Voices and images of the Great War 1914-1918
From the boys eagerly enlisting 'to have a go at the Boche' to the solemn burial of the Unknown Soldier, the Christmas truces that the generals could not prevent, the girls handing out white feathers on the London streets, the filth, the rain, the flies and rats, the military blunders - scenes from the Great War have an almost overwhelming emotional power. Here the acclaimed historian Lyn Macdonald brings together, largely from her own collection, songs, amateur poem, official reports, diary extracts, press cuttings, Photographs and eye-witness accounts of the Western Front and Gallipoli. The result is a terrifyingly vivid piece of unofficial history, which allows us, almost for the first time, to see the war as the combatants saw it.
Letters from the trenches, heartfelt doggerel, awkward young men in ill-fitting khaki putting on a brave face for the camera: these cannot fail to arouse pity and horror. The war was human folly on an unprecedented scale which set the pattern for our cataclysmic century, and yet we can meet its humble sufferers on intimate terms ... The misery is there, the courage and fear, just occasionally farce, and always the sickening repetitive monotony of hopeless horror.