Product Description
A classic war book by one of the finest poets of the Second World War. Keith Douglas was posted to Palestine in 1941 with a cavalry regiment. When fighting broke out at El Alamein in 1942, he was instructed to stay behind as a staff officer. But he wanted to fight, and so, completely disobeying orders, he drove a truck to the sight of the battle and participated as a tank commander. Alamein to Zem Zem is a vivid and unforgettable description of his experiences on the desert battlefield, seen through the eyes of a poet-soldier. 'Highly charged, violent descriptive prose ... conveys the humour, the pathos and the literal beauty of that dead world of tanks, sand, scrub and human corpses ... Comparable in descriptive power and intelligence to the books of Remarque, Sassoon and Blunden which spoke in similar terms of 1914-1918.' Spectator
About the Author
Keith Douglas was born in 1920. At school and at Oxford he was both a prolific poet and a committed member of the Officers Training Corps. When the Second World War broke out, he enlisted immediately, and was posted to Palestine in 1941. When his tank regiment began fighting in El Alamein in 1942, Douglas was instructed to stay behind as a staff officer. But he made his own way to the battlefield, an experience which he recounted in his prose memoir Alamein to Zem Zem (first published in 1946). He later took part in the Normandy invasion on 6 June 1944, and was killed three days later. His Collected Poems came out in 1951.
