Customer Reviews

Back to the Front: An Accidental Historian Walks the Trenches of World War I

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

I loved this book. I spent 30 years in the British Army and walked these battlefields many times. To those who know little of war, it is easy to dismiss this author's ideas. But to those of us who have direct experience of military stupidity, the kind of leadership that wastes lives, the kind of foolishness that the common soldier rises above, the author's words ring true. The description of the Western Front is beautifully done and over all this book is quite exceptional.

An incredibly well written journal of the author's walk along WWI's Western Front. O'Shea doesn't pretend to be a historian, and makes no bones about being a pacifist who distrusts the military. He stumbles upon his interest in the Great War, when a friend takes him to the former front, and the author is shocked to see the land still shows the ravages of the war, 70 years earlier.

He is an avowed Baby Boomer, whose mindset must have been shaped by living in a peaceful time and when it was normal to look at authority in a negative light. However, even with his pacifist views, his conclusions about WWI are right on the mark. To those who know anything about the history of WWI, like it or not, O'Shea places the blame on the old world generals who allowed their men to be slaughtered and never changed their strategy. Some have read the book and come away feeling that O'Shea holds the men who fought it in contempt. I found completely the opposite, as he mentions several times how few war memorials commemorate the real heroes of the War, the men in the trenches. But because he feels that their lives were wasted in a meaningless conflict, it is natural to come away with the feeling that he is painting all in uniform with the same brush.

His anti-military, pacifist views DO get a little heavy at times, but in all, I found this book to be: poetic in nature; always interesting; and an excellent companion to all who are interested in WWI history as well as those who simply enjoy literate discourse.

Seeing how other readers have found his pacifism impossible to deal with, I noted several times in the book how he almost purposely avoids mentioning WWII. There are several spots when he mentions areas prominent in both wars, namely the Argonne forest. References to WWII are not made, although you'd think they were there for the making. His only fleeting remarks refer to his dismay upon noting Jewish-German graves, saying that these men died in service to a country that would work to exterminate their ancestors only 20 years later.

It might be that O'Shea believes WWII to be a more justified war. While there were still debacles, the Allies certainly showed more concern for their men than they did in WWI. But who knows; maybe O'Shea will surprise me a come out with a diatribe against WWII as well.

An excellently written, thoughtful, and sometimes passionate. I do not accept the author's personal view completely, but he is a sincere observer and a skilled writer. A highly recommended book.

O'Shea doesn't really claim to be a historian. He is a guy who visited the Somme with some friends and was so blown away by the visible scars left by a long ago war that he chose to study the war and then return to look at the sights - as up close and insightfully as anyone I have read. As a retired Marine and amateur military historian, I bridled a little at the pacifist views that seemed to be hailing from an unreconstructed 60s perspective. But he is right about the generals of that war. They were unable to understand the war and their responsibilities. Too many of the sacrifices made by the soldiers of that war WERE needless - complaints about O'Shea's perspective introduced by some reviewers don't make the facts any less real. O'Shea's insight helps bring the war into much better focus. O'Shea's best contribution is the magic of his phrasing. He uses the English language as beautifully as anyone writing. I read the book with a highlighter to identify turns of phrase that deserve to be memorialized. I kept thinking, "Damn, I wish I'd written this." O'Shea is a writer. I hope he keeps doing it

Can't remember what possessed me to read this book, but I have never regretted it and given many copies of it as gifts. This book is really a bit of a travelogue in many respects. The author walks from one end of the Western Front (WWI) to the other and his engaging, journal style narrative brings you along for a fascinating ride.

After spending decades walking battlefields of the American Civil War, I found it intriguing to follow O'Shea's journey through the terrible battlefields of the War to End all wars. His experiences as he traverses ordnance and relic filled trenches and forests to the many memorials are really insightful and differ greatly from the kind of lionization of American Civil War battlefields that is so prevalent today.

In fact, the battlefields of the Great War seem to lie in a wierd sort of isolation. O'Shea frequently stumbles upon long deserted villages (this in the heart of Europe) and the experience is discomforting. And this is perhaps as it should be. These tortured fields of the Western Front were the scene of the greatest mass slaughter of armed humanity the world has yet experienced. Indeed, his journey and experiences are in fact lighter and more sanguine than dark and despairing.

O'Shea never strays too far in over-moralizing the futility of war, but of course the evidence he encounters conveys the true waste of war more than written words ever can.

I would like to have walked with O'Shea and in rereads of this excellent book, do so frequently.

For those of us whom have read Macdonald's "Somme", Tuchman's matchless "August 1914", or Cecil's "Flowers of Battle", this book is a cumulation and a closure. Having done the preparatory reading of the histories and the literature of W.W.I; with O'Shea we follow his journey into the geography of both.O'Shea is a walking tour of literature, history, geography, politics, tactics, and culture; with many a comment directed toward us the grandchildren of those so twisted in self-destruction that it is still in evidence on the landscape eight decades after; it is still reflected in the politics of today. His is a walking commentary, with reference to and critique of every social aspect that contributed to and resulted from the Western Front. O'Shea's observation is clear. The losers in war list their dead individually, so the endless drone of the recitation of the names of the victims will mask the names of the criminal.The statistics of the Great War are still staggering: From the Battle of the Somme, 73,412 bodies unidentified, 600,000 known dead just on the Allied side, one battle. From the Battle of the Argonne, more shot and shell fired in 72 hours than in the entire US Civil War. From Verdun, 60,000 French dead in 60 minutes. This book should make you sick, this book should clear you head of any military pretensions for your son or daughters. If you've bulked up on W.W.I. history and literature and need a book to pull it all together, this is that book. Put it up on your shelf next to Fussell, Junger, and Barker.

In none of the histories of WWI that I've read have I seen a translation of "Passchendaele." Although I knew that 800,000 men died there, until I read this book I didn't know that the word actually means "Valley of Crucifixion." Knowing this makes a difference. At least it does for me.

It's in small things like this that I readily saw the difference between what O'Shea has written and traditional history with its litany of names, dates, places and numbers. While O'Shea has done his homework and is very knowledgable about the war, because of the travelogue style in which he writes, his book makes the war less distant, less abstract and more real. I could read a hundred history books telling me about the million three-hundred thousand men who died at the Somme, but none of them would have the impact of someone telling me about how he stumbled upon a busted helmet in a wheat field there. Though my brain can absorb a number, my heart can't; what my heart absorbs is the helmet.

I lived in Germany for two years. I visited the Somme battlefield. I had no words to describe what I saw and felt there. I'm grateful that O'Shea did.

An excellent introduction to the geography of the Great War. Until reading Back to the Front, I hadn't had a good mind-picture of the countryside that formed the stage for WW I. Whether reading fictional accounts or the occasional history, I found myself quite familiar with the names but not the spatial relationships of one great battle to the next. By actually walking the Western Front, O'Shea becomes a human reference point: his simple walking pace brought Ypres, Passchendaele, Vimy Ridge, Messines and all those familiar names into proportion. For example, Passchendaele is withing walking distance of Ypres; maybe 10 km away.

The passage of time also is quite interesting. O'Shea walked and visited the Western Front some 70 to 80 years after. The Essex Farm Cemetery where McCrae was inspired to write "In Flanders Fields" is "almost in the shadow of a traffic cloverleaf."

This is a strange mixture of John Hillaby and Barabara Tuchman, with maybe a little Bruce Chatwin thrown in for good measure. I read it very quickly and thoroughly enjoyed it and was even a little peeved that I hadn't thought of it myself. (Fancy missing the opportunity of a book with a title like that!) There are a number of similar walks one can do, especially in Britain; I'm thinking of the walk along Hadrian's Wall in particular. Yet the notion of walking the old trench-lined area and no-man's land of Flanders is a terrific one. What an education! Fortunately for the reader, O'Shea has a competent writing hand as well, and I enjoyed the ramble he took me on.

O'Shea takes risks which, as far as this reader is concerned, nearly always come off. I was confident enough, reading the prose, to be willing to skip over any minor problems. Certainly there are no gaping wounds and nothing requiring major surgery. It seems to me I have read writing similar to this, which attempts to cut a swathe (and a swagger) through the language, while mistaking a pair of rather blunt pruning shears for a well-sharpened scythe. I congratulate this author on his use of the stone.

I can't say that it's much of a book when it comes to the war itself, but O'Shea never pretends it to be otherwise than a view at field level of what's left. If he gets a bit cross at times about some of the former silliness that took place there, who can blame him. I believe this is a first effort by the author and in that case, for my money, it's worth every one of those five available stars. I'd be very proud to have written this.

This book is a fascinating combination of a travel guide, synopsis of World War I, and
blistering tirade against the stupidity of military leaders during that war.

When one thinks of France or Belgium, one usually thinks of fine food, a beautiful and
peaceful countryside, and an Old World elegance and culture far removed from the crudity and
barbarism of the rest of the world. When one thinks of a toxic wasteland, so devastated by the
ravages of mankind as to become uninhabitable, one thinks of Chernobyl or the Love Canal, or
Lake Erie, before the cleanup. When one thinks of a landscape of pure horror, still disgorging
the skeletons of the dead slain on that spot, one thinks of the killing fields of Cambodia, or the
mass graves of Babi-Yar or the Katyn woods. When one thinks of an army attacking in massed
human waves, with the resulting slaughter of tens of thousands of soldiers in a single day, one
thinks of the Communist Chinese in Korea, or the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980's.

In fact, as this book demonstrates in its truly unique way, the countryside of Belgium and
France was and still is all of these things.

As a travel guide, the book takes the reader to the places in France and Belgium that formed
the entire length of the Western Front of WWI. These are for the most part little traveled and
little known to the usual tourists to Europe, and definitely not the first thing to come to mind when
most people think of traveling to France or Belgium. It is easy to imagine that after eighty years,
nature would have healed the scars inflicted upon the countryside of France and Belgium by
World War I, and yet there it is in this book, descriptions of places in both countries where even
today, unexploded artillery shells and the bones of soldiers from the Great War continue to
emerge from the earth, to be casually stacked at the roadside by farmers for pick up by the
authorities. In Ploegsteert Wood in Belgium is a gigantic unexploded mine still left over from
the 1917 Passchendaele offensive; a second mine had exploded in 1955. In France there are
the "Zones Rouge" that remain so heavily filled with unexploded ordinance and so deeply
cratered that they remain uninhabitable. And then there are the endless numbers of military
cemeteries and memorials all along the length of the former Western Front. Most horrific of all
are the gigantic ossuaries around Verdun. The author writes: (p.163) "At the base of the beacon
is an ossuary containing the remains of 150,000 soldiers whose blasted skeletons were found
scattered around the vicinity after the war. You can walk around inside the base, peering
through the windows at the heaps of bones piled high. Femurs go with femurs, tibias with tibias,
skulls with skulls, and so on. Off in the woods, wild boars dig up unrecovered skeletal parts and
make a meal."

The author's retelling of the events of World War I blends seemlessly with the tour through
the present day landscape. It is a rather simplified account, boiled down to one thesis, that
World War I was an endless string of military stupidity of such magnitude as to be beyond
comprehension. An example: (p.129) "The Ypres campaign ended in the ghastly slime of
Passchendaele. Now...perhaps the true scale of the crime can be better understood. Field
Marshal Haig advocated frontal assaults, devoid of surprise, in the rain and the mud of the
Salient, and even spoke of his cavalry breaking through into the open country. He promoted
these tactics after the Chemin des Dames, after Verdun, after the Somme, after Loos, after
Neuve Chappelle, after the Kindermord at Langemarck. It is astonishing that his name did not
become a verb meaning "to learn nothing"."

The author leaves a great many things unsaid, however. In reading the book, swirling along
with the time travel of the author, one cannot but help but link the events of World War I with
later events. The author, a devout pacifist, leaves one large wormhole unexplored in his time
travels. From his retelling, it is apparent that a great many of the surviving soldiers, like his
grandfathers, became confirmed pacifists as a result of the horrors of the war. And yet, there
were many others, like Corporal Adolf Hitler, who drew the opposite conclusion; that yes, there
were military blunders, but the answer was not to avoid war next time, but to do it right the next
time.

The endless suicidal human wave attacks of the European forces during World War I would
seem to be utterly inexplicable to modern-day Western thinking, with our emphasis on the value
of each individual human life. And so, conveniently, we have forgotten that it occurred at all,
and have also forgotten that this senseless slaughter was brought about entirely by the strategy
and tactics of military leaders who were given carte blanche to run the war as they saw fit.
Remember that, next time anyone tries to compare the Vietnam War with the Gulf War - the
moral of that story was not that military leaders should be given control of military operations,
free of constraint by political leaders. The real moral is that military leaders usually try to re-fight
the last war, hoping to do better the next time. Sometimes the lessons of the last war turn out to
be useful for the next war, as it was in the Gulf War. Sometimes the lessons of the last war, in
this case the war of 1870 between France and Germany, turn out to be hopelessly out of date.

In thinking about all this, I have this theory that the real reason for warfare in
modern times is no longer territorial gain, but simply that modern societies with an expanding
population of young males need to periodically explode off a big chunk of this population.
Otherwise the excess numbers of these young males, with their inborn drive for establishing
primacy through conquest, become too much of a societal burden. Witness the problems that
modern Western societies are having today with gangs ("hooligans" in Europe). Gangs never
seem to be a problem during a major war; the potential gangsters are all in the army, and put to
work killing each other in a socially acceptable fashion. Maybe there really is a reason for
massively stupid military leaders to exist after all.

One final link to modern day events. In this book are descriptions of endless numbers of
monuments and plaques scattered throughout Europe with the inscriptions of hundreds of
thousands of names of the individuals - husbands, fathers, brothers, sons - who died in the
battles of World War I. At one time, it was very important to a great many people that these
monuments be put up and that the names of those killed in battle be engraved into stone or
metal and thus be remembered for posterity. Eighty years later, as the last of the living
memories of World War I die out, hardly anyone visits these graves, and no on grieves over the
inscribed names on the monuments. And I think then also of the Vietnam Memorial in
Washington, D.C. What a sad thought.