Winter, 1915. Seven men step out of a column of sixty thousand and sit down in the snow. They have no food, no fire, and no road back. Ahead of them the file of prisoners crawls on into the fog like a great trampled worm. A Ukrainian doctor. A Hungarian. A Pole. A young Serb. An Austrian lieutenant who is blind and carries a violin. A man who has forgotten his own name. What happens on that mountain over one day and one night - the ball they invent to keep from freezing, the blind man who feeds his violin to the fire, the lot drawn to decide which of them must die so that the rest may eat, and what is said when the moment comes - Osyp Turiansky did not invent. He was one of the men. Driven across the Albanian mountains with the retreating Serbian army in the winter of 1915, he was one of roughly fifteen thousand prisoners who came out alive. Forty-five thousand did not. He wrote the book, he said, so that he would not lose his mind. Published in Vienna in 1921 and little read in English since, this is unlike anything else the First World War produced. Turiansky called it a picture from the abyss: not a novel but a novella-poem, in which narration breaks into verse, sentences shorten to the length of a breath, and rows of dots stand where language gives out. It is testimony written as art - and at the very edge of what human beings can do to one another, it refuses to become either a horror story or a sermon. At the centre of it a blind man who has lost everything says four words that the rest of the book is built to earn: There is a sun in life. This annotated edition restores the 1921 first edition entire - the subtitle later printings dropped, the dedication, the author's portrait, the four plates, and Robert Plen's contemporary essay - with an introduction, a glossary, and notes throughout on the history, the songs and rituals, and the choices behind every difficult line. Translated and annotated by Serhii Sakal.