the end of the original battalion", only 53 of his original battalion comrades survived unscathed. This battalion had also been involved in the first German poison gas attack on 22 April 1915. His family were also affected by the war. Herbert's older brother Lance Corporal Henry William Cowley died while training on military service in the 26th Reserve Training Battalion died of a cerebral haemorrhage on 14 September 1917 at Napsbury Hospital, St Albans, leaving a wife and three children. His other brother Charles Cowley (b. 1890, Wantage, Berks - d. 1973, New Zealand) served in the same regiment as Cowley from 1915 and became a Sergeant, invalided out with trench foot to become a musketry instructor in Devon. His wife Elsie Mabel (née Hurst) lost her 30-year-old brother Rifleman 4278 Percy Haslewood (or Hazlewood) Hurst of the 1st /16th Battalion, London Regiment (Queen's Westminster Rifles), who was killed on 1 July 1916, the first day of Battle of the Somme, during his battalion's diversionary attack on Gommecourt. Life after military service In late 1915 Cowley was invalided out of the Army, recovering from wounds and married Elsie Mabel Hurst on 8 December 1915 in Kingston, Surrey. Cowley very quickly returned his gardening and writing work to produce many books of practical, no-nonsense advice for the gardening enthusiast, Vegetable Growing in Wartime 1917, in his own way helping the war effort in the First World War's version of Dig for Victory. The tone of his editorials in The Garden was increasingly about the need for practical food production. Bad harvests and the increasing German submarine attacks on merchant shipping were causing shortages, price rises and uncertainty over future supply. Rationing was introduced in Britain in late 1917. Herbert Cowley continued to practical small pamphlets on Storing Vegetables and Fruit (1918), Cultivation with Movable Frames (1920) and a short book on The Modern Rock Garden (still in print). His largest book, The Garden Year appeared in 1936, when his garden journalism career appears to end. Cowley was still energetically going abroad in his fifties, despite his shrapnel wounds, leading trips to the Swiss Alps in 1936. Alpine plants were to remain a passion of Herbert Cowley to the end of his life in 1968. He was an honorary life member of the British Alpine Society. Friendship with Gertrude Jekyll Many of the famous postwar photographs of Miss Gertrude Jekyll and Jekyll's