Forgotten Voices of the Great War: A New History of WWI in the Words of the Men and Women Who Were There (Forgotten Voices/the Great War)

click here for more details, find new or used items	Max Arthur Our price £5.59 (£7.99) New from £2.88 Used from £0.98 Pages: 322 (Paperback) ISBN: 0091888875 Pub: Ebury Press Pub date: 2003-10-02 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 2687

Editorial Review:

These quibbles aside this is a worthwhile read and should encourage people not only to observe a minute's silence on Remembrance Day, but also to spend a few hours in the Imperial War Museum itself. --Miles Taylor

Reader Reviews:

Compelling Reading (0/0 people found this helpful)

The recent 90th anniversary of the end of the Great War spurred me to seek out some literature on the subject. My mother's father fought at Ypres and Arras, and was invalided home after a mustard gas attack. I was only 10 years old when he died, but I wish I could have talked to him about his experiences. This book gives a potted history of each year of the war followed by accounts of various survivors who were interviewed in the 1970's. I aim to read more of the Forgotten Voices series to further my knowledge. I received Harry Patch's The Last Fighting Tommy in the post today and look forward to reading his highly acclaimed account of his time in the trenches.

A window through time (0/0 people found this helpful)

War is never going to be a pleasant thing to read about, and this is no exception - it consists of testimonies from survivors, which have been cut into chunks and organised so that they refer to events in the order that they happened.

I happened across this in a charity shop at the end of October, and I can think of no better way to understand the real meaning of Armstice day - the absolute horror of the things they went through is something that I'd never be able to do. You get a real flavour of the way people were then too - women back in England handing out feathers (the symbol of a coward) to men in the street, completely unaware that a lot of them were back from the trenches sans uniform, which really affected the soldiers.

I won't go into the individual stories, but you can hear the voices rising from the page as you read - as an ex-actor, this is excellent source material if you're doing something set in this period.

A REALLY REALLY GOOD READ. Not many books have affected me as much as this one.

Voices of the Lost Generation (0/0 people found this helpful)

Forgotten Voices of the Great War is a collection of real life experiences of the First World War, as told by the ordinary people who lived through it.
I must admit that my knowledge of the First World War is a little blank. My only previous experience of this period was through school lessons about trench warfare, or by watching Blackadder goes forth. Therefore I can't make an analysis about the historical accuracy of the book. But what I can say is that I found it a very powerful and poignant work.

The author, Max Arthur, has spent several years listening to thousands of recordings of the men and women who lived during this period. These tapes were kept as archival records in the Imperial War Museum, after they were collected in 1972. These are essentially the voices of a lost generation. The book is divided into chapters that cover every year of the war, from 1914 to 1918. Within these chapters are accounts taken from individual campaigns or battles such as Gallipoli, The Second Battle of Ypres, or the Battle of Mons.

Arthur has sifted through these records to bring out the most varied and unique stories. We are told about gas attacks, boredom or banter between soldiers, but we also get to hear the points of view of people like Elizabeth Owen, who was a schoolgirl at the outbreak of the war. Many of these stories are touching and funny, while others can be truly horrifying. In the section on Gallipoli for instance, we get a story of the games played between British and Turkish soldiers, with some of them throwing tinned bully beef and strings of figs to each other as presents. In the same section it also tells you of the horrible and undignified deaths caused by dysentry and other diseases, which will probably be some of the most terrible accounts of the war you will ever read.

This is an incredibly powerful and important book. If you have ever wondered about life during the First World War, then this book should be the first one you read. Extraordinay.

Not everyone can get to source documents (1/2 people found this helpful)

This book is now part of a series collated from the IWM archives. Not everyone can get to source documents through time or distance. This book has brought some of the sources into the public arena. Naturally such short personal reminicences give a fragmented picture. If you want opinions handed to you, read a 'definitive' history. All history books, however good, are shaped by the author. If a book like this makes you question recived wisdom, it has done its job.

Good, but difficult to put in context. (1/1 people found this helpful)

This is an excellent collection of first-hand accounts of the Great War, from a variety of different contemporary contributors to that war.

The only problem with this book is that it divorces the account from much of the wider picture, so it tends to foster a 'I've read that book, I know all about WW1 now' sort of attitude. Perhaps it's just a reflection of our rushed aged, but I think the many other books, which describe some of the development of the war and intertwine similar first-hand accounts, do more justice to those milions who gave their lives on all sides, than a quick flit through this collection of stand-alone, very short stories.

Admittedly, the book has a very important role to play in appealing to those who may othwerwise not take an interest in WW1, so for that reason alone, it is a worthwhile production.

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