EYEWITNESS, Being Personal Reminiscences of Certain Phases of the Great War, Including the Genesis of the Tank.

First edition, first printing. Publisher's original black cloth ruled in green, red and brown to the upper and lower edges, titles in gilt to the spine. Portrait frontispiece, map endpapers, a folding diagram and nine photographs in black and white. A very good copy, the binding square and firm with some bumping to the corners and fading to the spine. The contents, spotted to the prelims and closed text block edges, are otherwise clean and without inscriptions or stamps.

Major-General Ernest Swinton had already had a long and illustrious career in the British Army before the advent of the First World War in 1914. Appointed as the official war correspondent by the war Minister Lord Kitchener in 1914, his reporting home was the only way for the British people to follow the war as journalists were at that time banned at the front. In these dispatches from the front Swinton told the public of the bloody fighting in Flanders and the heroic efforts of the Allies to stop the German Juggernaut. The miserable conditions and bloody siege warfare of the trenches left a lasting impression on him and he looked to a scientific solution to the muddy stalemate of the Western Front. He would gain lasting fame as the architect of the 'tank' project that was to revolutionise warfare in the First World War and for many years thereafter. In this volume of reminiscences he traces his involvement in the early years of the war and his later years as the driving force in the development and adoption of the tank.