RONALD SKIRTH. EDITED BY DUNCAN BARRETT - The Reluctant Tommy. Ronald Skirth's Extraordi8nary Memoir of the First World War.

London England, Macmillan, 2010. First Edition, Binding: Cloth, Very Good/Very Good. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" Tall Octavo 9780230746732 Hardback Hardback. First Edition. The Reluctant Tommy. In the First World War, the author was an ordinary tommy. His experiences were like those of many others: fighting in the trenches under constant bombardment, suffering under a cowardly commanding officer, enduring shell shock and finally, somehow, surviving. But Skirth's store is more extraordinary that than. For on the Flanders battlefield he had a moment of epiphany when he came across the dead body of a teenaged German soldier. The boy was just like him. His corpse was bizarrely untouched, and in his had was a photo of his girlfriend, who look just like Skith's own sweetheart, Ella. Afterwards Skirth resolved that he would never again help to take a human life. He altered the trajectory of guns so that they fired harmlessly, and embarked ion other small acts of sabotage at huge risk to his own life. Under immense pressure from the authorities he suffered nbreakdowns and attacks of amnesia, but somehow Skirth maintained his campaign of active pacifism, lived out the war, and returned to marry Ella. Making use of the author's letters and postcards to Ella, his contemporary journals and the memoir he wrote in his retirement fifty years later. Illustrated. 354 pp.