Soldiers Don't Cry

Sidney Allinson is Canadian news correspondent for Britain’s The Army
Quarterly and Defence. He is the author of The Bantams: The Untold Story
of World War I, Jeremy Kane, and Kruger’s Gold: A Novel of the
Anglo-Boer War.

Despite its title, this is not about military history or a veteran’s
retrospective. It is hard to know quite what to expect of a book that
seems part factual memoir of boyhood long ago and part whimsical
imaginings. Author Heywood Graeme might have been better off simply
calling it a novel, as it seems primarily fiction, interlaced with some
of his real-life memories of childhood.

The story reflects mainly happy reminiscences of pre–World War II
country life in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, England. The area
has a rich, distinctive history of its own, much of its events shrouded
by the dense woodlands that remain there to this day. Graeme takes
advantage of this almost mystical landscape as a setting for boyish
adventures and encounters with a cast of eccentric rural characters in
isolated hamlets. The author has a keen ear for their way of speaking,
and makes great use of the local Gloster dialect to convey their
personalities. However authentic, this may make a lot of the book’s
dialogue incomprehensible to some Canadians.

A number of family snapshots are included, but they are so muddily
reproduced it is hard to make them out. Also, the publisher set the text
in ragged-right format, which looks more like a typed manuscript than a
professionally produced book. Presentation aside, Graeme’s stories do
evoke an authentic sense of English regional attitudes and habits that
have largely disappeared in recent years.