Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

Average Customer Rating:

A book that should be read

Customer Rating:

wait on whilst the dead men are buried. A shallow grave marked by a rifle stuck up in the mud is all that can be done. It gives some satisfaction to do that, although we are well aware the men so buried will be thrown up and reburied by shellfire time after time until the fighting shifts on from here. Some day they may have real graves. What a lot to look forward to! It's as well their people can't fully realize what finding a soldier's grave really means. If there is one book that everyone should read on warfare, or just a book that should be read, this is it. Edward Lynch left Australia on 22nd August 1916 as a young man of 18 volunteering to serve on the Western Front. He returned to his homeland in 1919, lived through three of the most turbulent years of modern history. In 1921 he started to write of his experiences, twenty one school exercise books full. The initial idea was to publish the story, but due to circumstances at the time this never happened. After his death the volumes resurfaced when Edward's grandson Mike Lynch passed the volumes to the editor Will Davies. The result is a story that stands with any of the so called `classics' of the Great War and is superior to most. The story is that of a young private `Nulla' and his experience of some of the fiercest fighting in the area of the Somme from late 1916 through to 1918. The descriptions of actions including the firing of the mines on the Messines Ridge, tanks and the start of air re-supply. Interspersed are the personal asides, food contaminated with gas, the mod swings that effected individuals, the flashes of humour, including the description of Janker's for going AWOL, cleaning the trace chains of artillery harness, `We spent a whole day cleaning trace chains and polishing each link with spit sand and blasphemy'. Technically the book is very accurate, the story can be followed on maps, trench maps and panoramas, giving a wider understanding of small actions that took place during the period. The book draws few if any conclusions as to the rights and wrongs of the conflict, it praises and castigates offices, men and the enemy as the situation demands. This book is something special; Edward Lynch deserves a place amongst the revered author's of the Great War, an accolade he deserved but never got.

Faction?

Customer Rating:

Having read many WWI books recently, I'm afraid that as I read I increasingly got the feeling that this was just too much of a novel. Faction. Whilst it is clearly based on his real experiences, I felt that there was just too much embroidery, and then you are left wondering 'well how much of this can I really believe?'. Many books of memoirs were written just after the First World War and many Publishers were bored with the prospect of yet another. Doubtless writers felt that they had to 'spice it up' a little. I felt disappointed after I'd finished it. I've read War novels that I've found more believable. Sorry. Perhaps his war record was just as he says.

Somme Mud - Goodbye to All that revisited?

Customer Rating:

The story is of Nulla and his regular close nit cast of characters - Longun, Darky, Snow, Farmer, Jacob and others. The book covers some territory covered before. Most similarly by Robert Graves book - Goodbye to all that. Lynch does not delve deeply into the reasons for the war - which obviously contrasts with Graves. However Lynch does not shy away from describing the horror of the conflict. He mostly provides an illuminating insight of the (very effective) fighting capacity of the AIF. They are ruthless killers of "Fritz" - no more ruthlessly described as when a German Brass band spotted on an opposite hill about to enter a French village are clinically shot up. A lot of the book talks humorously of events but sometimes a paragraph brings up his inner thoughts in startlingly relief: "We remember when these two marched ahead of us carrying not canes but their lives, and leading us not to a sit-down dinner but to assault Fritz trenches or pill-boxes, or those deadly machine-gun nests from which so many of our mates collected their R.I.P. Some of us remember, too, when these two were just diggers in the ranks following on after other leaders who have since passed on. Some home to Australia maimed in body in spirit, soured and seared, or happy to have got out of it all at any cost. Others who found their last long resting place in the slimy Somme mud, or amid the utter desolation that is Flanders. Others still whose remains lie shattered and scattered in the hundred tiny graves that house all that is left of a man who caught the burst of a 9.2" His war was about mates and luck - and plenty of both. His prose is sincere and direct - I suspect rather like the man and his mates.

Outstanding WW1 Memoir

Customer Rating:

This is a great memoir, instantly ranking with book such as frank Richard's Old Soldiers Never Die as among the most evocative voices of the Great War as seen by the PBI. Lynch was an Australian, fighting with the 45th Battalion AIF from late 1916 to the end of the war. The centrepieces of this book are the descriptions of hand to hand trench fighting, which are raw and immediate. The most chilling description (apart from numerous descriptions of shellfire) are the images of the Somme battlefield in the freezing winter of 1916-1917, with casualties still frozen into the postures of brutal trench combat. This is the Great War memoir of our time, if such as statement isn't something of a paradox. Lynch's Australian sensibility, his cheerful challenges to authority and the democratic flavour of Anzac `mateship' are more attuned to a 20th century sensibility than some of the more literary laments to the `futility' of the war in the 1920s and 1930s. (The attitudes to other races in the opening chapter are shocking but not surprising for a memoir of the time; their omission would have been a pointless and historically dishonest piece of editing). A singular and powerfully important memoir of 1914-1918.

One of the best books about the war on the western front

Customer Rating:

I have read many books on the first world war and the western front in particular. Many of these have been excellent, such as the Lyn McDonald books, which give great insight into the horrors that the ordinary soldier had to endure. What sets this work apart from them is that it is a full acount of the war, written by an ordinary man in exceptional circumstances. It soon becomes clear that staying alive was just as difficult during spells of 'holding the line' as it was during a major battle. An incredible tale, honestly told with bravery and dignity. A must-read.