Description
Cape Town, South Africa: Howard Timmins, 1980. 185 pp, large 8vo (9 5/8″ H). B&w photographs. “Apart from its importance as an historical narrative the story told in these pages by a 22-year-old soldier has the unique quality of experience freshly captured – the truth of a soldier’s life in the critical battles fought in North Africa in 1941-42. It is a personal view of war with its boredom, its moments of terror, of tenderness and humour and its final realisation that war is not a glorious game. It is written from the limited viewpoint of a young N.C.O. with his self-doubt, his fantasies and his moments of despair. It chronicles the handful of men around him, a section of mortarmen, griping, idle, insubordinate, extra ordinarily light-hearted, never failing when courage was demanded – and finally dying together in the great and bloody battle of El Alamein which is the climax of the diary. Told in a day-to-day, sometimes hour-by-hour account, (this) is a book that will touch a responsive chord in the heart of every man who has borne arms – in any army.