Meeting the Enemy The Human Face of the Great War Synopsis
A British soldier walked over to the German front line to deliver newspapers; British women married to Germans became 'enemy aliens' in their own country; a high-ranking British POW discussed his own troops' heroism with the Kaiser on the battlefield. Just three amazing stories of contact between the opposing sides in the Great War that eminent historian Richard van Emden has unearthed - incidents that show brutality, great humanity, and above all the bizarre nature of a conflict between two nations with long-standing ties of kinship and friendship. Meeting the Enemy reveals for the first time how contact was maintained on many levels throughout the War, and its stories, sometimes funny, often moving, give us a new perspective on the lives of ordinary men and women caught up in extraordinary events.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9781408843352 |
| Publication date: |
24th April 2014 |
| Author: |
Richard Van Emden |
| Publisher: |
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| Pagination: |
400 pages |
| Primary Genre |
History
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| Recommendations: |
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Richard Van Emden Press Reviews
Remarkable ... Richard van Emden is a World War I specialist who has found a niche, little explored, charting the personal contacts between Britons and Germans and their feelings about each other as the war progressed . Makes you think rather differently about the so-called 'Great War For Civilisation - Daily Mail
Richard Van Emden's tour-de-force of research casts a fascinating new light on the human face of the Great War, allowing us into the strangest of meetings between British and German enemies in the trenches, behind the lines and on the home front ... Extraordinary and often inspirational stories of comradeship between foes ... Among many compelling photographs in this book, there is a grainy and heartbreaking image of a bowed and broken British prisoner tied to a post and left in the snow - Richard Kemp, a former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, The Times
From the horrors of the First World War battlefields are tales of extraordinary camaraderie between British and German soldiers - Daily Express
In Meeting the Enemy, the historian Richard Van Emden shifts his focus from the grim fields of the First World War to the small, all but unknown instances of compassion across enemy lines - New Statesman
About Richard Van Emden
Richard van Emden has interviewed over 270 veterans of the Great War and has written fourteen books on the subject including Boy Soldiers of the Great War and The Last Fighting Tommy. He has also worked on more than a dozen television programmes on the First World War, including Britain's Last Tommies, Britain's Boy Soldiers, the award-winning Roses of No Man's Land, and most recently, War Horse: The Real Story. He lives in West London.
More About Richard Van Emden
