Our book is in fair condition with tanning to the pages, but it has an intact dust jacket; this edition is becoming harder to find and is an opportunity to acquire at a reasonable price. Sven Berlin paints an interesting contrast of lyricism and realism, of actual battle incidents and more fugitive perceptions. While it covers almost day by day annotations of his experience as a gunner with an Artillery Heavy Regiment in France, soon after D Day, to the time when he was injured and invalided home in 1944. The great fear is in being alive; to softer memories of home occasioned by the villages through which they pass, the children seen, etc., etc. It is intense in feeling, spontaneous, personal, an artist\'s landscape of life and death of a rather special character. Sven Berlin is a painter, and also a poet, and his diary of his months of active service after his not fully explained enlistment (he was a pacifist and conscientious objector for the first three years of the war).