Enjoy the challenge of putting together this Harvest Time 1000 Piece Jigsaw Puzzle.
The perfect stay-at-home project,
‘I saw several fellows fall, one fellow coughing up blood & all the time, bullets were hacking about me. I ran for about 70 yards carrying with me all the Lewis gun things I had brought up & dropped breathless into a shell hole headlong onto a German who had been dead for months.’
Harold Drinkwater was not supposed to go to war. He was told he was half an inch too short. But, determined to fight for king & country, he found a battalion that would take him & was soon on his way to the trenches of the Somme. As the war dragged on, Harry saw most of the men he joined up with killed around him. But, somehow, he survived.
Soldiers were forbidden from keeping a diary so Harry wrote his in secret, recording the horrendous conditions & constant fear, as well as his pleasure at receiving his officers commission, the joy of his men when they escaped the trenches for the Italian Front & the trench raid for which he was awarded the Military Cross.
Harry writes with such immediacy it is easy to forget that a hundred years have passed. He is by turns wry, exhausted, annoyed, resigned & often amazed to be alive. Never before published, Harrys War is a moving testament to one mans struggle to keep his humanity in the face of unimaginable violence