REVEREND Claud Burder endured unimaginable horrors during the First World War.

He wrote them all down but hid away the manuscript and never told his family what he went through. His papers were tucked away in a trunk and stacked inside a Bournemouth garage until his son discovered them in 2009, and this eyewitness account has now been published as Hell on Earth – My Life in The Trenches.

“I think it’s the most graphic account written,” said son John Burder, aged 69, from Braidley Road in the town centre, who made TV programmes.

“It’s a first hand account, written immediately after the war, by a very well qualified man. He was not your average 16-year-old Tommy, he had a degree from Cambridge.”

John Burder spent a year working on the notes from 7am to 5pm and invested half his life savings to publish 500 hard-backed copies through Big Ben Books.

He thinks the book echoes soldiers’ experiences in Afghanistan and shows the ‘futility of war.’ “I have not published it to make money, I published it so people can read it,” said Mr Burder.

His father tried to join up as a reverend, but was told that he was too old, so he joined the Middlesex regiment as a private at the age of 32 and fought from 1915 to 1918.

“He had the most visual way of describing things,” said John.

“He wrote about moving through no mans land in the middle on the night into a trench. There was someone else resting and he didn’t want to disturb him.

“They were shelled all night and in the morning as the day light filtered through the air, he saw the man’s head had been shot off.”

Rev Burder died in 1968 aged 87 and John believes the book is a classic account of a caring man’s view of the war. “He did what thought was right.”