FATEFUL BATTLE LINE

The book combines a journal of infantry service on the Western Front with sketches and finished work made at the time and it has been skilfully edited and annotated by the late Michael Glover. Henry Ogle was a trained artist who, in his writing, fused the vividness of the painter's eye for detail with a writer's precision and awareness. Commissioned from the ranks, twice wounded, his gallantry rewarded with the Military Cross, he endured four years of war, an experience which seared him. Front-line, support and reserve trenches, raids, patrols and work details, outposts and piquets, hospitals and base areas, French and Belgian towns and villages, leave back home in England, the tragic landscape of Flanders, weapons, artillery, transport, draft and riding animals, and above all his fellow soldiers - Henry faithfully and often wittily recorded the day-to-day minutiae. Here too are the sudden shattering moments, of vast industrial armies locked in the last of the great siege wars and he demonstrates that the enduring legacy of the Great War lay in the spirit of the men who fought it. The outstanding feature is the complete lack of bitterness at the loss of four years of his life and the death or maiming of so many of his friends and comrades. And there is certainly no hatred of the German enemy. The boy from Preston grammar school done good. 216 page well illustrated large softback, 15.8 x 23cm.