Poor Bloody Infantry

Book excerpt: "The six year nightmare of World War II was nowhere more hellish than in the slit trenches -- living graves where distressingly callow infantrymen did their best to be heroes. Raked and pounded in the fields of Northern France, burned and bombarded in the Western Desert, steaming and rotting in the jungles of South East Asia, the P.B.I -- Poor Bloody Infantry -- saw the sharp end of war, far from home and often far from hope ... From the half-mad dream of training camps where they polished their insteps and scrubbed floors with toothbrushes, these young men in their field grey, olive drab and khaki ... had been sent packing into the teeth of the German war machine, waking up to the terrifying reality of the front, and sometimes the beyond of human endurance. They came face to face with their enemies as drawing room generals can never do, fought and died, rejoiced in their mates, sang songs, told black jokes and looked forward to the 'dixies' of stew, the postcards from home and the breathers between bombardments"--Jacket.