A Subaltern’s Share In The War

Lieutenant Devenish celebrated his twenty-first birthday, his last in peace-time, on the 25th of July 1914; he was by this point in his short life a soldier by profession and by choice. Having left Charterhouse with a taste for military ways after training in the O.T.C., he decided that his chosen profession should be spent in the Royal Artillery and entered into further training at Woolwich. By the time war begun in 1914 he was a fully-fledged officer. However, an indomitable spirit and a thirst for a more personal form of combat led him into the Royal Flying Corps.

The R.F.C. would mourn his passing on the 6th of June 1917, after only a year of having him in their ranks. George Devenish’s name is inscribed on the walls of the Arras Flying Services War Memorial, one of the many Allied fliers who lost their lives during the First World War fighting in the skies above the Western Front.

A kindly, sensitive man, but filled with a great deal of passion and pride, his letters are almost always upbeat and despite the carnage around him during the war, he never changed his “sunny disposition”.

Author — Lieutenant George Weston Devenish 1893-1917

Text taken, whole and complete, from the edition published in London, Constable and Company Ltd., 1917.

Original Page Count – xviii and 177 pages.