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Books

Describing the indescribable: news from the Western Front

6 January 2018

9:00 AM

6 January 2018

9:00 AM

At the close of the 1970s, I found a selection of postcards in an antique shop which had been sent from the Western Front in 1917 by a soldier named Private Howe to his young daughter Ena. I was struck by the immediacy of the language, and the careful avoidance of anything hinting at danger, combined with the tastefully chosen French photomontages of flowers and romanticised battlefields.

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