The second volume (The Battle Lost and Won, 1978) of Olivia Manning's (1911-80) The Levant Trilogy contains a highly effective account of the Alamein offensive. Although the bulk of the trilogy deals with wartime English expatriates and the complex marriage of Harriet and Guy Pringle, the battle scenes are seen through the eyes of Simon Boulderstone, an idealistic, 20-year-old lieutenant in the British army. Simon meets Harriet Pringle while on leave in Cairo just after having discovered that his brother has been killed in action. He returns to the front, assigned the role of liaison officer as the battle is beginning. Sent to deliver an important message to an army group that has lost radio contact, he undergoes the desperate, lost feelings of the soldier in combat. The ensuing scenes capture the confusion, fear, and sense of imminent death that the individual soldier experiences in battle, a scene where everything can seem to go wrong, but out of which sometimes comes sudden, unexpected victory.

Picking his way back from the front lines, stepping over the bodies of dead soldiers, Simon asks himself, "Is this what Hugo [his brother] died for? And am I to die for this?" A week later, the battle still raging, he goes to the front with a land mine map to help an infantry commander advance his troops. He soon discovers that the disparity between headquarters' view of the situation and the front line's reality can be great indeed. As Rommel's troops retreat, the British forces attempt to cut them off, but the Germans evade the trap. Meanwhile, Simon's jeep runs over a mine, and he wakes to find himself paralyzed from the waist down.

In The Sum of Things (1980), the third volume of the trilogy, Simon recovers the use of his legs and a new perspective on life, a recognition that he has been living in the shadow of his dead brother. Seasoned by battle and physical pain, he has become his own man. He returns to active service leading troops destined to spend the war in a remote Aegean island, not the return to battle he had hoped for, but he accepts his assignment with a new maturity and a confident anticipation of the future. The battle of El Alamein has been a turning point personally as well as historically.

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