The nine months that raced past the newly promoted major dragged painfully for the men who were on the continent. With the continual failure and desertion of the other allies the British forces were pushed further and further back. Any victory that they claimed only seemed to secure their failure on two more occasions. The troops were exhausted and as the summer surrendered it heralded a bitter winter.

The lightheartedness of the spring had fled. There had been battle after battle and the newly established army surgeon had been forced to accept that there were fewer people who could be saved than were fated to die. The successes of the year before, the qualification in April, all seemed to have frozen away in the bitter onset of winter. The French continued to push the British forces back, for they had been all b...

Please subscribe to keep reading.