Surprisingly, a British magazine published a terribly dry and unsympathetic review of My Memoirs by Kaiser Welhelm II (1859 – 1941).
Click here to read what the Kaiser thought of Adolf Hitler.
Surprisingly, a British magazine published a terribly dry and unsympathetic review of My Memoirs by Kaiser Welhelm II (1859 – 1941).
Click here to read what the Kaiser thought of Adolf Hitler.
The book reviewer for The New Republic, by Sidney B. Fay, summed-up his reading of the dethroned Crown Prince’s (1882 – 1951) post-war memoir in this way:
This is a remarkable book in at least three respects: it’s literary cleverness, it’s revelation of a new Crown Prince chastened by adversity, and it’s vivid pictures of men and events.
Added to the growing pile of reviews that attempted to sort out all the various explanations as to why the war went so badly for practically all the nations involved was this 1920 article that presented a clear description of the 1914 drive on Paris as well as the disaster that was the Gallipoli campaign.
The books reviewed were penned by two of the war’s principal players: The March on Paris by General Alexander Von Kluck (1846-1934) and Gallipoli Diary by General Sir Ian Hamilton (1853-1957).
The story of the German onrush and it’s memorable check can now be pieced together with accuracy. It tallies with the account of General Sir Frederick Maurice. We now know that the Germans failed through want of General Staff control, through inadequate intelligence, above all, through striking at two fronts at the same time.
In this article, the famous chaplain of the 165th Infantry (formerly the NY Fighting 69th) Father Francis Duffy (1874 – 1932) describes how the regiment was ripped to shreds in two offensives – hinting all the while that somebody blundered:
Since 1915 no commanders in the older armies would dream of opposing too strongly wired and entrenched positions [with] the naked breast of their infantry. They take care that the wire, or part of it at least, is knocked down by artillery or laid flat by tanks before they ask unprotected riflemen to [breach the line]. When the wire is deep and still intact and strongly defended, the infantry can do little but hang their bodies upon it.
More about Father Duffy can be read here…
War poet Robert Graves was assigned the task of reviewing the W.W. I memoir A Brass Hat in No Man’s Land
by the English General F.P. Crozier and came away liking it very much: It is the only account of fighting on the Western Front that I have been able to read with sustained interest and respect. Crozier’s memoir did not spare the reader any details involving the nastier side of the war; he reported on trench suicides, self-inflicted wounds and mutinies:
My experience of war, which is a prolonged one, is that anything may happen in it from the highest kinds of chivalry and sacrifice to the very lowest forms of barbaric debasement.
Click here to read the 1918 interview with General Hindenburg in which he declared that the Germans lost the war as a result of the American Army.
Heartlessly torn from the brittle pages of a 1929 issue of The Bookman was this summary and review of Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man by Sigfried Sassoon:
During the war something was lost to Englishmen which they can recapture in nostalgic memories but never recover in fact. This strange novel of Sassoon’s reminds one of the faintly faded colors and old-fashioned security of English sporting prints.
The following five page article was written by the World War I poet, Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967), in an
attempt to give a rough outline of what the British poets did in the Great War, making every allowance for the fact that they were writing under great difficulty….
Sassoon gave a thorough going-over of every war poet that he admired, naming at least twenty. It is a wonderful and revealing read for all those who have come to admire the poets of the First World War and Sigfried Sassoon in particular.
Henry Seidel Canby (1878 – 1961) was one of the founding editors of The Saturday of Literature
and in this article he put pen to paper and presented his readers with a concise summation of what he liked to call the five phases of war literature. Canby sensed that since 1919 there had been five unique types of war books, all produced by veterans, and that Erich Maria Remarque’s (1898 – 1970) All Quiet on the Western Front was typical of the fifth variety that was appearing in 1929:
The balance hangs true in Remarque. Pacifism is a theory, militarism is a theory, war is a necessity – not in its causes, for who really hates the enemy! – but for this doomed generation it is a fact. War for these men is normal, which does not mean that they like it.
A 1930 article about the movie can be read herecan be read here.
Attached, you will find the 1917 review of Carry On
by Coningsby Dawson (1883 – 1959). The book is a collection of the author’s beautifully crafted letters that were written to his family while he served on the Western Front during the First World War. Dawson’s ability to convey the urgency of the allied cause was so well received he was assigned to write two additional books by the British Ministry of Information: The Glory of the Trenches and Out to Win, both published in 1918 (neither of the two were any where near as moving as the one that is reviewed here).
Click here to read about W.W. I art.
This is a short, pithy review of E.E. Cummings’ (1894 – 1962) novel, The Enormous Room I1922), which was based upon his experience as an American volunteer ambulance driver and his subsequent incarceration in a French jail for having admitted to pacifist sympathies. The reviewer believed that the book provided:
the last word in realistically detailed horrors.
F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have remarked:
Of all the work by young men who have sprung up since 1920 one book survives – The Enormous Room by E.E. Cummings.
A magazine review of the classic American World War One novel, Three Soldiers by John Dos Passos.
This book is vivid, but not sentimental. It does not contain a description of a single battle. What it does describe is the transformation of minds and bodies under the stress of war.
In the bad-old days of World War I, author Andreas Latzko (1876 – 1943) served as a line officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army. While at the front he was affected by the horrors of combat until he found that he had seen enough and chose to desert. Even before the war had ended he managed to create an anti-war novel and get it to press before the Armistice. Digitized here is the 1918 review of his book, Men In War
Disillusionment and an almost morbid sympathy with mental and physical suffering are outstanding features of the book.
Israel Zangwill (1864 – 1926) was a member of the Jewish literary society in Britain; he was an prominent lecturer, journalist, novelist and playwright. Today, however, he is mostly remembered for his efforts on behalf of the Zionist movement to establish a Jewish homeland. The following is a luke-warm book review from 1916 covering his collection of essays about World War I, The War for the World
In Three Soldiers, John Dos Passos exhibited the disillusionment of the soldiers in the field; The Last Mile by Frank Macallister exposes the disillusionment of the soldier come home. The reviewer remarked that both men had been bamboozled by Woodrow and company.
A look at What Price Glory? and Journey’s End and the new spirit that created these dramas.
When R.C. Sheriff, nearly ten years after the Armistice, sat down to write an easy play for the amateurs of his boat club, he seems to have had no fixed notion as to what a play ought to be. The script of Journey’s End shows a complete absence of strain…
Click here to read an additional article concerning Journeys End.
Robert Littell reviewed the first New York production of Journey’s End by former infantry officer, R.C. Sherriff (1896 – 1975: 9th East Surrey Regiment, 1915 – 1918). We have also included a paragraph from a British critic named W.A. Darlington who had once fought in the trenches and approaches the drama from the angle of a veteran:
Click here if you would like to read another article about the WW I play Journey’s End.
A small column from a 1915 issue of Vanity Fair in which the correspondent praised the virtues of Howard Copeland (an American psychologist and ambulance volunteer working in Frabce), Gertrude Aldrich (author of an Atlantic Magazine essay titled, Little House on the Marne), Cardinal Mercier (author of the Great Belgian Pastoral) and W.F. Bailey (authored a paper concerning the war in Northeastern Europe). These writers are preferred to the usually celebrated ink-slingers like Hellaire Belloc, Rudyard Kipling, Anatole France, and Arnold Bennett who are all compared to amateur recruiting sergeants in support of the War.
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