in the period just preceding the war.
After Cambridge, he returned for a time to New Zealand, where he resolved to make his permanent home, but came back to England in December, 1913, to complete his legal studies and get called to the bar, and was still in England when the war broke out. Consequently the second stage is the story of seven months' experience as a lieutenant in the 13th Battalion of the Worcesters, and his letters of this period give an attractive, and intensely graphic account of the making of the new army. Finally, he was despatched, with a few other selected officers, to the Dardanelles, arrived on May 25th at Cape Helles, and was attached to the Essex regiment. The last stage, brief, glorious, and terrible, lasted only twelve days but, brief as it was, he had time to draw an enthralling picture of the unexampled horrors of this particular phase of trench-warfare. The book is steeped, from beginning to end, in a sober but fervent enthusiasm; and the cult of the Empire, in its noblest form, has seldom been as finely exemplified as by the life and death of John Allen.