Book Description

In this vivid and deeply moving memoir, novelist Robert Kotlowitz recounts his experiences as a teenaged infantryman in the Second World War. With a sharp, ironic eye, he brings every moment of his service to life, from the day he is drafted as an eighteen-year-old and thrown into basic training and maneuvers in Tennessee. Readers meet his commanding officers and fellow platoon members in all their quirky individuality, see the grimly foreboding drowning of fellow recruits in a swollen river, and feel his excitement and anxiety alike as the young Francophile and Jew arrives in France to face the German army, and watch the drudgery and senselessness of military routine erode his youthful idealism. Most shatteringly, he describes the horrific day in which almost his entire platoon is slaughtered in an ill-advised assault on a German position, during which he must play dead for twelve hours in the midst of furious fire. An immensely moving work of witness and of muted, well-justified rage, Before Their Time joins the ranks of the great and sobering stories of World War II.