With the British Army in Flanders & France

Now, I don’t usually do this, in fact I don’t think I have ever done so before, but I am going to recommend a read for you.  Until last week, this little book had resided for decades, unread, in a dark recess of the library – possibly because I really am fickle enough to not wish to read a book with a cover depicting a helmeted soldier when the contents all take place before helmets were introduced (and don’t get me started on films that make the same error), or maybe because Lice is a stupid name for a book, or maybe because it is a translation, I really don’t know.  The author, later to become a naturalised French citizen and already an influential writer in the European Modernist movement, was born in Switzerland of a Swiss father and a Scottish mother, joined up in France on the outbreak of war and, being a foreigner, spent the first year of the war as an acting corporal in the French Foreign Legion until the Germans shot his arm off.  The book is essentially a series of anecdotes about a bunch of mainly young, foreign, misfits who hate the Germans almost as much as they hate the military authorities, but who are determined to amuse themselves as much as possible before their luck runs out.  Which all sounds a bit like a template for every war film ever since, but there’s nothing clichéd in these pages.  Tales of nighttime punting in the Somme marshes behind German lines (eventually leading to the intervention of the French Navy), or booby-trapped gramophones, fixed to play the Marseillaise over and over and left in the German trenches, or the mystery of the bloody hand in the trench that came from nowhere – hence the original French title of ‘La Main Coupée’ – all add up to not only a gripping read, but an insight into warfare unlike any I have read before.  Give it a go.