The Sorrow And The Pity

The Sorrow and the Pity

The Pity of War

From a bestselling historian, a daringly revisionist history of World War I The Pity of War makes a simple and provocative argument: the human atrocity known as the Great War was entirely England's fault. According to Niall Ferguson, England entered into war based on naive assumptions of German aims, thereby transforming a Continental conflict into a world war, which it then badly mishandled, necessitating American involvement. The war was not inevitable, Ferguson argues, but rather was the result of the mistaken decisions of individuals who would later claim to have been in the grip of huge impersonal forces. That the war was wicked, horrific, and inhuman is memorialized in part by the poetry of men like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, but also by cold statistics. Indeed, more British soldiers were killed in the first day of the Battle of the Somme than Americans in the Vietnam War. And yet, as Ferguson writes, while the war itself was a disastrous folly, the great majority of men who fought it did so with little reluctance and with some enthusiasm. For anyone wanting to understand why wars are fought, why men are willing to fight them and why the world is as it is today, there is no sharper or more stimulating guide than Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War.

Fighters in the Shadows

The story of the French Resistance is central to French identity, but it is a story built on myths. 'La Résistance française' was not simply a national effort to free the country from German occupation, but a wider struggle, filled with conflicts and division. It included Spanish republicans, Italian and even German anti-Nazis. The defence against the Holocaust brought in Jewish resisters and Christian rescuers. It involved a civil war for the French Empire in Africa and the Near East. The movement itself was split between those on the far right and the far left, fighting for very different visions of the world. Robert Gildea returns to the testimonies of the resisters themselves, asking who they were, what they believed in and what compelled them to take the terrible risks they did. He brings to the fore the woman resisters, who history neglected. By looking again at the constructions and interplay of the myths surrounding the resistance, Gildea builds a vivid, gripping and entirely new account of one of the most compelling narratives of the Second World War.