The Recollections of Rifleman Bowlby by Alex Bowlby (Amazon) is a small book I picked up at Heathrow (funny how all my book buying is done at airports these days), and is, as the title hints, a memoir by the English version of a grunt during the 1944 Italian campaign.
This is fairly low-key as war memoirs go, written by a “gentleman” who chose to remain a regular soldier because he was, among the Cockney soldiers, “accepted for what he was rather than for what he was supposed to be.”
Two aspects of this book made an impression: First, the everyday manner in which people die, making a profound impression on the others – not the death of one individual, but the gradual way in which this takes a toll on the participants. Secondly, the number of soldiers who desert or refuse to go into battle, and how this is dealt with by the officers, who, rather than having them automatically court martialled, will give them a rest and let the pressure from the other soldiers get them back into service.
You get the impression of a book written entirely honestly, by someone who was a little too young to understand what was going on, and who aged fast.