George Simmers, who blogs as Great War Fiction, has found a list compiled in 1918. You can download the entire list at
http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89100015791;view=2up;seq=1
Here’s George on the list. Don’t miss the comments, and add one of your own.
http://greatwarfiction.wordpress.com/2013/05/07/130-books-about-the-war/
Don’t everyone fight over the books!
Here are people enjoying themselves at the beach in Ostend, Belgium, in 1913.
And here they are at summer’s end in 1914:
As I write this, Anzac Day is over in Australia and New Zealand, but here in the U.S. the commemoration continues — where World War I is remembered at all.
The amnesia of the American people is a subject for another day.
Here are links from Anzac Day remembrance all over the world.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/war/news/article.cfm?c_id=359&objectid=10879622
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N82wNJFVeK8
And — hankies at the ready:
Vimy Ridge Day was celebrated in Canada yesterday, a day to remember the men who fought April 9- 13, 1917, to take the ridge from the Germans and whose success — at a cost of more than 10,000 casualties, including 3,598 dead — marked a turning point for the Canada and its army.
From Veteran Affairs Canada:
Brigadier-General Alexander Ross had commanded the 28th (North-West) Battalion at Vimy. Later, as president of the Canadian Legion, he proposed the first Veterans’ post-war, pilgrimage to the new Vimy Memorial in 1936. He said of the battle:
“It was Canada from the Atlantic to the Pacific on parade. I thought then . . . that in those few minutes I witnessed the birth of a nation.”
Here’s a link to a wonderful story from CBC Hamilton, with photos, videos and audio recordings:
http://www.cbc.ca/hamilton/news/story/2013/04/08/hamilton-vimy-ridge.html
Carving the names of the missing on the Canadian National Vimy Memorial. There are 11,000 names.
Mother Canada mourning her dead; a detail of the memorial, one of the most impressive sites on the Western Front.
Here’s a bit of news from WW1HA President George Thompson:
Here’s the telegram that brave little Cher Ami, the passenger pigeon, carried for the Lost Battalion. Maj. Charles Whittlesey sent the message to his commanding officer.
Cher Ami was shot during his flight — his leg later had to be amputated.
And here’s the story of the Lost Battalion and its pigeon soldier:
Patricia McCarthy, winner of the National Poetry Competition, which carries a 5,000-pound prize, wrote her entry about World War I, based on her mother’s memories of the era. The poem, “Clothes that escaped the Great War,” can be found on this link at the Guardian website:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/mar/27/first-world-war-national-poetry-competition-2013
Here’s an excerpt:
“These were the most scary, my mother recalled: clothes
piled high on the wobbly cart, their wearers gone. …”
The National Women’s History Museum has an online exhibit on women’s roles during World War I. The exhibit includes a small gallery of photos of women building machine guns and so forth.
Here’s the link:
http://www.nwhm.org/online-exhibits/progressiveera/womenworkingworldwarI.html
Here’s a collection of links:
http://www.firstworldwar.com/features/womenww1_seven.htm
And here they are, chopping down trees, among other things.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XonhwLrAUVs
Would you have the courage to hammer on an artillery shell that way?
In a description of the French village of Albert:
Pieces of paper rustled about like footsteps, dirt covered the ruins, fragments of rusty shells lay as unsightly and dirty as that which they had destroyed. Cleaned up and polished, and priced at half a crown apiece, these fragments may look romantic some day in a London shop, but to-day in Albert they look unclean and untidy, like a cheap knife sticking up from a murdered woman’s ribs, whose dress is long out of fashion.
You can read more here:
One of the things I enjoy most about George Simmers’ insightful blog Great War Fiction is the way it leads me to other subjects — for instance, his latest post, about a play being produced in Manchester, England, brought up the story of “The Monocled Mutineer.” A book, then a BBC series, it told a highly dramatized story of petty criminal/imposter Percy Toplis and his role in the Etaples Mutiny.
I hadn’t known there was an Etaples Mutiny, though it was mentioned in Vera Brittain’s “Testament of Youth.” (It was one of many incidents she described so obliquely, it’s difficult to know what she’s actually talking about.)
Anyway, Etaples was a training camp on the French coast notorious for its terrible conditions. Wilfred Owen wrote that the faces of the men there had “a blindfold look and without expression, like a dead rabbit’s.”
Here’s George on “The Monocled Mutineer”: http://greatwarfiction.wordpress.com/2011/11/04/2670/
