"Stoney broke and alone in London. That's how I found myself one day some years before the Great War." So begins Fredrick French's "Tommy Atkins at Home and Abroad," an enormously entertaining memoir that tells the story of one remarkably articulate British soldier's experiences of enlistment, training, desertion, re-enlistment, travel to India, and serving in the Mesopotamian theatre (now Iraq) during World War I.