Have You Forgotten Yet?

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 In an appendix are hitherto unpublished letters by Shaw and Kipling.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)