To Serve Them All My Days Hardcover – September 25, 1972 by R. F. Delderfield
 
Young David Powlett-Jones, a Welsh miner's 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.
 
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