YOUNG CITIZEN OLD SOLDIER, From boyhood in Antrim to hell on the Somme: The Journal of Rifleman James McRoberts, Edited by David Truesdale (1st Ed. SIGNED)

Author: James McRoberts, Edited by David Truesdale. Published by Helion and Company, West Midlands, UK., 2012, 1st Edition. SIGNED and dedicated by the Editor. Printed in Malta by the Gutenburg Press. Like New Condition HARDCOVER Book, and Like New Unclipped Dust Jacket. Clean inside, tight spine. Size: 9.5 x 6.25 inch, 213 pages including index.

YOUNG CITIZEN OLD SOLDIER, is a remarkable memoir that is, by turns, lively, candid, humorous, poignant, and above all a window into the world of an Ulsterman who found himself both witness and participant to a series of remarkable events during WW1.

These notebooks, written at the time and with footnotes added some forty years later, record his Army service between 8 January 1915 and 3 April 1917. For almost 43 years three school notebooks lay in obscurity in the County Armagh home of sixty two-year old James McRoberts. The closely-filled pages recorded just over two years in his life in uniform as he played his part in what was then known as the Great War. During the Home Rule crisis of 1914, one of several in Ireland's history, James McRoberts, like many other men, joined the Young Citizen Volunteers, an organization that eventually became the 14th Royal Irish Rifles, a battalion of the 36th (Ulster) Division.