Paperback, Cardinal by Sphere Books, 1991; illustrated with lino-cuts by William Kermode.

This edition contains a 2-page Epigraph by the author, noting the death of William Kermode.
Book condition: good, with an uncreased spine.

The publisher's blurb for this edition states:

First published in 1930, this bitingly satirical account of an ordinary youth's experiences in the First World War is a classic of war writing. It is the story of John Bullock, the archetypal British Tommy, who enters the army with a patriotic fervour but leaves it a shattered man.

Exchanging total obedience as a clerk in a City office for more of the same in an army training camp, John Bullock makes a puzzled progress through the rigours and privations of army life. But soon, feeling strong and lusty in his nailed boots, he is in France, puffing cigarettes on puffing trains and watching fat and painted French girls offering 'jigajig' for ten francs. He writes to his father inventing the 'sullen mutter of the guns bombarding in the distance' when the only sullen mutter around is his gastric juices struggling with bully beef stew. He feels the romance of a war that will be over by Christmas.

But reality, not romance, awaits him in the trenches. Lice and trench fever compete with the shriek and the flash of bullets at night, the bodies of mules and men decorate the watery grey endless wastes of the battlefield. Soon his friends are dead, and Bullock must confront the brutal senselessness of war.

(For a further consideration of the book and the background to the writing of it, see Anne Williamson's The Patriot's Progress.)