Turner Donovan Military Books - The world’s finest selection of rare and out-of-print books on British military history from 1800 to 1945
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A Scholar's Letters from the Front: Written by Stephen H. Hewett, 2nd Lieut. in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. With an Intro. by F.F. Urquhart, Fellow of Balliol College. 1st Ed., xviii+114pp., portrait frontis. Longmans, Green & Co. 1918  #67103
[HLMainPic] Stephen Henry Philip Hewett was born in India in 1893 (his father was in the Indian Telegraph Service), educated at Downside & Balliol College, Oxford: completing his third year in 1914 he went to Savoy for the summer where he witnessed the French mobilization and made his way home, commissioned in 11th (S) Bn. Warwickshire Regiment, but kept back when the Battalion went overseas, he eventually joined the 14th Battalion – the First Birmingham City Battalion – at the Front in February 1916 & was KiA leading his platoon in an attack between High Wood and Delville Wood on 22nd July 1916. He was twenty-three & is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial. The book consists of lengthy 'diary letters' to his mother together with those to his sisters and various friends, containing, inter alia, affectionate descriptions of characters such as one Latham, the company officers' cook, and his horror at the first casualty he encountered: "his young freckled face was horribly smashed in by a bullet… I was severely shaken; but one has to get callous both in mind and body, and one does: and an hour's sleep revived me." Orig. paper covd. boards & cloth backstrip with paper label, eps rather browned, somewhat rubbed/worn, generally VG. See illustration on our website.   £145

     




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