Bloodied But Unbowed: A Story Of Two Yorkshire Bantams In World War 1, by Norman A Brooke, Fast Print Publishing at £8.99

Everybody by now has heard of Lord Kitchener’s First World War volunteers – the Pals battalions. Fewer may know much about Lord Birkenhead’s 22 Bantams battalions.

These were volunteers who shared the same physical characteristic – they were all under the British Army’s regulation height for recruits of 5ft 3in. One of them was Norman F Brooke; he was one of the Yorkshire Bantams, the 17th Battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment – the 2nd Leeds.

His actual experiences – he appears in the book as Fred Booth – including being wounded by an exploding German shell on the Somme, form part of a fictional First World War tale written by his son Norman A Brooke, a former Customs & Excise officer in Bradford’s Britannia House in the early 1950s.

Were the ten years of retirement he spent researching and writing it worth the effort? In spite of some errors along the way, I think Bloodied But Unbowed has potential perhaps unimagined by its author.

To ordinary soldiers, the trenches were water-filled ditches, mud-slides covered by duckboards, that were regularly knocked out of shape by a variety of German artillery fire, which Brooke describes.

This book is perhaps the next best thing to listening to a First World War veteran talking candidly about soldiering in France and Belgium between 1916 and 1917, the years of the bloody battles of the Somme, Messines Ridge and Passchendaele.

This is not a novel. Although there is a cast of eight main characters, either based on real people or invented, events are not dramatised according to the unfolding of a plot shaping their individual destinies.

What happens to these men is narrated by the author according to the various episodes of their war experiences at home and abroad. This is a description of the Bantams leaving the front line after nine days of muck and bullets: “Filthy, unkempt, covered in mud as well as blood, they staggered and lurched from side to side as they went. The usual badinage fell flat as it provoked no response at all from the troops being relieved...

“Because of the tortured nature of the ground, they proceeded in single file. The moment the line stopped, the leading man stuck the bayonet of his rifle into the ground, and resting his head on the butt, instantly fell asleep.”

The genesis of the book was a letter which his father’s commanding officer wrote to his mother in 1916: “Dear Mrs Brooke, It gives me the greatest pleasure in the world to have to inform you that your son Pte Brooke has been wounded...”

The wound was a “blighty” and took him back to England for repair and recovery. Unlike some of his comrades, he survived the war. It was his son who told the tale.