Kitchener's Last Volunteer: The Life of Henry Allingham, the Oldest Surviving Veteran of the Great War

Edinburgh & London: Mainstream Publishing. Very Good/Very Good. 2008. First Edition. Hard Cover. 8vo 1845964160 Dust jacket complete, unclipped. Original cloth boards with bright clear titling on spine. No ownership marks. Photographs on plates. 240 pages clean and tight. The Life of Henry Allinghemy the Oldest Surviving Veteran of the Greet War. Henry Allingham is the last British serviceman alive to have volunteered for active duty in the First World War and is one of very few people who can directly recall the horror of that conflict. In Kitchener's Last Volunteer, he vividly recaptures how life was lived in the Edwardian era and how it was altered irrevocably by the slaughter of millions of young men in the Great War and by the subsequent arrival of the modern age. Henry is unique in that he saw action on land, sea and in the air with the Royal Naval Air Service - which would later be amalgamated into what we know today as the RAF. He was present at the Battle of Jutland in 1916 with the British Grand Fleet and ,c ;; c to serve on the Western Front, where he encountered the many horrors of air warfare. He befriended several of the young pilots who would lose their lives, and he himself suffered the privations of the front line under fire. Widowed and living alone, in the twenty-first century Henry was befriended by Dennis Goodwin, who enabled him to tell his remarkable story to a wider audience through a BBC documentary. Driven to teach today's generation about the tragedy of war, in recent years Henry has become a hero to many, meeting royalty and receiving numerous honours such as the Legion d'honneur -- France's highest military accolade. Kitchener's Last Volunteer is the touching story of an ordinary man's extraordinary life - one who has outlived six monarchs and twenty-one prime ministers, and who represents a last link to a vital point in our nation's history. .