BOOK REVIEWS
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Great Battles of the Great
War |
This book, which is due to be published on November 11th., 1999, and which accompanies a new 6-part ITV series, is a combination of the skills of two men. The first is Michael Stedman, whose books on the Great War are already well-known, and the other is photographer Ed Skelding.
Although the book's title refers to "battles" it tells the story of three whole campaigns - Gallipoli, the Somme and the Third Battle of Ypres. I think that these three campaigns are well-chosen, because these are three names which became household words during the war, and which still have a certain resonance in the UK even today. The TV programmes, and the book, will teach what happened in these places to a new generation which has heard of their names, but might not know the full details of their history.
Michael Stedman's text is well-written, and it strikes a good balance between the different kinds of viewpoints which the writer has to take when describing campaigns like these. There is the wide view, which concerns itself with the background to the campaign, its purpose and the more distant events which affected its gestation and planning. Then there is the nearer view, covering what happened day-by-day, hour-by-hour and place-by-place. Finally there is the sharply focussed view of the combatants themselves, who might only have been able to see for themselves a small part of the battle, but who did so with a horrifying clarity. Michael Stedman considers all these viewpoints when telling the stories of these campaigns and switches from one to another effectively to give a very clear interpretation of events.
Ed Skelding's evocative colour and black-and-white photographs are part and parcel of the book, appearing on almost every page. There are also photographs taken during the war, but there is no attempt to marry the old and new photographs into a collection of "then and now" views of the same spot. Instead, Ed Skelding's pictures give a striking impression of what is is like to walk the battlefield areas now, just as the wartime pictures show us what it was like then. There is in truth a void in our perception of "then" and "now. The viewer often has to make a great leap of imagination to link the two, but so does any battlefield visitor in all but a few places.
Some photographs do approach the well-tried "then and now" format but in a new and interesting way which only happens now and again in the book, via a mixing technique which we can probably expect to see in the ITV series. This is where the wartime pictures and Ed Skelding's pictures are merged. This is done very effectively, and helps to make the leap of imagination I referred to earlier. Thus, the book's cover shows a party of British and German soldiers, cowering and slipping across the broken ground as they carry a wounded man towards the peaceful crest of the modern Hill 60, near Ypres, which is quiet now, but which still has the power to threaten. I also liked the picture of the Australian troops in their trench, with the modern day Mouquet Farm in the distance.
The captions to the photographs are almost a book in themselves. Indeed, I would suggest that readers work through the book as I did, reading only the text of each chapter before returning to the beginning and reading the captions to the pictures. It's rather like getting a general idea of what happened in a battlefield, before actually visiting it.
This is a beautifully put-together book with excellent content and well worth the cover-price of £16.95.
GREAT BATTLES OF THE GREAT WAR
is published by Leo Cooper, Pen & Sword Books, Ltd.
ISBN 0-85052-702-3
Hardback, 160 pages - photographs, maps
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