Diary Kept by Rifleman B. C. Stubbs of the Second Draft Sent to the Queen Victoria Rifles in France

The diary of Rifleman Bernard C. Stubbs reads like a man who knows he is writing his own epitaph. Beginning in February 1915, four months before a shell wound ends his life at twenty-seven, Stubbs records the grinding monotony and sudden terror of trench warfare with a soldier's frankness: the endless drills, the waiting, the comradeship that forms in shared fear. His unit, the Queen Victoria Rifles, sees action at Ypres and Hill 60, the killing fields of the First World War's early years. This is not history written from a safe distance. This is a young man's handwritten testimony from inside the mud and noise, recording what he witnesses and feels before the war claims him. The diary's final entries grow quieter, more personal, as if he senses what approaches. It is history at its most intimate and devastating.