The Reluctant Tommy By Ronald Skirth

Product Description

In the First World War, Ronald Skirth was an ordinary Tommy. His experiences were like those of many others: fighting in the trenches under constant bombardment, suffering under a cowardly commanding officer, enduring shell shock & finally, somehow, surviving. But Skirth's story is more extraordinary than that. For on the Flanders battlefield he had a moment of epiphany when he came across the dead body of a teenage German soldier. The boy was just like him. His corpse was bizarrely untouched, & in his hand was a photo of his girlfriend, who looked just like Skirth's own sweetheart, Ella. Afterwards Skirth resolved that he would never again help to take a human life. He altered the trajectory of guns so that they fired harmlessly, & embarked on other small acts of sabotage at huge risk to his own life. Under immense pressure from he authorities he suffered breakdowns & attacks of amnesia, but somehow Skirth maintained his campaign of active pacifism, lived out the war, & returned to marry Ella. Making use of Ronald Skirth's letters & postcards to Ella, his contemporary journals & the memoir he wrote in his retirement fifty years later, The Reluctant Tommy is the fascinating story of a man who stuck by his principles in impossible circumstances, & who had the courage to risk being shot as a 'coward'; an ordinary soldier with a truly remarkable story.