Mr. Edward Arnold's Autumn Announcements. 



JOHN HUGH ALLEN 



OF THE GALLANT COMPANY 



A Memoir by his Sister INA MONTGOMERY. 

 With Portrait, i vol. Demy 8vo. ios.6d.net. 



This book is the life-story of a young New Zealander who was 

 killed in action at the Dardanelles in June, 1915. 'it is told mainly 

 in his own letters and diaries which have been supplemented, so 

 far as was needful, with the utmost tact and discretion by his 

 sister and falls naturally into three- principal stages. Allen spent 

 four very strenuous years, 1907-1911, at Cambridge, where he 

 occupied a prominent position among his contemporaries as an 

 active member, and eventually President of the Union. Though 

 undergraduate politics are not usually taken very seriously by the 

 outside world, yet this side of Allen's Cambridge career has an 

 interest far transcending the merely personal one. Possessed, as 

 he was, of remarkable gifts, which he had cultivated by assiduous 

 practice as a speaker and writer, and passionately interested in 

 all that concerns the British Empire, and the present and future 

 relations between the United Kingdom and the Overseas 

 Dominions, his record may well stand as representative of the 

 attitude of the elite of the New Zealand youth towards these vital 

 matters in the period just preceding the war. 



After Cambridge, he returned for a time to New Zealand, where 

 he resolved to make his permanent home, but came back to 

 England in December, 1913, to complete his legal studies and get 

 called to the bar, and was still in England when the war broke 

 out. Consequently the second stage is the story of seven months' 

 experience as a lieutenant in the i3th Battalion of the Worcesters, 

 and his letters of this period give an attractive, and intensely 

 graphic account of the making of the new army. Finally, he was 

 despatched, with a few other selected officers, to the Dardanelles, 

 arrived on May 25th at Cape Helles, and was attached to the 

 Essex regiment. . The last stage, brief, glorious, and terrible, 

 lasted only twelve days but, brief as it was, he had time to draw 

 an enthralling picture of the unexampled horrors of this particular 

 phase of trench-warfare. The book is steeped, from beginning 

 to end, in a sober but fervent enthusiasm; and the cult of the 

 Empire, in its noblest form, has seldom been as finely exemplified 

 as by the life and death of John Allen. 



