Death and Beauty on the Western Front: My life on the Western Front

Blazing sunsets above blazing villages, glorious landscapes and cosy evenings with friends and comrades who he would never see again after the next bayonet charge, the pleasure in a glass of requisitioned champagne, the pride of fighting beside the major, the pain and hospitalisation from a battlefield injury; these are the scenes that were constantly played out in front of Alex-Victor von Frankenberg's eyes in 1914 and 1915. Death and beauty existed side by side in a never-ending sequence of extreme contradictions that fostered the concepts of heroism, fighting for a just cause, and a fervent patriotism that were vital to keep men advancing into slaughter. Death and Beauty on the Western Front is a memoir that reveals to the reader every frontline soldier's day-to-day experience; his trench, his bunker, the sound of the whistle to go over the top, the elation of victory, the exhausted trudge through the uneasy darkness past the corpses of his comrades and enemies, to his rest. Alex-Victor von Frankenberg speaks to us from our past. His words resound in our present.