Meeting the Enemy, by Richard Van Emden; 1914, by Allan Mallinson – review

The Great War was an obscene and futile conflict laying waste a generation and toppling emperors. Yet here are two books that situate the horrors of trench warfare within a much larger perspective. One argues that the war had a forgotten ‘human face’. The other that it might all have had a very different outcome.

Henry James described  the 1914 plunge of civilisation into blood and darkness as ‘too tragic for any words’ — and about tragedy there is always some air of inevitability, of sailing Titanic-like towards a foredoomed catastrophe. This air of unstoppable fatality has solidified over the intervening century.

During the famous 1914 Christmas truce the Tommies were struck by how many of the German soldiers that they met in no-man’s-land spoke excellent English: some could even have passed for Britons. This was because Germans constituted the third largest immigrant community in the pre-war UK, after the Irish and Russian Jews.