Keith Douglas wrote many fine poems and one very great book, all in 24 years. When he died during the invasion of Normandy in 1944, the world lost a writer of almost limitless promise.

The book – Alamein to Zem Zem – was published posthumously. It is a journal written in 1943 while Douglas was commanding a tank in the desert war against Rommel’s Afrika Corps. Defining the hardship and terror of the war, it is poetic in its clarity and intensity. He was also a brave, very gifted commander who cared about his men, yet saw himself as self-centred.

‘I am not writing about these battles as a soldier’, he wrote, ‘nor trying to discuss them as military operations. I am thinking of them – selfishly, but as I always shall think of them – as my first experience of fighting: that is how I shall write of them.’

He admits at once that mere writing about the war is necessarily inadequate: ‘to read about it cannot convey the impression of having walked through the looking-glass which touches a man entering a battle’. War is different in a way that defies description. Even in battle it achieves silence and a kind of stillness:

The view from a moving tank is like that in a camera obscura or a silent film – in that since the engine drowns all other noises except explosions, the whole world moves silently.

Douglas need not have put his genius at risk, but he did. He had a comfortable staff job, but, risking a further court martial – he had been court-martialled previously – he went to the frontline in ‘direct disobedience of orders’.  This drew respect from his men. His batman was impressed by one of his defections: ‘I like you, sir. You’re shit or bust, you are.’

‘This praise’, comments Douglas, ‘gratified me a lot.’

The frontline in question was the Battle of El Alamein. Further risks were taken with his genius when he was put in command of a three-man Crusader tank. These were small and low-slung three-man machines that were sent in ahead of the much bigger American tanks like the Shermans.

The book is a superb evocation of the lives and characters of the men he fought alongside. There was ‘the lazy and permanently discontented’ Mudie, who would wake up talking ‘as birds do’, and continue to talk until late into the night. From the higher ranks there was Piccadilly Jim who once unloaded his wrath on Douglas: ‘You are a most inefficient young officer. I couldn’t be more angry with you – I would willingly kill you at this moment.’

Finally, he expresses a kind of brotherly love for almost all of them: ‘We knew we were better than all of them… But the focal point of this confidence was Piccadilly Jim.’

Douglas’ own personality emerges, first, in his renegade manner – his two defections – and, second, in his literary genius. It is hard to believe this book was written as a journal. The writing blends incident, feeling and character as well as any novelist. He also has a capacity to find poetry from the banal eccentricities of military life.

The idiom of our wireless traffic, the mysterious symbolic language in some ways like that of a wildly experimental school of poets; or unemotional, dull, and thus humorous like the conversation of the two Englishmen in The Lady Vanishes…

Death is everywhere but it is never an end, the war just gone – not just the bombs and bullets, but the ‘brews’ the soldiers drink and the strange concoctions they eat. But in his poem ‘Vergissmeinnicht’ – ‘Forget Me Not’ – he seems to capture the true finality of death as he contemplates the terrible mess of the body of a German soldier.

For here the lover and killer are mingled
who had one body and one heart.
And death who had the soldier singled
has done the lover mortal hurt.

But the most haunting theme of the book – at least for me as an Englishman – is that of a lost world. Douglas says that the two main sources of allusion in the radio chatter were ‘horses and cricket’. This is England as she was then, but is no more. Britain entered the war as a leading frontline nation, it exited as a secondary player behind Russia, America and, latterly, China and Japan. I suspect Douglas intuitively grasps this transformation, even though he never lived to see the full force of the idea.

There will never be peace. Humans will always go to war. Douglas was as horrified, as any sane person would be, by the carnage. But he goes beyond politics and mere national rivalries to see the way people do not just die, they leave traces. And, in fighting, they create a unique culture of survival. No book has ever come so close to capturing this unique but also universal experience.