Derek Robinson - War Story

Finally, I should make it clear that the newspaper items which Paxton quotes in chapter 21 are not invented. All the reports appeared, word for word, in English newspapers in the days after the battle began. By a curious twist of events, the men at the Front often relied on those papers for news of the battle as a whole, but the papers could report only what the War Office told them. Thus the soldiers read of victories while they witnessed disasters.

We know now that the first day on the Somme took place almost exactly in the middle of the war. It certainly formed a watershed: it was the worst day ever for the British Army, with nearly sixty thousand casualties, of whom twenty thousand were dead, most of them in the first hour of the attack. The men of the Royal Flying Corps, living just a few miles behind the trenches, were not to know about that. Only they could see the entire battlefield, but even they could not see the tragedy.

Derek Robinson read history at Cambridge, was a fighter plotter in the RAF, spent ten years working for ad agencies in London and New York, and then came home via Portugal and the Channel Islands with his American wife Sheila.

War Story is his sixth novel. It shares with the others a certain debunking of the myths of war, and may be considered a prequel to Goshawk Squadron , which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1971 and is a kind of anti-Biggles.

Derek Robinson has also written books on rugby, squash and the underground West Country patois called ‘Bristle’. He broadcasts a bit. He lives in Bristol.

Goshawk Squadron

Hornet’s Sting

First published in Great Britain 1987 by

Macmillan London Limited

This edition published in Great Britain in 2011 by,

Quercus Editions Limited

21 Bloomsbury Square

London WC1A 2NS

Copyright © Derek Robinson, 1987, 2011

The moral right of Derek Robinson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

ISBN (Ebook) 978 0 857388 483 0

This book is a work or fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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