To Serve Them All My Days

To Serve Them All My Days by R. F. Delderfield. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780671213718.

Young David Powlett-Jones, a Welsh miners son, is invalided home from France when he suffers severe shell shock on the Western Front. At a remote English public school in Devon the debilitated veteran, himself barely out of his teens, decides temporarily to try his hand at teaching while striving to awaken from the nightmare of World War I -- the national catastrophe that sweeps England out of the comfortable certainties of the Victorian Age into the moral perplexities and harsh economic realities of more modern times.