I’m delighted to welcome Barney Campbell and his new book, The Fires of Gallipoli, to the blog with an excerpt.
Excerpt
Edward’s thick jumper proved its mettle and he slept soundly, stirring only around midnight as a snuffling deer broke nearby branches around the edge of the tree. He was awake for a few minutes while memories of nights on the front came to him, staring out into a dark night or peeping fearfully over the parapet when a baleful alabaster shone over the Peninsula in a sniper’s moon. He remembered nights on the line as he and Thorne tried desperately to suppress their chuckles into yelps of breathing. He was sure that he let out a giggle into the night before nothingness then fell over him, dreamless and warm.
He woke with his thighs damp from dew and drew away the groundsheet to see the million droplets on the cow parsley sparkle gold and rainbow colours from the low sun breaching the underside of the tree. A ghostly network of spiders’ webs hung above his head, made fuller by the dew, more ossified. He felt an awful pang, as Thorne stirred beside him, that he wasn’t able to see any of it.
They wormed out from under the tree and creaked limbs back to life, shaking away the residue of sleep and rubbing their sandpaper chins, teeth chattering at the morning’s chill. They got ready to go, the imprint of their bodies in the cow parsley already disappearing as the crushed stalks started to lean up again, and they rejoined the path and carried on.
The route took them over miles of gentle fields and woods, folds in the ground offering one of the most beautiful mornings Edward could remember; folds that, on a battlefield, would become must-take ridges and valleys raked by machine gun fire. Here though was a perfect land, unpoisoned by such snaky heads. The rising sun, still yet to gain its heat, uncovered spring’s half-built hedgerows as nearby woodpeckers saluted their arrival. So infrequent was any sign of habitation, with only a couple of soft yellow stone farmhouses nestling nearly invisibly into their surroundings, that it seemed for a time that they were walking through a zero-humaned world.
They moved so softly, boots tracing their way noiselessly over the grass and the soft earth, that at every wood or new field animals failed to notice them and carried on their activities unalarmed. In one small clump of trees were a cock and hen pheasant, he strutting and boastful with his neck thrust out in grandiose stupidity and she following along behind him picking up the food and grubs that he, in his magnificent self-regard, missed on his morning passeggiata.
Edward stopped for a while to watch them, and then started to describe the scene to Thorne, but not going on as long as he thought he might, seeing writ across his face a sheer exultation in the day and being where they were. Not the sights, of course, but the scents and the touch of the air on his skin seemed to be elevating him to the same sense of contented rapture as Edward felt. The gap between them may not be quite as unbridgeable as he had feared, then. Perhaps.
Here’s the Blurb
The Fires of Gallipoli is a heartbreaking portrayal of friendship forged in the trenches of the First World War.
‘In this vivid and engaging novel of war and friendship, Barney Campbell shows us once again that he is a natural writer. This is a novel of men at arms of the highest quality.’
~ Alexander McCall Smith
Edward Salter is a shy, reserved lawyer whose life is transformed by the outbreak of war in 1914. On his way to fight in the Gallipoli campaign, he befriends the charming and quietly courageous Theodore Thorne. Together they face the carnage and slaughter, stripped bare to their souls by the hellscape and only sustained by each other and the moments of quiet they catch together.
Thorne becomes the crutch whom Edward relies on throughout the war. When their precious leave from the frontline coincides, Theo invites Edward to his late parents’ idyllic estate in Northamptonshire. Here Edward meets Thorne’s sister Miranda and becomes entranced by her.
Edward escapes the broiling, fetid charnel-house of Gallipoli to work on the staff of Lord Kitchener, then on to the Western Front and post-war espionage in Constantinople. An odd coolness has descended between Edward and Theo. Can their connection and friendship survive the overwhelming sense of loss at the end of the war when everything around them is corrupted and destroyed?
The Fires of Gallipoli is a heartbreaking, sweeping portrayal of friendship and its fragility at the very limits of humanity.
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Meet the Author
Barney Campbell, author of The Fires of Gallipoli, was brought up in the Scottish Borders and studied Classics at university. He then joined the British Army where he commanded soldiers on a tour of Helmand Province, Afghanistan at the height of the war there.
That experience inspired him to write his first novel Rain, a novel about the war, which was published by Michael Joseph in 2015. The Times called it ‘the greatest book about the experience of soldiering since Robert Graves’s First World War classic Goodbye To All That’.
Barney has walked the length of the Iron Curtain, from Szczecin in Poland to Trieste in Italy. He currently works and lives in London.
Connect with the Author
MJ Porter 