Sometimes poor quality-control can be as lethal as bad design – this was certainly true in the case of HMS Glatton.
WWI
War Athletes: Wyndham Halswelle
Christopher Warner on sporting figures in conflict
War Athletes: Clem Lewis
In his poem ‘Dulce et decorum est’, Wilfred Owen reflects upon his experiences in World War One to capture the horrors of trench warfare. The haunting imagery describes an especially chilling glimpse of those afflicted by poison gas – men such as Welsh rugby star ‘Clem’ Lewis.
BEHIND THE IMAGE: Wartime Christmas
As they enjoy their sparse meal at Beaumont-Hamel on 25 December 1916, the men seem indifferent to a fellow soldier’s grave just inches away.
REVIEW – Allenby: making the modern Middle East
Edward Henry Hynman Allenby was born in 1861 in Brackenhurst, Nottinghamshire in comfortable circumstances – a Victorian squire perhaps destined to help govern the British Empire on behalf of the Queen-Empress.
REVIEW – Lawrence of Arabia on War: the campaign in the desert, 1916-18
Rob Johnson’s achievement in this book is to take Colonel T E Lawrence seriously as a theoretician and practitioner of war, and to produce the most comprehensive assessment of his contribution ever published.
REVIEW – Missing: the need for closure after the Great War
In the post-war years, they were remembered on monuments and in cemeteries, ‘made present’ by absence, by anonymity rather than by naming. The bereaved had no bodies over which to grieve, only the landscape itself and a few souvenirs sent home from the front.
‘Enormous’ WWI bunker system uncovered in Flanders
The bunker, under the village of Wijtschate in Flanders, is more than 20 feet underground and is believed to have accommodated up to 300 troops.
German U-boat surveyed over a century after wartime sinking
The U-boat went down with all hands and has rested on the seabed, some 37km (23 miles) off the coast of Yorkshire, ever since.
REVIEW – Hunger: how food shaped the course of the First World War
Hunger is breezy in its approach, but the subject Blom discusses is a serious one. Indeed, the spectre of food – or lack of it – haunts the First World War.
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