On 17 January 1956, more than two years after the publication of Nine Rivers from Jordan, a monumental memoir of his years as a war correspondent, Denis Johnston received an unexpected souvenir from the past. His journal records the incident:

Picked up from a pile of discarded arms outside the gates of Buchenwald in April 1945, the pistol was more than a reminder of the wartime travels that had brought Johnston from Egypt, across North Africa, north through Italy and into Germany. It indexed a further journey: from a commitment to a multiform neutrality – encompassing journalistic objectivity, technological immediacy and political non-alignment – to a conviction that neutrality represents an ideal incommensurate with the traumas of the Second World War. An examination of his wartime broadcasts, journals and memoirs reveals the pistol to be a loaded correlative of Johnston's lost and found commitment to a moral universe of rights and wrongs. In arming himself at the end of the war, he had finally taken a side.

The belated recovery of the weapon makes for a tidy anecdote about the return of the wartime repressed; indeed, in its elegant and compact symbolism, the scene is typical of Johnston's highly mediated autobiographical writings. Johnston was a prodigious chronicler of his own life: during the war, he recorded day-by-day observations about life as a correspondent in what he called his ‘War Field Books’. While the ‘War Field Books’ form only one part of Johnston's agglomeration of unpub-lished life writing, they represent the most substantial and detailed account therein of his experience of the war.