Blood Beneath His Boots

Two years of hard duty in Egypt, Italy and a Greece racked by civil war clearly had a huge impact on Private Bert Keeling of both the King's Shropshire Light Infantry and the Somersets. The miracle is that he survived. After sixty years of peace, he lost his wife, Peggy. Then, while visiting his neighbour, the author, it was agreed that Bert's recollections of World War II should be put down on paper. Was it therapy, or a thesis for our troubled times? Either way, this is a superb bunch of stories. They're delivered in a terse, no-nonsense style by a British infantryman, a stoical Brummie who constantly saw war at the sharp end. Here are the crowded hours of battle, the curious lulls and anxious days of waiting on the Gothic Line. Here is the rattle of the enemy's Spandaus, the stench of death, and corpses piled one on top of the other in a blood-filled ditch - so that Bert literally had 'blood beneath his boots'. Here, too, are the sullen faces of the defeated and the pathetic offers from local women for sex in return for... anything. In war, anything goes, and in the bitter episode in Greece in 1945, Bert found that civil war is possibly the worst of all; yet even here he had time to laugh. Reading his gritty, action-filled memoir is a reminder of unsung bravery, and a lesson to all of us who are alive today because of it.