Sapper Martin: The Secret Great War Diary Of Jack Martin

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 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 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 the arrival of packages from loved ones at home and the appalling conditions in which that attritional war was fought.

COVER: Paperback

CONDITION: Pre-Loved

TYPE OF BOOK: Fiction

SUB-TYPE: History-Biographies-Autobiographies

ISBN: 9781408803110

LANGUAGE: English

SUGGESTED AGE LEVEL: Adult

AUTHOR'S NAME: Albert John Martin, Richard van Emden

NO OF PAGES: 272

PUBLISHER NAME: Published 2010 Bloomsbury