Buying Options

Kindle Price:	$1.99
Sold by:	Hachette Book Group Price set by seller.

Promotions apply when you purchase

Deliver to your Kindle Library

You've subscribed to ! We will preorder your items within 24 hours of when they become available. When new books are released, we'll charge your default payment method for the lowest price available during the pre-order period.

Update your device or payment method, cancel individual pre-orders or your subscription at
Your Memberships & Subscriptions

There was an error. We were unable to process your subscription due to an error. Please refresh and try again.

Mud, Blood and Poppycock: Britain and the Great War (Cassell Military Paperbacks) by [Gordon Corrigan]

Follow the Author

Gordon Corrigan

Mud, Blood and Poppycock: Britain and the Great War (Cassell Military Paperbacks) Kindle Edition

by Gordon Corrigan (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

437 ratings

See all formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$1.99

—

Audible Audiobook, Unabridged

"Please retry"

$0.00

Free with your Audible trial

Hardcover

"Please retry"

$53.81

$44.00

$2.15

Paperback

"Please retry"

$17.46

$12.23

$3.42

Kindle
$1.99 Read with Our Free App
Audiobook
$0.00 Free with your Audible trial
Hardcover
$53.81

16 Used from $2.15 2 New from $44.00
Paperback
$17.46

26 Used from $3.42 9 New from $12.23

The true story of how Britain won the First World War.

The popular view of the First World War remains that of BLACKADDER: incompetent generals sending brave soldiers to their deaths. Alan Clark quoted a German general's remark that the British soldiers were 'lions led by donkeys'. But he made it up.

Indeed, many established 'facts' about 1914-18 turn out to be myths woven in the 1960s by young historians on the make. Gordon Corrigan's brilliant, witty history reveals how out of touch we have become with the soldiers of 1914-18. They simply would not recognize the way their generation is depicted on TV or in Pat Barker's novels.

Laced with dry humour, this will overturn everything you thought you knew about Britain and the First World War. Gordon Corrigan reveals how the British embraced technology, and developed the weapons and tactics to break through the enemy trenches.

Print length

432 pages
Language

English
Sticky notes

On Kindle Scribe
Publisher

Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Publication date

December 20, 2012
File size

3202 KB
Page Flip

Enabled
Word Wise

Enabled
Enhanced typesetting

Enabled
See all details

Gordon Corrigan
87
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $3.99
Gordon Corrigan
133
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $3.99
Gordon Corrigan
8
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $3.99
Gordon Corrigan
121
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $3.99
Gordon Corrigan
41
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $3.99
Gary Sheffield
396
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $3.99

Editorial Reviews

Review

'... convincing and highly revisionist... Myth after myth about [the generals] collapses before Corrigan's minute and wittily presented research... Corrigan peppers his book with statements that read outrageously at first but which he then backs up with devastating statistics ... This punchy book does not go over the top.' -- Andrew Roberts MAIL ON SUNDAY 28/9/03 'This fine revisionist book on the First World War amounts to a frontal bayonet charge on a well dug-in enemy, with no quarter given. The title 'Mud[...etc]' gives a hefty hint as to the book's content: a highly effective rebuttal of the "Lions led by Donkeys" school... Corrigan is a combative, persuasive and very readable historian.' -- Gary Sheffield THE INDEPENDENT (2/8/03) 'Gordon Corrigan has set out to expose this popular view, or myth as quite simply not in accordance with fact. To this task he brings a mass of evidence coupled with an ability to write clear, crisp, highly readable narrative... MUD(etc) should be in every school library - and studied with an open mind by all who teach the young about the Great War.' -- Correlli Barnett DAILY MAIL (18/7/03) '..this is no mere hagiography or turgid, blow-by-blow account of battles which, frankly often seem repetitive. Corrigan's book is a fascinating read because he sets it up as a trial by jury. Each chapter (and they can be read in what order you please) takes a specific 'myth' of the Great War and subjects it to a test of evidence. The result - even if you want to disagree with Corrigan's overall thesis - is gripping.' -- George Kerevan THE SCOTSMAN (19/7/03) 'Corrigan has fashioned a pugnatious case, stripping away many of the misunderstandings and falsehoods that have settled as if they were established truths in the popular imagination.' -- Graham Stewart THE SPECTATOR (9/8/03) 'The generals were all incompetent buffoons who didn't care who they sent to their death. That's the accepted view of British leadership in WW1. Not so says Gordon Corrigan in his revisionist account of the war.' LIVING HISTORY (Aug 03) 'Any historical novelist planning a novel about the First World War who doesn't buy this book deserves Field Punishment Number One.' HISTORICAL NOVELS REVIEW (AUG 03) 'It is hard to quarrel with arguments so clearly and rationally presented, arguments well sustained by detailed evidence from official records... The seriousness of the author's theme is, however, pleasantly lightened by shafts of humour and the inclusion of amusing asides... This readable yet scholarly book will provoke discussion but may have come too late to change received opinion of the Great War.' SOLDIER (lead review) Aug 03 'Corrigan's depiction of the army grounded in his own experience. A fascinating and refreshingly different book.' THE ARMOURER (Sept/Oct 03) 'This is a welcome addition to the revisionist view of World War One. Corrigan tackles head on the myths propounded by author such as Alan Clark... he produces a more balance view of the events of 1914-18... A good argumentative tone is struck thoughout the book.' MILITARY ILLUSTRATED (Oct 2003) 'Gordon Corrigan's Mud Blood and Poppycock offers a witty and revisionist history of Britain and the Great War.' HISTORY TODAY (November 03)

About the Author

The author was commissioned from the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst in 1962 and retired from the Brigade of Gurkhas in 1998. A member of the British Commission for Military History and a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, he speaks fluent Nepali and is a keen horseman.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00GU32XSS
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Weidenfeld & Nicolson (December 20, 2012)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ December 20, 2012
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 3202 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 432 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #739,902 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #487 in World War I History (Kindle Store)
- #1,369 in World War I History (Books)
- #1,409 in History of United Kingdom

Customer Reviews:
437 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Gordon Corrigan

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Major JGH Corrigan MBE FRHistS. Gordon Corrigan was commissioned from the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in 1962 and was an officer of the permanent cadre of the Royal Gurkha Rifles before leaving the army in 1998. He served mainly in the Far East but also in Cyprus, Berlin, Belize and N Ireland. He was awarded the MBE (military) for setting up and commanding the first Brigade of Gurkhas depot in the UK. He is now a professional historian. He is the author of Sepoys in the Trenches, The Indian Corps on the Western Front 1914 – 1915, (Spellmount, 1999); Wellington, A Military Life, (Hambledon & London, 2001); Mud, Blood and Poppycock: Britain and the First World War (Cassell & Co, 2003); Loos 1915, The Unwanted Battle (Spellmount, 2006); Blood, Sweat and Arrogance – And The Myths of Churchill’s War (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006); The Second World War – A Military History (Atlantic Books 2010); A Great and Glorious Adventure – A Military History of the Hundred Years War (Atlantic Books 2013) and Waterloo – A New History of the Battle and its Armies (Atlantic Books 2014) and numerous E books. His television appearances include The Gurkhas, Napoleon’s Waterloo and Battlefield Detectives, and so far he has presented five series on various aspects of military history. He has conducted military history study tours in Europe, N Africa and Asia and is a regular lecturer on cruises with Noble Caledonia and on rail journeys in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and China with Golden Eagle Luxury Trains. He has lectured in the United States and Canada and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, an Honorary Research Fellow of the Universities of Birmingham and Kent, a Member of the British Commission for Military History, a Freeman of the City of London and a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Farriers. His interests include horses, long lunches and the Times crossword, not necessarily in that order. He is married to Imogen, herself an Anglo-Saxon and Medieval historian, and lives in Kent.

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5

437 global ratings

5 star		58%
4 star		29%
3 star		9%
2 star		1%
1 star		2%

How customer reviews and ratings work

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

WryGuy2

A good read and well argued

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 16, 2011

Verified Purchase

"Mud, Blood and Poppycock: This Will Overturn Everything You Thought You Knew about Britain and The First World War", by retired British officer Gordon Corrigan is a book that attempts to dispel many of the popularly held "myths" about World War I.

Among the "myths" Mr Corrigan tackles is that Great Britain lost an entire generation to the war; that calvary was an oversized, worthless fighting component in WW I; that British generals were generally incompetent and uncaring; and that the United States' contribution to the war was insignificant.

All of his arguments are well reasoned and supported, and often contains some sly British humor. I agreed with most (although not all) of his points and conclusions. For example, Mr Coorigan debunks the lost generation myth by pointing out that Great Britain's losses for the war were significantly less than France and Germany's, but the impact on the British psyche was proportionately greater because of the facts that: 1) Great Britain was not historically used to raising extremely large armies and sending them off to war, unlike their allies and foes on the continent and seeing large casualty lists, and 2) because of recruitment of "Pals" battalions, where people from one area or trade signed up and served in the same unit. If a Pals battalion took heavy casualties, the impact was devastating on the area they came from, and would be widely publicized, even though most areas took far, far fewer casualties.

The author has clear favorites (Field Marshal Douglas Haig) and culprits (Prime Minister David Lloyd George), and his tone can be a bit overbearing or self-righteous at times. For example on the chapter dealing with the British military justice system in the war (a chapter whose conclusions I agree with), he has the following footnote, referring to himself and his experience on court martials: "This author, as a member, prosecuted or defended at over a hundred courts martial of British soldiers over a period of 35 years, ranging from murder to fraud. He has not infrequently known the guilty to be acquitted, but never an innocent man to be convicted." First, I would certainly hope that he would not have voted for an innocent man to be convicted. Second, since many charges come down to one man's word against another's, I would suspect that, rarely, innocent men could well have been convicted, as occasionally happens in courtrooms throughout the world, the author's strong belief notwithstanding.

I find this book to be a similar to John Mosier's book, "Myths of the Great War", although Mr Corrigan's book deals primarily with the British, and is a bit less controversial. All said, though, I think the author successfully explains and discredits most the "myth's" he tackles, and I feel that the book is well worth reading by anyone who wants to hear the other side of the story regarding how World War I was fought on the British side.

5 people found this helpful

Helpful

Maskman

Thorough and readible: A treasure!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 1, 2004

Verified Purchase

Gordon Corrigan has produced a real wonder here: A history book that is thorough, readible, and even humorous! Corrigan's intent is to debunk myths and explain the realities of the First World War in terms that make sense to an audience that has little frame of reference to the realities of the early Twentieth Century. Drawing only the British experience, both from a desire to keep the material to an accessable scope, and from familiarity (Corrigan is former Royal Army), he has accomplished exactly that, and more. This is not a typical chronology of war, nor a list of battle honors, nor is it a narative in the usual sense. Corrigan sticks resolutely to his purpose, and only gives specific battle details when they serve the purpose of elucidating the conditions that existed, despite the undoubtably intense temptation to wander further afield.
By approaching his material myth-by-myth, Corrigan has simplified his task, and made his lessons more accessable to the reader, even if it means that he somtimes retraces his own footsteps. This choice lends Mud, Blood, and Poppycock to use as a textbook as well as a volume of general history. You needn't read the entire book to gain value from it, you only need open to any specific chapter, and Corrigan's entire argument for debunking that particular myth is layed out for you in it's entirety, with no need to refer elsewhere. If, however, you *do* wish to refer elsewhere, there is a rather complete list of end notes to each chapter. This is one of the few items about which I might have any quibble: While the end notes are more useful if you're going to follow-up with additional research, a casual reader would find footnotes easier to read, without needing to flip back and forth to the end of the chapter.
Corrigan isn't infallible, and he does make the occasional error, such as asserting that no army can plan for the 'next' war, but instead *must* plan for future wars by learning from past wars, and that no army has the resources to plan speculatively for the future. This is clearly in error: While any responsible army must indeed study the lessons of past wars, a truly responsible army also studies future trends. Now I realize that that particular doctrine is relatively new, asserting that it doesn't exist at all is a mistake. He does give himself an 'out' by noting that armies of the day had little budgetary resource for studying war from a speculative approach. Still, Corrigan would've done better to explain that doctrine changes, rather than deny its existance. This is one of the very few failed analysis I can find in the entire book, and is actually a pretty minor one (as are the few other such). On the other hand, Corrigan's dry wit permiates the book, making me smile at the oddest moments. One comment that simply cracked me up was a reference to the shape of mortar pits resulting in an increase in constipation. I won't give away the entire joke (nor any of the others scatered throughout), so you'll just have to buy or borrow the book and find it yourself. In fact, I STRONGLY recommend that you do so... Not only is the wit entertaining, but the book is also a wonderful work of historical scholarship. Corrigan's conclusions are solidly based in carefully documented research, and appear to be without ulterior motivation, further reenforcing the value of this work.
READ it!

8 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

RLM

Reality gets a look in, at last.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 28, 2019

Verified Purchase

Reading through some of the less flattering reviews of this book it is very clear that many people will not, under any circumstances, have their minds changed about WW1. This very well written work deals with the reality of a time when the industrial revolution had given us the power to kill each other on a scale never known before. It takes a long time to properly train a soldier and that time just wasn't available. The British Army had to absorb, train and deploy hundreds of thousands of young men and they had to do it very quickly or the war would have been lost. In that situation newly created formations could never have been handled as expertly as we have wished and the author's main point, that all concerned did very well in the circumstances, is more than reasonable. WW1 was followed by the great depression and it is hardly surprising that many wondered if it had been worth all the sacrifice. WW2 was followed by the optimistic 50s and the swinging 60s and we regard that conflict as being worthwhile and generally well managed by comparison. My father, who volunteered in 1939, was in the army until 1946 and fought all four of his country's enemies, disagreed as he encountered expensive incompetence at every level but he accepted that warfare would always have an element of chaos. The author has produced a very worthwhile book.

15 people found this helpful

JRF

A different look at the Great War

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 29, 2019

Verified Purchase

This book was a real eye-opener for me, overturning many of the common tropes associated with the Great War. For example, troops living in squalid conditions before being ordered to almost certain death by incompetent and uncaring generals who were safe and comfortable well behind the lines, and summarily executed by firing squad if they showed any signs of what is now called combat stress.

There is of course no getting away that appalling slaughter did take place, perhaps most notably the first day of the Somme and its 20,000 British and Empire dead. What the author (a former army officer) shows authoritatively and clearly is that while mistakes and errors of judgement were certainly made in this new (to everyone) mode of war, lessons were learned and the sacrifices were not in vain.

As well as disposing of the popular myths very effectively, the author highlights some less well known aspects of the war. For example, although the Germans started the use of gas (of various kinds), the British became masters of both its use and defence against it (but were careful not to be the first to use a new kind before the Germans did, to avoid accusations of escalating matters).

Very highly recommended for anyone wanting a depiction of this terrible conflict with the myths stripped away.

11 people found this helpful

William Sellwood

Rehabilitation of the British & Empire military in WWI

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 14, 2019

Verified Purchase

Douglas Haig was not a blinkered blunderer. Lloyd George, like the Fuhrer in the later continuation, was not a military genius, which did not stop him from interfering - and blackguarding - his military chiefs. The men were cared for as well as the situation allowed, with remarkably regular withdrawals to rest areas and home leave. They remained, despite the bad conditions and lethal weaponry, remarkably healthy. The Germans were not so well served.
Corrigan makes well the point that Generals can only fight the previous war, being not blessed with a crystal ball, but have to learn and adapt to their present circumstances. This the British army - lead by Haig but subordinate so often to the French interest - certainly did. One trusts that the calumnies levelled at Haig and his associates will disappear.
The book is written by a senior military man, the sort I think who has a twinkle in his eye. He has examined documents from ordinary soldiers, about ordinary soldiers, about the horses they relied on for muscle-power and transport, about the General Staff, who were not the chinless nincompoops of "Oh What a Lovely War", about the public school officers who led. Still, details were included where needed in what is necessarily a broad brush approach. Excellent book.

7 people found this helpful

Lindsey Brooks

Disappointing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 28, 2019

Verified Purchase

I had hoped for some new insights into the conduct of the First World War from this book but was disappointed. There is nothing new here, merely a re-statement of the "Revisionist" viewpoint on the war with a lot of selective examples to support the authors' contentions and omissions of some that don't, laced with some rather sarcastic attempts at humour and all backed by an arrogant and condescending opinion that only soldiers can understand war, so no one else should ever question whether they are going about it the right way. The author shows little appreciation or understanding of the political, diplomatic and economic realities and imperatives involved during the war and thus has a tendency to ignore or oversimplify them. While I agree to some extent with his underlying argument (though not to the same extreme), I was being taught much the same perspective on World War One in my history lessons at school back in the 1970's, but in a better balanced and much more entertaining way, by a man who really knew what he was talking about.

5 people found this helpful

Peter Ward

It's good to check the myths. They may well be wrong.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 7, 2019

Verified Purchase

Very readable by an ex-serving soldier who is an acknowledged historian. If we are in love with with the idea that the Great War was needless, that so were all the casualties and that the generals were callous incompetent butchers who kept away from all the mess, we may find it difficult to face the evidence that the author -- in company with many other historians now -- puts forward. Sadly believing the myths stops us learning the real lessons that need learning. Well worth reading.

Buying Options

Buy for others

Buying and sending eBooks to others

Follow the Author

Mud, Blood and Poppycock: Britain and the Great War (Cassell Military Paperbacks) Kindle Edition

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Editorial Reviews

Review

About the Author

Product details

Videos

About the author

Gordon Corrigan

Customer reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries