From Private to Field-Marshal : Sir William Robertson ; 1921 with Dust Jacket

From Private to Field-Marshal

By Field-Marshal Sir William Robertson

Published by Constable and Company, London, 1921. First Edition. hardback book with a very good original dust jacket. 8vo, pp xix, 396. Illustrated.

CONDITION
A very good first edition. The original jacket is verey good with just a tad of nibbling from the top of the spine. The jacket is now protcted in a removable mylar sleeve. Boards and spine good. All contents present and pages good throughout. Tad light spotting to prelims. Small name to front endpaper. Overall a good first edition.

Field Marshal Sir William Robert Robertson (29 January 1860 – 12 February 1933) was a British Army officer who served as Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) – the professional head of the British Army – from 1916 to 1918 during the First World War. As CIGS he was committed to a Western Front strategy focusing on Germany and was against what he saw as peripheral operations on other fronts. While CIGS, Robertson had increasingly poor relations with David Lloyd George, Secretary of State for War and then Prime Minister, and threatened resignation at Lloyd George's attempt to subordinate the British forces to the French Commander-in-Chief, Robert Nivelle. In 1917 Robertson supported the continuation of the Battle of Passchendaele (also known as the Third Battle of Ypres) at odds with Lloyd George's view that Britain's war effort ought to be focused on the other theatres until the arrival of sufficient US troops on the Western Front.

Robertson is the only soldier in the history of the British Army to have risen from an enlisted rank to its highest rank of field marshal.

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