Give Us This Day

This narrative runs its course through the most momentous years of our nation's history, when Britain was struggling for its very existence against innumerable odds during World War II. It is a personal view, at first of a boy of 15 years of age in 1939, who was consequently called up into the Army in 1942, and saw most of the Italian campaign; in the battles of Camino, Garigliano, Damiano, Anzio, The Gothic Line, Senio, and the final battle in the advance to the Po. This title for the book, I found most fitting in that when you are living in the uncertainty, that is the battlefield, and faced with your possible demise, you seek solace in your faith. There was also a saying of the infantryman, with a religious connotation - 'no atheist ever dug a slit trench.' It is also a tribute to my friends who never returned, or lived to see the peace, and now remembered only by the nation on Armistice Day, or by those who loved them throughout the years and still feel the pain of their passing.