The Last Post by Max Arthur

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Review: The Last Post by Max Arthur.

 

Laundry Fairy got me this one for Christmas. There are a lot of similar books on the market at the moment, many of them by the same author, who has made it his thing.

It is basically the recollections of the last surviving British veterans of the First World War. So you ladies might be forgiven for dismissing this as a "boy" book about war.

Actually upon reading it I realised it has a much more general appeal, the reason why I will go into shortly.

Twenty-one men write their stories in this book. They were all over a hundred already. By the time the book was finished there were only four left. And the last two- Henry Allingham and Harry Patch- died last year.

This book really was the last post.

The main strength of the book is that it does not only document the men's wartime experiences but they were encouraged to tell their whole life stories.

And EACH one of these men has over a HUNDRED years of history to tell!

So I quickly became fascinated by the glimpses of a world and English lifestyle long gone, as lived by the common man. The class system, the relative poverty, the village life. My own parents were born at the end of WW1 and some of the things they had told me from their childhoods I recognised .

One of the stories made me feel strange as the man had trained and lived in Northampton. I knew all the factories and places he mentioned and I had even slept in the same army barracks as an army cadet as a kid.

This was a very easy book to read as each chapter was a self-contained story and so I could read a whole chapter in odd moments.