From the Front Line: Family Letters & Diaries, 1900 to the Falklands & Afghanistan, by Hew Pike
‘Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier,’ reckoned Dr Johnson, and certainly every soldier thinks the less of himself for not having seen action. For four generations the extended Pike family has written movingly of the miseries of partings and of the ‘noise, violence indignity and death’ of the battlefield, but give any of them the choice between a cushy command at Catterick and the Normandy beaches and it is no contest.
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