William St Clair is perhaps the only soldier to have left a continuous account of his experiences day by day from the moment of joining up in 1914, through the years of horror in the trenches, to the march into Germany in 1919 and the long aftermath of trying to make sense of what had happened. A private in the medical corps, St Clair wrote daily letters often scribbled under fire. Published for the first time, these raw, truthful, and deeply moving letters give us what we have not properly had before, the voice of an ordinary soldier who is also a wonderful writer.
