This second volume of Sergeant Jim Maultsaid's expressive pictorial diaries of the Great War starts with preparations in the woods of Thiepval. "Pass the cruel barbs through and around in loops. We are out wiring, in the dead of night. Zip! Zip! Rat-a-tat! A bullet strikes metal and soars away." Boxing competitions and the 100-yard dash keep morale up. Then on 1st July at 6 am, a day which will see the end of the 14th Rifles, "the air is rent with a tornado of gunfire". The Ulster Boys "stumbled in amongst the wreckage of bodies, wooden beams and revetments" to clear the dug-outs, where Jim accounts for several Germans. "War! Hellish war!" Kid Lewis, "a great little hero", is lost. "The slopes of Thiepval run red with the blood of Ulstermen." Then "Like a thousand-ton hammer, it strikes me". On the first day of the Battle of the Somme Jim is seriously wounded and invalided out. Two unknown boys bandage the wound, Sergeant Tommy Murphy offers a mug of tea and Jim drags himself to the Red Cross station, losing blood and in terrible pain. After hospital in Suffolk Jim is sent to Cambridge for officer training. He then finds himself leading a detachment of the Chinese Labour Corps, a little-known supporting force that did manual labour to free up fighting men for the front line. The work was often difficult and dangerous and Jim pays generous tribute to his men, accompanied as always by vivid drawings. When a detachment is laying railway sleepers close to a main line, an express unexpectedly thundering through leads some workers to drop their sleepers on the track with terrifying results and loss of life. The final push by the Germans, surrounded as they were by petrol and oil dumps, was a terrifying slaughter. 17.8 x 25.4cm, 249pp, drawings on most pages.
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