With A Machine Gun to Cambrai
Military Memoir World War I History British Army Personal War Narrative Tank Warfare Western Front Eyewitness History
First-edition hardback of George Coppard’s 1980 memoir “With a Machine Gun to Cambrai” – the voice of the ordinary British Tommy who really fought from the Somme to the 1917 tank offensive. 174 brisk pages, still tight and unmarked inside, give today’s reader the same unfiltered view that impressed historians at the Imperial War Museum when they first helped publish it. If you collect WWI firsts, this is the edition to own; later reprints are plentiful, but a clean 1980 printing with the original dust jacket is already scarce in the trade.
Coppard’s story is special because he wrote it while the mud was still fresh in memory, yet with the perspective of a man who survived the entire war and lived to see the 1970s. He takes you into the front-line funk-holes, explains how a Vickers gun team actually lived, moved and fired, and ends with the first great tank attack at Cambrai – a battle he watched from a shell-hole while his gun kept firing. Historians quote this memoir as a key eyewitness counter-balance to official histories; collectors value it for the same reason readers do – it feels honest, human and urgent.
The book arrives ready for shelf or classroom: illustrated plates, complete dust jacket (edge-wear and spine fade, see photos), no ex-library stamps, no inscriptions, pages clean and unthumbed. A solid vintage copy for teachers building a living-history shelf, re-enactors needing primary source detail, or any reader who wants the Great War told by the man who carried the gun, not the general who planned the map.
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