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The Unreturning Army
In the centenary year of World War I, names such as Ypres, the Marne, the Somme, and Passchendaele are heavy with meaning as settings for the near-destruction of a generation of men. It is this aura of tragedy that makes Huntly Gordon’s memoir, drawn from his letters written from the Front, such a potent one.
He was sensitive, intelligent, unpretentious, and, as his account reveals, capable of detached and trenchant judgment. As the summer of 1914 drew to a close, it was difficult for a 16 year-old schoolboy to realize that the world for which he had been prepared at Clifton College was itself preparing for war. By 1916, he was commissioned in the Royal Field Artillery. By June 1917, he was at the Ypres Salient, getting his "baptism" at Hell Fire Corner in an intensive artillery duel that formed the prolog to Passchendaele itself. Early in 1918, his battery would fight a series of rearguard actions near Baupaume that would help turn the tide of the massive German Spring offensive.
Huntly Gordon has given us an enduring and classic memoir: a poignant and extraordinarily human account of history as it happened.
He was sensitive, intelligent, unpretentious, and, as his account reveals, capable of detached and trenchant judgment. As the summer of 1914 drew to a close, it was difficult for a 16 year-old schoolboy to realize that the world for which he had been prepared at Clifton College was itself preparing for war. By 1916, he was commissioned in the Royal Field Artillery. By June 1917, he was at the Ypres Salient, getting his "baptism" at Hell Fire Corner in an intensive artillery duel that formed the prolog to Passchendaele itself. Early in 1918, his battery would fight a series of rearguard actions near Baupaume that would help turn the tide of the massive German Spring offensive.
Huntly Gordon has given us an enduring and classic memoir: a poignant and extraordinarily human account of history as it happened.
240 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1967
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About the author
Huntly Gordon
4ÌýbooksHUNTLY STRATHEARN GORDON was born in a Perthshire in 1898. He was educated at Clifton College and joined the Royal Field Artillery in 1916. By June 1917, aged just 19, he was on the Western Front. Though badly wounded (he was declared 25% disabled), he survived the war, confounding the army medics by playing rugby again and taking up medicine. He gave up his studies -- having 'seen too many people die' -- and took a job with Shell Oil in 1923, who sent him to China. Three years later, he was forced to flee as the communist insurgency raged. Back in the UK, he joined London Transport, while devoting his spare time to working with Sir Mortimer Wheeler and surveying archaeological sites in England and France. During the Blitz, he initiated the food trains for refugees and was awarded an MBE. He moved to Hampshire in the 1950s and ran a market garden business. A heart attack in 1960 forced him to take things more slowly and The Unreturning Army was published in 1967. His second book, The Minister's Wife, was published in 1978. Twice married, Huntly Gordon died in 1982, and is buried by the ancient Kincardine church in Strathspey.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
October 5, 2024
Told mainly through his letters home, this time capsule book follows the author from naive schoolboy, through enlistment and training, to the horrors of Passchendaele and Baupaume where he served in the Royal Field Artillery. It’s quite narrowly focused, the author having little knowledge of wider strategic events, pretty much what you'd expect from a junior officer in WW1. But at just over 200 pages it’s a quick, well written and interesting read.
March 10, 2025
An excellent read about a tragic loss of life for so many young men during the Great War. Harrowing how the dreams of so many young men were dashed within days of arriving on the front line. Excellently written from the memoirs of a young front line officer
November 27, 2018
Huntly Gordon, the author of this superb memoir of a field gunner in Flanders during the First World War, wrote that he offered it for ‘those who wanted to know, without reading volumes of history, what it was really like to be there on the spot�, and one of his wartime friends the artist Keith Henderson, wrote to him on its publication, ‘Dear Huntly � well done! But those nightmares, you have revived them, and what I have tried these many years to forget is as vivid and lurid as ever…�
This really is a wonderful book. Gordon’s humanity, his good-nature and general lack of self-pity come shining through, all these years on. I would love to have met this man, who in later life, among other things, initiated food trains during the Blitz for the thousands sheltering in the London Underground.
When I researched the war dead commemorated on the Southborough War Memorial, I had to keep focused on their individual circumstances, as there were over 250 of them, but with every book I read on the First World War, I gain more knowledge. The Unreturning Army doesn't disappoint � it informed my understanding, conveying to me something of the reality of what many of the Southborough and High Brooms men must have gone through.
When I visited Ypres a few years back I went for an early morning run through the Menin Gate Memorial arch and along the Menin Road. Gordon describes the scene in July 1917: “Most of the traffic supplying the line in front of Ypres must pass through here, and the Boche takes heavy toll of it � day and night. The bridge, whether originally arched or not, is now a solid mass of stonework, supplemented, indeed cemented, by the remains of smashed vehicles and the fragmented bodies of horses and men.�
His vivid descriptions of winter conditions for the gunners includes the following account of transporting and setting up the battery from December 1917: "... when darkness fell it began to freeze hard. We did our best to keep warm by huddling together in our doorless carriages, but were stiff and cold when at 2 am we reached the deserted station of Boisleux-au-Mont and were told to off-load ... unloading the horses was a maddeningly slow process, in flurries of snow and a searing wind ... all the ropes were like bars of iron from the intense frost ... somehow or other the job was done at last, and the chill rising sun found us marching through featureless snowy wastes towards our destination ... here the camp site allotted to us was on the exposed top of a ridge, where there was nothing but a few tents to give shelter from the wind. The water troughs had three inches of ice on them, but a pick-axe overcame that difficulty ... the poor horses droop patiently at their ropes, their blankets just keeping them alive ..."
He writes later of being re-united with his war-horse, Fly, after the start of the big German push on 21 March 1918: "Suddenly a horse whinnied. I turned, and there was my beloved mount, Fly, asking for her sugar. She had been pressed into service as lead-horse of a gun-team in another battery. They told me they had found her running loose; and pretty worn out she looked, reduced to a shadow through lack of food and water. But after some forceful discussion with the office in charge, I got her back; and she carried me stout-heartedly for the remaining days of my service."
The men who fought this terrible war often wrote of their ambivalent feelings about the enemy - Gordon writes "What a Mad-Hatter's War this is! Like everyone else I see Germany as an evil enemy, who ruthlessly broke her guarantee to Belgium, and loosed war on her unready neighbours to secure the domination of Europe. Against that we are rightly fighting - for our freedom. But all that is background. The sorry fact remains that I do not hate the Germans personally." And in a period of respite from the fighting, he reflects "For out there, it is not just the Valley of the Shadow, but the very home of Death itself, where neither trees, nor plants, nor birds, nor even soldiers can hope to keep alive for very long." Later on in the book, he "raises my tin-hat" to a German machine-gunner, who forebore to fire on the stretcher-bearers carrying a seriously wounded Gordon away from the spot where he had been hit by an explosive shell fall-out, and without whom "this book could never have been written."
What were soldiers reading in the trenches? Gordon found the Psalms "a very present help in trouble", and also had a copy of Dickens' Pickwick Papers with him. Bruce Bairnsfather's cartoons were, of course, always worth a chuckle from all ranks.
We all have family stories of our grandfathers, great-uncles, etc coming home from the war and having very little to say about their experiences - for what kind of frame of reference could they give them? As Gordon writes of his leave"... there came a seemingly endless succession of friends and relations, who all inanely asked, "How are you getting on out there?" to which I invariably replied, 'Fine, thanks, just fine.' What else could one say? How could they begin to understand? We were now simply in different worlds."
All these years later, this book, writing as it does not only of the humanity and purposefulness of men working together, their stoicism and fortitude, but also the times when their feelings ran out of control, pictures for us many of the things of which they could not speak.
I cannot recommend it too highly.
This really is a wonderful book. Gordon’s humanity, his good-nature and general lack of self-pity come shining through, all these years on. I would love to have met this man, who in later life, among other things, initiated food trains during the Blitz for the thousands sheltering in the London Underground.
When I researched the war dead commemorated on the Southborough War Memorial, I had to keep focused on their individual circumstances, as there were over 250 of them, but with every book I read on the First World War, I gain more knowledge. The Unreturning Army doesn't disappoint � it informed my understanding, conveying to me something of the reality of what many of the Southborough and High Brooms men must have gone through.
When I visited Ypres a few years back I went for an early morning run through the Menin Gate Memorial arch and along the Menin Road. Gordon describes the scene in July 1917: “Most of the traffic supplying the line in front of Ypres must pass through here, and the Boche takes heavy toll of it � day and night. The bridge, whether originally arched or not, is now a solid mass of stonework, supplemented, indeed cemented, by the remains of smashed vehicles and the fragmented bodies of horses and men.�
His vivid descriptions of winter conditions for the gunners includes the following account of transporting and setting up the battery from December 1917: "... when darkness fell it began to freeze hard. We did our best to keep warm by huddling together in our doorless carriages, but were stiff and cold when at 2 am we reached the deserted station of Boisleux-au-Mont and were told to off-load ... unloading the horses was a maddeningly slow process, in flurries of snow and a searing wind ... all the ropes were like bars of iron from the intense frost ... somehow or other the job was done at last, and the chill rising sun found us marching through featureless snowy wastes towards our destination ... here the camp site allotted to us was on the exposed top of a ridge, where there was nothing but a few tents to give shelter from the wind. The water troughs had three inches of ice on them, but a pick-axe overcame that difficulty ... the poor horses droop patiently at their ropes, their blankets just keeping them alive ..."
He writes later of being re-united with his war-horse, Fly, after the start of the big German push on 21 March 1918: "Suddenly a horse whinnied. I turned, and there was my beloved mount, Fly, asking for her sugar. She had been pressed into service as lead-horse of a gun-team in another battery. They told me they had found her running loose; and pretty worn out she looked, reduced to a shadow through lack of food and water. But after some forceful discussion with the office in charge, I got her back; and she carried me stout-heartedly for the remaining days of my service."
The men who fought this terrible war often wrote of their ambivalent feelings about the enemy - Gordon writes "What a Mad-Hatter's War this is! Like everyone else I see Germany as an evil enemy, who ruthlessly broke her guarantee to Belgium, and loosed war on her unready neighbours to secure the domination of Europe. Against that we are rightly fighting - for our freedom. But all that is background. The sorry fact remains that I do not hate the Germans personally." And in a period of respite from the fighting, he reflects "For out there, it is not just the Valley of the Shadow, but the very home of Death itself, where neither trees, nor plants, nor birds, nor even soldiers can hope to keep alive for very long." Later on in the book, he "raises my tin-hat" to a German machine-gunner, who forebore to fire on the stretcher-bearers carrying a seriously wounded Gordon away from the spot where he had been hit by an explosive shell fall-out, and without whom "this book could never have been written."
What were soldiers reading in the trenches? Gordon found the Psalms "a very present help in trouble", and also had a copy of Dickens' Pickwick Papers with him. Bruce Bairnsfather's cartoons were, of course, always worth a chuckle from all ranks.
We all have family stories of our grandfathers, great-uncles, etc coming home from the war and having very little to say about their experiences - for what kind of frame of reference could they give them? As Gordon writes of his leave"... there came a seemingly endless succession of friends and relations, who all inanely asked, "How are you getting on out there?" to which I invariably replied, 'Fine, thanks, just fine.' What else could one say? How could they begin to understand? We were now simply in different worlds."
All these years later, this book, writing as it does not only of the humanity and purposefulness of men working together, their stoicism and fortitude, but also the times when their feelings ran out of control, pictures for us many of the things of which they could not speak.
I cannot recommend it too highly.
April 15, 2019
Magnificent !
This book is one of the finest I have had the privilege to read and I have read countless concerning WW1.
The authors descriptive powers of his experiences
are nothing short of awesome.
What a Man ! not only outstandingly brave but also compassionate and caring in equal measures.
To fellow WW1 history Buffs, if this publication is
New to you, don't hesitate in purchasing as it is one Gem of a Memoir.
This book is one of the finest I have had the privilege to read and I have read countless concerning WW1.
The authors descriptive powers of his experiences
are nothing short of awesome.
What a Man ! not only outstandingly brave but also compassionate and caring in equal measures.
To fellow WW1 history Buffs, if this publication is
New to you, don't hesitate in purchasing as it is one Gem of a Memoir.
May 2, 2020
A stirring account of a young subaltern’s war through 1917-18. Huntley Gordon provides a detailed account of life with the guns, and though takes the reader through the battle of passchendaele and the German spring offensives, with our allusion to the wider strategies they represented. This is a true account from the soldiers� perspective on the ground. Strongly recommended to expert and novice of the Great War alike.
March 29, 2021
A wonderful read
The first thing to come across is what a superb human being the author is. A very well documented account of his war in the trenches. Historically extremely interesting
The first thing to come across is what a superb human being the author is. A very well documented account of his war in the trenches. Historically extremely interesting
Read
October 8, 2021An excellent read
Eloquently written a first hand account of a terrible time. For any former soldier the truth of war fighting can never truly be explained. Unless you have been there you can never know.
Eloquently written a first hand account of a terrible time. For any former soldier the truth of war fighting can never truly be explained. Unless you have been there you can never know.
January 30, 2022
How can you not rate this five stars.the book brings home the futility of war but from someone who's was there and not some fictionalised account the wording is of its time,and jingoism is rife,but the patriotic fervour is evident.
May 26, 2024
This is an excellent book. The author has a pleasing style of prose and a good eye for detail. He's also fairly droll, so it makes for an entertaining read. It's nice to get a postscript detailing in brief his after war experiences.
August 5, 2019
Fascinating
A must read book for anyone with an interest in humanity.
Tells the story of a young officer during the First World War
A must read book for anyone with an interest in humanity.
Tells the story of a young officer during the First World War
January 7, 2020
Worth a read
He talks of the west York’s at one point,a detailed map outside Ypres is provided This was where my GGrandad was killed. My GG WOULD HAVE HEARD HIS GUNS!
Awesome!
He talks of the west York’s at one point,a detailed map outside Ypres is provided This was where my GGrandad was killed. My GG WOULD HAVE HEARD HIS GUNS!
Awesome!
January 17, 2021
Huntley Gordon was commissioned into the Royal Artillery in 1916 , this book details all he went through, a thrilling account of the horror of it all.
September 23, 2022
A totally humbling read, these men sacrificed so much. It’s an honest human reflection of epic events, no history book betters the pages of a journal written in the mud of trenches.
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