Keith Douglas was born in 1920. At school and at Oxford he was both a prolific poet and a committed member of the Officers Training Corps. When the Second World War broke out, he enlisted immediately, and was posted to Palestine in 1941. When his tank regiment began fighting in El Alamein in 1942, Douglas was instructed to stay behind as a staff officer. But he made his own way to the battlefield, an experience which he recounted in his prose memoir
Alamein to Zem Zem (first published in 1946). He later took part in the Normandy invasion on 6 June 1944, and was killed three days later. His
Collected Poems came out in 1951.
'This is the only book from the Second World War comparable with the first-war narratives of Sassoon, Blunden or Graves... When the battle of El Alamein began, the poet Keith Douglas was in Cairo with Divisional HQ. Eager not to miss the action, he took a truck and, against orders,...
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