The Great Lover

An anti-war WWI novella that exceeds even Kubrick's <i>Paths of Glory</i> in its depiction of the real-world horrors of war. Structured in the form of the "lost journals" of James Edwin Rooke - a fictional poet much celebrated in the years following the war, who built his career on collections of war-related poetry. While serving as a British officer in the trenches at the Battle of Somme, Rooke is occasionally visited by a strange apparition, usually presaging and interfering with some event which would have otherwise taken his life.