Description
Book SynopsisRobert Irwin Knight, bank clerk, left Downpatrick for Armyservice, initially as a sergeant with the British ExpeditionaryForce in France, surviving its chaotic retreat and subsequentevacuation from Dunkirk. Thereafter as aCommissionedOfficer he served in the defence of the UK. Finally he took partin the Normandy campaign.
After retirement from a post-war career as an English teacher atBanbridge Academy, he wrote of his war-time service, a memoirnotable for its wit and self-deprecation. He gives charming,penetrating descriptions of his fellowofficers and men, of thepeople among whom they moved, the liberated and theconquered.
This humane and intelligent man has written the leastmilitaristic account possible of his hopes and fear, hisexhilaration and anxiety, during six years of service.
Written some forty years after the event, the memoir isenlivened with literary references, the fruit of his subsequentunivers
