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Title: Death's Men: Soldiers of the Great War by Denis Winter ISBN: 0-14-016822-2 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: March, 1993 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.36 (11 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: British soldiers on the Western Front in World War I.
Comment: A scholarly analysis of how British soldiers lived on the Western Front. Winter explains all the aspects of the soldier's lives such as the class background, officers, education, weapons, life in the trench and back area, and the aftermath for these soldiers. The reader is meant to ponder what this war meant, but it was hell.
Winter limited his perspective to the British soldier, so one wonders how the German, Austrian, French, and Russian soldiers lived in comparison with the British. It would have been a nice chapter for a comparison. However Winter does a good job explaining all aspects of the British soldier's life.
A good read of a tragic war. Winter gives both a soldier's perspective along with a scholarly analysis of the British soldier. This book will give the reader something to think about.
Rating: 2
Summary: Lot of anecdotes, not much history
Comment: The World War I British infantryman's life, whose story has been minimized or neglected by traditional histories of the war and the public at large, was "made up of small details and large emotions." (16) So argues Denis Winter in Death's Men: Soldiers of the Great War. He focuses primarily on the "inner lives of 'the Other Ranks,'" (ibid.) whose memoirs and reminiscences allow for the creation of what he describes as "the 'inner history'" of the Great War.
Winter structures Death's Men both chronologically and thematically. This approach allows him to show how typical British enlistees ("Kitchener's Men") progressed from being new recruits to frontline soldiers and, if they were lucky, to returning veterans after 1918. Military historians as well as casual readers will certainly admire Winter's thorough and vivid handling of trench warfare and the tremendous toll it took on men's lives, both physically and emotionally.
The strength of Winter's book is its graphic depiction of the men in the trenches and the nature of modern warfare on the western front from 1914 to 1918. Technologically advanced weaponry such as high explosive artillery ammunition, the machine gun and flame throwers made combat hellish beyond description. "The order of life," Winter concludes, "seemed beyond the comprehension of a soldier under a barrage of gas and shells...even if a man could gather himself to contemplate anything beyond survival." (115) At times, Winter's prose is remarkable, as when he describes the infantryman as "object not subject. He saw himself as the rodent occupier of a pockmarked, grassless zone, whose forward limit was determined by the very limit of human endurance. What was he but the counter in a game..." (Ibid.) No squalid detail is too small to evade mention by the numerous soldiers Winter employs to tell his story. Dozens of first hand accounts culled from diaries, memoirs and letters depict the minutiae of the British foot soldier's life in France, including shrapnel wounds, trench foot, bread weevils, brothels, mustard gas attacks, and grave digging-just to list a few.
Winter does not neglect the psychological effects of this modern war on the men fighting it, and devotes an entire chapter-"The Strain of Trench Warfare"-to it. The hideous, modern "arsenal of weapons" led to a war in which "infantry became merely hunters and hunted." (128) The Great War, he asserts, "posed a greater test than any previous war." He rightly points to the reality that unlike previous wars in which battles lasted for hours or days at most, the trench-bound British soldier of the First World War "was hardly ever out of danger," (131) where death loomed constantly.
Despite Winter's skill in vividly illustrating the dreadful struggles of the western front, Death's Men suffers from two major problems. First, this is primarily an impressionistic book, with little statistical or analytical work involved. Winter often cites his own experiences (or those of his relatives) and makes dubious extrapolations from them, such as his first-hand knowledge of shell shock victims. "Each week," he reports, " I see in Leavesden mental hospital...a man whose memory is perfect...to 1917. Thereafter he can remember nothing." (140) Aside from the question of Winter's medical qualifications to make judgments about post-combat stress victims, one wonders how accurate an extrapolation can be from just one veteran the author happens to know. This error is known as "the fallacy of the lonely fact[:]...a statistical generalization from a single case." Examples of impressionistic generalizations abound in Death's Men. Winter's sweeping claims such as "cleanliness was always the highest priority" of the soldier; (146) "all men feared artillery"; (121) and "all soldiers were bitterly depressed when time came to return to France" from leave, (169) serve to brush off exceptions to his broad, imprecise statements, most of which lack citations and statistical support. Although he writes that against such a diversity of soldier's war experiences "generalization must clearly have its limits," (17) Winter fails to heed his own advice.
The second, and perhaps bigger flaw of Death's Men is that it is largely an anecdotal collection of war stories, all of which serve to answer his preconceived declarative question: the war was horrible for the men who fought it. With this closed-end hypothesis in mind, Winter seems to have trudged off to the archives and, unsurprisingly, found exactly what he was looking for. His survey is not so much an historical inquiry as it is a compilation of individual accounts from only one of the war's theatres that he for the most part fails to interpret, quantify and contextualize. He provides only eight footnotes in this 265-page book, a limitation that lessens the book's usefulness to other scholars, or to readers wishing to learn more.
Death's Men lacks a proper historical question. It is instead a compilation of soldiers' experiences about which the author's opinion often substitutes for interpretation, such as when he harshly criticizes the army's induction and basic training system for subduing the individual in a dehumanizing manner. "Our soldiers," Winter opines, "until the last year of the war, continued to be trained as blockishly as had been Wellington's men." (49) Winter fails to provide context for his impressionistic assertion, or alternative explanations. Was basic training harsh in the Great War because the army had so many civilians to train? Did military authorities grasp the fundamental need to prepare troops for the modern battlefield, to ward off mutiny, and to harden the men in advance? He does not consider this, and provides few accounts from officers or NCOs about the obvious need for discipline. Death's Men will certainly satisfy those readers searching for absorbing tales of World War I combat and the misery of the trenches. A scholarly, interpretive study of British foot soldiers, however, this is not-such an empirical analysis remains to be written.
Rating: 5
Summary: The horror of trench warfare
Comment: A brilliant work which describes the pitiless and aching horror of trench warfare. The finest work of its kind by far- and I have read a lot of WW1 history. Winter uses contemporary accounts of the war to reveal what the war was like for a generation of young British soldiers, many of whom would be seared by the experience for the rest of their lives.
Winter's mordant British wit and understatement are on display throughout this riveting work eg.(pg. 205):
'"In the main communication trench we passed a man carrying a sandbag full of something. Thefts of rations and minor stores from the line are increasing. I therefore ask, "What have you in that bag ?" "Rifleman Grundy,sir," came the unexpected reply.'
Highly recommended.
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Title: Eye-Deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in World War I by John Ellis ISBN: 0801839475 Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr Pub. Date: September, 1989 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916 (Penguin History) by Alistair Horne ISBN: 0140170413 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: January, 1994 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Good-Bye to All That : An Autobiography by Paul Fussell, Robert Graves ISBN: 0385093306 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 01 February, 1958 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell ISBN: 0195133323 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: February, 2000 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: To the Last Man: Spring 1918 by Lyn MacDonald ISBN: 0786707976 Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub. Date: 30 January, 2001 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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