Description

Cassell and Company, 1919. Hardcover, 305 pp. No other printings listed. In acceptable condition/ NO dust jacket. Blue illustrated cloth covered boards have nicking and fraying to the edges of the covers and moderate overall scuffing, aging and soiling. Spine is cracked along the front hinge but covers are still attached text block is still securely bound. Varios notes in pencil on front paste-down and half-title page. Otherwise pages are browned with age with occasional spotting and soiling. An acceptable reading copy but NOT a facsimile. [From review in the 1919 Argonaut, Volume 85] Lieutenant Lewis R. Freeman . . . was at the front for four years, partly as a free-lance correspondent and for a year and a half as the official "writer-up" for the British navy. All of the doors that were usually closed to the correspondent were open to him. He was in the enviable position of constantly being invited by the authorities to come in, make himself at home, and look around him. If there was anything that he had not yet seen, he had only to mention the fact and the omission was at once made good. No better man could have been found for the task, if we may judge from the fascinating book that he has given to us. Lieutenant Freeman resorts to the happy expedient of allowing his many heroes to tell their own stories in their own way, and thus we have first-hand narratives of nearly all the naval expedients devised during the war. He tells us of solitary combats with the submarine, of fights between aeroplanes and submarines, depth bombs, of convoys and patrols, and life on the ships of the great navies. Even aspect of the great war comes in for its share of attention, and it is all told with an admirable and vivacious energy that holds the breathless attention from the first paste to the last. The many illustrations are from photographs by the author and are particularly good.