In July of 1942, Mowat was an eager, idealistic infantry lieutenant barely out of his teens, bound for Europe on a troop ship and impatient to see action. This powerful true account of the action he saw, and against all odds survived, evokes the terrible reality of warfare with an honesty and clarity fiction can only imitate. Here is the agony and the antic humour, the tragedy and the tedium, the special camaraderie shared only by those who have fought a war. Here, too, is the impassioned anger of one soldier who discovers he can no longer accept the bloody carnage that engulfed him near the end of the Italian campaign: "I was staring down a vertiginous tunnel where all was black and bloody and the great wind of ultimate desolation howled and hungered. I was alone....relentlessly alone in a world I never knew....and no birds sang." A timeless story of the courage forged by terror in a man's heart.