I Shall Not Be Away Long

'Moving, powerful, important' - Michael Morpurgo ---- 'A classic of its kind' - William Boyd ---- A larger-than-life infantry officer's letters written from the Western Front to his West End actress wife from 1915 to 1917, visually presented with images of all the letters as well as pictures and detailed notes about the people and objects and events he encounters, showing how personal and family and war history connects through to today. Not only are the letters almost completely uncensored and full of incident described with directness and bluff humour, but the people mentioned along the way give a full spectrum of supporting characters, from Charles Bartlett's actress wife and their friends on the West End stage, to soldiers noted for their heroism or eccentricity or insubordination or complicated love lives (or combinations of all of these), to men avoiding conscription, to spies, royalty and a newspaper magnate. The letters give a portrait of a man, a marriage, and a time of traumatic uncertainty. Charles Bartlett is not an exemplary hero, but his flaws make him all the more human as he struggles through leading his Battalion at the Battles of Loos and the Somme and the frights and labours of life on the Western Front. A companion volume to Andrew Tatham's first book 'A Group Photograph - Before, Now & In-Between', it shares many of the same characters and explores the same ideas of what it is like to be a human being in any time, how our beliefs and hopes compare to reality, and what remains of us after we are gone.