BORN in battle, Peter White's journal is one of the most extraordinary stories to come out of the Second World War. As a 24-year-old lieutenant in the King's Own Scottish Borderers, Peter kept an unauthorised journal of his regiment's advance through the Low Countries and into Germany in the closing months of the war.

Forbidden by his commanding officer from doing so for security reasons, Peter's boyhood habit of diary-keeping had become an obsession too strong to shake off.

Each day, he found time to record in copious detail the war going on around him, the lives and deaths of the men with whom he served, and the inexorable Allied advance into the Third Reich.

In one of the most graphic and finely crafted evocations of a soldier at war, the images he records are not for the faint-hearted.

There are heroes within its pages, but there are also disturbing insights into the darker side of humanity, frequently brushed aside in many other war accounts -- the men who broke under the strain and who ran away; the binge drinking that occasionally rendered the whole platoon unable to fight; the looting and the callous disregard for human life that happens when death is a daily companion.

Hidden away for more than 50 years, White's diary is a remarkable account of the horrors of war experienced by a British soldier in the greatest conflict of the 20th Century.

Born in South Africa of English parents and brought up in England, Peter White was a devoutly religious man whose chosen career as an artist suited his gentle nature.

But he felt that he could not live in a nation at war without 'doing his bit', so he volunteered for service in the Army, seeing action as an infantry platoon commander with the 4th Battalion of The King's Own Scottish Borderers.

After he married and settled in East Anglia, he became a successful portrait painter.

He died in 1985. His widow Elizabeth White is still alive and living in Suffolk.

It was while Harry Prince was researching the death of his brother -- who was killed in action with The King's Own Scottish Borderers -- that he discovered one of the soldiers had kept a diary.

This remarkable find led to consent from Mrs White for Harry to have copyright ownership of the diary and that it would be published.

Peter White's story With the Jocks, A Soldier's Struggle for Europe 1944-45 has a foreword by Sir John Keegan: "As his narrative unfolds, with its relentless emphasis on cold, casualties and the impersonal cruelty of war, the reader becomes almost consumed with disbelief that men could endure what they did.

"To get up each morning, after a day which had been itself an escape from death, to swallow tinned bacon, hard tack, and chlorine-flavoured tea.

"To plod forward across soaked fields in which every footstep might set off a lethal explosive charge, to lie for hours in freezing water while shells raked the landscape, to rise as darkness fell in the hope of finding a dry spot to shelter for the night after a mouthful of bully beef and hard biscuit.

"War is often narrated as an adventure story. War may be an adventure. Peter White's war was not so, nothing but a grim passage of duty."

An outstanding feature in the diary is the authors' drawings. Peter dug out his pencil and sketch pad from his rucksack at every passing opportunity -- in-between battles or while everyone was asleep and drew memorable scenes such as relaxing with a smoke, only to be killed in the morning. (Published by Sutton at £19.99)