LETTERS FROM TWO WORLD WARS. A Social History of English Attitudes to War 1914-45.

Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: Alan Sutton. Very Good/Very Good. 1993. First Edition. Hard Cover. Lge 8vo 0750902949 Dust jacket complete, unclipped. Brown cloth with bright gilt titling on spine. No inscription. 228 pages clean and tight. This collection of extracts forms a vivid and poignant history of the experience of modern warfare. Divided into two parts, on the First and Second World Wars, the letters have been drawn together to provide a continuous narrative of events from the fresh perspective of those who were intimately caught up in them. In addition, these letters, a large number of which come from ordinary soldiers and civilians, chronicle a nation's response to war. Common emotions and attitudes are revealed, both towards the personal experience of war and the wider question of the morality of war in general. `It's a bloody thing, half the youth of Europe blown through pain to nothingness,' wrote Rupert Brooke in 1914; `The world has gone truly mad,' wrote a private to his mother expressing the same incomprehension nearly thirty years later. Recurring themes include the spirit of camaraderie and selflessness, whether in the trenches of Flanders during the First World War or in the London suburbs during the Blitz of 1940-1: comradeship, as one private wrote from his squalid trench, was `the only clean thing borne of this life of cruelty and filth. It grows in purity from the very obscenity of its surroundings.' Humour and a determination to carry on life as normal is also prevalent: a civilian caught in his bath during an air raid in Liverpool relates, `I arose, put on my tin hat, and returned to my bath, a sweet sight, but one must wash.' Letters From Two World Wars has been compiled from private as well as published sources, providing a new and illuminating firsthand account of conflict in the twentieth century. .