"Homage to Catalonia" by George Orwell

George Orwell's account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War was written in 1938, before the final victory of the Fascists under Franco, so it is necessarily incomplete. But this doesn't matter. It isn't an attempt at history. It is a very visceral account of fighting in a war. It starts with his experiences as a dreadfully ill-equipped militiaman in the trenches following which he goes on leave to Barcelona only to be caught up in street fighting when the different anti-Fascist factions decide to fight among themselves; finally he has to escape from Spain after the socialist organisation with whom he has enlisted are proscribed.

It's an enthralling read. He has passages in which he describes aspects of his experience in which his adjectives are perfectly chosen:

• "My memories of that part of the war - the red flags in Barcelona, the gaunt trains full of shabby soldiers creeping to the front, the grey war-stricken towns further up the line, the muddy, ice-cold trenches in the mountains." (Ch 1): Gaunt trains: wow!
• "the atmosphere of that time ... is all bound up with the winter cold, the ragged uniforms of the militiamen, the oval Spanish faces, the Morse-like tapping of machine-guns, the smells of urine and rotting bread, the tinny taste of bean-stews wolfed hurriedly out of unclean pannikins." (Ch 6)
• "Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered with willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen - all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the road of bombs." (Ch 12) Final words. I adore the horses who "browse and meditate". Brilliant!

The only difficulty I had with this book was understanding all the different factions, referred to usually by their initials. I can pardon some confusion: immediately before and during the Civil War, Spain was a chaos of competing political tendencies to the extent that in one day she had three premiers! Orwell does his best to explain things (who was POUM and PSUC and UGT and NCT etc) in Appendix I but I needed this information drip-fed to me through the text. 

 Nevertheless, I don't think I have ever read a book which better captures the experience of soldiering, although Laurie Lee's memoir of the Spanish Civil War A Moment of War and Joyce Cary's Memoir of the Bobotes both come close. 

Selected Quotes:

• "the characteristic smell of war - in my experience a smell of excrement and decaying food." (Ch 2)
• "I never think of my first two months at war without thinking of wintry stubble fields whose edges are encrusted with dung." (Ch 2)
• "It was beastly water, hardly more transparent than milk." (Ch 3)
• "In war all soldiers are lousy, at least when it is warm enough. The men who fought at Verdun, at Waterloo, at Flodden, at Senlac, at Thermopylae - every one of them had lice crawling over his testicles." (Ch 5)
• "There was a kind of harrow that took one straight back to the later Stone Age. It was made of boards joined together, to about the size of a kitchen table; in the board hundreds of holes were morticed, and into each hole was jammed a piece of flint which had been chipped into shape ... It made me sick to think of the work that must go into the making of such a thing, and the poverty that was obliged to use flint in place of steel. I have felt more kindly towards industrialisation ever since." (Ch 5)
• "No sooner had the fighting started than the hotel filled to the brim with a most extraordinary collection of people. There were foreign journalists, political suspects of every shade, an American airman in the service of the Government, various Communist agents, including a fat, sinister-looking Russian, said to be an agent of the Ogpu, who was nicknamed Charlie Chan and wore attached to his waistband a revolver and a neat little bomb, some families of well-to-do Spaniards who looked like Fascist sympathisers, tow or three wounded men from the International Column, a gang of lorry drivers from some huge French lorries which had been carrying a load of oranges back to France and had been held up by the fighting, and a number of Popular Army officers." (Ch 9)
• "Even a man as tall as I am cannot wear a long Mauser down his trouser leg without discomfort. It was an intolerable job getting down the corkscrew staircase of the observatory with a completely rigid left leg. Once in the street, we found that the only way to move was with extreme slowness, so slowly that you did not have to bend your knees." (Ch 9)
• "The fact is that every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency." (Ch 10)
• "Roughly speaking it was the sensation of being at the centre of an explosion. There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all round me, and I felt a tremendous shock - no pain, only a violent shock, such as you get from an electric terminal; with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shrivelled up to nothing." (Ch 10) Orwell's experience of being shot in the neck.
• "No one I met at this time ... failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all." (Ch 10)
• "It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench." (Appendix One)

Other books by Orwell that I have reviewed in this blog:

• The Road to Wigan Pier: a masterpiece of reporting on social conditions in England in the 1930s
• Down and Out in Paris and London

Other books about war reviewed in this blog are here.

Here is a review of Orwell's biography by Michael Shelden

June 2023; 248 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"A Moment of War" by Laurie Lee

Laurie Lee is best known for his memoir of childhood Cider with Rosie but for my money his later works deserve just as much attention. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning records a journey he made through Spain in the 1930s, tramping and busking with his violin. In this book, dedicated "To the Defeated",  Lee returns to Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War as part of the International Brigade. It is full of incident. He is arrested as a spy ... three times, each time being imprisoned and expecting to be shot. He describes the shambolic training he underwent and how the ragamuffin soldiers amused themselves during the long periods of inaction. He has several encounters with girls and at least one with a boy (provided by the guards on what he expects will be his last night in the condemned cell). He describes the casual killing of those suspected of being spies, fascists or traitors. During a battle he himself kills a man. So there is plenty of excitement.

But the descriptions. Lee was a poet: his descriptions are lyrical:

• "The guards, in their heavy brown overcoats, began to steam like sweating horses." (Ch 1)
• "I saw the landscape shudder into shape." (Ch 1)
• "It was now about noon, with the sun at its low winter strength, and across the northern horizon the mountains caught it like broken glass, each peak flashing with blue and white light." (Ch 2)
• "Her body met mine with the quick twist of a snake." (Ch 2)
• "The long-forgotten juices of real home-cooked food, swimming aromas of tomatoes, dried beans, and garlic sausage, and boiled chicken peeling on the bone." (Ch 6)
• "We ... were faced by a small brass band like a firing-squad. In the dead morning light they pointed their instruments at our heads and blew out a succession of tubercular blasts." (Ch 3)
• "When a shell hit the ground and exploded near by, the snow rose in the air like a dirty ghost, and hung there spikily billowing, before collapsing into the ground again." (Ch 8)

Selected quotes:

• "I was at that flush of youth which never doubts self-survival, that idiot belief in luck and a uniquely charmed life, without which illusion few wars would be possible." (Ch 1)
• "He didn't like that kind of warfare - mostly hanging about in ditches, then massacre and panic." (Ch 1)
• "the simple, voluptuous appetite of youth when taste was never jaded." (Ch 6)
• "It was one of the coldest nights I could remember. I lay with my hands between my thighs, my clenched teeth chattering, my overcoat crackling with frost." (Ch 8)
• "Under bombardment, the body takes over the mind; it stiffens and melts, the mouth floods and dries, and all one's senses rush to the back of one's neck." (Ch 8)
• "I had killed a man and remembered his shocked, angry eyes. There was nothing I could say to him now. ... Was this then what I'd come for, and all my journey had meant - to smudge out the life of an unknown young man in a blur of panic which in no way could affect victory or defeat?" (Ch 8)
• "It was like taking part in some surrealist chess, where pawns became Kings and Queens without warning, and the value of the pieces changed in mid-play." (Ch 9)

Fabulous. June 2021; 178 pages

Other memoirs and autobiographies reviewed in this blog may be found here. Other books about war may be found here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Memoir of the Bobotes" by Joyce Cary

Cary was an Irish novelist born in 1888 and dying in 1957 whose most famous works are Mister Johnson and The Horse's Mouth.  This memoir was published after his death and refers to the time when, as a young man of about 24, he went to Montenegro to work for the Red Cross in a war zone during the First Balkan War, a fight between various Balkan states and the Turks that served as a sort of dress rehearsal for the First World War.

It has some remarkable writing which evokes perfectly the fellowship of young men in war and the everyday mundane lives of soldiers, most interested in keeping warm, eating, and where they are going to sleep than in any aspects of chivalry: “Anyone will tell you you that a war is not made up of fighting, but just exactly of stew, and if you are lucky, eggs. Just as the life of an American woman does not consist altogether of marriages and divorces, with homicide here and there, but of stew and eggs, and such matters.” (3.32) This is summed up in his last lines: "If this proves a disappointing book, it must be because there is too much eating, and too little incident in it - too much like life, which is perhaps disappointing for the same reason." He is so right in everything except that this book disappoints.

But the idea that life is made up of the commonplace is a theme of the book:

• “The commonplace infects every person and situation as soon as you are close to them. If the Lieutenant had produced a pistol suddenly, and offered to rob me, there would have been no more than a troublesome brawl, less picturesque than a fight between two sparrows in a gutter or an apache outrage.” (1.2)
• “I saw an Apache outrage once. ... Newspaper reports of this sort of affair make every city clerk long for romantic outlawry. He takes tram to Poplar and smokes opium, or goes for a gypsy during his week’s holiday, and gets harvest bugs in his legs and can't sleep at night without making his under arm go dead. Real outlawry is no more romantic than a desk.” (1. 2)

Ironically, because this is a memoir of war, it is packed with incident. Almost as soon as he arrives in Montenegro he does the tourist thing to see a Montenegrin citadel on top of a hill; a saboteur blows up the ammunition dump stored there and Cary is arrested by a rather frightened soldier. “I don't think he was so much afraid of the shrapnel, as still entirely overset by the surprise of the first bang. His eyes were popping out with excitement, and his breathing was like that of an old asthmatic.” (1.2) Cary is then accused of sabotage, only being released after bravely seeking wounded amid the still exploding ammunition.

He makes one feel the horrors and the everyday of war. In some ways this book reminded me of All Quiet on the Western Front:

• “As for the bodies, it is the birds and the sun that take off the noses. The nose is soft, and offers itself kindly to a beak. The sun easily shrivels it. In the same way the flesh about the mouth goes before the harder skin over the cheek bones, and the stomach before the ribs.” (1.10)
• “The whistle can be heard (very thin and sometimes intermittent) a long time before the shot arrives. You have plenty of time to reflect that you can't get out of the way because the way it's not certain enough, and that if there is going to be anyone killed, he will have to be killed, and nothing more’s to be done.” (1.12)
• “The Turks came out afterwards and bayoneted the wounded. Some of them were tangled in the wire, and hung there helpless until they were shot to pieces, or spitted.” (3.24)
• “I lay down with the soldiers - while I had the use of one man's chest for a pillow, another used my thigh” (3.25)
• “The harder it is to keep house the more important it becomes, and the more carefully is domesticity studied, as in wartime. What is the special significance of the term ‘Old Soldier’? It means one who is so cunning a housekeeper that he can make himself comfortable where others are at a loss. A man who always has something eatable in his haversack and drinkable in his bottle, a reserve of tobacco and matches, a warm hole to sleep in.” (3.27)
• “Though I had not made my sleeping sack ... I had watched over it, it guarded it, trundled it about, shouldered it or over the hills, until it had at least the status of a comrade, if not altogether a child of my own fashioning.” (4.40)
• “It is by an imaginative effort rather than direct realisation that danger and the possibility of bullets can be understood. The sniper waits for the failure of the imagination and shoots you because you have forgotten that you must believe in him.” (4.44)

Some things never change:

• “Englishmen pass through the world as if its countries were so many chambers of the Sarcophagus Club, as if they had been only lately elected, and were still afraid of the waiters.” (1.1)
• “Naturally, if one speaks English to a person that only knows French and Albanian, it must be spoken very loud indeed to make him understand.” (1.11)
• “It is always better to do things in Montenegro and get permission afterwards.” (3.25) I have observed that this is true not only in Montenegro but around the world.

He is excellent at description:

• “He was a portly old gentleman, and the immense long barrelled revolver, which all Montenegrins carry in the front of their sash, stood at a long distance from his backbone.” (3.32)

And he really understands people:

• “The Sergeant-Major was really a kind man, but I had not yet discovered that no bolts ever flew out of his thunder.” (1.4)

Selected quotes:

• “There is no kind of work always so apt to hand in a base camp as the moving and removing of boxes.” (1.3)
• “A clergyman once told me privately that he could not understand how a boat could be sailed against the wind. I told him that I should be very diffident of attempting his trade, while he declared it required less wits than any other - that that was why the clergy wore their collars back before, as a warning that special allowance should be made for them by ordinary intelligent persons.” (1.4)
• “There is nothing so delightful as busy and active work which has some sort of immediate result, everyone likes cutting down trees, painting fences. rummaging box-rooms, excavating pits, blasting rocks.” (1.4)
• “I had a nest of my own on top of a pile of baggage, shared with an old mother, who had no corners. She was above stays, and even the point of her elbow was comfortably soft. When she laughed her whole surface waved in ripples; to make a remark to her was as if you should drop a stone in milk.” (1.6)
• “This was already the time of the armistice, which was respected far too well by the Montenegrins for their own good. For the first time they were fighting by the rules of European warfare, and they are not yet enough civilized to know that these rules are never kept.” (1.12)
• “Soap and clean sheets are only the binding of the book - useful to keep it together, but paid for with a grudge.” (2.21)
• “Cap is a marcher with that sort of spring in the joints which is like wit in an argument.” (3.23)
• “The etiquette is two salutes to the handshake - a courtesy-sandwich with the meat in the middle.” (3.26)
• “The others only desired a large fire with plenty of flame and smoke - a fire as easy to cook over as it would be to tow a baby's perambulator with a ten-coupled engine.” (3.27)
• “We had a bayonet for candlestick, stuck down in a crack of the hearth, with the candle in its socket.” (3.27)
• “The pup lost herself on Murican journey, and caused Lauder some uneasiness. He waited two days, and then marched back alone to find her. She was with a lover. Lauder did not approve the match, describing the bridegroom as a black mongrel, lame in the hind leg, with a broken tail, and forbade the banns. The pup nevertheless grieved for a few hours, and then worked off her trouble in prolonged efforts to get a four inch skull into a three inch meat tin.” (4.40)
• “You who sit in an armchair, made by a man you don't know the name of, and bought in a shop, before a fire of coals dug out by total strangers in a country as far off, for all you care, as Kamtchatka, delivered at your door by a heaver at best merely an acquaintance, arranged and lit by a servant who probably did not greatly like you, do not know what the pleasure of the fireside means.” (4.40)
• “The Boy Scouts were supposed to be a Red Cross unit, but they were of very tender years besides being armed to the teeth.” (4.41)

This is a beautifully written book.

October 2019; 164 pages

Other memoirs reviewed in this blog may be found here. Other books about was are here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

My parents were members of the Readers Union Book Club. They must have had a great person to choose the books. This is one of the many I have enjoyed and reviewed in this blog. Here is a list:

• Life with Ionides by Margaret Lane: about a man catching snakes in East Africa
• The Golden Isthmus: the history of Panama from its discovery by Europeans
• The Incredible Mile by Harold Elvin: the travelogue of a journey on the Trans Siberian express
• A Pattern of Islands by Arthur Grimble: the memoir of a Colonial Officer on the Gilbert and Ellice Islands
• Invasion 1940 by Peter Fleming: an account of Britain's unpreparedness and preparation for a Nazi invasion
• Bus Stop Symi by William Travis: three years lived on the sometimes less than idyllic Greek island of Symi
• A Memoir of the Bobotes by Joyce Cary: a memoir of time spent in the Balkan Wars (before the First World War)
• The Great Trek by Oliver Ransford: a history of the formation of the Orange Free State and Transvaal by Boer farmers trekking from the Cape Colony

"All Quiet on the Western Front" by Erich Maria Remarque

The classic anti-war novel, published in 1929 and based on the author's experiences in the German Army during the First World War.

There is philosophy, there is eloquence, there is horror, there are purple passages. This might make the diet over-rich were it not for the context of a man in his tight-knit bunch of friends doing incredibly normal things. Thus, for example, the line "We are two men, two minute sparks of life; outside is the night and the circle of death.” (C 5) might sound a little pretentious were it not for the fact that this is in the context of a midnight feast of stolen goose, roasted and devoured, during a bombardment. Remarque can get away with his purple passages because of the ordinariness of the descriptions and the rooting of all that takes place in such mundane and everyday reality. In fact, he does more than 'get away' with it; it is the prosaic but detailed description of ordinariness that makes the philosophy stand out and lends it its unforgettable power. Were it not for lines such as “There is a smell of tar, of summer, and of sweaty feet.” (C 3) he could not write “I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow." (C 11)

This is a book all about contrasts. For example: “One morning two butterflies play in front of our trench. They are brimstone-butterflies, with red spots on their yellow wings. What can they be looking for here? There is not a plant or flower for miles. They settle on the teeth of a skull.” (C 6) He can do this in a single line: “The branches might seem gay and cheerful were not cannon embowered there.” (C 4)

He is eloquent in his bitterness about his teachers who persuaded him and his classmates to enlist. “For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress - to the future. We often made fun of them and played jokes on them, but in our hearts we trusted them. ... But the first death we saw shattered this ... The first bombardments showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces. While they continued to write and talk, we saw the wounded and dying.” (C 1) But he accepts that you can’t do anything about that. “Where would the world be if one brought every man to book?” (C 1)

This bitterness extends to initial training. “We learnt that a bright button is weightier than four volumes of Schopenhauer. ... With our young awakened eyes we saw that the classical conception of the Fatherland held by our teachers resolved itself here into a renunciation of personality such as one would not ask of the meanest servants ... We were to be trained for heroism as though we were circus-ponies.” (C 1)

He feels that he has been ruined by the war. He wonders what he can do now, a young man whose college years were spent in killing men. "Through the years our business has been killing; - it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what shall come out of us?” (C 11) And can he even live? “Now if we go back we will be weary, broken, burnt out, rootless, and without hope. We will not be able to find our way any more.” (C 12)

He is bitter against politicians. "I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another." (C 11) He has a solution: “Kropp proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out among themselves. Whoever survives, his country wins.” (C 3)

This is an eloquent condemnation of warfare.

Other great lines:

• “The poor brave wretches, who are so terrified that they dare not cry out loudly, but with battered chests, with torn bellies, arms and legs only whimper softly for their mothers and cease as soon as one looks at them.” (C 6)
• “Between five and ten recruits fall to every old hand.” (C 6)
• “We were never very demonstrative in our family; poor folk who toil and are full of acres are not so. It is not their way to protest what they already know.” (C 7)
• “What is leave? - A pause that only makes everything after it so much worse.” (C 7)
• “Even a soldier’s behind likes to sit soft.” (C 10)

June 2019; 191 pages.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Another powerful book about the war in the trenches is At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop. Other books about war which are reviewed on this blog can be found on this page.

Other books by German authors reviewed in this blog.

"The History of the Peloponnesian War" by Thucydides

This translation by Sir Richard Livingstone was first published in 1943 and the author makes parallels with events leading up to the Second World War. The translation is selective of parts of the original, and orders those parts on a slightly different order from the original, but this mostly works. The flaw is that it includes very little of the eighth book which Thucydides left incomplete but of which Livingstone leaves merely a stump.

What is remarkable about the book is that it is so modern. The events recorded cover a period in which Athens, mostly from sheer hubris, went from Empire to defeat. As such there are interesting parallels with the present situation in which the oligarchical Brexiteers hark back to the days of the British Empire in order to persuade the citizens of Britain to take risks. Let us hope that the results are not as devastating for the British as they were for the Athenians.

Thucydides has a very modern point of view. He is realpolitikal:

• “Men secure peace by using their power justly but by making it clear that they will not allow others to wrong them.” (1.71)
• “It has always been a law that the weaker should be subject to the stronger” (1.76)
• “Where force can be used, law is not needed.” (1.77)
• “Bad laws which are never changed are better for a city than good ones that have no authority.” (3.37)
• “Ordinary men usually manage public affairs better than their more gifted fellows.” (3.37)
• “Three failings most fatal to empire - pity, sentiment, and indulgence.” (3.40)
• “The question of justice arises only between parties equal in strength ... the strong do what they can, and the weak submit.” (5.89)

But he is also good at the psychology behind democratic politics:

• “Men seem to resent injustice more than violence; the former is regarded as unfair advantage taken by an equal, the latter is compulsion applied by a superior.” (1.77)
• “It is a common mistake in going to war to begin at the wrong end, to act first, and wait for disaster to discuss the matter.” (1.78)
• “Zeal is always at its height at the commencement of an undertaking.” (book 2)
• “Villainy is sooner called clever than simplicity good, and men in general are proud of cleverness and ashamed of simplicity.” (3.82)
• “The secret of this was the general extraordinary success, which made them confuse their strength with their hopes.” (4.65)
• “It is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use reason arbitrarily to thrust aside what they do not fancy.” (4.108)

The battle tactics include a perceptive observation about:

• How men fight:because the shield was held on the left arm making the right side more vulnerable the hoplite armies tended to swerve towards the right; this, he suggests, was because the man on the extreme right tended to move right leaving his neighbour's right exposed so he moved right, and so on.
• Disinformation: “Fire-signals of an attack were also raised towards Thebes; but the Plataeans in the town at once displayed a number of others, prepared beforehand for this very purpose, in order to render the enemy’s signals unintelligible, and to prevent his friends getting a true idea of what was passing.” (3.22)
• Geophysics: “About the same time that these earthquakes were so common, the sea at Orobiae, in Euboea, retiring from the then line of coast, returned in a huge wave and invaded a great part of the town, and retreated some of it still under water, so that what was once land is now sea; the inhabitants who could not reach the higher ground in time were drowned.” (3.89)

Selected quotes:

• “My history has been composed to be an everlasting possession, not the show-piece of an hour.” (1.22)
• “They [Athenians] were born into the world to take no rest themselves and to give none to others.” (1.70)
• “We are wise because we are educated with too little learning to despise the laws, and with too severe a self-control to disobey them.” (1.84)

OK, it got a bit tedious when there was yet another battle in a place whose name I failed to recognise but this is a problem I have with all war histories. Otherwise it was surprisingly readable.

March 2019; I read it on holiday in Greece travelling from Athens to Delphi, Olympia, and Nafplion; it was a little disappointing to drive past Sparta but at least I was on the Peloponnese.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Other books about war reviewed in this blog can be found on this page.

"Convoy" by Caroline Davies

This is a book of poems about the battles around Malta in the second World War. It is written from the points of view of some of the combatants. Some of them are on Royal and Merchant Naval ships in a convoy trying to bring essential supplies to the besieged Maltese; some poems are written as if by fighter pilots struggling to keep the German and Italian bombers from bombing the island into submission.

As a history of this part of the war it has its interests and I was certainly keen to find out whether ships (and people) survived or not.

But it isn't my sort of poetry. I am an old-fashioned unsophisticated sort of chap when it comes to poetry. I like scansion. I like rhyme. In short, I like structure. If a poem doesn't have structure it has to be remarkably good to qualify as a poem. The difference between prose and this sort of poem, for me, is in the language. Poems can use words to convey feelings and ideas as precisely (although in an entirely different way) as a cryptic crossword. Thus 'the force that through the green fuse drives the flower' works as a line of poetry because of the alliteration; when Wilfred Owen rhymes nervous with knives us and war with wire it is the use of the false rhymes that put us on edge; when Rudyard Kipling talks about 'Boots, boots, boots, boots' it is the monotony of that rhythmic tread that defines the poem. Poems use the music of words.

There are moments in this book when that works. On page 38, in 'Don't...' we are told that 'The sky holds splattered smudges of ack-ack' which works (and I especially like the word 'hold') up until the 'ack-ack'. But a lot of the poems use dry unemotional words. To be charitable, one might assume that this is a deliberate attempt by the author to represent the stiff-upper-lips of the boys. But I don't understand why this is a book of poems.

Interesting as history with occasional moments of poetry. 

June 2013; 95 pages