a world undone the story of the great war

On Meyer’s vast canvas he displays the historical forces and the human leaders who took Europe and the world into the fiery furnace.įor Americans who are curious but only vaguely cognizant, Meyer’s sketches of the British Cabinet, the Russian Empire, the aging Austro-Hungarian Empire, the leaders of Prussia with their newly minted swagger, are lifelike and plausible. Hanson’s picture is a narrow one of unspeakable suffering. So at the end of the war the monuments in each belligerent nation to the unknown became their cenotaphs. Hanson uses three soldiers - one Briton, Alec Reader one German, Paul Hub one American, George Seibold - to tell his tale, drawing on their letters and the memories of families and friends.

What yesterday was unthinkable in the fighters’ constricted world today is a fact of life.

The reader comes to understand that we are coming to take the suffering, the deaths of millions, for granted. In “Unknown Soldiers,” Hanson, a writer who lives in England’s Yorkshire Dales, piles horror upon horror. Neither author is an academic historian, but Meyer writes clearly and comprehensively about the complex four-year period as does Hanson on his share of it. Meyer is a skillful guide for readers, like many Americans, who are not steeped in the broad sweep or intricate details of the storm of fire. “Unknown Soldiers” by Neil Hanson takes a merciless look at the unthinkable conditions of the static trench war in Northern France and Belgium, which gave a new, bottomless and hollow tone to the ancient phrase “human folly.” And the reaction - appalled, barely comprehending - to the millions of harmless and ordinary people who were consumed in that war, as in a field of grass on fire, became part of the common contemporary experience before the full extent of this vast and malevolent disaster could be felt. New empires, their bases shaken, had to rise - and fall. Men and women had to write books about it, create paintings of it, address it with various forms of art until it could come slowly and haltingly into view. It took years before the surviving world more fully integrated into its basic understanding of reality the terrible lessons of those unspeakable four years. The enormous size of the great blow that European civilization dealt to itself was not at first apparent to everyone, so annihilating was the explosion. The Story of the Missing of the First World WarĪS stealthy and sure as the dust that permeated the Manhattan air from the pulverization of the World Trade Center in 2001, as lasting in human affairs as the radiation from Hiroshima, the telltale trails of the Great War - World War I - still haunt the consciousness of modern man.

A world undone the story of the great war