In July of 1942, Mowat was an eager, idealistic infantry lieutenant barely out of his teens, bound for Europe on a troop ship and impatient to see action. This powerful true account of the action he saw, and against all odds survived, evokes the terrible reality of warfare with an honesty and clarity fiction can only imitate. Here is the agony and the antic humour, the tragedy and the tedium, the special camaraderie shared only by those who have fought a war. Here, too, is the impassioned anger of one soldier who discovers he can no longer accept the bloody carnage that engulfed him near the end of the Italian campaign: "I was staring down a vertiginous tunnel where all was black and bloody and the great wind of ultimate desolation howled and hungered. I was alone....relentlessly alone in a world I never knew....and no birds sang." A timeless story of the courage forged by terror in a man?s heart.(August 2003)
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Ever the naturalist, Mowat recalls that he learned to identify German weapons by their sounds, "a discovery which excited me almost as much as if I had stumbled on a batch of new bird species." But the war was no game, and Mowat's memoir grows ever more sombre as friends and compatriots fall, one by one, to enemy fire and illness. His book, a graceful work of personal history, does his fellow warriors honour even as it protests the madness and destruction of war. --Gregory McNamee --This text refers to the Mass Market Paperback edition.
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I had been searching for a book that could possibly inform and educate me on a Canadian's standpoint of the second world war. I quickly realized that I had picked out a good book. It puts you in the mind of a young man reaching adulthood and as had every other young man at the time, had his mind set in joining his fellow Canadians and Allies in the battle. This mindframe had been to be fairly excited and actually happy to go to the frontlines. As it had obviously not been programmed to the unfortunate reality of the war itself. Farley Mowat tells a great and wonderful story of his life before and during the timeline of the Canadian military's part in the war itself. Whether it was the obvious anxiety of waiting to be shipped overseas to the frontlines, or the brutal and graphic reality of the battle itself, Mowat unveils a true and dramtically emotional story of World War II.
Myself I was seaching for a book such as this one. It retold the historically correct graphic and terrifying nature of war, more specifically that of the Second World War. I know that one such as myself will never know and hopefully never experience the reality of war but, I can honestly say that I have infinite gratitude and thanks for those who fought for our freedom. All in all, a WONDERFUL book and I highly recommend it to any Farley Mowat fans or anyone who likes great historical literature. I just cannot seem to express how great of a book this really was. Hope you like it too!
Canadian soldier's exploits in WW 2.
It holds your interest right from the start, when as a young man
he enlists in the Canadian armed forces as a "glamorous adventure", and continues to hold your interest to the very end, when as a
combat veteran he realizes that war is no game - it's a dirty,
bloody, horrifying business.
He takes you along for the ride : you are there in the midst of
the carnage & madness they call war. A visceral experience you
won't soon forget.
and growing up during WW2.I picture in my mind his covet
to get into the war,also his dedication to ensue in his... Read more
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