Second to None: The Fighting 58th Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force

Second to None is a carefully researched and well-crafted account of the World War I experiences of the 58th Battalion, first raised in 1915 in response to demands for more soldiers as trench warfare became a vast dying ground for the youth of Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.Mr. Shakleton's recounting of the training, parades, transfers, raids and major engagements allows the facts of numbers of deaths, shell shock victims, wounded and missing in action to convey to his readers the horror of the war to end all wars. He supplements the battalion's War Diary with letters, maps, information from interviews and his own reading and background to fill in details that the reader needs to understand the routines that surrounded the constant killing. There is also an oblique reference to the strange behaviour of one of the battalion's commanding officers. His sober, simple, unembellished and well organized prose is a counterpoint to the chaos of the trenches where every day men saw, heard and smelled death in scenes that haunted the survivors until their own deaths. Any reader interested in the First Great War will want this account in their library for it allows one to experience life in the trenches `up close and personal'.