Time at War

By Nicholas Mosley

Book Overview

Aged twenty, and with no war experience, Nicholas Mosley found himself in charge of a platoon of men positioned along the Italian front during the Second World War. With his father in prison on charges of treason, he had enlisted primarily in an effort to improve his family image. But the war left Mosley a radically changed man: he had gone in out of personal convenience, and left with a sense of greater purpose. Saved from death by one of his men, holed up in barns and trenches and tents, and marching across Europe, Mosley found in war a certainty that eluded him in peacetime. "War is both senseless and necessary, squalid and fulfilling, terrifying and sometimes jolly," he writes. "This is like life. Humans are at home in war (though they seldom admit this). They feel they know what they have to do." In an interview conducted between 1977 and 1978, Nicholas Mosley said, "When I was young William Faulkner was my great love, not just because of the density of style, but because he seemed to be dealing with the question not of what will happen next but what is happening now. The first Faulkner novel I read was The Sound and the Fury, which I got hold of when we liberated a POW camp in Italy in 1944 and I liberated the Red Cross Library. I was about twenty.... What in god's name, after all, was I doing aged twenty in Italy in a war?"

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1564784568
• ISBN13: 9781564784568
• Release Date: November 2006
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Length: 185 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.4" x 7.9"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Highly recommended.

Time at War is the autobiographical account of award-winning author Nicholas Mosley's service during World War II. Born in London, Mosley chose to enlist in the military at the age of twenty, to improve the status of his family name while his father was imprisoned by the government as an alleged security risk. Mosley served on the bloody Italian front, was once rescued from death by one of his men, and witnessed the devastation of war firsthand; but it was a war he knew had to be fought, and it kindled a sense of purpose in him that had eluded him during peacetime. A powerful true story about coming of age and learning to define oneself, as surely as it is a no-holds-barred firsthand account of the terrors and challenges of the European Theater of World War II, Time at War is highly recommended.