Customer Reviews

1914

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This book (along with all of her other works) was an excellent telling of the first days of the war in 1914. She details the British rush to go to France and bayonet the "Hun" and save Belgian babies.
Told with a historian's eye for detail and with the priceless words from the men that fought in the terrible war fill the pages with amazing courage, endurance and hardship.
Plenty of great maps allow the reader to follow the advance, then retreat of the British forces and their harrowing withdrawl under savage German pursuit.
This book is available from AmazonUK.com and well worth reading if you are interested in this period.
Enjoy

McDonald's books are excellent. It is sometimes hard to follow the big picture of a battle from how she writes, so these books are not for people looking to start learning about the war. But if you already know the basics of what happened in places like Mons, Ypres, Somme then her books are wonderful. All too often people think of WW1 and imaging only men sitting in muddy trenches and dying under mahcine guns and gas while Red Triplanes fly over head. McDonald goes in very close to the story having interviewed veterans while they were still with us and her books recount the adventures of men on guard duty, or in transit, in the dreaded 'glass house' or moving forward with the line.
Reading her books you won't get the grand view of the battle field. You will get the memories of men who saw their little piece of it and tells you what they went through.

Lyn Macdonald has captured the sadness and realization of a British generation that is losing it's image of war being glorious, for God and King, for the empire; to awaken the nightmare and hardship of war for survival.

The innocence and naive courage of the professional and voluntary British soldier is brilliantly relayed to the reader. The futility of war and the snuffing out of lives filled with hope and a yearning for adventure is aptly captured by the author through the biographies of the soldiers involved. The slow, painful sinking into total war, and the final realization of what war is all about shakes the readers emotions and causes one to wonder how the world can ever continue to fall into war so easily and glibly.

The stunning cover photograph of the UK edition of this wonderful book shows the beaming faces of hundreds of young British men aboard the ship that was to take most of them to their deaths. Lyn Macdonald lets the Tommy speak for himself and we can sense how, what seemed at the time to be nothing more than a high-spirited bank holiday lark, turned out to be a hideous bloodbath under a beating September sun. In all her books, the author identifies with her witnesses so completely that you almost feel in your gut the depth of their fear, anguish and bravery. Their songs, their humour, their humanity permeate "1914" and, without ever being overly-poetic, the author's prose conjures up the sights and the sounds of the front with a skill which easily surpasses many writers of fiction. Words like patriotism and gallantry, as she has said herself, fall strangely on modern ears but these books allow the common soldier himself to describe the horror and futility of war. Thanks for the memories, Herr Kaiser !

Lyn MacDonald is a great discovery I made while browsing a bookstore in London. A ream of books about WWI told from the perspective of participants, fiction-like & yet nonfiction. Her books are still in print, in Penguin editions, in the UK. This book, 1914, gives the reader an superb view of what it was like to be British, on the front-lines in the early months of war, on the home-front as a civilian (in England) or on the home-front as an aspiring soldier. You can't go wrong with this volume.

For readers interested in the initial days of World War I from a first hand perspective they can not go wrong with Lyn MacDonald's presentation. Her offering, similar to her other works takes a decidely British point of view specifically from that of the man on the spot, the first person narrative. This is accomplished through the letters, diaries, and interviews of the participants. The action begins during the British Bank Holiday when one million British veteran troops from around the world converge on Belgium to defend her sovereignty when invaded by Germany. No mistake here, Britain is here for Belgium and not for France, but it is France that reaps the benefit of the loss of 900 thousand British lives in the defense of Belgium. It is due to the heroic action of the British that the German juggernaut was not only stopped but turned back on itself and spent at the First Battle of the Marne. The superiority of the British veteran can be noted by the insistance, to this day, by the Germans belief that the British had used machine guns. The fact remains that with only rifles at their disposal, the British with discipline, raw courage, cohesiveness, steady rapid fire, and the three-oh-three(.303), were able to stand in as a much needed Horatio. As Mark Twain's life was marked by Haley's Comet, the Italian Renaissance marked by the reign of the Medicis, the Great War is marked by the two battles of the Marne. It was the British veteran of 1914 that made the First Battle of the Marne possible and Lyn MacDonald portrays the desperate struggle, confusion, and heroics of these early days with a clarity and continuity that is easy for the casual reader to feel, understand, and appreciate.