This text is a study of the importance and significance of community identity to a fighting unit in the First World War. In this case the unit in question is primarily 7th King's Regiment and more widely the 55th West Lancashire Division, 1914-18. The book is based upon the author's own PhD thesis 'The 1/7th Battalion King's Liverpool Regiment and the Great War - the experience of a Territorial battalion and its Home Towns'. It is an analysis of the...

This text tells the full story of the 17th Battalion, The Middlesex Regiment - the 'Footballers' Battalion' 1914-18. It charts the history of the Battalion on the football pitch and in the trenches of the Great War, drawing on previously unpublished letters and personal accounts.

Almost 1,100 Territorials of the Liverpool Rifles deployed overseas in early 1915, but by the end of the war, less than 100 remained with the battalion. This book narrates their daily struggle in the pitiless arena of modern warfare; from their apprenticeship during the Second Battle of Ypres, to their epic actions with the famed 55th Division.

Colonel Graham Chaplin, commander of the Cameron Highlanders, wrote letters from the trenches almost daily to the wife he had married just before the war began. Even if he had no time to write, he would at least send a postcard to reassure her he was 'quite well'. These personal and loving letters give a rare insight into the mind of a serving officer, his worries about his men and his family back home, his concern for the progress of the war (however...