商品簡介
Ninety years after the Armistice of 1918, the First World War continues to haunt the British imagination. Some five million British servicemen went to war between 1914 and 1918, and few families, high or low, were untouched by its effects. For King and Country tells their stories in their own words - written in letters, diaries, memoirs, songs and poems. There are letters of farewell to mothers and fathers from young men who knew all too well that they might soon die - as so often they did. The letters speak about God, duty, sacrifice and patriotism in language that unfamiliar today. 'I could not wish for a finer death ... I died doing my duty to my God, my Country, and my King,' wrote one young officer before the Battle of the Somme in 1916.
This collection also charts the move from the idealism of 1914 and Rupert Brooke's 'If I Should Die' to disillusion as the war ground on and the death toll mounted, which was given angry, despairing voice by Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen; they are joined by unknown soldiers who speak with searing vividness of the misery of the trenches. Just as heart-rending are the writings of those who could only look on as a generation of men sacrificed themselves on the battlefields of Western Europe.
作者簡介
Brian MacArthur was executive editor on The Times, and founder editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement and Today, editor the Western Morning News, and now works for the Daily Telegraph.
