This My War This My Death

The emotional and gripping memories of the fighting, the gas, the mud and the terror at Verdun, at Arras and at Guillemont during the Somme Offensive of 1916 by a man who lived through the battles, but who was destined never to see his homeland again. 

“…heavy curtains mercifully keep from us the true face of mankind’s appalling guilt.”

With the heightened sensitivities of a poet, the author muses on the immense beauty in life and nature – until Verdun, until the battle of the Somme, claiming the lives of much-loved friends and comrades, and then he reveals the true horror that the propaganda refused to disclose to the German population. He survived the terror of a massive allied bombardment and attack as he sat in the disgusting mess of a rain and mud-filled German trench. He lived through the heartbreaking, gut-wrenching brutality of self-preservation at Verdun.

Not every day was spent with a bayonet in a trench, however. Not every day was a day saturated with death. Even in a trench, life took on a semblance of normality, a surreal reality that merely assumed normality until the contrast was abruptly highlighted by rest periods in the surrounding towns and villages.

An idyll that crashes to earth when the fighting starts again. 

    “Each man is comforted, but often, just three steps further on, filled with new hope, one of the bandaged men will be caught in the devastating blast of a shell. There is no rescue anywhere, no safety anywhere in this hell.”

    This, then, is the other-worldly life of a soldier at war abandoned by so-called civilisation and finding comfort in the beauty of nature where he can – until, at the last, death finds him, too.