The Unreturning Army by Huntly Gordon: book review

The Unreturning Army: A Field Gunner in Flanders 1917-18 (1967, this edition 2015) is the updated memoir of Scottish soldier Huntly Gordon with additional letters found by his son David Gordon. It is the trench warfare of the Western Front in France, particularly near Ypres.

Huntly Gordon begins his memoir with ‘I never meant to be a soldier.’ In the second chapter the Great War (the first world war) is at Britain’s doorstep. His choice was to enter the lighthorse brigade as a gunner, the Royal Field Artillery, with training at Woolwich in the Royal Military Academy. His training in ‘equitation’ is his training with horses. But the two year course is abruptly shortened to nine months in order to get into battle quickly.

On 17 June 1917 Huntly was in Flanders, France, on the Western Front. Before the American forces joined the battle American horses were already there. Gordon is paired with a ‘nice bay mare of fifteen hands’ called Molly and later with a mare called Fly.

World War I was the deadliest conflict in history. In the field near Ypres the life expectancy of a soldier was three weeks. There were over 17 million deaths in the four-year battle from 1914-1918, and the Library of Congress estimated that eight million horses died.

Gordon writes a diary, almost daily, while in the field, which forms the core of this memoir, with post-diary footnotes about the fate of men he mentioned by name in the journal. Rain, snow, mud, gas, gun-fire, shelling, vermin, insects, noise, smells, sleeplessness, injuries, and death – of men and horses – this is an account of the hardships it takes to endure each day and each night in the trenches.

For example, ‘The smell of chloride of lime hung heavy in the air mingling with the stench of corpses and latrines’ – and – ‘the new German gas is worse than chlorine, as it raises blisters’ (it was mustard gas). He survived longer than three weeks, but in one night in early August 1917, he says of the 46 ‘of us at the gun-position, only eleven are left’ – 12 were killed, 13 wounded, and 10 shell-shocked.

For the 180 men in a battery (an army artillery unit, the equivalent of an infantry company) there were nearly 200 horses. He tells of their deaths too. ‘A third [horse] lay with a shattered hind-leg, at which it kept looking around with staring eyes, as it tried to get up off the roadway’ and was shot to end its suffering. In addition to horses were mules (donkeys) – ‘mules are usually much steadier under shell-fire … only one musn’t argue with them … they haven’t the fine spirited appearance of a good horse, but out here it’s more important to do the job well than to look impressive, which probably applies to us too!’

Gordon finishes his diary abruptly on 24 April 1918 at Meteren, 10 months after he landed in Flanders. It was a horrid harrowing day seven months before the war ended, but a pivotal point in the battle.

Punctured with Shakespearean quotes and war poetry, with one sargeant described as a Falstaffian figure, this is an intellectual diary and memoir, but one that is readable, directly-stated, and observantly told – readers can clearly and visibly picture where the soldiers were, what they saw, heard, felt, tasted and smelled. It is a compelling piece of prose, of actual events, thoughts, and emotions.

This is a harrowing and extraordinarily exceptional narrative about trench warfare at the Western Front. What happens after 24 April – written in the Postscript and Afterword – is miraculous.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).