Meeting the Enemy (56 page)

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Also available by Richard van Emden

Boy Soldiers of the Great War

The youngest soldier who fought in the First World War is believed to have been just twelve years old. Caught up in the wave of patriotism, many thousands of other boys are known to have lied about their age, inflated their chests and stood on tiptoes to bluff their way into a war of unforeseen horror. How and why so many under-aged boys were able to get to the Western Front remained unexplained and, until Richard van Emden’s classic account, largely unexplored.
Boy Soldiers of the Great War
tells the incredible stories of the young boys who went to fight for their country.

‘Should this have been allowed to happen? Richard van Emden's fascinating and distressing account ... shows how difficult it is to provide a simple answer.’
Sunday Times

‘Engaging, well-written and balanced.’
The Times

‘Excellent and even-handed.’
Daily Telegraph

The Last Fighting Tommy

.(Written with Harry Patch)

Harry Patch was the last British soldier alive to have fought in the trenches of the First World War. From his vivid memories of an Edwardian childhood, the horror of the Great War and fighting in the mud during the Battle of Passchendaele, working on the home front in the Second World War and fame in later life as a veteran,
The Last Fighting Tommy
is the story of an ordinary man’s extraordinary life.

‘An extraordinary biography by the very last witness of a devastating

four years in British history’

Daily Mail

‘Patch was not unique among millions of his comrades who endured that prolonged and supreme test of nerve and courage.

But, uniquely, as the last survivor, he embodies them all’

Sunday Express

‘This articulate, modest and outspoken man not only remains one of the last living links with a traumatic  event that has become part of the national consciousness, but is an unassailable witness of what the war was like for’

Daily Telegraph

The Soldier’s War

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The Great War ended more than ninety years ago yet still haunts and fascinates us today. In
The Soldier’s War
, Richard van Emden traces a history of the fighting month by month and year by year, using original diaries, letters and as-yet-unseen photographs taken by the soldiers themselves. We follow the British Tommy through devastating battles and trench warfare from the outbreak of war in 1914 to the armistice four years later, guided by Richard van Emden’s sure explanations. This is a history of the war as seen from the trenches that is shockingly intimate, sometimes heartbreaking, often wryly amusing, but always compelling.

‘Thousands of books have been written about the Great War, but perhaps none so vividly evocative as The Soldier’s War … an extraordinary homage to a lost generation’

Daily Mail

‘In
The Soldier’s War
, Richard van Emden has toiled in archives and hunted down caches of letters to tell the story of the war chronologically through the eyes of the Tommies who fought it’

The Times

‘Van Emden manages to establish in an immediate empathy with these ordinary men of Britain, thrown into such horrendous conditions. They hope, moan, laugh, grieve, despair and pray their way through the four years of the “war to end all wars”’

Time Out

Edited by Richard van Emden

Sapper Martin

.

Jack Martin was a thirty-two-year-old clerk at the Admiralty when he was called up to serve in the army in September 1916. These diaries, written in secret, hidden from his colleagues and only discovered by his family after his return home, present the Great War with heartbreaking clarity, written in a voice as compelling and distinctive as Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon and all the more extraordinary given that it is not an officer’s but that of a private. From his arrival in France and his participation in the Somme, through offensives at Ypres and eventual demobilisation after the Armistice, we see wartime life as it really was for the ordinary Tommy.

‘Honest, insightful and full of humour … Richard Van Emden’s editing of the diaries is sensibly unobtrusive and self-effacing, largely allowing

Martin’s words to speak for themselves’

Sunday Times

‘Extraordinary. Beautifully written, it reveals a cheerful man with a sharp eye and a gift for description that’s unforgettable.

Through his eyes we see wartime life as it really was for the ordinary Tommy’

Choice

Tommy’s Ark

Soldiers and their Animals in the Great War

For soldiers in the Great War, life was bleak. Going over the top was a comparatively rare event, and much more frequently they were bored and missing their families at home. Seeking comfort and entertainment in their isolation, many soldiers found both in the animal kingdom. From the lion that was allowed to patrol the front-line trenches and the monkey that guided a lost officer back to his battalion, Richard van Emden, one of our leading Great War historians, has assembled a whole series of extraordinary stories about this little-known aspect of the war, to throw new light on the lives of the men who fought on the Western Front.