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Behind the Lawrence Legend
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£25.00. Oxford University Press, 284pp, 35 ills. In page notes and refs. Bibliog., index, ISBN978-0-19-880227-3 Philip Walker In the brief introductory chapter to Seven Pillars of Wisdom, TE Lawrence noted “In reality I never had any office amongst the Arabs; was never in charge of the British mission with them”. Of the 46 fellow he names, 5 he …
Debts without redemption, Cultural differences in First World War Finance
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Debts without redemption, Cultural differences in First World War finance, £23.70 (Waterstones), Aspekt Publishers, Netherlands, 402pp, some black and white ills and diagrams in text, index, notes and refs, ISBN 978-94-6338-189-5 Aris Gaaff The human cost of the War is well known: the financial cost much less so. I was reluctant to read this, bei…
Dawn of Victory – Thank You China! – Star Shell Reflections 1918-1919
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Dawn of Victory – Thank You China! – Star Shell Reflections 1918-1919: The illustrated diaries of Jim Maultsaid £25.00 published price Pen & Sword 348pp, 219 illustrations (some composites) 70 b/w photos, 2 maps, ISBN 978-1-52671-270-7 Barbara McClune The centenary of the end of the First World War this year is unlikely to bring a change …
What did you do in the Great War Grandfather? The Life and Times of an Edwardian Horse Artillery Officer.
What did you do in the Great War Grandfather? The Life and Times of AN Edwardian Horse Artillery Officer. Helion, £16.95. 187pp, 187 ills, 4 maps, bibliog., index ISBN 978 1 91217403 4 Charles Barrington Author, Charles Barrington, enjoys the good fortune of being published by Helion, and, consequently, the assurance of quality productio…
Cyril Keepfer, 1894-1918 a Denbigh boy and the Great War
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Cyril Keepfer, 1894-1918 a Denbigh Boy and the Great War Bridge Books, Wrexham 48 pp, 20 pp photographs, 4 maps notes and references no index ISBN 978-1-84494-111-7. Christopher Keepfer Roberts £15 incl. P&P UK, £20 incl. P&P non U Proceeds less P&P to British Legion, from the author - email chris.k.roberts@btinternet.com) 2…
Rats Alley: Trench Names of the Western Front, 1914 – 1918
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Rats Alley: Trench Names of the Western Front, 1914 – 1918 The History Press £40.00, 767pp, 25 ills,24 1 bibliog., index ISBN 978 0 7509 8055 5 Peter Chasseaud On its first publication in 2006, what the marketing men call the ‘Unique Selling Point’ of Peter Chasseaud’s Rats Alley was simple. In listing the names over 10,000 named trenches on …
Publishers, Readers and the Great War: Literature and Memory since 1918
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Publishers, Readers and the Great War: Literature and Memory since 1918 £84, Bloomsbury Academic, 272pp, 15 ills -in page -index notes and refs, bibliog. ISBN 978 1 4742 9149 1 Vincent Trot Yes. Publishers, Readers and the Great War, is an academic work. Its price is academic and unfriendly. No doubt, sales to bejewelled libraries of universi…
African Kaiser: General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck and the Great War in Africa
African Kaiser: General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck and the Great War in Africa £20, Hurst Publishing, 448pp, no ills, 3 maps, no notes or refs, select bibliog. index. ISBN 978 1 84904 867 5. Robert Gaudi I do not normally read others’ reviews of books before writing my own and, although I do not have great regard for Allan Mallinson’s works on t…
Walking Ypres
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Walking Ypres Pen & Sword Barnsley 2017 £15.99, 296 pp, pb ills & maps throughout. ISBN: 0-17815-900-3 Paul Reed As the title suggests ‘Walking Ypre’ is standard ‘Battleground Europe’ fare intended for the footslogger rather than the exponent of mobile battlefield visiting. The book offers 14 chapters, each a walk from a designated …
The Zeppelins: An Illustrated History by Phil Carradice
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This does exactly what it says in the title. It offers a concise history of the development of the Zeppelin airship from its inception, carrying passengers and as an unwieldy weapon of war. Graf Ferdinand von Zeppelin, a Prussian career soldier and an observer in the American Civil War, had seen the advantages of balloons for observation. An intel…
Jack and Hopit: A Cavalryman and his War Horse in the Great War
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Jack and Hopit: A Cavalryman and his War Horse in the Great War (Helion and Company) £16.95 Serena Merton This was sparked discovering Hopit’s impressive memorial, engraved with his battle honours, a few miles from his master’s much later one. Jack Colvin left no description of his wartime experience, but the regiment’s war diary and othe…
France and the Great War, 1914-1918. Leonard V Smith, Stephane Audoin- Rouzeau and Annette Becker
Cambridge University Press, 2003, 218 pp, index, illustrations, maps, bibliography. (New Approaches to European History). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0 521 66631 7, £15.95 soft cover; ISBN 0 521 66176 5, £42.50 hardcover. Kindle £25, Hardcover (New £111 - Used £66), Softcover (New £26 - Used £2) Prices as of 2022 Translations f…
And We Go on by Will R Bird
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McGill–Queen’s University Press, Montreal, 2014, soft covers, £16.99, 240pp ISBN: 9–780–773–543–966 Originally published 1930. The name of Will Bird will be familiar to some Stand To! readers from his book, Ghosts Have Warm Hands, which features reports of the author’s personal encounters with spectral apparitions on the Western Front, 1917–1918…
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
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Vintage, 1994. Softback, 407pp., £5.99. ISBN 009938791 3. Works of fiction are not often referred to in Stand To !, but occasionally a work appears of sufficient character to merit a review. Birdsong is one of these. It appeared in the Sunday Times best sellers list for many weeks during 1994. Briefly, the story opens in Amiens in 1910, when Ste…
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
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'This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.' This is the epigraph of Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war novel,…
Trial by Friendship. Anglo-American Relations 1917-1918. David R. Woodward.
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1993 University Press of Kentucky [This review first appeared in Stand To! No.43 April 1995. Members of The Western Front Association receive our journal Stand To!, three times a year and have access to the full archive online]. Anglo-American relations at the time when the United States entered the Great War have been somewhat neglected by Bri…
Manfred Von Richthofen. The Red Air Fighter
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Manfred Von Richthofen. The Red Air Fighter ISBN 1 85367 079 0 199 pp. Illustrated. Casebound. £14.95. First Published in Germany in 1917 Greenhill Books. New 1990 edition of original 1918 translation. ISBN 1 85367 079 0. [This review first appeared in the Spring 1991 edition of Stand To! No.31. The entire archive is available to view b…
Rayford W.Logan and the Dilemma of the African American Intellectual by Kenneth R. Janken (1993)
By Kenneth Robert Janken University of Massachusetts Press 1993 319 pages ISBN-10 : 0870238582 ISBN-13 : 978-0870238581 There are several reasons why Americans are not that interested in the First World War: they came to it late, their losses were nothing like as severe as other combatants, there was little negative impact on the home front …
Filming All Quiet on the Western Front by Andrew Kelly
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I.B. Taurus, 1998. Price unknown. ISBN 86064 000 0. Erich Maria Remarque's extraordinary novel All Quiet on the Western Front invariably leaves a deep and lasting impression. 600,000 copies were sold across the world within three months of its publication in January 1929. Though not the first war film to be made, Lewis Milestone's film of the b…
The Lusitania, the Life, Loss and Legacy of an Ocean Legend by Daniel Allen Butler
Stackpole Books, Mechanicsburg, PA, 2000, 291 pp. $29.95. ISBN 0 8117 989 2. Even at this late date, the Lusitania continues to intrigue. A single, unreliable bronze torpedo from a German unterseeboot sank the mammoth British liner in May 1915, some three months after the Germans had announced an unrestricted U-boat attack of merchantmen of a…
The Great War 1914- 1918 by Ian F.W.Becket
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Modern Wars in Perspective Series Longman, 2001, pb, 508pp, maps, £16.99. ISBN 0 582 32248 0. There have been some important works on the Great War published recently; the first volume of the new history by Hew Strachan is reviewed elsewhere in this issue, and we have a new contribution of great merit from Gary Sheffield. Ian Becket is a great m…
Riding the Retreat: Mons to Marne 1914 Revisited by Richard Holmes
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Jonathan Cape, 1995. Hardback, 280 pages £20. ISBN 0224037625 [This review first appeared in the 1996 edition of Stand To! No.45] Riding the Retreat arrived in my postbox just as I finished Army Battlefield Guide - Belgium and Northern France by the same author. They are in marked contrast. I have always hankered after riding the Somme on …
‘The Life and Last Words of Wilfrid Ewart’ by Stephen Graham
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Wilfrid Ewart, journalist and author, served in the Scots Guards 1915-1919. A prolific writer, he kept a notebook with him at all times. Conveniently (for us) he was injured badly enough to return him home twice during the war during which time he wrote numerous accounts of his experiences ‘under a different name every time’. (Graham, 1924, p.14) F…
A Complete Orchestra of War: A History of the 6th Division on the Western Front 1914-1919 by Peter Hodgkinson
Helion & Company Ltd., 1919. £28.00, xxv + 455pp pb, maps, photos, tables, index, notes and refs. ISBN: 978-1-912866-19-9 During the Great War the United Kingdom raised 58 infantry divisions whose active service was spent wholly or partly on the Western Front. These were reinforced by two divisions of the Indian Army, four from Canada, five…
'Misfire: The Sarajevo Assassination and the Winding Road to World War 1' by Paul Miller-Melamed
Oxford University Press, 2022 £22.99 Hardback 194 pages, 32 images, 4 maps. ISBN 9780195331042. It is sometimes said that ‘there is a reason for everything’ and for a world changing event as impactful and far–reaching as the First World War then the quest for a root cause takes on a particular urgency. Whilst the expansive histography on this…
Of No Earthly Use. The 2nd Line Territorial Force Divisions and the Western Front 1914–18 by K W Mitchinson
(Helion, 2021) £29.95, paperback, 301 pages inc maps, index, notes and refs. plus 18 pages full colour photographs. ISBN 978–1–914059–95–7 Buy a copy now > https://bit.ly/3OpHctp Since 1995, Bill Mitchinson has been producing meticulously researched books on some of the less fashionable units of the British Army in the early 20th century, espe…
Hindenburg, Ludendorff and Hitler: Germany’s Generals & the Rise of the Nazis by Alexander Clifford
(Pen & Sword, 2021) £25.00, 368 pages, notes, sources, b/w photos and index. ISBN 978–1526–78333–2 Buy a copy here > https://bit.ly/3Q6K7bE Marshal Ferdinand Foch generalissimo of the Allied armies in the final year of the Great War, reportedly condemned the terms of the subsequent Versailles settlement as ‘Not a peace treaty, but an armis…
A Great Hatred – The Assassination of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson MP by Ronan McGreevy
Faber & Faber, 2022 £16.99, paperback 442 pages, notes, bibliography b/w photos and index ISBN 978–0–571–37281–2 On the afternoon of 22 June 1922, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, the Irish–born former Chief of the Imperial General Staff and Unionist MP for the Northern Ireland constituency of North Down, unveiled a memorial in Liverp…
Memoirs of the Great War: Complete and Unabridged, Volume I
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Legacy Books Press, (2022) £20.95, 472 pp. maps, b/w photos and index ISBN 978–1–927537– 65–7 It would be difficult to think of a person more suited to command the French army in the first months of the Great War than Joseph Joffre. At a time when all about him were losing their heads, occasionally literally, Joffre kept his. His refusal to acce…