Snorting coke — the perfect pick-me-up for tired Tommies
A BROKEN WORLD by Sebastian Faulks and Dr Hope Wolf (Hutchinson £20 % £14.59)
‘WE WENT collectively mad,’ writes Faulks in his introduction to this unusually well-chosen collection of letters, diaries and memories of the Great War.
There’s no shortage of horrors here — a young lieutenant describes digging through bodies that have the consistency of Camembert. A Punjabi Mohammedan writes an anguished letter home to his family: ‘For God’s sake, don’t come, don’t come, don’t come to this war in Europe.’
Perhaps most poignant of all, though, is the grief-stricken mother who sends flower seeds to the Front after her son has been killed in the hope that others might see them grow.
THE FIRST WORLD WAR ON THE HOME FRONT by Terry Charman (Andrew Deutsch £19.99 % £14.59)
WHILE war raged on the Western Front, life at home was going through colossal upheavals. Charman, senior historian at the Imperial War Museum, gives a vivid sense of how people adapted to all these changes. In big cities, self-service restaurants came into being because there weren’t enough women to be waitresses — most were working in munitions factories.
And, in an attempt to stop dealers from selling cocaine to exhausted soldiers desperate for a pick-me-up, possession of the drug became a criminal offence for the first time.
ZEPPELIN NIGHTS: LONDON IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR by Jerry White (The Bodley Head £25 % £17.50)
THE horrors of the London Blitz have been comprehensively recorded.
Less well-known is the prolonged aerial bombardment that went on during World War I. On May 31, 1915, Zeppelins appeared in the skies above London for the first time, dropping bombs and grenades on the pedestrians below.
Jerry White, professor of history at Birkbeck College, gives a compelling account of what it was like to live in a city ruled by fear — and which soon resembled a giant lunatic asylum.
Overcome with patriotic fervour, one vicar in Brixton, South London, insisted that all his hymn books should be re-covered in khaki and turned his crypt into a rifle range.
TOMMY’S WAR: THE WESTERN FRONT IN SOLDIERS’ WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHS by Richard van Emden
(Bloomsbury £25 % £17.50)
MOST histories of the war concentrate on those who were in command, but van Emden has chosen to focus on the soldiers on the ground.
There are extracts from journals and letters: ‘Remember little Belgium! It’s impossible to forget it when you’ve got half
of it clinging to your boots and the other half splashed all over your uniform,’ one lieutenant notes, dryly.
There are also some astonishing photos t aken on Vest Pocket Kodaks, t he smartphones of their day.
One blurred snapshot shows the famous Christmas truce of 1914.
Two lines of soldiers, one German, one British, stand several feet apart, tentatively holding out t heir hands t owards one another.
TO FIGHT ALONGSIDE FRIENDS: THE FIRST WORLD WAR DIARIES OF CHARLIE MAY Edited by Gerry Harrison (Collins £16.99 £12.90)
SOLDIERS were forbidden from keeping diaries during World War I, but thankfully Charlie May, a captain in the 22nd Manchester ‘Pals’ Battalion, was one of the many who disobeyed orders. When he was killed, aged 27, on the first day of the Somme, May left seven pocketbooks behind him — the final volume was found on his body. A journalist before the war, he proved to be a natural diarist, as wry as he was sharp-eyed.
In 1916, May witnessed two officers enjoying a very grand lunch in a trench when a bomb exploded nearby.
‘On the table was a great heap of mud. One solitary silver spoon stuck out of it. Of the rest of the splendour nothing remained.’
THE FIRST WORLD WAR REMEMBERED by Gary Sheffield (Imperial War Museum £50 £31.50)
THE idea of a sumptuously produced, coffeetable history of World War I might strike some as a bit odd, but there’s no doubt this is a very handsome piece of kit.
Along with crisply informative essays and an accompanying DVD, you get replica letters from the Front, a copy of Kitchener’s orders to the British Expeditionary Force and even a booklet of handy French phrases that was handed out to every soldier. Along with the plaintive ‘ J’ai les pieds bien mouilles’ (‘I have very wet feet’), there’s
‘ Les Bosches sont la’ — translated not entirely accurately as ‘The Germans (brutes) are there’.
ANTIQUES ROADSHOW: WORLD WAR ONE IN 100 FAMILY TREASURES by Paul Atterbury (BBC Books £25 £17.50)
WHEN Antiques Roadshow asked viewers to bring them memorabilia from the war, they were deluged with contributions.
There’s a wallet that saved a soldier’s life — the photos inside were perforated by a bullet — an Iron Cross given by a German to the Briton who spared his life, and even a tree rat, now stuffed, that was rescued by a soldier after it had been knocked unconscious by a shell-blast. It subsequently became his mascot.