Brothers in War by Michael Walsh

Book Description

Secondhand. Good condition. Ex library copy with no external stickers. Remnant of date due slip on inside page, now covered with blank ex libris bookplate sticker. Stamps on inside pages. Pages are sunned. Some foxing on tail foredge. Slight skew to spine. Binding and body text are still very good.

The Beecheys were a close-knit family, eight brothers and five sisters under the loving eye of their mother, Amy.

As the First World War raged across Europe and beyond, the brothers were one by one swept up into its devastating path. Some were keen to enlist from the start, others were conscripted, and some dead against. Eventually, all would serve King and Country on the battlefields of France, Flanders, East Africa or Gallipoli.

Tragedy followed tragedy as, one after another, the Beechey boys fell. Even amid the carnage of the trenches, it was a family sacrifice almost without parallel and one that remained forgotten and unmarked for ninety years, until now.

Kept in a small brown case handed down by the brothers' youngest sister, Edie, were hundreds of letters sent home from the front by the Beechey boys: scraps of paper scribbled on the firing line, heartfelt letters written from a deathbed, exasperated correspondences detailing the absurdities of life in the trenches.

From it all emerges the remarkable tale of the lost brothers. Piecing together the Beechey story, Michael Walsh interweaves these letters with a moving account of the war and its shattering effects at home and abroad.