A Soldier on the Somme and Passchendaele: More Than Man Can Bear

This is the First World War account of Douglas Crockatt based on his personal diaries and family letters illustrated with original maps and documents issued to officers in WW1 as well as regimental records, all preserved in a family archive held in the Special Collections Department of Leeds University Library. In 1914, at the age of 19, poised to join his family business, Douglas Crockatt, a pacifist, volunteered for the Ambulance Service and in 1915 served for 9 months on the Western Front, near Merville and Bac St Maur where he recounts his experience of the aftermath of the Second Battle of Ypres, and the Battle of Aubers Ridge. In 1916, influenced by the suffering he saw as a nursing orderly, he decided to become a "fighting soldier" and trained first for the infantry, then for the Machine Gun Corps - a move from one extreme to the other, from pacifism to operating "the queen" of deadly weapons on the Western Front.As a machine gun officer in 1916 he was wounded at the Battle of t