Fields of War: Fifty Key Battlefields in France and Belgium
Rattling around northern France on various trips, as much as I would enjoy the great culture and astonishing natural beauty I was drawn, too, to the many battlefields there, to me haunted places, sites of such horrid valor and mad history. Normandy. The Somme. Verdun. Caen. Amiens. It is a truly humbling experience.<P> I wish I'd had Robert Mueller s book with me so that I could have done it better. Mueller sFields of War: Fifty Key Battlefields in France and Belgiumis an important, essential companion to anyone s attempt to understand and honor the vast array of human suffering, courage and sacrifice to be found in the region s hundreds of memorials, monuments and cemeteries. It is a small sample of Europe s endless warring, a slight swath arcing across just one part of one nation and a bit of another yet marked with so much war. For so many, many centuries the region, like all of Europe, has seen battle after battle, death after death, in an unending symphony of slaughter. Fields of War helps enormously to understand what happened and what a visitor can encounter to appreciate it.<P> This excellent book charts battlefields from the Hundred Years War through the Second World War and so much in between. With maps, photographs, charts and concise explanations it guides a visitor through the blood-drenched landscape where heroism was demanded in impossible causes, sacrifice compelled for no knowable reason, where the land s ground-down communities bled for the lords and masters insanities. Where nature reclaims the serenity of the fields of northern France and Belgium, this guide delivers us the schemes of war, how a hillock there or a trench here changed history for a brief moment. It walks us through scenes where so many of our near ancestors bled and helps us understand what it took to get from one place to another at such huge cost. It is a practical book delivering history in cool, helpful abundance.<P> In Mueller's hands, we can almost understand what soldiers by the tens of millions saw as they looked out from their trenches, across their crossbows or through their tank slits. He directs us to the most effective museums, monuments, vantage points. He sends us through quiet lanes when the tourism maps might channel us along more beaten paths. His maps bring clarity to rolling landscapes once, somehow, full of the rage and pain of battle.<P> He does it calmly and with the purpose to be helpful to the visitor trying to make sense of senseless things. This is a true gift. I have stood, dumb, at the cliffs of Normandy and never quite mastered who landed where. I have walked where trenches once were and never quite got the handle on what took place when armies poured forward at that very spot to their doom. I have reflected in the quiet of cemeteries marking so many battles and it was so important to me that I did so, but am sure I missed some other one, equally important, equally dizzy-making. When I return, if I am fortunate enough to do so, this book will show me ways I might not find on my own.<P> Fifty battlegrounds within 240 miles of Paris, reflecting more than 500 years of war and tens of millions of lives lost. It is nearly too much to contain in even this substantial effort. As he must to retain his own sanity, the author professionally avoids the emotion or judgment that I feel freer to render upon so many kings, kaisers, emperors, presidents and ministers, so many bad generals and sinister politicians. Instead, he lets events tell their own story.<P> It is a hard story indeed. --Denis Horgan, Connecticut WatchdogIt is a brave author who attempts to pack more than 600 years of military history into one volume, but Mueller succeeds in this with some skill, and the book is nicely organized in chapters covering periods from the Hundred Years War and WW2. Common sites are described as well as those less familiar, and the historical descriptions are good, and well constructed. The maps are good, and the illustrations well chosen and clear. An excellent, highly recommended companion to the battlefields of France and Belgium, and a good single volume to keep in the car. --Paul Reed, First World War historian and authorFields of War gives you not only a wealth of historical information about this part of Western Europe: the political times & countries doing battle, armies & battle movements, key opponents & weaponry, aftermaths & consequences, it also has text boxes explaining how to take the battlefield tours ... ... Some may want to whet their appetite for the next 500 years of warfare by following the Battle of Crecy, others will zero in on a specific modern battle. Either way, Fields of War is clearly laid out, readable & filled with useful details. --D. H. Brown, Military Writers Society of America