ooking back upon the operations of 1916, and in anticipation of the battles to come, the French prime minister, Aristide Briand, remarked that military offensives had become ‘really like a great industrial undertaking. There were so many miles of front, so many troops, and so many guns required; all had to be calculated to a nicety, and all kinds of preparations made’.1 In the…
By the time the First World War ended in 1918, eight million people had died in what had been perhaps the most apocalyptic episode the world had known. This Very Short Introduction provides a concise and insightful history of the 'Great War', focusing on why it happened, how it was fought, and why it had the consequences it did.It examines the state of Europe in 1914 and the outbreak of war; th…
ost descendants grow up with a ‘lived history’ of the war in the family before they possess a ‘learned history’.7 When I began interviewing British descendants, I was initially taken aback by how little they knew about what their mothers and fathers did during the war. Some turned to fiction to fill in the gaps. Rosemary Game’s father was a tunnell…