Bernard Adams (writer)

When England declared war against Germany in August 1914, Adams was torn — as a prospective missionary, his life's work would be to promote peace, but he also felt it was his duty to enlist.

He joined the 1st Battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, commissioned as a lieutenant; it was the same regiment in which poets Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and David Jones also enlisted.

)[5] On the night of 7 June 1916, while supervising a group of soldiers setting up barbed wire in no man's land, Adams was shot in the forearm by a German sniper.

[4]: 227  The wound was serious, and Adams was evacuated to England to recover — thereby missing the regiment's futile assault a month later on Mametz Wood as part of the Battle of the Somme.

In keeping with operational security while the war was still being fought, Adams changed all the names of his fellow soldiers, and even referred to his regiment simply as "a Welsh battalion.

A good deal of his book is reproduced from a diary, or from letters written at the time; but he is the master, not the slave, of these contemporary documents, and knows when to cut and when to summarise.

For it is a work of the rarest vividness and distinction; and at every turn it is marked by a radiantly sincere determination to tell the truth about things which have generally been grossly distorted by sentiment and cant.

Nothing more real or more poignant has been written about the war, while a quiet sense of humour, playing over the narrative, continually keeps the writer upon the safe side of exaggeration.