Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2218 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 322 pages

Amazon.co.uk
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

Review
'This extraordinary book is crammed with details, conjuring up the atmosphere of war as vividly as the frequent descriptions of appalling violence', Daily Telegraph .'The stories of these now long-dead vets simply jump off the page', FHM .'The words of the soldiers are as fresh as if they were written yesterday...extraordinary', Deborah Moggach, Mail on Sunday .'Everyone who loves oral history will enjoy the often harrowing accounts contained in this book', History Today .'A compelling account of a world not to be forgotten', Despatches

The so-called Great War was an inglorious affair, and will always make painful reading because of the terrible cost of young lives, millions of them, and the utter senselessness of starting it in the first place. The causes of this criminal catastrophe have never been satisfactorily explained, and in this book we have a selection of transcribed recordings and wireless broadcasts made by men who went through it all, up at the front. The immediacy of this anthology makes harrowing reading. To select and arrange this collection of observation and comment left by the war's survivors, the editor has opted for a chronological approach - the only possible pattern, if you think about it, since that was the way it happened. It is a compelling and disturbing book, with one horror piled upon another and leavened by a grim humour that only serves to expose the hopelessness of the whole tragic affair. By far the best commentator in the book is Rifleman Henry Williamson, who must be the same man who went on to write one of the great novels (and certainly the longest, at 16 volumes!) of the First World War, A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. The military historian Max Arthur has made his selection with care, and has produced an anthology of on-the-spot reports which is at once revealing and unsettling. Most of the soldiers featured here were simple men who had acts of heroism thrust upon them and behaved with magnificent valour, often at the cost of their lives. (Kirkus UK)

Andrew Motion, The Times
"These stories are so harrowing, and their witness so precise and devastating"