One Man's War's - Howard Timmins 0869781790

Published by Howard Timmins. Authors James Ambrose Brown, Hardcover, 185 pages. Pre-owned. Condition fair. 

 Apart from its importance as a 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, 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, extraordinarily 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-to-hour account, One Man's War is a book that will touch a responsive chord in the heart of every man who has borne arms-in any army. It has the singular merit of immediacy as the young writer (who went on to become one of South Africa's best-known) made his first efforts to capture the emotions of a soldier and to record what he saw as faithfully as he was able - sometimes brutally, sometimes with comic irony, sometimes with a poetic eye for the unexpected: a desert flower, a fall of rain, and even the sinister beauty of falling flares. The diarist has edited the original here and there and added notes which give a picture of the actual military situation, often unknown to the writer at the time. The original handwritten diary is in the South African Library,