Frank Richards was one of the first troops to arrive in France after the declaration of war in 1914. He had served with the Royal Welch Fusiliers in India and was an experienced soldier. He stayed with his regiment until the Armistice in 1918 never missing a battle, never getting wounded, never applying for a promotion or a transfer. He wrote Old Soldiers Never Die as an account of the war from the viewpoint of the regular soldier: it has become one of the classic accounts of trench warfare and of living, fighting and surviving on the Western Front.