Even the most widely-read buffs of WWI history will be utterly absorbed by Alexandra Churchill and Nicolai Eberholst’s Ring of Fire as a result of the authors’ painstaking research into fresh material that provides multiple fresh perspectives on this most brutal of conflicts.
Overturning any notion that there’s nothing new to be known about the complex chain of events that led to its outbreak, Churchill and Eberholst here share their own translations of a huge body of new material from all corners of the globe, adopting an approach that’s both scholarly and personal, recognising a multitude of entangled complexities. “We think about the First World War in absolute”, they contextualise. “This country declared war on this day, this battle started and ended then. However, even at the beginning, though the hope until the very last was that it might come to nothing and everyone might be able to stand down and go home, no nation simply went to war on one specific day”.
All the more pertinent in the context of current conflicts, and as a result of its presentation of stirringly relatable first-hand accounts, Ring of Fire is a must-read for aficionados of 20th-century history.
A remarkable, eyewitness-based view of the outbreak of the First World War.
As war broke out in the summer of 1914, not a nation on Earth understood the magnitude of what they were about to face. To win it, whole populations must be mobilised, and neutrality was impossible to practice. Our understanding of this complex conflict has been coloured by a blinkered approach to popular history. It has ignored the fact that Denmark actively participated in laying minefields as soon as war began; that the first British shots were fired in West Africa, by a black man; and the first Australian casualties occurred not at Gallipoli, but in the Pacific. The authors have scoured the globe in search of an enormous quantity of fresh material. This is not history as told by 'great men', this is a people's view of the war, translated from more than a dozen languages to fashion a new inclusive, touching and surprising tale of events that we thought we knew...
Alexandra Churchill is an experienced historian and television and podcast presenter. Her specialties are the Western Front and the Middle East. Nicolai Eberholst is a Danish archivist working in Copenhagen, and his specialities are the Eastern and Italian Fronts, and neutrality in the First World War. Between them they have expertise in nine languages. Together, Alex and Nicolai have been instrumental in the formation of a charity, the Great War Group, which was established to make the subject more inclusive and to break down national barriers in sharing information about the war.
