Old men remember: reliving the horror of Tobruk

‘Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,/ But he’ll remember, with advantages,/ What feats he did that day.’ Peter Hart quotes the St Crispin’s Day speech aptly, for as an oral historian at the Imperial War Museum, he’s done his bit over the years to record memories. By the 1980s the IWM’s sound archive had amassed an impressive collection of interviews with veterans of the first world war, and so began on those of the second. At Close Range weaves the recollections of 50 veterans (an unusually high number for a single unit) from what, as Hart puts it, some might consider a relatively obscure regiment, into a continuous narrative of five years’ campaigning — ‘from the traumatic excitement of action to the banalities of life as a soldier at war’.

That was the 107th Regiment, Royal Horse Artillery (South Nottinghamshire Hussars), former Yeomanry cavalry who’d been converted to artillery in 1922.