Baron was acclaimed for his firsthand fictionalisation of the D-Day offensive, From the City, From the Plough, but this 1953 collection of war stories is arguably his masterpiece. It's a curious little book, strung together from a sequence of unconnected though clearly autobiographical vignettes. A London East End intellectual and leftwing activist, Baron found himself "content to live physically active and intellectually lethargic in the womb-like warmth of comradeship"  though his battalion turn out not to be a wholly uncultivated bunch, avidly passing round a copy of David Copperfield, or discussing Beethoven while crouched over a latrine trench. And few have captured the anxious, almost celebratory, lull before the commencement of hostilities quite as brilliantly as Baron, who finds himself sailing towards the slaughter on a Normandy beach and observes his fellow soldiers "standing along the side, watching disaster draw towards them as idle and as apparently dissociated in their helplessness as loungers at the rail of a seaside pier".