A Moment of Madness

All is not quiet on the Western Front. The horrors of the trenches have taken their toll on Jackson and, as he prepares to go over the top, he must fight the demons in his head as well as the terror in his heart.

In a quagmire of mud and blood, death and destruction, a moment of madness seizes Jackson as the war around him merges with the brutal insanity in his own mind.

When the whistles finally signal the big push, the barbed wire and shot and shell and the Hun across the muddy battlefield are not the only enemy to be overcome.

A study in the horrors of war and the devastating condition that is Post Traumatic Stress, or shell shock as it was known at the time, A Moment of Madness sees a man under the pressures of his time, the constraints of his honour and duty and the inescapable death trap that was the mud and blood spattered trenches of the Great War.

From The Author:

For a number of years I have been a volunteer researcher for my local archives, The East Riding Treasure House, researching and documenting the lives of local men and women who served in the Great War. Many of the people were soldiers in the East Riding and Yorkshire Regiments, The Hull Pals and Beverley and Scarborough Terriers. So, while A Moment of Madness is a work of complete fiction it has it's roots in some horrible truths. The story is an amalgamation of snippets from war diaries and newspaper accounts, stirred up a bit and given a pinch of imagination. The main character, Jackson, is a hybrid of many soldiers I've researched, just as some of the things he witnesses are things described from the time.

The fantasy element is my take on Post Traumatic Stress, something I suffer from myself. While anyone who suffers this awful condition will tell you that it is all but impossible to convey to someone else, I hope that Jackson's tale gives at least an impression of it and does justice to the absolute hell that the Western Front must have been.