Publisher's Synopsis
A classic war book by one of the finest poets of the Second World War. Keith Douglas was posted to Palestine in 1941 with a cavalry regiment. When fighting broke out at El Alamein in 1942, he was instructed to stay behind as a staff officer. But he wanted to fight, and so, completely disobeying orders, he drove a truck to the sight of the battle and participated as a tank commander. Alamein to Zem Zem is a vivid and unforgettable description of his experiences on the desert battlefield, seen through the eyes of a poet-soldier. æHighly charged, violent descriptive prose à conveys the humour, the pathos and the literal beauty of that dead world of tanks, sand, scrub and human corpses à Comparable in descriptive power and intelligence to the books of Remarque, Sassoon and Blunden which spoke in similar terms of 1914-1918.Æ Spectator
