The author of this unusual Great War memoir, R. A. Lloyd, was an Irish-born working-class man with ambitions - later fulfilled - to become a teacher. He enlisted in the 1st Battalion, the Life Guards in 1911 and by the time the Great War broke out was a Corporal of Horse. The memoir has great value as a portrait of the class conscious life in one of the British Army's traditionally elite cavalry regiments. There are scenes - familiar to anyone who has seen the hit play 'War Horse' - of a Life Guard's life both in barracks at Knightsbridge, London and behind the trench lines of the Western...