With my regiment — A Closer Reading

The Rhythm of Billeting

Mills devotes considerable space to the mechanics of quartering troops, treating it as a skill to be mastered. In one episode, he and a fellow officer guarantee to billet 200 men in a village of two farms and four cottages within fifteen minutes. The prose becomes almost technical: "The eye quickly gets trained to know what amount of men will go into what space." Barns, stables, and outhouses are assessed with a surveyor's precision. The author notes that French barns "always have plenty of straw" and make "warm, snug lying." This attention to shelter and logistics—counting men in by torchlight, transferring the last twenty-five from a porch to a barn—gives the account a grounded, step-by-step quality. The reader is made to feel the weight of wet boots and the relief of a mattress, details that accumulate into a portrait of war as a series of small, urgent arrangements.

Voice and the Officer's Perspective

The narrative voice is that of a junior officer who is both participant and observer. Mills writes with a dry, understated humor—his landlady is "aghast at the National crisis, and rather shocked at my levity"—and a willingness to admit uncertainty. He describes the "happy, careless—some people say, rather useless—life of the army officer in peace time" without defensiveness. The tone shifts when he recounts the kindness of a Tommy who offers the officers a room at the back of a cottage, noting that "the little class distinctions between officer and man are to a certain extent preserved on active service." This observation, offered without sentimentality, reveals a narrator attentive to the social codes that persist even under fire. The voice remains consistently that of a platoon commander, not a general or a journalist: concerned with his men, his orders, and the next billet.

Pace and the Lull Before Action

The excerpts show a deliberate alternation between movement and stillness. After the initial rush of mobilization, the narrative slows to describe the process of billeting in minute detail: the search for barns, the negotiation with the Adjutant, the stew of "bully beef and vegetables" cooked over a fire. The pace is unhurried, almost domestic, until a sudden shift—"Report yourself to O.C. 1st Battalion at —— immediately"—jolts the reader back to the urgency of war. This rhythm of hurry and halt, of waiting and moving, is central to the memoir's structure. Mills does not rush toward the firing line; he lingers on the moments in between, the "joy of throwing off our wet boots and coats" and stretching out on a mattress. The effect is to make the reader feel the weight of time itself, the long hours that precede any attack.

Readers approaching this memoir should expect a narrative that values the quotidian over the spectacular. Mills is less interested in the grand sweep of strategy than in the texture of a single night's billeting or the taste of a stew shared with men. The pseudonym "Platoon Commander" signals a perspective that is deliberately limited, grounded in the immediate and the practical. For those seeking an account of how war is actually lived—day by day, barn by barn, mile by mile—this book offers a rare, unadorned record.

That afternoon, the rain against the windows blurred the pages of With my Regiment, and I lost myself in the quiet weight of a young officer’s kitbag—rations, letters, orders. The way he measured home by footsteps between billets felt achingly human. Later, nearly by accident, I reached for Passed by the censor — A Closer Reading, and found that same measured voice, only closer to the bone.