Author: Laurence Housman
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812218152
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332
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Book Description
More than eight million young men perished during the First World War—a staggering figure. The natural reaction to such a great loss of humanity was to forget the individuals and recast the conflict into one of faceless armies and battles commemorated in stone and metal monuments. War Letters of Fallen Englishmen was published following the war in order to remind the living of those who were lost in the name of the British crown—brothers, husbands, fathers, sons. This collection provides, in the very words of those who participated and died in combat, the closest approximation possible to the experience of war. Carefully selected from thousands of letters, those in this collection are poignant, powerful, and graphic and were chosen for their depth of perception, the intensity of their descriptions, and their messages to future generations. This edition contains a new foreword by the distinguished World War I historian Jay Winter.
Author: Philipp Witkop
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812208781
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 405
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Book Description
Originally appearing at the same time as the pacifist novel All Quiet on the Western Front, this powerful collection provides a glimpse into the hearts and minds of an enemy that had been thoroughly demonized by the Allied press. Composed by German students who had left their university studies in order to participate in World War I, these letters reveal the struggles and hardships that all soldiers face. The stark brutality and surrealism of war are revealed as young men from Germany describe their bitter combat and occasional camaraderie with soldiers from many nations, including France, Great Britain, and Russia. Like its companion volume, War Letters of Fallen Englishmen, these letters were carefully selected for their depth of perception, the intensity of their descriptions, and their messages to future generations. "Should these letters help towards the establishment of justice and better understanding between nations," the editor reflects in his introduction, "their deaths will not have been in vain." This edition contains a new foreword by the distinguished World War I historian Jay Winter.
Author: Caroline Dakers
Publisher: Constable
ISBN: 1472113373
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 253
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Book Description
When war broke out in 1914 conscription seemed unnecessary; there was no shortage of volunteers ready to lay down their lives for their country. In this fascinating book, illustrated with contemporary drawings and photographs, Caroline Dakers explores exactly what their 'country' meant to the men and women who fought, died, survived. She suggests that, with a little subliminal help from literature, art and propaganda, the British volunteer, whether factory worker, farm hand or public school boy, felt that he was fighting for old England - village, church, meadow and carthorse, rather than city, factory, commerce and motor car. Drawing on a wide range of unpublished papers and family archives, Dr Dakers recreates the world of the countryside at war. There are chapters on agriculture (literally 'the home front'), and life and death in the manor house, vicarage, school and farm. And while all this was being fought for, The French countryside was smashed into a quagmire. This is the most complete picture yet of the impact of the First World War on rural England; a war which, if only in the ubiquitous village war memorials, still reverberates across the decades.
Author: Anthony Fletcher
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300195532
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 347
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Book Description
A powerful account of life and loss in the Great War, as told by British soldiers in their letters home
Author: Elizabeth A. Sudduth
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781570035906
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 428
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Book Description
Bruccoli Great War Collection at the University of South Carolina: An Illustrated Catalogue provides a reference tool for the study of one of the great watershed moments in history on both sides of the Atlantic serving historians, researchers, and collectors.
Author: Charles Messenger
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN: 1780227590
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 350
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Book Description
This is a comprehensive account of how the British Army coped with and adapted to the enormous challenges and pressures of the First World War -- the first major continental war that the army had had to fight for almost a hundred years. Following the course of the War, both on the Western Front and in other theatres, Charles Messenger tells how the British Army managed the challenges of command, training, technology and new weapons of war. He examines officer selection, medicine, discipline, the manpower crisis of 1918, the integration of women into the forces and many other topics. Based on years of original research, this will become the standard work of reference on the organization and administration of the biggest army Britain has ever put into the field.
Author: Harro Grabolle
Publisher: Akademiai Kiado
ISBN: 9789630581929
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
Analysis of British and German prose fiction written between 1916 and 1937, with different ideological points of view. Authors represented include, from Germany, Fritz von Unruh, Josef M. Wehner, Werner Beumelburg, Arnold Zweig, and from Britain, Alec J. Dawson, Alan P. Herbert, Arthur D. Gristwood, Frederic Manning and David Jones.
Author: Keith Simpson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317404122
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 160
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Book Description
This book, originally published in 1981, tells the story of the regular soldiers and reservists of the British Expeditionary Force (B. E. F.) who fought in the first six months of the First World War on the Western Front. This photographic history of the B. E. F. is unique in that the photographs were taken not by official war photographers, but either by the few press photographers who were able to get near the Front or by members of the B. E. F themselves. Complementing the photographs are many first-hand accounts of their experiences by ‘Old Contemptibles’ and an authoritative text by Keith Simpson.
Author: Michael Guida
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190085533
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 233
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Book Description
Listening to British Nature: Wartime, Radio, and Modern Life, 1914-1945 traces the impact of sounds and rhythm of the natural world and how they were listened, interpreted, and used amid the pressures of modern life to in early twentieth-century Britain. Author Michael Guida argues thatdespite and sometimes because of the chaos of wartime and the struggle to recover, nature's voices were drawn close to provide everyday security, sustenance and a sense of the future. Nature's sonic presences were not obliterated by the noise of war, the advent of radio broadcasting and the rush ofthe everyday, rather they came to complement and provide alternatives to modern modes of living.Listening to British Nature examines how trench warfare demanded the creation of new listening cultures in order to understand danger and to imagine survival. It tells of the therapeutic communities who used quiet and rural rhythms to restore shell-shocked soldiers and of ramblers who sought toimmerse themselves in the sensualities of the outdoors, revealing how home-front listening in the Blitz was punctuated by birdsong broadcast by the BBC. In focusing on the sensing of sounds and rhythms, this study demonstrates how nature retained its emotional potency as the pace andunpredictabilities of life seemed to increase and new man-made sounds and sonic media appeared all around. To listen to nature during this time was to cultivate an intimate connection with its vibrations and to sense an enduring order and beauty that could be taken into the future.
Author: Edward A. Gutiérrez
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700624449
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
“It is impossible to reproduce the state of mind of the men who waged war in 1917 and 1918,” Edward Coffman wrote in The War to End All Wars. In Doughboys on the Great War the voices of thousands of servicemen say otherwise. The majority of soldiers from the American Expeditionary Forces returned from Europe in 1919. Where many were simply asked for basic data, veterans from four states—Utah, Minnesota, Connecticut, and Virginia—were given questionnaires soliciting additional information and “remarks.” Drawing on these questionnaires, completed while memories were still fresh, this book presents a chorus of soldiers’ voices speaking directly of the expectations, motivations, and experiences as infantrymen on the Western Front in World War I. What was it like to kill or maim German soldiers? To see friends killed or maimed by the enemy? To return home after experiencing such violence? Again and again, soldiers wrestle with questions like these, putting into words what only they can tell. They also reflect on why they volunteered, why they fought, what their training was, and how ill-prepared they were for what they found overseas. They describe how they interacted with the civilian populations in England and France, how they saw the rewards and frustrations of occupation duty when they desperately wanted to go home, and—perhaps most significantly—what it all added up to in the end. Together their responses create a vivid and nuanced group portrait of the soldiers who fought with the American Expeditionary Forces on the battlefields of Aisne-Marne, Argonne Forest, Belleau Wood, Chateau-Thierry, the Marne, Metz, Meuse-Argonne, St. Mihiel, Sedan, and Verdun during the First World War. The picture that emerges is often at odds with the popular notion of the disillusioned doughboy. Though hardened and harrowed by combat, the veteran heard here is for the most part proud of his service, service undertaken for duty, honor, and country. In short, a hundred years later, the doughboy once more speaks in his own true voice.
