Steady Drummer

The author of this memoir of the Salonika front - a neglected theatre of the Great War - was himself an Oxford-educated scholar of ancient Greek. Stanley Casson (1889-1944) had a spell in the Flanders trenches - where he wrote war poetry - before being sent to the more congenial climate of Greece. As an expert on the country he joined the General Staff and was present when the Bulgarian front broke, and the British, French, Greek and Serb Allies pushed up into a defeated Austria. After the war, Casson became director of the British School in Athens and died during the second World War in a plane crash while again serving as a liaison officer with the Greeks. This book is an erudite and informative account of a campaign often overlooked but which he convincingly argues was no side-show, but made a vital contribution to the final Allied victory.