THE BEAUTY AND THE SORROW THE BEAUTY AND THE SORROW An intimate history of the First World War PETER ENGLUND Translated by Peter Graves First published in Great Britain in 2011 by PROFILE BOOKS LTD 3A Exmouth House Pine Street London EC1R 0JH www.profilebooks.com Copyright © Peter Englund, 2011 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Typeset in Minion by MacGuru Ltd [email protected] Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays, Bungay, Suffolk The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978 1 84668 342 8 eISBN 978 1 84765 430 4 The paper this book is printed on is certified by the © 1996 Forest Stewardship Council A.C. (FSC). It is ancient-forest friendly. The printer holds FSC chain of custody SGS-COC-2061 SGSCOC2061 CONTENTS To the Reader / ix Dramatis Personae / xii 1914 / 1 1915 / 73 1916 / 201 1917 / 317 1918 / 421 The End / 497 Envoi / 507 Sources and Literature / 508 List of Illustrations / 514 Index / 517 Dedicated to the memory of Carl Englund Private in the Australian Army, Service Number 3304, 3rd Australian Division, 11th Brigade, 43rd Infantry Battalion Fought at the Battles of Messines and Passchendaele, 1917 Died in the fighting outside Amiens, 13 September 1918 His place of burial is unknown TO THE READER The famous American war correspondent Stanley Washburn was invited in 1915 to contribute to The Times History of the War. He refused, even though he had been asked by none other than the mighty Lord Northcliffe: ‘I told him quite frankly that I did not want to write anything during the war which was published under the name of “history”, saying that, in my opinion, no one who lived in a campaign could possibly be sufficiently well informed, nor have the proper perspective, to write anything of that nature.’ I have had reason to think of Washburn’s words on a number of occa- sions. I am an academic historian by profession but I have also tried my hand as a war correspondent in the Balkans, in Afghanistan and, most recently, in Iraq. As a historian, there have been many times when I have longed to be present where and when events happen, but once I had arrived in, say, Kabul, I discovered the same thing as many other people in the same situations: to be right in the middle of events is no guarantee of being able to understand them. You are stuck in a confusing, chaotic and noisy reality and the chances are that the editorial office on the other side of the planet often has a better idea of what is going on than you do – just as a historian, paradoxically enough, often has a better understanding of an event than those who were actually involved in it. You become aware that distance is frequently the ingredient that makes understanding possible. But distance exacts a price: perhaps inevitably, much of the direct experience is lost. This is a book about the First World War. It is not, however, a book about what it was – that is, about its causes, course, conclusion and consequences – but a book about what it was like. In this volume the reader will meet not so much factors as people, not so much events and processes as feelings, impres- sions, experiences and moods. It is not my intention to compete with the many excellent histories of the Great War that have appeared over the years. I hope, rather, to complement ix
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