Twice in the 20th century, a British Expeditionary Force has taken the field in Northern France to fight beside the French Army. Twice, the Expeditionary Force has survived threat of complete destruction. But the differences between the Retreat to Dunkirk in 1940 and the first encounter with the enemy at Mons in 1914 are significant.

At 9.30am on 21 March 1918, the last great battle of World War I commenced when three german armies struck a massive blow against the weak divisions of the British Third and Fifth armies. It was the first day of what the Germans called the kaiserschlact (the kaiser's battle), the series of attacks that were planned to break the deadlock on the western front, knock the British Army out of the war and finally bring victory to imperial Germany. Through first-hand accounts by survivors of the battle, Martin Middlebrook discusses the battle.

The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.' Sir Edward Grey, British foreign secretary, 3 August 1914. Drawing on a wealth of material from the Guardian archives 'When the lamps went out' presents a surprising, immediate, sometimes bleakly humorous, sometimes horrifying insight into life during the Great War. We see Boy Scouts patrolling the British coasts, David Lloyd George addressing women war workers, Charlie Chaplin impersonators on the Euston Road and Vesta Tilley at the Ardwick Empire. We see suffragist nurses on the Western Front and Bolsheviks in Glasgow, Pathan soldiers in Flanders and Anglo-Japanese armies in China. Small countries are saved - and aliens persecuted. New technologies - from picture houses to the first reports of gas weapons - are reported upon, as well as movie stars and John Buchan's bestsellers. The bloody battles, defeats, and victories are all here but this book focuses on the women, men and children who lived, loved, defied, perished and survived in the war to end all wars.

Het leven van soldaat en burger in Vlaanderen tijdens de Eerste Wereldoorlog.

This comprehensive dictionary of one of the world's greatest conflicts contains over 1,200 entries, combining facts, narrative and analysis, and covers all aspects of history's first global conflict such as: - Actions from Achi Baba to the Zeebrugge raid, from the Falkland Islands to the Masurian Lakes. - Campaigns from the Arab Revolt to Verdun, from East Africa to East Prussia. - Theatres of war from the Baltic to the Balkans, from Africa to the Arctic. - Fighters and commanders from Abdullah ibn Hussein to Sergeant York via Pershing, Pilsudski and Petain. - Forces from the Romanian Navy to the Royal Flying Corps, from the South Persia Rifles to the Serbian Army. - Weapons and equipment from balloons and bayonets to Battleships and Big Bertha. - Tactics and strategies from submarine warfare to sniping, from the Schlieffen Plan to strategic bombing, breakthrough and blockade - Politics and diplomacy from Willhelm II to Woodrow Wilson, from the July Crisis to Versailles - Home Fronts from the Armenian Massacres to the Amiens - Dispatch, from Albania to Australia, from women to war socialism.

De la révolution d'octobre 1917 aux derniers événements de 1922, la guerre civile russe a fait des ravages : des millions de morts, épidémies de typhus et de choléra, famine et misère, terreur et déportation des populations. On connaît surtout la lutte des rouges contre les Russes blancs. Mais une troisième force issue du monde rural émergeait. Bandes de pillards ou années de partisans, paysans insurgés, les "verts" se sont battus contre les blancs et les rouges : ils ont refusé la circonscription, la réquisition de récoltes ou se déclaraient pour la liberté du commerce et contre la dictature de la ville, rejetant les "communes", anarchistes, socialistes révolutionnaires ou ultra-nationalistes. Leur histoire est ici revisitée à la lumière de documents russes, souvent inédits en français, traduits par Jean-Jacques Marie. Ces témoignages sont rares. Ils ont disparu ou ont été qualifiés de "bandits" ; Staline les a gommés de l'histoire pour réduire la révolution à un conflit manichéen. L'historiographie, quant à elle, leur réserve une place presque inexistante. Le récit des événements - ponctué de ces textes et de témoignages forts - fait apparaître des acteurs mythiques : Makhno et son armée, le général Wrangel, les révoltés de Cronstadt, le baron fou Ungern ou le chef partisan Kotovski...

The author explores, in both fiction and non-fiction, the ways in which literature shapes our perception of war. The book contains critical essays on English and American writings about the wars of this century and short stories which render the experience of war from a feminist perspective.

In 1914 at the beginning of the war, Britain's maritime supremacy had remained unchallenged for around 100 years. Many expected another Battle of Trafalgar but advances in technology saw a very different kind of warfare with the widespread use of mines, submarines and torpedoes. This book examines the events that led to war and the naval arms race between Britain and Germany. It traces the events of the war at sea looking at the major battles as well as the effects of unrestricted submarine warfare and the sinking of the Lusitania and profiles key figures of the war.

This book is the only comprehensive history of the total experience of the Russian Civil War. Focusing on the key Volga city of Saratov and the surrounding region, Donald Raleigh is the first historian to fully show how the experience of civil war embedded itself into both the people's and the state's outlook and behavior. He demonstrates how and why the programs and ideals that had propelled the Bolsheviks into power were so quickly lost and the repressive Soviet party-state was born. Experiencing Russia's Civil War is based on exhaustive use of previously classified local and central archives. It is also bold and ambitious in its breadth of thematic coverage, dealing with all aspects of the war experience from institutional evolution and demographics to survival strategies. Complicating our understanding of this formative period, Raleigh provides compelling evidence that many features of the Soviet system that we associate with the Stalin era were already adumbrated and practiced by the early 1920s, as Bolshevism became closed to real alternatives. Raleigh interprets this as the consequence of a complex dynamic shaped by Russia's political tradition and culture, Bolshevik ideology, and dire political, economic, and military crises starting with World War I and strongly reinforced by the indelible, mythologized experience of survival in the Civil War. Fluidly written, replete with new information, and always engaged with important questions, this is history finely wrought.