Harry’s War - Hardcover

Drinkwater, Harry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0091957214 ISBN 13: 9780091957216

Publisher: Ebury Press, 2013

Synopsis

‘I saw several fellows fall, one fellow coughing up blood and all the time, bullets were hacking about me. I ran for about 70 yards carrying with me all the Lewis gun things I had brought up and dropped breathless into a shell hole headlong onto a German who had been dead for months.’

Harold Drinkwater was not supposed to go to war. He was told he was half an inch too short. But, determined to fight for king and country, he found a battalion that would take him and was soon on his way to the trenches of the Somme. As the war dragged on, Harry saw most of the men he joined up with killed around him. But, somehow, he survived.

Soldiers were forbidden from keeping a diary so Harry wrote his in secret, recording the horrendous conditions and constant fear, as well as his pleasure at receiving his officer's commission, the joy of his men when they escaped the trenches for the Italian Front and the trench raid for which he was awarded the Military Cross.

Harry writes with such immediacy it is easy to forget that a hundred years have passed. He is by turns wry, exhausted, annoyed, resigned and often amazed to be alive. Never before published, Harry's War is a moving testament to one man's struggle to keep his humanity in the face of unimaginable violence.

About this title

Review:

"A lost diary of the Great War so brutally vivid you'll feel you are there in the trenches" (Daily Mail)

"One of the best diaries of the First World War" (Rodderick Suddaby, former keeper of the Department of Documents at the Imperial War Museum)

"Unique ... an unvarnished view of the war’s horrors – and its occasional joys" (Telegraph)

"A remarkable insight into the mind of a man who went through WW1 as an infantryman in the trenches, private and officer ... No-one who wants to understand the truth about the trenches can ignore this book" (Colonel John Hughes-Wilson)

Book Description:

The remarkable First World War diary of Private Harry Drinkwater, published for the first time

About this edition

• Publisher: Ebury Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0091957214
• ISBN 13: 9780091957216
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 416
• Editor: Cooksey Jon