A Gloucestershire Lad at Home and Abroad

F.W. Harvey left the green valleys and rolling Cotswold hills of Gloucestershire to fight in the mud of Flanders. This collection gathers the poems he wrote as a soldier in the 5th Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment, and what emerges is a fierce, tender love letter to a homeland that existed somewhere beyond the trenches. Harvey does not glorify war or wallow in despair. Instead, he holds both truths at once: the unbearable weight of what war demands and the unbearable beauty of the countryside he left behind. The poems move between memory and present, between the barns and hedgerows of home and the shattered landscape where young men wait for dawn. There is humor here, and there is grief. There are verses that sound almost like folk songs, passed hand to hand in the trenches. For readers who find the grand narratives of WWI overwhelming, Harvey offers something rarer: the intimate, specific voice of one ordinary man trying to keep himself whole while the world burns.