No Man's Land - Writings from a World at War

[Moonraker]

This is a 550-word collection "chosen and introduced by Peter Ayrton" featuring forty-seven writers from all the main participating countries in the Great War. Some feature more than once. The contributions are excerpts from novels, rather than complete short stories.

 

Some of the authors - Sassoon, D H Lawrence, Brittain, Aldington, Remarque, for example - will be familiar to most of us, but others less so. Likewise, some of the theatres of war that feature will be very well-known, but there were some - in South East Europe - where I wasn't always sure which side the characters' country was on. (Of course, some loyalties wavered and changed during the war.) Some passages  appear for the first time in English.

 

There are some very graphic descriptions of war injuries and hospitals. (I had to stop reading one during breakfast.) An excerpt from The German Prisoner by James Hanley (who served with the Canadian Expeditionary Force) describes two British working-class privates obscenely killing an ineffectual German prisoner. And there are several gibes aimed at self-satisfied ladies back home eager for men to fight but oblivious to what physical and mental harm it does to them. There's very little over-the-top heroism.

 

Published by Serpent's Tail in 2014, priced at £25.

[David Ridgus]

Now available in paperback for under a tenner. Great War poetry is so regularly anthologised it makes a refreshing change to see a prose collection

 

David

[Moonraker]

I thought that £25 (perhaps less from websites) for the hardback was a reasonable price, but under £10 for the paperback is remarkable value. A good chance to read about the war in parts of the world that will be unfamiliar to most of us. Now I'm seeking out copies of a couple of the books featured.

 

Moonraker