Harry Mead tackles a whole brigade of books about those who volunteered to fight for their country... and those who took a little more persuading to join the ranks.

MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS: The Crofton Diaries edited by Gavin Roynon (Sutton, £19.99)

'WAR is a funny game. Bored in Billets. Terrified in Trenches.'' An exact summation by cavalry officer Sir Morgan Crofton, in November 1914, just two months after the start of the First World War. Ranging from (usually caustic) reflections on Government policy to mundane daily detail - "cold and inclined to rain...couldn't find a decent barber's shop'' - diaries he kept in the first two years of war, here impeccably edited, and well-illustrated with maps and photographs, catch the war from a serving officer's perspective.

Which, when it came to the real business, wasn't significantly different from that of his men... "The trench was only about a yard wide and a line of men moving along it did not leave much room. It was horrible. The corpses were dragged and pushed along like sacks of potatoes, anything to get them clear of the trench." And after an assault on German trenches only about 50 yards away: "We heard wounded Germans calling out in a plaintive and mournful manner. They were like Banshees. Then one by one the cries ceased, presumably as the men died..."

Crofton himself, a Boer War veteran, came through the war unscathed but with three medals for distinguished conduct.

TOMMY: The British Soldier on the Western Front in 1914-18 by Richard Holmes (HarperCollins, £20)

PTE Thomas Atkins has been promoted. For Holmes uses the fictional Atkins' nickname to include all who served on the Western Front, including the generals. These, he believes, have been wrongly maligned, not deserving Sassoon's line: "He did for them both with his plan of attack".

Many more generals died in the First World War than the Second. Though Tommy Atkins fared worse, trench warfare was much more about attrition than "going over the top" - actually called "going over the bags" at the time. Some infantrymen spent two years without taking part in a single attack.

Holmes gives many more such revisionist insights. While conventional judgment has it that the early stages of the war proved cavalry to be redundant, Holmes reveals that the British Cavalry Corps made a successful charge as late as October 1918, capturing 500 prisoners, who had confronted them with ten artillery cannon and 150 machine guns.

FORGOTTEN VOICES OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR by Max Arthur (Ebury Press, £19.99)

CAN there be any forgotten voices now? The story of the Second World War seems to have been told and retold down to every last Land Army girl. But anyway, here, drawn from taped interviews held by the Imperial War Museum, are hundreds of personal stories, from the battlefront and back home, and including evacuees and prisoners of war. Though exact details are not to hand, an audio version is also available: tapes or CDs which can be bought as a complete set or covering a particular year.

THE CALL-UP: A History of National Service by Tom Hickman (Headline, £17.99)

PEACETIME now - so-called though there was the Korean War and conflict in Cyprus, Kenya and other places. Hickman, who did NS with the Welch Regiment, has put together his own narrative from the memories of 80-or-so of the two million men "called up' between 1947 and 1963. While many regarded it as a frustrating interruption to their lives, others look back fondly on it, still cherishing the sense of comradeship they say it produced.

ENTER DRUM AND COLOURS by Alan Brewin (Brewin Books, Doric House, 56 Alcester Road, Studley, Warwickshire, B80 7LG: Tel: 01527 854228, £9.95)

ONE man's fuller memories of National Service, with the Green Howards from 1955 to 1957. Midlander Brewin doesn't seem to have too bad a time of it. One of his memories, from Tripoli, is of coming across "an old tank engine rusting in a siding", together with "a rake of wooden-bodied coaches... I measured the coaches and made drawings and took photographs with some idea that the information might prove useful in the future, either for an article or, more ambitiously, for a model of the line..."

Published: 15/03/2005