From the lush green countryside of England, two boys (Gaunt & Ellwood) harbour a secret love for each other, to the trenches and ditch during World War 1.

The writing is poignant, raw, brutal, violent, vivid imagery and harrowing.
Any love they shared, it's sacred, yet at the same time it's so hurtful, aching, and agonizing, but tender all the same, because in the midst of war, it's not all about love. It's watching your friends die, worrying if the other will make it back, and the horrors of war and how it changes a person.

A love is not only formed, but it's being tested, constantly because they live in the grim reality surrounded by death.

I read this entire novel with bated breath, I was scared to breathe in too deep, for how brief and fleeting each moment of happiness is.

and a sudden dry bleakness spread over Gaunt's heart as he thought of Hercules, and Hector, and all the heroes in myth who found happiness briefly, only for it not to be the end of the story.

Alice captured the sufferings of war and the humane side of both sides of the war, and only has one conclusion:
War brings pain and death to all: every man, woman, and child; and to the soil, the air, and the water.

We have doomed the world with our advancements, with our democracy that is so much better than whatever they've thought of, with our technology that will so improve their lives, and now algerian men must choke to death on their own melted insides in wet Belgian trenches.

I don't have words to say if this is a happy ending, or simply it's an ending, because despite the brutality of it all, the story concluded as it should, and it can't be anymore perfect.

".... You'll write more poems. They are not lost. You are the poetry."
Yours,
Gaunt