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| Somme Mud | 
 enlarge | Author: E.p.f. Lynch
Creator: William Davies
Publisher: Doubleday
Category: Book
List Price: £17.99
Buy New: £10.70
You Save: £7.29 (41%)
New (5) from £9.95
Avg. Customer Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 24044
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.4
ISBN: 0385612788
EAN: 9780385612784
ASIN: 0385612788
Publication Date: February 11, 2008
Availability: Usually dispatched within 5 to 9 days
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| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 Faction? September 26, 2008
Having read many WWI books recently, I'm afraid that as I read I increasingly got the feeling that this was just too much of a novel. Faction. Whilst it is clearly based on his real experiences, I felt that there was just too much embroidery, and then you are left wondering 'well how much of this can I really believe?'. Many books of memoirs were written just after the First World War and many Publishers were bored with the prospect of yet another. Doubtless writers felt that they had to 'spice it up' a little. I felt disappointed after I'd finished it. I've read War novels that I've found more believable. Sorry. Perhaps his war record was just as he says.
 Somme Mud - Goodbye to All that revisited? August 30, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The story is of Nulla and his regular close nit cast of characters - Longun, Darky, Snow, Farmer, Jacob and others.
The book covers some territory covered before. Most similarly by Robert Graves book - Goodbye to all that.
Lynch does not delve deeply into the reasons for the war - which obviously contrasts with Graves. However Lynch does not shy away from describing the horror of the conflict.
He mostly provides an illuminating insight of the (very effective) fighting capacity of the AIF. They are ruthless killers of "Fritz" - no more ruthlessly described as when a German Brass band spotted on an opposite hill about to enter a French village are clinically shot up.
A lot of the book talks humorously of events but sometimes a paragraph brings up his inner thoughts in startlingly relief:
"We remember when these two marched ahead of us carrying not canes but their lives, and leading us not to a sit-down dinner but to assault Fritz trenches or pill-boxes, or those deadly machine-gun nests from which so many of our mates collected their R.I.P.
Some of us remember, too, when these two were just diggers in the ranks following on after other leaders who have since passed on. Some home to Australia maimed in body in spirit, soured and seared, or happy to have got out of it all at any cost. Others who found their last long resting place in the slimy Somme mud, or amid the utter desolation that is Flanders. Others still whose remains lie shattered and scattered in the hundred tiny graves that house all that is left of a man who caught the burst of a 9.2"
His war was about mates and luck - and plenty of both. His prose is sincere and direct - I suspect rather like the man and his mates.
 Outstanding WW1 Memoir July 22, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a great memoir, instantly ranking with book such as frank Richard's Old Soldiers Never Die as among the most evocative voices of the Great War as seen by the PBI. Lynch was an Australian, fighting with the 45th Battalion AIF from late 1916 to the end of the war. The centrepieces of this book are the descriptions of hand to hand trench fighting, which are raw and immediate. The most chilling description (apart from numerous descriptions of shellfire) are the images of the Somme battlefield in the freezing winter of 1916-1917, with casualties still frozen into the postures of brutal trench combat.
This is the Great War memoir of our time, if such as statement isn't something of a paradox. Lynch's Australian sensibility, his cheerful challenges to authority and the democratic flavour of Anzac `mateship' are more attuned to a 20th century sensibility than some of the more literary laments to the `futility' of the war in the 1920s and 1930s. (The attitudes to other races in the opening chapter are shocking but not surprising for a memoir of the time; their omission would have been a pointless and historically dishonest piece of editing).
A singular and powerfully important memoir of 1914-1918.
One of the best books about the war on the western front July 16, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I have read many books on the first world war and the western front in particular. Many of these have been excellent, such as the Lyn McDonald books, which give great insight into the horrors that the ordinary soldier had to endure. What sets this work apart from them is that it is a full acount of the war, written by an ordinary man in exceptional circumstances. It soon becomes clear that staying alive was just as difficult during spells of 'holding the line' as it was during a major battle. An incredible tale, honestly told with bravery and dignity. A must-read.
Probably the truest account of Western Front soldiering. May 22, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
There are books about the Great War, and then there is Somme Mud.
The days of glorified war stories are over, and this book takes the reader on a gritty, totally from-the-heart account of every horrific day in the Western Front.
Whilst full of frightening moments, it also conveys the real sense of comradeship and frequent dark humour of those serving under conditions none of us can know today.
What struck me most about this book was the reminder that the prospect of being sniped, shelled (sometimes by your own side), gassed, or just drowned in flooded shell holes, was present every moment of just about every day. It's also a stark reminder of the appalling conditions men endured for several years.
A brilliant book that ranks amongst the best ever written in terms of actually comprehending - as far as we can today - what men went through, far from home.
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