Reilly 349.

Victor George Henry West, poet, born February 18, 1919; died February 2 2002


Inscribed by the author who was a soldier in World War II and as well a Prisoner of War.
'"to Ted from Vic in gratitude November 1975"

Vernon Scannell, declared in his introduction to the book that "the sense of what the war was really like to the common soldier in action could be scarcely more poignantly and exactly expressed".

obit Alan Brownjohn
Monday March 25, 2002
The Guardian

Victor West, who has died aged 82, was a leftwing zealot, soldier, artist - Winston Churchill hung a painting by him at Chartwell, and Ascot grandstand sported his mural - teacher, poet, and voluminous chronicler of second world war rank-and-file servicemen in action and captivity......He was born in Lambeth. The family moved to Whitstable, Kent when he was three, and there a boyhood interest in battles was heightened (ironically, in view of what happened later) by a lecture he heard at the age of 10 on the catastrophic Gallipoli campaign of the first world war.....He volunteered when the war began, joining the King's Royal Rifle Corps. In what he later described as "the heroic muddle of the defence of Crete" in 1941 he became one of nearly 20,000 prisoners and spent the next four years in German prisoner-of-warcamps. There he forged passes and ration books for escapers, gave anti-fascist pep talks, and began to write poetry, sometimes while restrained in handcuffs. Combat's degrading horrors and the rigours of captivity became his principle themes when he got into his stride as a poet in the late 1960s.

His best work up to then was collected in his one full-length volume The Horses Of Falaise (1975), with its cover drawing by Elizabeth Frink.

The published writings are a fraction of the verse, diaries, letters and memoirs, preserved in the Liddell Hart archive at King's College, London and the Australian War Museum in Canberra