Carry On: Letters in War-Time

These are not war reports or propaganda. These are the private letters of a twenty-four-year-old Canadian artillery lieutenant writing home to his family from the killing fields of France in 1917. Coningsby Dawson poured his fear, his longing, and his dawning comprehension of what war actually meant into letters that never meant to be published. They are the voice of a generation asked to sacrifice everything, recorded in real time, before the outcome was certain. The letters move from the excitement of enlisting through the grinding horror of the Western Front. Dawson writes of comradeship and terrible loneliness, of nights under bombardment and days spent watching young men die. He grapples with what courage means when you're terrified, what home means when you can't return to it unchanged. This is the war as lived from inside the mud, and the portrait that emerges is both devastating and deeply human. For anyone who wants to understand what the First World War felt like to the people who fought it, there is no substitute for this kind of raw, unfiltered voice.