Back to the Front (32 page)

Further Reading

T
HE GREAT WAR
has also been a great war of words. Although the conflict has attracted more than its fair share of bores, there
are nonetheless a lot of interesting reads in its massive bibliography. What follows is a brief list of some of the better
works that should be easily—and currently—available in bookstores and public libraries to nonspecialists and accidental historians.
Scholars, look elsewhere.

There is a holy trinity of superb popularized histories of the First World War. Each deals with a different episode. Barbara
Tuchman's Pulitzer Prize-winning
The Guns of August
(Ballantine, 1994), a page-turning account of the war's outbreak, is deservedly a classic. So too are Alistair Home's
The Price of Glory: Verdun, 1916
(Penguin, 1979) and Leon Wolff's indignant
In Flanders Fields: The 1917 Campaign
(Greenwood, 1984), an account of the Passchendaele campaign. There are other books that almost match this standard of good
popular history, but none surpasses it.

For oral history, the work of Lyn Macdonald stands alone as the heavyweight of Great War testimonials. Some of her histories
include books on Third Ypres
{They Called It Passchendaele:
Macmillan, 1988), Loos
{1915: The Death of Innocence:
Henry Holt, 1993), the British retreat from Mons to the Marne
{1914: The First Year of Fighting:
Simon & Schuster, 1988), and the work of front-line nurses (
The Roses of No Man's
Land:
Macmillan, 1989). To my mind,
ipi$
is the most interesting. Although sometimes repetitive, Macdonald's books are invaluable resources for recapturing the "voice"
of war's participants. Similarly, Martin Middlebrook's
The First Day on the Somme, 1 July 1916
(Allen Lane, 1971) patches together the recollections of those who survived the deadly foray into no-man's-land that ended
in disaster.

For the big picture of the war, the most recent hefty tome of note is Martin Gilbert's
The First World War: A Complete History
(Henry Holt, 1996). It is readable and rich in anecdote. This, as a complement to Marc Ferro's translated classic
The Great War 1914-191%
(Dorset, 1990) or A.J.P. Taylor's caustic
The First World War: An Illustrated History
(Berkley, 1972), provides an excellent overall view of the war. The late Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, in his as yet untranslated
La Grande Guerre des
Francais, L'Incomprehensible
(Perrin, 1994), provides a Gallic counterpoint to the Anglo reference book of the war: Basil Liddell-Hart's
History
of the First World War
(Pan, 1970). These last two should be attempted if you've got lots of time on your hands. To those with limited hours to devote
to reading, I recommend picking up Taylor's pocket-sized history, if only for the pleasure of smiling at his sardonic photo
captions.

Often, the big picture is less interesting than the specialized study. Two brilliant books give searingly scary descriptions
of the Western Front. John Ellis's
Eye-Deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in World War I
(Pantheon, 1977) and Denis Winter's
Deaths Men: Soldiers of the Great
War
(Penguin, 1985) are well-documented, detail-crammed reconstructions of troglodyte trench life. Winter, an impassioned historian
with a polemical pen, has also published
Haig's Command: A Reassessment
(Penguin, 1992), a masterful new indictment of high-level bungling that should, but probably won't, silence the stubborn apologists
of Douglas Haig in military history circles. Winter's prose on the subject of the field marshal makes mine look like that
of a diplomat.

In a class of its own among military histories is John Keegan's
The Face
of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme
(Penguin, 1983).
Instead of dealing with generals and grand plans and the like, Keegan set out to determine how the ordinary soldier experienced
the awful ordeal of the battlefield. The result is a felicitous and fascinating masterpiece of scholarship and lively writing.

For those interested less in battle than in beauty, World War
Vs
outpouring of excellent poetry and prose continues to be passed down to modern readers. Anthologies of work from the period
abound—I recommend anything compiled by Jon Silkin or Jon Silver, two Brit lit mavens with a cosmopolitan sweep that goes
beyond the well-trodden paths of Owen, Sassoon, and other great English war poets. A truly exceptional anthology—and an exception
to my stated intention to keep this bibliography limited to readily available books—is Tim Cross's
The Lost
Voices of World War I: An International Anthology of Writers, Poets and
Playwrights
(University of Iowa, 1988). Cross includes only writers who died in World War I and yet produces a wide-ranging compendium
of wasted genius that expressed itself in everything from Serbo-Croat to Breton. The introductory essays to each artist are
uniformly excellent, and the overall commentaries about the cultural importance of the conflict are first-rate.

Cultural concerns bring us to yet another trinity of nonfiction classics dealing with the war. Paul Fussell's
The Great War and Modern Memory
(Oxford, 1975), on the lingering influence of British war poetry and its cultivation of irony, is justly famous for its literate
treatment of the conflict. Fussell's writing is tendentious, his conclusions bold. Less well known is Samuel Hynes's
A War Imagined: The First World War and
English Culture
(Atheneum, 1991), a finely observed study of changing perceptions of the war among British intellectual and artistic elites.
More continental in outlook is Modris Eksteins's
Rites of Spring: The Great War
and the Birth of the Modern Age
(Houghton Mifflin, 1989), an engaging examination of how World War I was the nightmarish midwife at the birth of a sensibility
that eventually matured as Nazism. All three studies are difficult to put down.

The literary pantheon of Great War novelists—Henri Barbusse, Ernst J linger, Ford Madox Ford, Erich Maria Remarque, Blaise
Cendrars, et al.—should not obscure the powerful writing of the conflict's memoirists. In my opinion, Robert Graves's
Good-bye to All That
(Anchor, 1957) remains the most entertaining of the memoirs readily available, although by far the most moving is Vera Brittain's
Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical
Study of the Years 1900—192$
(Penguin, 1989). A woman'svoice crops up once again in current fiction about the conflict: Pat Barker's trilogy of Great War
novels,
Regeneration
(NAL-Dutton, 1993),
The Eye in the Door
(NAL-Dutton, 1995), and
The Ghost Road
(Viking, 1995) — the last won the 1995 Booker Prize—stands as a compelling monument to the distant war's staying power in
the imagination. In the same imaginative vein, David Macfarlane's memoir of his Newfoundland family's experience of the war,
The Danger Tree
(Walker & Company, 2001), remains a model of micro-history and writerly evocation of past drama.

Acknowledgments

T
HERE ARE MANY
people to whom I owe a debt of gratitude. Friends and colleagues have given me encouragement, pointed out avenues
of research, and, perhaps most importantly, shown forbearance in hearing me go on and on about the Western Front for close
to a decade now. Strangers, too, have been helpful—hundreds of people in Belgium and France treated me with courtesy during
my journey, if only to give me the time of day, a glass of beer, or directions to the next stop in no-man's-land. A backside
full of buckshot was never once even a remote possibility.

At the outset four people—Audrey Thomas, Ernst Herb, Mimi Tompkins, Scott Blair—helped me figuratively lace up my boots and
get going. Audrey, in fact, picked out the pair of boots that were made for walking. Scott, a non-accidental historian, badgered
me back to the Front and, as deadlines drew nearer, gave freely of his time to act as consultant, traveling companion, reader,
fact-checker, and debating partner. He and Mitchell Feinberg sacrificed several glorious spring weekends to hole themselves
up in Mitch's Paris office and make accurate maps of the French and Belgian boondocks. Heroic.

Many others lent support, in different ways. My parents, Daniel and Annie, and two brothers, Donal and Kevin, offered encouragement
from the start, even when it looked as if I'd never get started. The now widely dispersed gang at
Paris Passion
magazine helped, too. My thanks to Edward Hernstadt for his cafe counter eloquence, to Heidi Ellison for her bemused support,
and to the late Alexandra Tuttle for her characteristically barbed praise of the project. In New York, fellow journalist John
Howell constantly dug up weird warfare books for me out of old catalogues. Even if many of them dealt with Stonewall Jackson
and Robert E. Lee, they were unfailingly stimulating. As were the company and conversation of many others who contributed
to my thinking about the Front: Eli Gottlieb, Ben Brantley, Timothy Morrow, Mark Schapiro, Sonia Kronlund, Randall Koral,
Olga Vincent, Noelle de Chambrun, Alexander Whitelaw, Elizabeth and Kevin Conlon, Zia Jaffrey, Bruce Alderman, Lenny Borger,
Graham Fuller, Kathleen O'Shea, Patrick Cocklin, Alan Tucker, Kate Turner, Stokes Howell, Helen Mercer, Peter Lahey, Carole
Tonkinson, Susan Schorr. Thanks are also due to George Gait and Ernest Hillen, who published "All Quiet," the travel article
that is the
seed
of this book, in
Saturday Night
magazine in 1989. And to Matt Cohen, whose timely advice and support eased my way into the waters of book-length composition.

Publishers Scott Mclntyre, Patricia Aldana, and George Gibson have been warmly supportive of a first-time author. Editor Barbara
Pulling has been gentle—and extremely effective in curbing my worst
excesses.
Despite her impressive vigilance, the blame for any remaining errors or lapses should be laid squarely on my doorstep.

Which brings me home, to Jill Pearlman, who I sometimes feel must be itching to reread the fine print of our wedding contract.
I have shamelessly called on—the unkind might say exploited—her talents as writer, editor, and proofreader in preparing this
book, and without her support and understanding would not have finished it in this century. When we met in Manhattan in 1990,
it is unlikely that Jill could have foreseen a future of picnics on Belgian battlefields or of tiresome breakfast conversations
that begin thus: "Do you realize what happened seventy-seven years ago today?" Finally, a word of gratitude to my baby daughter,
Rachel, for having had the exquisite good taste to come into the world the day
after
November II.