Intimate Voices from the First World War
In June 1918, while holding back a German advance on the French town of Marne, American officer John Clark wrote a letter to his sweetheart in which he compared his wartime experience to "great cinema, constantly changing, constantly moving." But cinema couldn't do justice to all the drama contained in the pages of this extraordinary collection of diary entries and letters written by combatants in World War I. An outgrowth of the acclaimed British television documentary, The First World War, this book features the writings of individuals from 13 different nations. The first entry, a letter from incarcerated 16-year-old Vaso Cubrilovic, one of the collaborators in the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Serbia, voices a youthful and naïve militancy that exposes the arbitrary nature of the act that set off the beginning of the war. By putting his words first, the authors provide an interesting context for the subsequent fear, despair and confusion expressed by the young warriors who were sent to the trenches. The distinct voices include those of an Englishman who is ambivalent about the cause yet glad to be making use of himself, an unflinchingly patriotic Frenchman and a German who seems to have had wartime patriotism thrust upon him. The war's purpose seems to dissolve as each individual's story unfolds, and as the accounts of men "crying with exhaustion and rage" or dreaming of their families back home begin to mount up. In this carefully researched and assembled book, the question of war and its meaning is distilled into the vision of a single human being who records history with his eyes, ears and blood. Photos throughout, six maps.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.