Peter J. Conradi

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

Christmas Day truce of 1914. Credit: Frederic Villiers/ The Illustrated London News/The Bridgeman Art Library 
issue 05 October 2013
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  • Meeting the Enemy: The Human Face of the Great War

    Richard van Emden

    Bloomsbury, pp. 384

  • 1914: Fight the Good Fight

    Allan Mallinson

    Bantam, pp. 503

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.

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