Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man

Before Siegfried Sassoon became known for his furious war poems, he wrote this gentle, elegiac account of the world the war would destroy. Narrated by George Sherston, a lightly fictionalized version of the author, it follows a shy orphan raised by an aunt in rural Kent, his boyhood on horseback, and the long golden afternoons of fox-hunting and village cricket. Then 1914 arrives, and the hunting fields empty as the young men enlist. The book closes with Sherston in the trenches, the old England already slipping away. First published anonymously in 1928, it won both the Hawthornden and James Tait Black prizes and opens Sassoon’s George Sherston trilogy. This free PDF and EPUB edition carries that vanished countryside forward.