Born in battle, Peter White's journal is one of the most extraordinary
stories to come out of the World War II. As a 24-year-old lieutenant in
the King's Own Scottish Borderers, Peter kept an unauthorized journal of
his regiment's advance through the Low Countries and into Germany in the
closing months of the war in Europe. Forbidden by his commanding officer
from doing so for security reasons, Peter's boyhood habit of diary
keeping had become an obsession too strong to shake off. In this graphic
and finely crafted evocation of a soldier at war, the images he records
are not for the faint hearted. There are heroes aplenty within its
pages, but there are also disturbing insights into the darker sides of
humanity - the men who broke under the strain and who ran away; the
binge drinking which occasionally rendered the whole platoon unable to
fight; the looting, the rape, and the callous disregard for human life
that happens when death is a daily companion. Hidden away for more than
50 years, this is a rare opportunity to read an authentic account of the
horrors of war experienced by a British soldier in the greatest conflict
of the 20th century.