The principal primary sources are Wilson’s diary and his letters, which provide an incomplete and, at times, unreliable picture: Wilson was, as Caesar notes, a dreamer, a chancer, and a man adept at varnishing the truth. The citation for the Military Cross he won stated: “It was largely owing to his pluck and determination in holding this post that the enemy attack was held up.” It was Wilson’s first day on the frontline.Ĭaesar is a journalist foremost, rather than a historian, yet the book has been meticulously researched. Isolated, in advance of the British frontline, raked by German machine guns, Wilson continued to fire on the enemy. “Almost every man not taken prisoner was a casualty,” Caesar writes. As a second lieutenant in 1/5th West Yorkshire Regiment (Prince of Wales’s Own), Wilson witnessed the destruction of his battalion at Wytschaete, on 25 April 1918. Wilson’s short, irregular life pivoted, as with so many of his generation, on a single day in Flanders. How the son of a Bradford mill owner got to the Rongbuk monastery forms the central narrative of this carefully crafted, riveting tale.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |