216 siege battery diary index

Albert H Lewis was born in 1884 and died in 1961.
He lived most of his working life in Croydon and was a printer compositor by trade. He was married to his cousin Annie (not uncommon in those days) and had one daughter Maude who never married but spent a good part of her life breeding Scottish terriers.
At the outset of the war in 1914 'Bert was already 30 years old and by the time he arrived in France towards the latter part of 1916, he was 32. He trained as a gunner and joined the newly formed 216 Siege Battery of the Royal Garrison Artillery using the recently converted 6-inch siege howitzer.Almost from the moment he landed in France he kept a diary and recorded events as he saw them, sometimes in considerable detail and sometimes very hastily scribbled in pencil . Like many soldiers writing of their experiences at the time Bert would often describe events with a degree of detachment that belied the horror which he undoubtedly experienced and invariably with a very dark sense of humour.
The diary also gives a true insight into the nature of warfare from the point of view of an artilleryman during the Great War. Here was an ordinary God-fearing family man thrust like so many before him into the great mincing machine called the Western Front. Writing this diary was one way in which he retained his sanity in surroundings that most of us could barely imagine. His sense of duty and honour is of a bygone age when values were simpler than today and the diary is a poignant reminder of the sacrifice made by a generation existing now only as a memory reaching back to us through artefacts like this diary.

The Diary

The image shown above is 1/2 the size of the actual diary and the words "Where is it?" are embossed on the cover.
The contents of the diary are priceless historically since they give an account of some of the major events, like the opening of Kaiserslacht in March 1918 from a retreating artilleryman's point of view and describes the chaos in the British lines as the Germans advanced.
Please bear in mind that this is completely original material which has never been published before.