Have You Forgotten Yet? : the First World War Memoirs of C.p. Blacker Mc,ma,md,frcp,mrcs - BLACKER DR.JOHN (ED)

Have You Forgotten Yet?

the First World War Memoirs of C.p. Blacker Mc,ma,md,frcp,mrcs

By: BLACKER DR.JOHN (ED)

Hardcover | 7 March 2000

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The book tells the story of an infantry officer on the Western Front from 1915-1918. For the majority of this time the writer was in the Fourth Battalion of the Coldstream Guards, which had been designated as a "pioneer" battalion keeping open the lines of communications. As they were not called upon to 'go over the top', their casualties were lighter than those of other battalions. This so preyed on the author's conscience he applied for, and was granted, a transfer to the Second Battalion. He was wounded in September 1918, and was hospitalized for three weeks. By the time he rejoined his battalion, the Germans were in full retreat, and the book ends with a moving description of the liberation of French towns which had been under German occupation for fours years.

The book differs from others of this genre by virtue of several features: the writer's introspective reflections on the traumatic events in which be was involved; his shrewd character sketches of his fellow officers; his strange mystical experience on the banks of the River Somme; the poignant juxtaposition of desolation wreaked by the war and his intense love of natural history, particularly birds and wild flowers. Above all he believed that the whole war was a hideous mistake.
Industry Reviews
These are the wonderfully vivid memoirs of the Great War of 1914-18 by Blacker, who was an 18-year-old undergraduate when the war began, served for a year as an orderly in a Belgian hospital, and then rose to command a company of the Coldstream Guards and received a Military Cross for his endeavours. In World War II he received a George Medal: an unusual pair of decorations for gallantry, but he was not a usual man. Condensed from a much longer manuscript by his son, Blacker originally wrote it long after the events it describes. Clear and easy to read, it brings back with stunning force how awful - and yet how necessary - that war's slaughter was. Blacker relied partly on a remarkable memory, partly on diaries and letters written at the time. He had an eye for the ordinariness of war: the relative worth of a blanket and a British warm overcoat on a chilly night; the wail of shells, the ubiquity of mud. He also had a keen eye for birds and flowers, when there were any to be seen. A Few months' timber work in the Foret de Clairmarais gave him an inner peace he found he could carry forward onto the battlefield of the Somme. His only sibling, a younger brother, was killed in 1915; he reflected often on the probability of life after death, and came to accept his own mortality calmly. He describes what it feels like to be badly wounded, and to see one's friends blown to pieces; pouring out in retrospect what soldiers on the front line tried to keep from their families and thus adding to what we can know of the real nature of war. In an appendix are hitherto unpublished letters by Shaw and Kipling. Review by M R D FOOT (Kirkus UK)

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