The Music Maker

On 8 May 1945, 46-year-old Drum Major, Henry Barnes Jackson, staggered towards his American liberators. Emaciated, dressed in rags, his decayed boots held together with string, he’d been force-marched for twenty days over the Austrian Alps after five heinous years as a POW in Nazi labor camps. He collapsed into his liberators’ arms, clinging to his only meaningful possession—his war diary. Having already experienced the horrific nature of battle in the First World War, Jackson continued as a dru