The Imperial War Museum Book of the First World War

by Malcolm Brown

A Great Conflict Recalled in Previously Unpublished Letters, Diaries, Documents and Memoirs

Genres: History

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Malcolm Brown is a best-selling popular military historian. Originally a television producer specialising in military documentaries, he has been a freelance historian at the Imperial War Museum since 1989. Brown has researched and written extensively on the First and Second World Wars. He is a regular contributor to BBC History Magazine, and lives in Reading.

Reviews

[William Shep · Rating 5 out of 5]

As the author states in his preface, the Imperial War Museum is the author of this thoughtful collection of moving textual and visual records of the First World War. The Museum was established in the wake of this devastating conflict and has an almost endless reserve of pictures, posters, postcards, photographs, films, pamphlets, books, diaries, letters, and documents detailing the massive British effort to fight and win 'the war to end all wars.' While the war was highly political and technological, the book's focus is on the personal and the particular. The subject matter is not so much war as people caught up in war. The author attempts to present a fresh look at the Great War that is as objective as possible yet spiritually evocative and in context to current events. Strong editing is used to weave together personal profiles and special features with linking narrative prose that is clearly written. In these pages great political and military figures such as David Lloyd George and Douglas Haig appear remote and somewhat dehumanized rather than the masses of individual participants as is usually the case. For example, the reader is shocked at the situation of W.H. Wykeham-Musgrave, Royal Navy, who was torpedoed three times on the same day as the armored cruisers HMS Aboukir, Hogue, and Cressy were sunk by a single German U-boat on 22 September 1914. There is also ample evidence of the largely unheralded efforts of women in the munitions factories and in military support services such as nursing and transportation. Contemporary humor is on display regarding the contrasting abysmal conditions in the trenches and the more comfortable home front. In one military paper a woman asks a soldier "What struck you most about the Ypres battle?" and he replies "Shrapnel, lady." (p. 265). Finally, the book concludes with one soldier's disillusioned commentary that "the old order had changed.....riches reigned in their stead....money that had been reaped from the bodies of the dead. This was victory. The war to end war" (p. 282). Such loss of idealism became the zeitgeist for an entire 'lost generation.'