With the Jocks

Born in battle, Peter White's journal is one of the most extraordinary stories to come out of the Second World War. As a 24-year-old lieutenant in the King's Own Scottish Borderers, Peter kept an unauthorised journal of his regiment's advance through the Low Countries and into Germany in the closing months of the war in Europe.

Forbidden by his commanding officer from doing so for security reasons, Peter's boyhood habit of diary-keeping had become an obsession too strong to shake off. Each day he found time to record in copious detail the war going on around him, the lives and deaths of the men with whom he served, and the inexorable Allied advance into the Third Reich.

In one of the most graphic and finely crafted evocations of a soldier at war, the images he records are not for the faint-hearted. There are heroes aplenty within its pages, but there are also disturbing insights into the darker side of humanity, frequently brushed aside in many other war accounts - the men who broke under the strain and who ran away (sometimes with tragic results); the binge drinking that occasionally rendered the whole platoon unable to fight; the looting and the callous disregard for human life that happens when death is a daily companion.

Hidden away for more than fifty years, White's diary is a remarkable account of the horrors of war experienced by a British soldier in the greatest conflict of the twentieth century.