Nigel Jones

‘Ordinary Scared Human Beings’

The Reluctant Tommy

By

Macmillan 455pp £16.99 order from our bookshop

The author of this memoir of the Great War, Ronald Skirth, died in 1977. He was an ordinary ranker, a man of the people rather than one of the public school subalterns who wrote most of the war memoirs. And, instead of accepting his place as a cog in the war’s great mincing machine, he revolted against it, condemning not just that war, but all wars. 

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • Lecture on war and peace in 19th-century Europe by Professor Sir Richard Evans, Thurs 25 Oct, 6.30pm Europe House… ,
    • 'Why, throughout the world, are so many people fascinated by the fiction and reality of espionage? And why of all p… ,
    • . here on books, Muriel Spark and life's tangled dance ,
    • RT : There aren't enough aggressive subtitles these days: ,
    • Churchill's on the cover of the October edition of the magazine. Piers Brendon reviews two new books about the Brit… ,
    • 'Readers have no more power to predict where the next story is going to take them than the prisoners had to determi… ,
    • 'Ho was no Soviet or Chinese puppet. He was a nationalist first and foremost. Had the Americans just realised this.… ,
    Follow Us