Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo

Both my Grandfathers fought in the Great War of 1914-1918; one died from the prolonged effects of mustard gas poisoning, when my own father was still only a boy; the other never spoke of the actions for which he was awarded the Military Medal, a medal which he kept in a shoebox his whole life, but which is now proudly on display in the Regimental Museum of the Queen’s Own Highlanders at Fort George near Inverness.

Perhaps because its horrors were so without precedent, the Great War has always held a morbid fascination for me. As a teenager I read lots of books about the subject and tried to imagine what the trenches must have been like - an impossible task. The experiences described in Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War and Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That are so truly shocking that the reader reels under the effect of their words as if being punched or kicked by them. Writers like Sebastian Faulks (in Birdsong) or Pat Barker (in the excellent Regeneration trilogy) do their best to imagine the carnage and bloody chaos in all its gruesome glory, but again the effect is strangely numbing. Morpurgo takes a gentler approach which is all the more effective for it.

The story of Tommy Peacful and his brother Charlie, the book unfolds in a series of flashbacks. We learn early on that Tommy has a dark secret, which not even his own brother knows, and this shapes some of his feeling s about events. The brothers grow up together, make an enemy of the local squire, fall in love with - and out with each other over - the same girl, before eventually joining up together to fight in 'the war to end all wars'.

The story unfolds at a gentle pace, but with a quickening dread as the horror of the trenches draws closer and closer. Morpurgo finishes the book with a flourish (even though if you read the novel closely enough you will work out the twist in time for the end) and creates a book of such rare warmth and depth that you'll want (as I did) to turn back to the first page and read it all over again!

Mr Mudd