F L Goldthorpe

Ts account (33pp), written ca 1934, of his experiences during the First World War, describing his enlistment with an unidentified battalion of The Duke of Wellington's (West Riding Regiment) in November 1914 with whom he embarked in April 1915 for active service on the Western Front, was almost immediately wounded, and then evacuated back to the United Kingdom; after convalescence he resumed duties with the 3/5th (Pioneer) Battalion The Duke of Wellington's at Clipstone in Yorkshire before being transferred in spring 1916 to the 185th Company Machine Gun Corps, from late summer of that year embarking for active service in Mesopotamia where he describes the many profiteering activities that occurred on the voyage to Basra, the exhaustion suffered by the soldiers involved in the Allied advance from Kut to Baghdad, the execution of a number of men for falling asleep on guard duty, the threats posed by the intense heat, insects and marauding Arabs, his evacuation to Bhopal, India, to convalesce from sandfly fever, and then his employment in India on garrison duty at the MGC Headquarters at Mhow for the remainder of the war.

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