Kitchener is one of the most successful, and controversial, generals in the history of the British Empire. Uncovering new material, this title is the definitive biography of the iconic general. Originally published: London: Hamilton, 1985.

In the early days of the First World War, Lord Kitchener made his famous appeal for volunteers to join the New Army. Men flocked to recruiting offices to enlist, and on some days tens of thousands of potential soldiers responded to his call. Men had to be at least eighteen years old to join up, and nineteen to serve overseas, but in the flurry of activity many younger boys came to enlist: some were only thirteen or fourteen. Many were turned away, but a lot were illegally conscripted, and as many as 250,000 underage boys found themselves fighting for King and Country in the First World War. Over half would never return home. In this groundbreaking new book, John Oakes - whose own father-in-law walked out of the Welsh valleys to join the Royal Navy at the age of fourteen - delves into the complex history of Britain's youngest Great War recruits. Focusing on the recruitment crisis of 1914, he reveals why boys joined up, what their experiences were and how they survived to endure a lifetime of memories. For those who didn't, an unknown grave awaited, and in some cases their mothers never knew what had become of their children.

A new study of one of Britain's most famous soldiers.

Henry Allingham is the last British serviceman alive to have volunteered for active duty in the First World War and is one of very few people who can directly recall the horror of that conflict. In Kitchener's Last Volunteer, he vividly recaptures how life was lived in the Edwardian era and how it was altered irrevocably by the slaughter of millions of men in the Great War, and by the subsequent coming of the modern age. Henry is unique in that he saw action on land, sea and in the air with the British Naval Air Service. He was present at the Battle of Jutland in 1916 with the British Grand Fleet and went on to serve on the Western Front. He befriended several of the young pilots who would lose their lives, and he himself suffered the privations of the front line under fire. In recent years, Henry was given the opportunity to tell his remarkable story to a wider audience through a BBC documentary, and he has since become a hero to many, meeting royalty and having many honours bestowed upon him. This is the touching story of an ordinary man's extraordinary life - one who has outlived six monarchs and twenty-one prime ministers, and who represents a last link to a vital point in our nation's history.

This brief narrative is by no means a complete record of life in a battalion of one of Lord Kitchener's first armies. It is, rather, a story in outline, a mere suggestion of that life as it is lived in the British lines along the western front. If those who read gain thereby a more intimate view of trench warfare, and of the men who are so gallantly and cheerfully laying down their lives for England, the purpose of the writer will have been accomplished.