Understandable perhaps from the point of view of the poet: readers on the other hand might wish to demur. The poems gathered here and chronologically ordered, thereby tracing the course of the war, are an extraordinary testimony to the almost unimaginable experiences of a combatant in that bitter conflict. Moving from the patriotic optimism of the first few poems (" ... fighting for our freedom, we are free") to the anguish and anger of the later work (where "hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists / Flounders in mud ... "), there comes a point when the reality of trench-warfare and its aftershocks move beyond comprehension: Sassoon knows this, and it becomes a powerful element in his art. As a book, the images have a cumulative relentlessness that make it almost impossible to read more than a few poems in one sitting. Unlike the avant-garde experiments developing in Europe in the first decades of this century, Sassoon's verse is formally conservative--but this was perhaps necessary, for as one reads the poems, one feels that the form, the classically inflected tropes, the metre and rhyme, apart from ironising the rhetoric of glory and battle were necessary techniques for containing the emotion (and indeed, a tone of barely controlled irony may have been the only means by which these angry observations would have been considered publishable at the time). When Sassoon's line begins to fragment, as it does in several of the later poems, it is under the extreme pressure to express the inexpressible. Compassion and sympathy are omnipresent here, in their full etymological sense of suffering with or alongside others--something the higher echelons of command (those " ... old men who died / Slow, natural deaths--old men with ugly souls") were never able or willing to contemplate. But Sassoon intuited the future of warfare, could sense that this was not "the war to end all wars": the mock-religious invocation of the final poem prefigures the vicious euphemisms of more recent conflicts: "Grant us the power to prove, by poison gases, / The needlessness of shedding human blood." Sassoon's bile-black irony signals a deep-felt pessimism: it was with good reason. --Burhan Tufail

    In Fighting the Flying Circus, Captain Rickenbacker recounts his combat missions against the Germans in the skies over Europe during WWI.

    It brings a sort of sickening feeling to me even now, though I consider myself hardened to such sights.” Modest and unassuming, Feilding was a front line soldier in World War One, and a leader of men, preferring to volunteer for a dangerous duty rather than an order a subordinate to do so in his place. With a narrative broken only by the months he spent recuperating from wounds, Feilding was blessed with an extraordinary luck: his survival was a mystery even to his comrades. Vivid yet unexaggerated in its depiction of life at the front, Feilding’s letters are driven by his thoughts, emotions and experiences of the war, and of home. “…it was nice to think that at last, after all the years of war, these men were getting some personal and first-hand recognition from their fellow-countrymen.” Written with the events still fresh in his mind, and often while still on the battlefield or in the trenches, Feilding’s letters to his wife form one of the most compelling accounts of the Western Front during the First World War. Rowland Feilding (1871-1945) continued his family’s close association with the Coldstream Guards, transferring to the regiment from the City of London Yeomanry in 1915. In 1916 he took command of the 6th Connaught Rangers, and following its disbandment in 1918 the 1/15th Londons (Civil Service Rifles). They were demobilised the following year. Albion Press is an imprint of Endeavour Press, the UK's leading independent digital publisher. For more information on our titles please sign up to our newsletter at www.endeavourpress.com. Each week you will receive updates on free and discounted ebooks. Follow us on Twitter: @EndeavourPress and on Facebook via http://on.fb.me/1HweQV7. We are always interested in hearing from our readers. Endeavour Press believes that the future is now.

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