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More than eight million young men perished during the First World War—a staggering figure. The natural reaction to such a great loss of humanity was to forget the individuals and recast the conflict into one of faceless armies and battles commemorated in stone and metal monuments. War Letters of Fallen Englishmen was published following the war in order to remind the living of those who were lost in the name of the British crown—brothers, husbands, fathers, sons. This collection provides, in the very words of those who participated and died in combat, the closest approximation possible to the experience of war. Carefully selected from thousands of letters, those in this collection are poignant, powerful, and graphic and were chosen for their depth of perception, the intensity of their descriptions, and their messages to future generations. This edition contains a new foreword by the distinguished World War I historian Jay Winter.
While cricket remains a national game today, at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, it was THE national game. Cricketers were the sporting icons of their age, as footballers are today. When the call to arms was made in 1914 and the years of war that followed, it was answered in droves by young men including Test and First Class cricketers. The machine guns and gas of the Western Front and other theatres did not discriminate and many hundreds of these star performers perished alongside their lesser known comrades. The author has researched the lives and deaths of over 200 top class cricketers who made the ultimate sacrifice. He includes not just British players but those from the Empire. The enormity of the horror and wholesale loss of life during The Great War is well demonstrated by these moving biographies.
Until now Hugh Butterworth was just one of the millions of lost soldiers of the Great War, and the extraordinary letters he sent home from the Western Front have been forgotten. But after more than ninety years of obscurity, these letters, which describe his experience of war in poignant detail, have been rediscovered, and they are published here in full. They are a moving, intensely personal and beautifully written record by an articulate and observant man who witnessed at first hand one of the darkest episodes in European history. In civilian life Butterworth was a dedicated and much-loved schoolmaster and a gifted cricketer, who served with distinction as an officer in the Rifle Brigade f...
A tremendous piece of research, conducted over ten years, in which are listed, in alphabetical order, the names of over 60,000 officers of the British Empire who died during the Great War, including nurses and female aid workers. Based on the CWGC Registers, the information provided includes not only that shown in ‘Officers Died' but also the place of burial or commemoration. The alphabetical listing means that looking up a name does not require prior knowledge of the regiment (as in ‘Officers Died') though this information is given, as well as cross-reference to the relevant page number in ‘Officers Died’.
Readers of the 1917 Wisden Cricketers' Almanack were advised by the editor, Sydney Pardon: “Its chief feature is a record of the cricketers who have fallen in the War – the Roll of Honour, so far as the national game is concerned.” By the time the conflict was over, Wisden had carried almost 1,800 obituaries. Test players like Colin Blythe were far outnumbered by men with a lesser claim to fame, as schoolboy cricketers were sent out to the battlefields fresh from their playing fields. Amid the carnage and confusion, errors inevitably crept in: names were wrong and there were cases of mistaken identity. Some mistakes have lain buried in Wisden's pages for a century: as this book disclos...
This is the first full-length study of the life and music of the composer George Butterworth (1885-1916), whose career was cut short by a sniper's bullet at the Somme. He was perhaps the finest of the many outstanding musical talents whose lives were claimed by the First World War. Michael Barlow traces Butterworth's brief life: from preparatory school through Eton and Oxford, a teaching post at Radley, study at the Royal College of Music, a period as a music critic for The Times, and his enlisting in August 1914 which, two years later, led to his heroic death at the Somme. All of Butterworth's surviving compositions are discussed, and important chapters examine his Housman settings and his friendship with Vaughan Williams. Also chronicled for the first time are his extensive activities as a folksong and dance collector.