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Gallipoli to the Somme - Recollections of a New Zealand Infantryman (Paperback)
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Gallipoli to the Somme - Recollections of a New Zealand Infantryman (Paperback)
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Alexander Aitken was an ordinary soldier with an extraordinary
mind. The student who enlisted in 1915 was a mathematical genius
who could multiply nine-digit numbers in his head. He took a violin
with him to Gallipoli (where field telephone wire substituted for
an E-string) and practiced Bach on the Western Front. Aitken also
loved poetry and knew the Aeneid and Paradise Lost by heart. His
powers of memory were dazzling. When a vital roll-book was lost
with the dead, he was able to dictate the full name, regimental
number, next of kin and address of next of kin for every member of
his former platoon-a total of fifty-six men. Everything he saw, he
could remember. Aitken began to write about his experiences in 1917
as a wounded out-patient in Dunedin Hospital. Every few years, when
the war trauma caught up with him, he revisited the manuscript,
which was eventually published as Gallipoli to the Somme in 1963.
Aitken writes with a unique combination of restraint, subtlety, and
an almost photographic vividness. He was elected fellow of the
Royal Society of Literature on the strength of this single work-a
book recognised by its first reviewers as a literary memoir of the
Great War to put alongside those by Graves, Blunden and Sassoon.
Long out of print, this is by some distance the most perceptive
memoir of the First World War by a New Zealand soldier. For this
edition, Alex Calder has written a new introduction, annotated the
text, compiled a selection of images, and added a commemorative
index identifying the soldiers with whom Aitken served.
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