Remembering The Great War by Ray Westlake (Brewin Books, £9.95)
THIS is a meticulous study of war memorials in Herefordshire and Gloucestershire, a thorough examination of the stories that lie behind the cold stone inscriptions.
The author has spared no effort to discover the facts behind these individual tragedies.
Thousands of young men - some poor, others the privileged sons of the gentry - found comradeship in the fields of northern France and Flanders during the great European catastrophe of 1914-18.
Their impossibly youthful faces, carefully composed for the photographer, have a haunting quality that transcends time and distance.
It is hard not to be moved - and although Ray Westlake has provided a document of record rather than emotion, the accounts are nevertheless imbued with a poignancy born of dreadful circumstances. Because of these qualities, it may be possible to forgive the writing style.
Sad to say, his prose is littered with poor sentence construction - mistakes that should have been picked up by more competent editing. Many books are, after all, really the product of first-class editors.
However, this is still a work of great merit and worth the outlay of slightly less than a tenner.
John Phillpott
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