Nigel Jones
‘Ordinary Scared Human Beings’
The Reluctant Tommy
By Ronald Skirth (Edited by Duncan Barrett)
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.
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