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The Great War of 1914-1918 now stands at the furthest edge of living memory. And yet, hardly a month passes without some dramatic and sometimes tragic discovery being made along the old killing fields of the Western Front. Graves of British soldiers buried during battle still lying in rows seemingly arm in arm or found crouching at the entrance to a dugout; whole underground cities of trenches, dugouts and shelters have been preserved in the mud; field hospitals carved out of the chalk country of the Somme marked with graffiti; unexploded bombs and gas canisters all of these are the poignant and sometimes deadly legacies of a war we can never forget.Killing Time digs beneath the surface of war to uncover the living reality left behind. Nicholas J. Saunders brings together a wealth of discoveries to offer fresh insights into the human and often barbaric aspect of warfare. He uses discoveries in the trenches, family photographs, diaries and souvenirs to give the dead a voice. You cannot fail to be fascinated and moved by what he unearths.

The struggle between Germany and the Allies along the Western Front is for many the most familiar element of World War I. However, many less well-known theatres of conflict, key to the overall progress and conduct of the war, hold as much relevance to both the traveller and the armchair enthusiast. In this work, the author sheds light on the fighting methods of the protagonists in less familiar settings, whether in the Italian Alps or in the cloying heat of the Greek coast.In the first weeks of fighting, stubborn Belgian resistance resulted in a desperate battle to stabilise the front and compelled the German advance to be diverted against the British at Ypres. French determination to win back Alsace-Lorraine plunged the Vosges region into fluid conflict for over a year from August 1914 before both sides realised the impossibility of a decisive success in this area. The three-year struggle between Italy and Austria across the alpine passes was to draw German, British and French forces into the region. Anglo-French assistance to the Serbs through Salonika produced a standoff between the Allies and the Central Powers which was only to be resolved in the last months of the war.

The Germans fighting on two fronts were concentrating in the east where the Russians were weakening. In the west, the Allied effort was met with well prepared German defences, and efforts to open a new front on the Gallipoli Peninsula had foundered. Decisive action to break the deadlock on the Western Front saw a mighty attack of six British divisions planned for the autumn of 1915 in the vicinity of the small mining community of Loos en Gohelle where The Big Push would begin. The bitter recriminations that followed the perceived failure reduced the Battle of Loos to a footnote in the history of the Great War for many decades.Entirely lost in translation has been the Boys Own tale of the Tommy who kicked a football ahead of the charge. That soldier was identified as Rifleman Frank Edwards, and through his original research, Ed Harris clearly establishes for the first time that the first great attack by the British army was begun when Edwards kicked a football towards the German lines. Harris sheds light on what it was like to be a part of this crucial battle and questions the largely held view that Loos was a failure, using material sourced from a wide variety of sources form the Imperial War Museum to the National Football Museum.

Georgina Lydia Lee (1869-1965) moved in high society and, together with her husband Charles, had many contacts with members of the Establishment. In October 1913, aged 44, Georgina gave birth to her only child, Harry. Georgina was closely involved with the domestic war. She describes the food shortages that took hold as Britain was blockaded and the terror and carnage caused by the Zepplin air raids that assailed London.Letters from the six serving members of her family alerted her to the despair at the size of the Regular Army in 1914, the reality of the shell shortage scandal in 1915, the shortcomings of Sir Ian Hamilton in the Gallipoli campaign. By late 1916 Georgina shared her countrymens anti-German feeling, as the scale of the Somme casualties became known. She writes of public figures, such as Sir Edward Grey, Asquith, Churchill and Lloyd George and the events that shook British society in the midst of war. Her diaries offer a fascinating insight into how Britain coped with the pressures and crises of the First World War on the Home Front.

In little over three weeks of intensive fighting, which not only witnessed the first British use of poison gas, but also the debut of New Army divisions filled with citizen volunteers, British forces at Loos managed to drive up to two miles into the German positions. However, they were unable to capitalise on their initial gains. After suffering nearly 60,000 casualties (three times the number suffered by their opponents) and being driven from the German lines in disorder, bitter recrimination followed. Nick Lloyd presents a reassessment of the Battle of Loos, arguing that it was vital to the development of new strategies and tactics. He places it within its political and strategic context, as well as discusses command and control and the tactical realities of war on the Western Front during 1915.

The story of Bletchley Parks codebreaking operations in the Second World War is now well known, but its counterparts in the First World War Room 40 & MI1(b) remain in the shadows, despite their involvement in and influence on most of the major events of that war. From the First Battle of the Marne, the shelling of Scarborough, the battles of Jutland and the Somme in 1916, to the battles on the Western Front in 1918, the German naval mutiny and the Zimmermann Telegram, this cast of characters several of them as eccentric as anyone from Bletchley Park in the Second World War secretly guided the outcome of the Great War from the confines of a few smoke-filled rooms.Using hundreds of intercepted and decrypted German military, naval and diplomatic messages, bestselling author Paul Gannon reveals the fascinating story of British codebreaking operations. By drawing on many newly discovered archival documents that challenge misleading stories about Room 40 & MI1(b), he reveals a sophisticated machine in operation.

In August 1914, Kitcheners Contemptible Little Army was highly professional but small, equipped with only what they could carry and they were facing a force of continental proportions, heavily armed and well supplied. The task of equipping the British Army was truly Herculean. Many able men had volunteered to fight in the trenches, and others would soon be called up, so this vital work was to be undertaken by the ordinary men and women left behind. In time, the government recognised the need for skills of engineering and logistics, and many of those who had survived the onslaught were brought back home to work. Ordnance is the story of these men and women. It traces the provision of equipment and armaments from raw material through manufacture to the supply routes that gave the British Army all the material it needed to win the war. It is a story of some failures, but also of ingenuity and effort on the part of ordinary people to overcome shortfalls in organisation. It is a story of some lessons learnt, but of others that werent, and these would have long-lasting repercussions.

This is the story of the British Armys endeavours during the Great War to deceive the enemy and trick him into weakening his defences and redeploying his reserves. In this year-by-year account, Martin Davies shows how Sir John French and Sir Douglas Haig actively encouraged their Army commanders to employ trickery so that all attacks should come as a complete surprise to the enemy. The methods of concealment of real military artefacts and the creation of dummy ones were ingenious enough but the real art lay in the development of geographically dispersed deception plans which disguised the real time and place of attack and forced the enemy to defend areas threatened by fake operations. Some of these plans, such as disguising mules as tanks and creating dummy airfields bordered on the farcical but were often amazingly effective. The driving force behind the deception plans was GHQ and the Army commanders, further dispelling the myth of Lions led by Donkeys. Evidence shows that the British Army employed deception to advantage in all their theatres of operation.

The Palestine campaign of 1917 saw Britains armed forces rise from defeat to achieve stunning victory. After two failed attempts in the spring, at the end of the year they broke through the Ottoman line with an innovative mixture of old and new technology and tactics, and managed to advance over 50 miles, from Gaza to Jerusalem, in only two months. As well as discussions of military strategy, Stuart Hadaways gripping narrative of the campaign gives a broad account of the men on both sides who lived and fought in the harsh desert conditions of Palestine, facing not only brave and determined enemies, but also the environment itself: heat, disease and an ever-present thirst.Involving Ottoman, ANZAC, British and Arab forces, the campaign saw great empires manoeuvring for the coveted Holy Land. It was Britains victory in 1917, however, that redrew the maps of the Middle East and shaped the political climate for the century to come.

The failure of the Gallipoli campaign was instantly blamed on a great untruth that the War Office was unprepared for Dardanelles operations and gave Sir Ian Hamilton little in the way of maps and terrain intelligence. This myth is repeated by current historians. The Dardanelles Commission became a battleground of accusation and counter-accusation. This book, incorporating much previously unpublished material, demonstrates that geographical intelligence preparations had indeed been made by the War Office and the Admiralty for decades. They had collected a huge amount of terrain information, maps and charts covering the topography and defences, and knew a great deal about Greek plans to capture the Gallipoli Peninsula. At least one plan was Anglo-Greek!Much of this material, which is here identified and evaluated, was handed over to Hamiltons Staff. Additional material was obtained in theatre before the landings, T. E. Lawrence playing a part. Grasping Gallipolli, which is the first book to examine the intelligence and mapping side of the Dardanelles campaign, looks closely at its terrain, and describes the production and development of new operations maps, and clarifies whether the intelligence was properly processed and efficiently used. It also examines the use of aerial photos taken by the Royal Naval Air Service during the campaign, and charting, hydrographic and other intelligence work by the Royal Navy.

Carshalton in Surrey was deeply affected by the First World War: over 1,900 local men enlisted to fight. Of those men, 243 lost their lives and are commemorated on the war memorial. As we find ourselves commemorating the centenary of the war, it is more important than ever that these men are not forgotten. Drawing on over six years of research, this book brings together the stories of the lives and deaths of these men. Utilising a wide variety of sources and complemented by many previously unseen photographs, their stories are told here, from the fourteen sets of brothers who were killed, to the devastating effect of the Somme campaign in which nineteen local men lost their lives on the opening day alone.

Winston Churchill called it the unknown war. Unlike the long stalemate of the Western Front, the conflict 191418 between the Russian Empire and the Central Powers was a war of movement spanning a continent from the Arctic to the Adriatic, Black and Caspian seas and from the Baltic in the west to the Pacific Ocean.The appalling scale of casualties provoked strikes in Russias war industries and widespread mutinies at the front. As the whole fabric of society collapsed, German money brought the Bolsheviks to power in the greatest deniable dirty trick of the twentieth century, after which Russia stopped fighting, eight months before the Western Front armistice.The cost to Russia was 4 million men dead and as many held as POWs by the Central Powers. Wounded? No one has any idea how many. All the belligerent powers of the Russian fronts were destroyed: the German, AustroHungarian and Russian empires gone forever and the Ottoman Empire so crippled that it finally collapsed in 1922.During four years of brutal civil war that followed, Trotskys Red Army fought the White armies, murdering and massacring millions of civilians, as British, American and other western soldiers of the interventionist forces fought and died from the frozen Arctic to the arid deserts of Iran. This is the story of that other First World War.

In early 1918, it seemed to many that the British people and the Allies were close to defeat. At home, the chief culprit was the German U-boat. Sailing almost unopposed from the North Sea ports of Zeebrugge and Ostend, the submarines were taking a heavy toll on Allied shipping, and no one seemed to be doing anything about it. The job eventually went to Vice Admiral Roger Keyes, The Modern Nelson, who had a long record of close action with enemies from China to the Heligoland Bight. Equally, he was unafraid of those senior to him whom he considered to be incompetent. Within days of his appointment Keyes had put together an audacious plan to sink blockships in the enemy-held ports. However, his success, along with the eleven VCs won in the battles, led his detractors to play down his achievement, even by using German propaganda against him. This entirely new account, containing groundbreaking research and rare illustrations throughout, at last sets the record straight about these important engagements.

The words of Unknown Warriors resonate as powerfully today as when first written. The book offers a very personal glimpse into the hidden world of the military field hospital where patients struggled with pain and trauma, and nurses fought to save lives and preserve emotional integrity.The books author was one of a select number of fully trained military nurses who worked in hospital trains and casualty clearing stations during the First World War, coming as close to the front as a woman could. Kate Luard was already a war veteran when she arrived in France in 1914, aged 42, having served in the Second Boer War. At the height of the Battle of Passchendaele, she was in charge of a casualty clearing station with a staff of forty nurses and nearly 100 nursing orderlies.She was awarded the RRC and Bar (a rare distinction) and was Mentioned in Despatches for gallant and distinguished service in the field. Through her letters home she conveyed a vivid and honest portrait of war. It is also a portrait of close family affection and trust in a world of conflict. In publishing some of these letters in Unknown Warriors her intention was to bear witness to the suffering of the ordinary soldier.

An indispensable guide to the British Army during the First World War covers the men who fought for Britain: from the Old Contemptibles the professionals who stemmed the German advance at the beginning of the war to the Territorials, the Derby Men, Kitcheners New Army and the conscripts who eventually defeated the Kaisers armies four years later. Andrew Rawson examines the impressive contributions made by the Dominions and the Empire and explores aspects of doctrine, training, communications, strategy and tactics, together with divisional organisations, histories and the roles of the different Arms and Services. He reviews all aspects of the soldiers everyday life uniforms, equipment, rations, trench life, leave and military discipline and profiles the commanders and the legacy of the war in art, as well as providing information on cemeteries and places of interest. It is all here, in one book.

"I found to my delight that I had stumbled across a kind of soup kitchen. The Tommy in charge was stirring a copperful of Shackles (soup made from the very dregs of army cooking and stirred with a stick). I must have looked in need of extra nourishment for he said Dyer want a drop, son?Yes please I replied if you can spare it. The warmth and zest from that beefy liquid, unexpected as it was, compelled me to accept a second bowlful which I drank with the same enthusiasm as the first." - George Coppard, from With A Machine Gun to Cambrai.From bully beef to Ticklers jam, explore what kept Tommy Atkins fed in the trenches by reading recipes and learning how meals were made just yards from the enemy. In this book Andrew Robertshaw combines history, recipes and historical experiments to reveal how Army Cooks in the First World War fed millions of men everyday against the odds.

On 21st March 1918, 29th and 3rd Casualty Clearing Stations RAMC were encamped at Grévillers, just behind the front line, when Germany launched its final, massive offensive. These Field Hospitals were the lifeline to the rear for the unabated deluge of wounded which soon overwhelmed both units; all wards were full and operating theatres were working round the clock to deal with the endless queues for amputations and major surgery. In the words of Major-General von Bertele in his foreword: that casualty care should be managed on such a scale and at such a pace leaves the reader open mouthed.Lifeline is a touching record of the care provided by an often exhausted but dedicated medical and nursing staff and the bravery and spirit of their patients as the hospitals, always under intense pressure, moved back and forth with the changing positions of the line during the last months of the war.

The new series of Spellmount Military Memoirs provides rare and sought-after texts for the collector of classic historical works, together with rigorously selected personal narratives never before in print destined to become classics in their own right. Llewelyn Alberic Emilius Price-Davies was awarded the Victoria Cross when serving with the Kings Royal Rifle Corps during the Second Boer War. He went on to serve as Divisional Corps liasion officer in 1914-15, his correspondence offers a rare insight into the changing face of the British Army at this time. In 1916 he took over the 113th Brigade, in a New Army Division 38th (Welsh). The first major test was on the Somme at Mametz Wood, where the divisional commander was sacked. He describes this famous fight and eventual capture of the wood in dramatic detail. Once again in the thick of the fighting at Pilckem Ridge in 1917 on the first day of Third Ypres, his letters show the importance of this battles success. In 1918 he travelled to Italy, where his diaries reveal for the first time how the Allied Command functioned in this theatre. His constant correspondence with his brother-in-law Henry Wilson, the C.I.G.S., is a unique insight into British Army High Command and this legendary Field Marshal. This rare collection of letters offers a broad and detailed insight into the First World War that will fascinate any enthusiast.

Gas! Gas! Quick, Boys! reveals for the first time the true extent of how chemistry rather than military strategy determined the shape, duration and outcome of the First World War. Chemistry was not only a destructive instrument of war but also protected troops, and healed the sick and wounded. From bombs to bullets, poison gas to anaesthetics, khaki to cordite, chemistry was truly the alchemy of the First World War. Michael Freemantle explores its dangers and its healing potential, revealing how the arms race was also a race for chemistry to the extent that Germanys thirst for the chemicals needed to make explosives deprived the nation of fertilizers and nearly starved the nation. He answers question such as: What is guncotton? What is lyddite? What is mustard gas? What is phosgene? What is gunmetal? This is a true picture of the horrors of the Chemists War.

The battlefields of Gallipoli and Salonica were a far cry from life on a small working farm in County Louth, Ireland, and yet, in 1915, Captain David Campbell, M.C., 6th Royal Irish Rifles, found himself in the searing Turkish heat, confronted by a faceless and seemingly tireless enemy. Less than twenty months after joining the Officers Training Corps in Trinity College Dublin, Campbell led his company over the arid ground to the Front. From the beginning he kept a diary, describing life in these two theatres of war in great detail. Forward the Rifles is that diary. In it, he encapsulates the frightening scale of warfare, and yet he managed to find humour in the simple acts of himself and his men, as they trudge through daily life, trying to keep their bodies nourished and their spirits buoyed. The story of Captain David Campbell is one that will ring true for many, and yet it is an intensely personal one, chronicling his recovery from the physical and mental wounds of battle. Now, more than three decades after his death, the unswerving loyalty, courage and kindness of Captain David Campbell, M.C., are reborn.