Announcing the launch in the Kindle Store of: Goodbye, Piccadilly

Men of the London Regiment advance through gas at the Battle of Loos

On 25th September, 1915, Rifleman Edwards and other members of the 1st Battalion London Irish Rifles’ football team kicked a ball towards the enemy trenches during their assault on the German-held village of Loos.

On 22nd September 2013, the London Irish Rifles, (now a reserve army company based in Camberwell, London) will celebrate and remember Rifleman Edwards and his comrades at their Loos Sunday parade. To coincide with the anniversary of the Battle of Loos, I’m publishing Goodbye, Piccadilly.

Goodbye, Piccadilly follows the adventures of Reg Kendrick and his brother in the London Irish Rifles at the outbreak of the Great War, and through to the Battle of Loos in September, 1915.
 
You can find it in the Kindle Store here. You can read the synopsis at the bottom of this post.

I hope you enjoy reading it, and if you do, please leave feedback and tell a friend!

 

It is 1914, and the last thing anyone expects is a war. Yet on the first Saturday of August, the Territorial Army is mobilized. Germany has invaded Belgium, and Britain is at war. Reg Kendrick finds himself at the front in charge of a section of men, without any clue as to what’s going on or what’s expected of him; but he begins to learn, and quickly.

Albert Kendrick is both resentful and disdainful of his younger brother’s accomplishments. But something good happens to Albert: he meets Florence Russell, a wonderful young woman. She could be the making of him, but he manages to mess it all up, and he loses her. To Reg. Consumed with jealousy and swearing revenge, he joins the army and follows Reg to France.

The brothers begin to adjust to life on the Western Front; the life of a soldier with its periods of boredom, of horror and terror and even of humour. But then their division is selected to play a crucial role in the Great Push, a major combined assault by both British and French forces.

Across flat, featureless terrain, seventy thousand men advance towards the well-entrenched enemy. Through a fog of chlorine gas and on into the streets of Loos, they wrest the town from the Germans at the point of their bayonets.

And within this maelstrom, the two brothers finally face up to their differences.