Description
Title: An Anzac on the Western Front – The Personal Recollections of an Australian Infantryman from 1916 to 1918
Author: Williams, Harold Roy
Condition: Mint
Edition: 1st Edition
Publication Date: 2012
ISBN: 9781848847675
Cover: Hard Cover with now very scarce Dust Jacket – 208 pages
Comments: An Australian soldier’s story of 1915-1918 which include some of the history of the 56th Battalion AIF. This is essentially a reprint of “The Gallant Company” which was first published in 1933 and now a scarce and highly sought after title.
“The ordeal of the night was plainly visible on all faces, ghastly white showing through masks of grim and dried sweat, eyes glassy, protruding, and full of horror seen only upon men who have lived through a heavy bombardment.” So wrote Harold Roy Williams of his time in the Battle of Fromelles in July 1916.
Having enlisted in 1915 and serving in the 56th Battalion Australian Imperial Force, Williams had only arrived in France, from Egypt, on 30 June 1916. He describes the horrors of the Fromelles battlefield in shocking clarity and the conditions the troops had to endure are revealed in disturbing detail.
Surviving a later gas attack, Harold Williams’ subsequent postings read like a tour of the Western Front. Following the Somme
there was the mud and squalor of the line south of Ypres, the German Spring Offensive of 1918, the Battle of Amiens – frequently described as the most decisive battle against the Germans in France and Flanders – the capture of Villers-Bretonneux and, finally, the assault on Péronne.
Injured at Péronne and invalided back to the United Kingdom, Williams survived the war to return to Australia in 1919. An Anzac
on the Western Front is his graphic description of his service in the First World War – an account that was described as “the best soldier’s story … yet read in Australia” when it was first published.
