Год издания: 2001

Язык: английский

Страниц: 1248

Формат: PDF

Размер: 82 Mb
This book was commissioned, far too long ago, by Oxford University Press, as a one-volume replacement for C. R. M. F. Cruttwell's A history of the Great War; first published in 1934 and regularly reprinted thereafter. One of its admirers, Tim Travers, has described his book and Liddell Hart's The real war (1930) as the founding volumes of what he calls the 'objective tradition in British military history. Cruttwell did indeed achieve a remarkable degree of detachment. Nonetheless, both Cruttwell and Liddell Hart were describing events in which they themselves had participated, albeit at a comparatively humble level, and whose consequences continued to affect them for the rest of their lives. Having been born after the Second World War, I fancied that I belonged to an age-group that could at last claim some distance from the events of 1914-18. The films and fiction of my childhood drew their inspiration from the deeds of my father's generation, not of my grandfather's. As the twentieth century closed, few who fought on the Somme or at Ypres still survived. If part of a historian's function is to put the events of the past into perspective, the ability to do so should increase year on year.