Once There Was a War

‘Do you know it, do you remember it, the drives, the attitudes, the terrors, and, yes, the joys?’ Thus Steinbeck introduces his collection of poignant and hard-hitting dispatches filed for the New York Herald Tribune when Second World War was at its height. He begins in England, recounting the courage of the bomber crews, the tragic air-raids and the strangeness of the British, before being sent to Africa and joining a special-operations unit off the coast of Italy. Eating, drinking, talking and fighting alongside the soldiers, Steinbeck’s empathy for the common man is always in evidence in these pieces, and he never fails to evoke the human side of an inhuman war.