arthur gwynn-browne

"I am in the F.S.P. F.S.P. stands for Field Security Personnel. That is the authorized version." So begins this remarkable account of six months' service with the British Expeditionary Force in France, up to and including the terrible retreat to and evacuation from the beaches of Dunkirk at the end of May, 1940.

Absorbing, affecting, thrilling, often funny, this book is very different from other war memoirs. It was the first on-the-ground account of Dunkirk to be published (in 1942) and lacks nothing in the immediacy of its telling. The narrative is gripping and the style is revolutionary, immersing the readers in the emotional and psychological turbulence of the author's experience, and making them feel they are living through it themselves. The result is a stunningly authentic and involving record of one of the defining episodes of twentieth-century British history.

Editor N.H. Reeve provides a lucid critical and biographical Afterword, and includes two extracts from an unfinished work by Gwynn-Browne, in which his idiosyncratic stream-of-consciousness style is used to describe the London Blitz and the mood of the civilian population in wartime.