It was the Hell you’d feared in childhood, come to devour the children. It was treading over the
corpses of your friends so that you might be killed yourself. It was the congealed evil of a
century.
In 1914, war feels far away to Henry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood. They're too young to enlist, and
anyway, Gaunt is fighting his own private battle — an all-consuming infatuation with the dreamy,
poetic Ellwood — not having a clue that his best friend is in love with him, always has been.
When Gaunt's mother asks him to enlist in the British army to protect the family from anti-German
attacks, he signs up immediately, relieved to escape his overwhelming feelings. But Ellwood and
their classmates soon follow him into the horrors of trenches. Though Ellwood and Gaunt find
fleeting moments of solace in one another, their friends are dying in front of them, and at any
moment they could be next.
This week's book is In Memoriam by Alice Winn and we'll be meeting at Ye Olde Cocke on Wilmslow Road in Didsbury — contact us for details.