I have a bookcase upstairs which keeps my grandparent’s favourite novels, and I go to their collection when I’m looking for something challenging, or classic, or different. I didn’t know Siegried Sassoon had written novels, and so when I saw ‘Memoirs of an Infantry Officer‘ I was intrigued.

The book was first published in 1930 and it’s a fictionalized autobiography set between the early spring of 1916 and the summer of 1917.

I’ve never read anything like it.

It’s a first hand account of the Great War told through the eyes of a soldier living through it, taking the reader from the front lines of the Somme and Arras to name but a few, across no-man’s-land, through the trenches, field hospitals and training camps, back to his home in the Kent countryside for brief stretches of leave.

The horror of senseless, constant death becomes accepted somehow, by the soldiers who live to tell the tale. While those back in England are fed propaganda by the media machine, cheering on good old Blighty, oblivious to the reality of what will be the massacre of a generation of young men.

Then there’s the dawning realisation of the senselessness of the conflict and the incompetance of its leadership.

Reading this book is like walking alongside this imaginary second-lieutenant in real-time. There’s no hindsight, he doesn’t, can’t, know the future, or how the war will play out, or what the consequences of it all will be. I think that’s what makes this novel so powerful. That and Sassoon’s exquisite use of language to describe the unimaginable.