A Humorous diary of a Sapper's account of his 6 months spent in The Falkland Islands during 1983. You've read books about being at the 'Sharp end' of the stick, now firmly grab the blunt end 'cos it won't hurt.

Albert John ('Jack') Martin was a thirty-two-year-old clerk at the Admiralty when he was called up to serve in the army in September 1916. These diaries, written in secret, hidden from his colleagues and only discovered by his family after his return home, present the Great War with heartbreaking clarity, written in a voice as compelling and distinctive as Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon and all the more extraordinary given that it is not an officer's but that of a private. From his arrival in France and his participation in the Somme, through offensives at Ypres and eventual demobilisation after the Armistice, we see wartime life as it really was for the ordinary Tommy. In these journals, introduced and edited by bestselling First World War historian Richard van Emden, we witness the cheerful Albert Martin getting to grips with life in the trenches and, together with his comrades in the Royal Engineers, confronting the ever-present threat of injury and death. We also see the mundane reality of life at the front line - the arguments with superiors, the joy brought by the arrival of packages from loved ones at home and the appalling conditions in which that attritional war was fought.

"The product of over twenty-five years of research, Beneath Flanders Fields illustrates the evolution of military mining, leading to its deployment in the greatest siege in military history - in the trenches of the Western Front." "In the words of the tunnellers themselves, and through previously unpublished photographs - many in colour - as well as contemporary plans and drawings, this book reveals how this most intense of battles was fought - and won. Few on the surface knew the horrific details of the tunnellers' work, yet this silent, claustrophobic conflict was a barbaric struggle that raged day and night for almost two and a half years, and one which generated mental and physical stresses often far beyond those suffered by the infantry in the trenches. On 7 June 1917 at Messines Ridge, the tension was broken with the opening of the most dramatic mine offensive in history."--BOOK JACKET.

Includes the Proceedings of the Royal geographical society, formerly pub. separately.

Few soldiers on the Western Front had heard of the Australian Electrical and Mechanical Mining and Boring Company, even after it had been renamed the ‘Alphabet Company’ by an AIF wag. Yet many knew the work of this tiny unit which numbered fewer than 300 at full strength. Despite its small size, the Alphabet Company’s influence was enormous and spanned the entire British sector of the Western Front, from the North Sea to the Somme. The Lightning Keepers: the AIF’s Alphabet Company in the Great War is the story of the ‘Alphabeticals’ who, led by Major Victor Morse, DSO, operated and maintained pumps, generators, ventilation fans, drilling equipment and other ingenious devices in extreme circumstances. Given the horrendous conditions in which the troops lived and fought, this equipment was desperately needed, as were the men who operated it in the same, often nightmarish setting. This is the first account of the dynamic little unit that was the Alphabet Company, a unit that has been neglected by history for a century. It is the story of the men, their machinery and the extraordinary grit they displayed in performing some of the most difficult tasks in a war noted for the horrific conditions in which it was waged. They do not deserve to be forgotten.