Meeting the Enemy: The Human Face of the Great War

Description

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.

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.

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 * From the horrors of the First World War battlefields are tales of extraordinary camaraderie between British and German soldiers * Daily Express * Excellent and even-handed * Daily Telegraph on Boy Soldiers of the Great War * A compelling work * Independent on The Soldier's War * One could not ask for a more dramatic and entertaining selection on a little known area of Great War history by an experienced chronicler and anthologist of that cataclysmic event * Spectator on Tommy's Ark * A terrific book. If ever you are in doubt about the devastation and universal suffering that war brings to us, and to all creatures, great and small, then read Tommy's Ark * Michael Morpurgo, author of War Horse *