Twelve Days on the Somme - Sidney Rogerson

[Barking]

Just bought a hard back copy from the local branch of The Works for £4.99

[trenchtrotter]

Its a cracking read. The description of the fighting before Le Transloy is great and to visit the area now it is easy to see the topigraphy Rogerson describes.

TT

[WilliamRev]

I've just started reading this too - bought a second-hand copy cheaply on Amazon, and it already is fascinating.

Looking on my bookshelf I am staggered to find that I have fifteen WW1 memoirs (13 written by junior officers, 2 by other ranks) in the 1930s, all keen to have their say after a decade or so of silence.

William

[clive_hughes]

Unlike the output of many others, this was written to combat what the author saw as a wave of literary hysteria about the "madness" of the war.

It is in consequence not full of wham-bam action, firing squads, poetry, or social commentary. It's a description of those "twelve days" up at Le Transloy in all their cold, muddy, boring, frustrating, dark and occasionally dangerous reality. And for that reason alone it stands out from the pack.

Greatly recommended by the late Rose Coombs as the best piece of first-person writing about the Somme.

Clive

[squirrel]

Superbly written book and a must for every WW1 enthusiast's bookshel;.

[WilliamRev]

I have now finished this book, and it is indeed a fascinating read. Rogerson was a good writer, publishing seven books on various topics in his lifetime. In choosing to concentrate on a specific 12-day spell at Transnoy in November 1916, as the Battle of the Somme was coming to a cold muddy end, he recounts one of those short periods of time where life is so intense that every detail remains in the mind a decade and a half later. He is able to give us details and descriptions of scenery, trenches and procedures that are not found elsewhere, and I particularly liked the account in the last pages of the book of the battalion waiting four hours in the rain for a train to turn up.

I would recommend anyone interested in this book (ie anyone interested in the minutiae of life on the Western Front or in the Battle of the Somme) to furnish themselves with a copy now - there are plenty of cheap hardback copies available on Amazon (using the forum link of course), and I'm sure that there will come a day when this is no longer so.

William

[John(txic)]

There are about half-a-dozen copies still available in the Wolverhampton branch of "The Works"

[Vista52]

I'm nearly finished reading this book. I'm really enjoying it.

From this Topic:

http://1914-1918.inv...ch#entry1257904

Does it looks like Fall Trench would be somewhere close to where the Freeway is now?