TOWARD THE FLAME has been on my shelf for more than a dozen years now, and I have started to read it and put it down several times. Last night I finally finished reading it, but it was something of a chore. The jacket copy says the book was "Considered by many to be the finest American combat memoir of the First World War," but I found it tedious, repetitive and fragmented, and then it simply ended abruptly, almost 'in media res.' Allen was a platoon leader with the 28th Division, and his story covers just a couple of months, July and August, 1918.

Yes, it is very descriptive of both the fatigue, boredom and sudden horror of war, but it appears that Harvey Allen took very little pains to craft his story into a coherent narrative or to try to draw any conclusions from his experience. Indeed, Allen has this to say in his preface -

"It is a narrative, plain, unvarnished, without heroics and true ... It gives a glimpse of some of the fighting about Chateau-Thierry and Fismes, but above all, it shows how we lived and died, ate, cooked, looked, thought and felt during this time . .. The book is not propaganda of any kind. It is much more than that; it is a picture of war, broken off when the film burned out."

I have the utmost respect for Allen, who went on to write many books, including a bestseller, ANTHONY ADVERSE, but the fact that it took me several tries to finish TOWARD THE FLAME, perhaps suggests it could use a touch more 'varnish.' I will, however, recommend it to war lit buffs, if only for its gritty detail and authenticity.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER ( )

A gripping, vividly detailed, unsentimental combat memoir by an American soldier who served on the Western Front. ( )

A fine personal memoir of a fighting man in WW I. ( )