Baron went on to publish fifteen novels in all, including two more based on his wartime experiences: There’s No Home (1950), set during the Italian campaign, and The Human Kind (1953, later filmed by Carl Foreman as The Victors, 1963). Eight of Baron’s novels, including the ‘War Trilogy’, are currently in print. He also wrote numerous film and television screenplays. He died in 1999.

Introduction

War literature is often associated with the First World War, with an explosion of the genre in the late 1920s. Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front was a bestseller and later made into a Hollywood film, while generations of schoolchildren have grown up on a diet of the poetry of Wilfred Owen and the words of Siegfried Sassoon.

Yet the novels of the Second World War – or certainly those written by individuals who had first-hand experience of that war – are often forgotten. Alexander Baron’s From the City, From the Plough is one of the most impressive from both conflicts and is written from the perspective of the ordinary soldier, rather than the largely officer-penned novels of the earlier war. The book proved popular on publication and has remained admired by commentators and historians ever since. From the City, From the Plough depicts a fictional infantry battalion training in England, before going on to fight in the D-Day landings and the ensuing Normandy campaign. The novel’s great strength is its unflinching realism; coupled with Baron’s skilful economy of language and the unsentimental way such devastating events are portrayed. This lends the work a huge emotional power – less is certainly more in this case.