My Bit

George Ashurst served with the Lancashire Fusiliers, taking part in First Ypres, Gallipoli and the Somme, and enduring months of thrench warfare on the Western Front, making numerous grim and dangerous patrols into no man's land.
His memoirs vividly reveal the reality of life in the trenches and the feelings of those who had to suffer it.
Ashurst was often frightened and uncertain, occasionally infuriated by the 'shirking' amongst the officers, was usually ready for a cigarette or drink, but when his batallion attacked he would not shrink from his duty.

Well-observed first-hand accounts of the First World War by working-class soldiers are relatively rare. My Bit is just such an account. Written in the 1920s both from diaries and from memory, it clearly conveys the 'timeless voice from the ranks'.