title: In the Face of the Enemy: A Battery Sergeant Major in Action in the Second World War
author:  E.A. Powdrill 
description: Ernest Powdrill joined the Territorials in 1935 and transferred to the Regular Army in 1938. By the time his regiment went out to France in September 1939 he was a full gun sergeant.
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  # Christopher Bush  
  
  
  _The Case of the Fighting Soldier_
  
  
  
  
  
  _What was I to be this time? A Commandant again of a Prisoner of War Camp? Was
  I to get a sedentary job at the War Office itself, and begin the slow process
  of fossilisation? Was I due for some wholly new job of which the rank and file
  had never even heard? As it turned out, I most certainly was.  
    
  _
  
  
  
  
  
  Ludovic Travers reports to room 299 of the War Office to receive new orders.
  He is sent up to Derbyshire to be a training officer for the local Home Guard,
  and to be plunged headlong into a new wartime mystery. It is not long before
  he meets the ‘fighting soldier’ of the title, a tough veteran of the Spanish
  Civil War and dozens of other bloody battlefields.
  
  
  But when chewing-gum is discovered wedged into the barrel of a bomb launcher,
  it is obvious there’s an individual—or more than one—in the camp out to make
  sure someone doesn’t live to fight another day. And it’s not long before their
  diabolical i