Forgotten Voices Of The Great War
Arthur Max
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Cover Type: Hardcover
Book Condition: Very Good
Jacket Condition: Very Good
Publisher: Ebury Press
Publisher Place: London
Publisher Year: 2002
Edition: Reprint
Description: 327 pages. Book and Jacket are both in Very good condition throughout. On The First Day Of The Somme Battle, Company After Company Went Forward. I Could Hear What They Were Going Into. I Waited All Day With My Company Lying In A Sunken Road And Believe Me, You Sweated Blood.
Publishers Description: Max Arthur's compilation of First World War memories, Forgotten Voices of the Great War, offers a reminder of the scale of human experience within the 1914-18 conflict. Arthur, a military historian best known for his history of the RAF and his account of the Falklands campaign in 1982, has assembled hundreds of excerpts from the sound archives of the Imperial War Museum. Officers, rank-and-file troops, Australians, Americans, war widows, women in the munitions factories, and German soldiers too, all left oral testimony of their experiences, and these interviews provide the basis of the book. Arthur has put them in chronological and campaign order, and provided a general commentary, but beyond that, has left the rich and moving record to speak for itself. The sheer humdrum ordinariness of modern warfare--the mud and rain, the relentless loss of life and inevitability of death, the pointless routine of attrition--come over in the matter-of-fact recollections of so many. But so too does the humanity and morality of the ordinary soldier--a factor that rather belies the recent emphasis amongst some historians on how soldiers loved to kill. Arthur might have intruded more. No biographical information is given about the owners of these "voices", nor does he say when, where and how this oral testimony was gathered. These quibbles aside this is a worthwhile read and should encourage people not only to observe a minute's silence on Remembrance Day, but also to spend a few hours in the Imperial War Museum itself. --Miles Taylor
ISBN: 9780091882099
(134670)
