Of all war diaries I've read three have so far stayed most in my mind:

The Backwash Of War (The Human Wreckage Of The Battlefield As Witnessed By An American Hospital Nurse)
Not So Quiet... Stepdaughters of War

and this one.

All three have an immediacy, an honesty, a rage and openness so many others entirely lack. I am aware of why they lack this, because neither the public, nor the publishers really wanted to read about what it really meant, because then people simply didn't believe, because most of these men and women suffered gravely from PTSD and their only recourse was to lock what happened firmly away inside themselves.

All the more important to take note of those people who unlocked their inner selves and bared it stark and naked to everyone to behold. These three did and bled for it. Literally and I am sure also figuratively.

Atkinson is, for a male of the era, on par with the raw rage of Zenna-Smith and La Motte. He owns up to his shell-shock and battle fatigue, describing in brutal detail how he cowers inside roadside holes, too afraid and tired to even move, contemplating his revolver and a bullet through his brain. He writes about his abject fear, crawling home to his billet shivery and on all four. He describes how he frequently snaps and forces himself to get on with it, and how the man he once was, that young brilliant engineer out of public school, slowly disintegrates into the wreck he is at the end of the war and the taciturn cynic he becomes after it.

This is a brilliant, a straight, a fearsome and horrific account, completely apart from either jingoism or hyperbole, on par with the two abovementioned women. It is, as well, witness of the utter rage this war engendered. ( )