Private Edward Roe receives his call up to the so called Great War on 5 August 1914, little realising that the clock of Christianity has just started ticking backwards; marking the beginning of his 'Hells Bells' diaries of daily life on the front line. His prose is a combination of close proximity machine-gun fire and distant, often misplaced, artillery bombardment; from doing nothing one day he is caught between crossfire the next. Shot in Ypres and later wounded again in Mesopotamia, Roe chillingly recalls the 'heroic dead' strewn across battlefields; where he carries not just weapons and rations, but a ticket of his own in this lottery of death. Between mouthfuls of bully-beef and biscuits there is a reminder of Christmas 1914, in the trenches, when war-worn men downed tools and took to No Man's Land only for peace to be destroyed by another outburst of paranoia. (Kirkus UK)