The Diary of an Unprofessional Soldier by the Late Captain T.A.H. Nash, 16th Bn Manchester Regiment 1914 - 1918

We are very sparing in our acquisitions of "personal accounts", but this one is special. Nash was always officer material, but he made a point of wishing to spend some time in the ranks, so he started as a private in the Gloucestershire Regiment; after 8 months with the Gloucesters, during which time he served on the Western Front, he was commissioned into the Manchesters, where he stayed for the rest of the war. This book was, basically, self published. Pictons were the printers. It is printed as what appears to be a facsimile of a typewritten script. Nevertheless, it is a lovely little (just over 200 pages) volume, with a lot of images, drawings, appendices with all sorts of information, and so on. It is all of this which sets this book apart from the usual run of published diaries and so on. It is because of this that it is in The Collection.