The Adventures of an Ensign

These are the wartime adventures of “Vedette”, a pseudonym of noted journalist and screenwriter G. Valentine Williams, during the First World War. Williams volunteered for service at the age of 32, a little on the old side for service in a unit as prestigious and hard-fighting as the Irish Guards. He was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant or “Ensign”, and found himself travelling to France and the frontline in 1916. There was little enough time for him to learn his duties and responsibilities in the field before he and his men were thrown into the hell of the Battle of the Somme. The sounds of the shells, bullets, and cries of “Stretcher-BearER!” were to become all too familiar to the author before he was wounded and sent back to Blighty. His memoirs are told in the third person, with the verve, wit, and vivid detail that befit William’s journalist background.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.