Rendezvous with Death : Artists and Writers in the Thick of It 1914-1918

This book sheds new light on the colourful personalities including Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Alan Seeger, Ivor Gurney, Edward Thomas, Isaac Rosenberg, Ralph Vaughan Williams and George Butterworth, all major figures among Englands creative artists during the First World War. Thanks to the authors research and knowledge, the book is a very English story about the tragically short spring of English artistic creativity between 1910 and 1920; the greatest such renaissance since Shakespeare and Purcell in the 17th century. It focuses on these exceptional poets, composers and artists experiences in the front line and what resulted from these. A short personal Preface records that the authors father, Sergeant Major Anthony Geraghty (later anglicized as Garrity) survived one year and 271 days on the front line with the British Expeditionary Force in France and Flanders including the Somme, in which he served alongside the composer Butterworth in 13th Battalion, Durham Light Infantry.