The Reluctant Tommy

by Duncan Barrett (Author), RonaldSkirth (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2011

  $4.24

  In the First World War, Ronald Skirth was an ordinary tommy. His experiences were like those of many others, save in one thing. When Skirth went out into No Man's Land after Passchendaele and saw the dead body of a teenaged German soldier, he resolved that he would never again help to take a human life. Making use of Ronald Skirth's letters and postcards to his sweetheart, Ella, his contemporary journals and the memoir he wrote in his retirement fifty years later, The Reluctant Tommy is the fascinating story of a man who stuck by his principles in impossible circumstances. With a foreword from Jon Snow, and now repackaged for paperback, it is an new classic of the war memoir genre; the tale of an ordinary soldier with a truly remarkable story. 'Different from the hundreds of other memoirs about the Great War ...What he has to say was hard come by and should be heard' Daily Mail 'Superb' Daily Telegraph 'An important contribution to the literature of the war ...whenever I get too misty-eyed about officer-man relationships I shall reread it to remind me of how badly things could go wrong.' Richard Holmes, Evening Standard

• Used

  Hardcover
  2010

  $4.25

  'Ella darling, There are things I have concealed from you up till now that I think you ought to know; things that have turned me from a different person from the Ronald you know.' So, in April 1918, Ronald Skirth, a non-commissioned officer in the Royal Artillery, wrote to his sweetheart, back in England. A year before, Skirth, then just nineteen years old, had been sent to fight on the Western Front. This is his story, the story of a young man who went to war a devoted servant of King and country and returned utterly convinced that war, all war, was wrong and who acted upon his convictions, making a pact with God that he would not kill. This riveting memoir was written fifty years after the end of the war, drawing on his own contemporary diary entries and letters home. Never published before, it affords a vivid, moving and surprising insight into that most dreadful of conflicts.