Customer Reviews
Somme Mud - we remember them - By: Mr. C. Fawcett, 30 Nov 2008 
I was interested when I saw this book as my grandfather was at the Somme but would never speak of it. I had heard about itin history & seen a few television programs but I was interested to learn about it from the mind & voice of one who was there.
Once started the book is very hard to put down. My respect for my grandfather & those who went off to fight this war has grown tremendously.
A must read for those wishing to know about those unsung heroes who gave their all.
A book that should be read - By: Tony B, 19 Nov 2008 wait on whilst the dead men are buried. A shallow grave marked by a rifle stuck upin the mud is all that can be done. It gives some satisfaction to do that, although we are well aware the men so buried will be thrown up & reburied by shellfire time after time until the fighting shifts on from here. Some day they may have real graves. What a lot to look forward to! It's as well their people can't fully realize what finding a soldier's grave really means.
If there is one book that everyone should read on warfare, or just a book that should be read, this is it. Edward Lynch left Australia on 22nd August 1916 as a young man of 18 volunteering to serve on the Western Front. He returned to his homelandin 1919, lived through three of the most turbulent years of modern history.
In 1921 he started to write of his experiences, twenty one school exercise books full. The initial idea was to publish the story, but due to circumstances at the time this never happened. After his death the volumes resurfaced when Edward's grandson Mike Lynch passed the volumes to the editor Will Davies.
The result is a story that stands with any of the so called `classics' of the Great War & is superior to most. The story is that of a young private `Nulla' & his experience of some of the fiercest fightingin the area of the Somme from late 1916 through to 1918.
The descriptions of actions including the firing of the mines on the Messines Ridge, tanks & the start of air re-supply. Interspersed are the personal asides, food contaminated with gas, the mod swings that effected individuals, the flashes of humour, including the description of Janker's for going AWOL, cleaning the trace chains of artillery harness, `We spent a whole day cleaning trace chains & polishing each link with spit sand & blasphemy'.
Technically the book is very accurate, the story can be followed on maps, trench maps & panoramas, giving a wider understanding of small actions that took place during the period. The book draws few if any conclusions as to the rights & wrongs of the conflict, it praises & castigates offices, men & the enemy as the situation demands.
This book is something special; Edward Lynch deserves a place amongst the revered author's of the Great War, an accolade he deserved but never got.
Faction? - By: D. N. Gibson, 26 Sep 2008 
Having read many WWI books recently, I'm afraid that as I read I increasingly got the feeling that this was just too much of a novel. Faction. Whilst it is clearly based on his real experiences, I felt that there was just too much embroidery, & then you are left wondering 'well how much of this can I really believe?'. Many books of memoirs were written just after the First World War & many Publishers were bored with the prospect of yet another. Doubtless writers felt that they had to 'spice it up' a little. I felt disappointed after I'd finished it. I've read War novels that I've found more believable. Sorry. Perhaps his war record was just as he says.
Somme Mud - Goodbye to All that revisited? - By: Jeremy Price, 30 Aug 2008 
The story is of Nulla & his regular close nit cast of characters - Longun, Darky, Snow, Farmer, Jacob & others.
The book covers some territory covered before. Most similarly by Robert Graves book - Goodbye to all that.
Lynch does not delve deeply into the reasons for the war - which obviously contrasts with Graves. However Lynch does not shy away from describing the horror of the conflict.
He mostly provides an illuminating insight of the (very effective) fighting capacity of the AIF. They are ruthless killers of "Fritz" - no more ruthlessly described as when a German Brass band spotted on an opposite hill about to enter a French village are clinically shot up.
A lot of the book talks humorously of events but sometimes a paragraph brings up his inner thoughtsin startlingly relief:
"We remember when these two marched ahead of us carrying not canes but their lives, & leading us not to a sit-down dinner but to assault Fritz trenches or pill-boxes, or those deadly machine-gun nests from which so many of our mates collected their R.I.P.
Some of us remember, too, when these two were just diggersin the ranks following on after other leaders who have since passed on. Some home to Australia maimedin bodyin spirit, soured & seared, or happy to have got out of it all at any cost. Others who found their last long resting placein the slimy Somme mud, or amid the utter desolation that is Flanders. Others still whose remains lie shattered & scatteredin the hundred tiny graves that house all that is left of a man who caught the burst of a 9.2"
His war was about mates & luck - & plenty of both. His prose is sincere & direct - I suspect rather like the man & his mates.
Outstanding WW1 Memoir - By: Withnail67, 22 Jul 2008 This is a great memoir, instantly ranking with book such as frank Richard's Old Soldiers Never Die as among the most evocative voices of the Great War as seen by the PBI. Lynch was an Australian, fighting with the 45th Battalion AIF from late 1916 to the end of the war. The centrepieces of this book are the descriptions of hand to hand trench fighting, which are raw & immediate. The most chilling description (apart from numerous descriptions of shellfire) are the images of the Somme battlefieldin the freezing winter of 1916-1917, with casualties still frozen into the postures of brutal trench combat.
This is the Great War memoir of our time, if such as statement isn't something of a paradox. Lynch's Australian sensibility, his cheerful challenges to authority & the democratic flavour of Anzac `mateship' are more attuned to a 20th century sensibility than some of the more literary laments to the `futility' of the warin the 1920s & 1930s. (The attitudes to other racesin the opening chapter are shocking but not surprising for a memoir of the time; their omission would have been a pointless & historically dishonest piece of editing).
A singular & powerfully important memoir of 1914-1918.
