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Meeting the Enemy: The Human Face of the Great War
Richard Van Emden
€ 26.99
€ 24.77
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Description for Meeting the Enemy: The Human Face of the Great War
Hardback.
A British soldier walked over to the German front line to deliver newspapers; British women married to Germans became ‘enemy aliens’ in their own country; a high-ranking British POW discussed his own troops’ heroism with the Kaiser on the battlefield. Just three amazing stories of contact between the opposing sides in the Great War that eminent historian Richard van Emden has unearthed – incidents that show brutality, great humanity, and above all the bizarre nature of a conflict between two nations with long-standing ties of kinship and friendship. Meeting the Enemy reveals for the first time how contact was maintained on many levels throughout the War, and its stories, sometimes funny, often moving, give us a new perspective on the lives of ordinary men and women caught up in extraordinary events.
Product Details
Format
Hardback
Publication date
2013
Publisher
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC United Kingdom
Number of pages
400
Condition
New
Number of Pages
400
Place of Publication
London, United Kingdom
ISBN
9781408821640
SKU
V9781408821640
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 4 to 8 working days
Ref
99-2
About Richard Van Emden
Richard van Emden has interviewed over 270 veterans of the Great War and has written fourteen books on the subject including Boy Soldiers of the Great War and The Last Fighting Tommy. He has also worked on more than a dozen television programmes on the First World War, including Britain’s Last Tommies, Britain’s Boy Soldiers, the award-winning Roses of No Man’s Land, and most recently, War Horse: The Real Story. He lives in West London.
Reviews for Meeting the Enemy: The Human Face of the Great War
Remarkable ... Richard van Emden is a World War I specialist who has found a niche, little explored, charting the personal contacts between Britons and Germans and their feelings about each other as the war progressed … Makes you think rather differently about the so-called ‘Great War For Civilisation’
Daily Mail
Richard Van Emden’s tour-de-force of research casts a fascinating new light on the human face of the Great War, allowing us into the strangest of meetings between British and German enemies in the trenches, behind the lines and on the home front ... Extraordinary and often inspirational stories of comradeship between foes ... Among many compelling photographs in this book, there is a grainy and heartbreaking image of a bowed and broken British prisoner tied to a post and left in the snow
Richard Kemp, a former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, The Times
From the horrors of the First World War battlefields are tales of extraordinary camaraderie between British and German soldiers
Daily Express
In Meeting the Enemy, the historian Richard Van Emden shifts his focus from the grim fields of the First World War to the small, all but unknown instances of compassion across enemy lines
New Statesman
Richard van Emden uncovers myriad encounters between German and British forces ... Van Emden’s tales of friendship and honour between enemies only heighten the mystery of how these men slaughtered each other in their millions for four years
Metro
Meeting the Enemy is a meticulously researched account of contacts between the British and Germans during the war, mainly in the trenches, but also as prisoners of war and as “enemy alien” wives. It is full of fascinating information and will appeal particularly to great war gluttons, the people who can’t get enough of this stuff
Observer
An interesting chapter on what happened to those in mixed Anglo-German marriages ... Van Emden wants to remind us that not all was hellish: there was also humour, mutual baiting and occasional easy-going relations. As well as direct contact during the Christmas truces, this book explores indirect contacts, using many unpublished letter and diaries
Peter Conradi, Spectator
A real cracker
Literary Review
Daily Mail
Richard Van Emden’s tour-de-force of research casts a fascinating new light on the human face of the Great War, allowing us into the strangest of meetings between British and German enemies in the trenches, behind the lines and on the home front ... Extraordinary and often inspirational stories of comradeship between foes ... Among many compelling photographs in this book, there is a grainy and heartbreaking image of a bowed and broken British prisoner tied to a post and left in the snow
Richard Kemp, a former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, The Times
From the horrors of the First World War battlefields are tales of extraordinary camaraderie between British and German soldiers
Daily Express
In Meeting the Enemy, the historian Richard Van Emden shifts his focus from the grim fields of the First World War to the small, all but unknown instances of compassion across enemy lines
New Statesman
Richard van Emden uncovers myriad encounters between German and British forces ... Van Emden’s tales of friendship and honour between enemies only heighten the mystery of how these men slaughtered each other in their millions for four years
Metro
Meeting the Enemy is a meticulously researched account of contacts between the British and Germans during the war, mainly in the trenches, but also as prisoners of war and as “enemy alien” wives. It is full of fascinating information and will appeal particularly to great war gluttons, the people who can’t get enough of this stuff
Observer
An interesting chapter on what happened to those in mixed Anglo-German marriages ... Van Emden wants to remind us that not all was hellish: there was also humour, mutual baiting and occasional easy-going relations. As well as direct contact during the Christmas truces, this book explores indirect contacts, using many unpublished letter and diaries
Peter Conradi, Spectator
A real cracker
Literary Review