Situated somewhere between a diary, a chronicle, and a memoir, From Military Life brings together the “notes” recorded by Georgios V. Diamantakos in two successive notebooks during his military service in the First World War, from August 1916 to early November 1920. The notebooks were later apparently forgotten in a heavy drawer of an old wooden wardrobe in Zagora, on Mount Pelion.
A “diary chronicle” spanning nearly six years of military life across different regions of mainland Greece, the work also condenses — often with strikingly precise detail — crucial historical developments, wartime events, and the personal anxieties, disappointments, and joys, both great and small, of its soldier-author. Initially serving as a clerk, then as a mess officer, lance corporal, corporal assigned to the regiment infirmary, stretcher-bearer at the Battle of Skra — where he was promoted “for bravery” to the rank of sergeant — machine gunner, and, during periods of relative calm at outposts along the Greek-Bulgarian and Greek-Serbian borders, a writer as well.
In addition to the prose Military Life, written in formal Katharevousa Greek, Georgios V. Diamantakos also left behind a lengthy vernacular verse drama, most likely written as a way of processing — and transforming — the horrific experience of the deadly Battle of Skra. This theatrical dialogic work is also included here, in the hope that the publication of these two complementary texts may contribute not only to historical knowledge, but also to a deeper human understanding.
