Product Description

In 1960, the Imperial War Museum began a momentous and important task. A team of academics, archivists and volunteers set about tracing WWI veterans and interviewing them at length in order to record the experiences of ordinary individuals in war. This book presents the story of WWI in the words of those who experienced it.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18638 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-02
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.14" h x 7.87" w x 4.96" l, .69 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

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• Mint Condition
• Dispatch same day for order received before 12 noon
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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

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