The Reckoning – Review
The First World War was a brutal conflict. Imagine being a soldier in the trenches. Facing death in the trenches or facing death in no man’s land. Anything else would be a better option.
Or would it?
Perhaps being captured and taken away from the frontlines to a nice safe camp would be better. But it wasn’t.
In The Reckoning, Nathan Greenfield shares the stories of Canadian POWs during the First World War. This was an eye opening account of their experiences.
POWs lived on starvation diets, relying on packages from Canada to survive. They were beaten and tortures both physically and psychologically. Rules were broken, forcing prisoners to work for the war effort and being too close to the frontlines.
Greenfield goes through the stories not by participants but chronologically. So as POWs made their escape, we go from day to day rather than story to story. This sometimes got confusing but did give a sense of the progression through the war.
As a student of Canadian military history and someone interested in the First World War, I appreciated The Reckoning.
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