The Great War and Italy, 12 Nov 2008
I fully agree with what the other reviewers have said about this book, which is a marvellous overview of the Italian front during 1915-18. Not only a military history - though it is that, of course, but also a political and cultural history. And not only of the Italian experience, even though that is the main focus, but also of "the other side", the multi-national Habsburg empire. The outnumbered Austrian army (with bosnians and croats strongly represented here) fought well on the Italian front, in contrast with other theatres.

The author gives a balanced, beautifully written, exciting and very moving account of this not-so-known part of the Great War: how Italy tumbled into it 1915, the desperate and futile fighting along the Isonzo, the debacle of Caporetto, the recovery and the peace settlement eventually leading to the establishment of fascism. The author is very much inside his material, and the book has a very strong sense both of time and of place. At times it reminded me of Alistair Horne or John Keegan. Strongly recommended, and not only to military history buffs!

A fascinating history of a forgotten front, 10 Oct 2008
For those of you who have read Hemingway's Farewell to Arms, you would be aware that the a war was fought on the Italian Front during the Great War. However, because so much is written about the Western Front, Gallipoli and even the Eastern Front, it is easy to forget this part of the war. Thompson, however, has brought together a book which seeks to redress this balance - and in my opinion it does so beautifully.

Unlike many dry history books, Thompson paints a picture of suffering, confusion and unbelievable bravery from a front which claimed millions of lives over the course of the War. Many of us know how the advent of technology brought about countless deaths on the Western Front, but countless more were lost on the Italian front due to the adherence to out of date tactics and ideas, and a futile attempt to gain land towards which many of the soliders fighting felt very little.

The book doesn't just provide names and dates. It also explores the politics, poetry and society which emerged out of the fray. It is easy to read, well researched and engaging without alienating the reader in any way. For a comprehensive understanding of an under represented period of history, you couldn't do much better.

Learn about what you were not told, 15 Sep 2008
In the UK, were are taught about the First World War. We are taught about the trenches, the slaughter and the waste. Mostly, were are taught about the British and Commonwealth soldier's experience on the Western Front. 'The White War' teaches the English reader about what they are not taught - the Italian/Austrian front.

After declaring war on Austria-Hungary for dubious territorial reasons, Italy sent hundreds of thousands of men to their deaths on the rocks of Carso near Trieste. Men, indeed, who were most likely to be peasants from places such as Calabria in the south, who barely had the vaguest idea of 'Italy' or what they were ordered to fight for. Thomson details the grim experience and grimmer treatment of these men from their superiors. The Commander-in-Chief of the Italian Army, Luigi Cadorna, even practiced the Roman-era punishment of decimation for retreating or mutineering troops. Nor was Cadorna a particularly successful commander, often conceding vast losses for pointless gains soon lost. He was replaced, eventually, but too late to save the Italian effort.

Thompson shows that this war, though being triggered by that infamous shooting in Sarajevo, was propagandised as a continuation of the Risorgimento (the 19th Century unification of Italy), even though Italy had only a partial claim to Trieste, and very little to the majority-Germanophone South Tyrol.

The writer does all this well, and even the digressions into Italian war literature (no doubt inserted as a counterpoint to Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, 'Dulce et Decorum est' school) are fairly tolerable - though the well-aimed kicking given to D'Annunzio is amusing. Faint praise is not what this book deserves, however. It deserves to be read, and read especially by those whose sole exposure to WW1 history is the Western Front. They will learn something, even if it may be different to the lessons of Ypres and the Somme.

The Italian Great War and the roots of Facism , 07 Sep 2008
I have just finished reading "The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1918 by Mark Thompson which is a study of a 1st World War front that is often forgotten but where Italy lost 689, 000 solders( Britain lost 662,000 + 140, 000 reported as missing). That we tend to associate the infantry war with the plains of Flanders and Russia reveals the common myth as this part of the struggle was mountain warfare albeit also with trenches.

The conduct of the war exposed the weak hold of liberal structures and politics on the Italian population and the defeat of victory quickly let in 20 years of fascist government. The collapse of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, and take over the successor national states by the communists has made it difficult to get a sense of what really went on: Italians and other non Germanic nationals did fight for the Emperor, many of the feature of Fascism (a puppet parliament, a muzzled press, a romantic nationalism, a militarised state) had their roots on the political conduct of the war.

What made the book an interesting read is that Mark Thomas does more then hold to the historical arc of the events from the turmoil in Italy leading to its ripping up of a long standing agreement to be allied with the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary ( It took on a secret 30 pieces of silver territorial deal with the Allies). And ending with the desperate mad dash to occupy land vacated by the collapsing Hapsburg armies-it made the most of the cock-up where as the armistice agreement ended the war one day earlier for Austria-Hungary. What he does is switch the narrative in cinematographic terms from wide/long shots, medium to close-ups as the narrative unfolds. So we take the long view at the ideas affecting Italian practice in politics, art and military such as Romantic Vitalism or the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche. Or the impact of how Italian unification actually unfolded. We then have medium shot accounts of how individual battles unfolded from both of the combatant's perspectives or the power struggles and conduct at military and political levels. And finally the close-up accounts of artists, reporters, and survivors that expose the official accounts or help to explain the mindset of the elites.

It was this rounded and varied explanation that held my attention, as I tended to wander in the step by step of accounts of the battles(my attention span rather then the quality of the writing, although these are necessary to understand the appalling and arrogant way that the soldiers were used. For example, Military discipline justified the ancient Roman practice of randomly killing 1 in 10 solders if the platoon had infringed any rules which could be just turning up late from leave. The fact, with no interest shown in the reason was enough for summary execution. This is because the Italian army leadership took the most extreme view of all the armed forces in the 1st world war that the solders were only cannon fodder to do the will of the supreme commander. An attitude they paid for when Austria-Hungarian forces with direct support of Germany developed a forerunner of Blitzkrieg and took back all the territory fought over in the past three years and swept down to the pre 1866 national boundaries.

The resource imbalance between the foes and the deteriorating political realties for the Central Powers meant that this could not be turned into a knock-out blow. But with Russia out and embroiled in Revolution and no significant Allied victories, the collapse of the Central Powers as Germany struggled to avoid the fate of Austria- Hungary created the German Nazis myth of a stab in the back. It also confirmed the lack of democratic populist support for liberalism.

So why should you read this book? Well it gives you a clear account of one part of the wider First World War front that is only now becoming clear and even possible to study. (Attempts to clear the names of those summarily executed is still politically sensitive in Italy.) But a more important reason is that it offers insights into the conduct of events now. If History has anything to teach, its that we the ordinary people wont get a true picture what our masters have been doing in our name until we are pushing up the daisies.. In knowing what was going on behind closed doors then, we can question what the media, cultural elites, military strategists, politicians are doing now. But of course if you think we have the straight line on the War on Terror, then give it a miss.

The Great War and Italy, 12 Nov 2008
I fully agree with what the other reviewers have said about this book, which is a marvellous overview of the Italian front during 1915-18. Not only a military history - though it is that, of course, but also a political and cultural history. And not only of the Italian experience, even though that is the main focus, but also of "the other side", the multi-national Habsburg empire. The outnumbered Austrian army (with bosnians and croats strongly represented here) fought well on the Italian front, in contrast with other theatres.

The author gives a balanced, beautifully written, exciting and very moving account of this not-so-known part of the Great War: how Italy tumbled into it 1915, the desperate and futile fighting along the Isonzo, the debacle of Caporetto, the recovery and the peace settlement eventually leading to the establishment of fascism. The author is very much inside his material, and the book has a very strong sense both of time and of place. At times it reminded me of Alistair Horne or John Keegan. Strongly recommended, and not only to military history buffs!

A fascinating history of a forgotten front, 10 Oct 2008
For those of you who have read Hemingway's Farewell to Arms, you would be aware that the a war was fought on the Italian Front during the Great War. However, because so much is written about the Western Front, Gallipoli and even the Eastern Front, it is easy to forget this part of the war. Thompson, however, has brought together a book which seeks to redress this balance - and in my opinion it does so beautifully.

Unlike many dry history books, Thompson paints a picture of suffering, confusion and unbelievable bravery from a front which claimed millions of lives over the course of the War. Many of us know how the advent of technology brought about countless deaths on the Western Front, but countless more were lost on the Italian front due to the adherence to out of date tactics and ideas, and a futile attempt to gain land towards which many of the soliders fighting felt very little.

The book doesn't just provide names and dates. It also explores the politics, poetry and society which emerged out of the fray. It is easy to read, well researched and engaging without alienating the reader in any way. For a comprehensive understanding of an under represented period of history, you couldn't do much better.

Learn about what you were not told, 15 Sep 2008
In the UK, were are taught about the First World War. We are taught about the trenches, the slaughter and the waste. Mostly, were are taught about the British and Commonwealth soldier's experience on the Western Front. 'The White War' teaches the English reader about what they are not taught - the Italian/Austrian front.

After declaring war on Austria-Hungary for dubious territorial reasons, Italy sent hundreds of thousands of men to their deaths on the rocks of Carso near Trieste. Men, indeed, who were most likely to be peasants from places such as Calabria in the south, who barely had the vaguest idea of 'Italy' or what they were ordered to fight for. Thomson details the grim experience and grimmer treatment of these men from their superiors. The Commander-in-Chief of the Italian Army, Luigi Cadorna, even practiced the Roman-era punishment of decimation for retreating or mutineering troops. Nor was Cadorna a particularly successful commander, often conceding vast losses for pointless gains soon lost. He was replaced, eventually, but too late to save the Italian effort.

Thompson shows that this war, though being triggered by that infamous shooting in Sarajevo, was propagandised as a continuation of the Risorgimento (the 19th Century unification of Italy), even though Italy had only a partial claim to Trieste, and very little to the majority-Germanophone South Tyrol.

The writer does all this well, and even the digressions into Italian war literature (no doubt inserted as a counterpoint to Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, 'Dulce et Decorum est' school) are fairly tolerable - though the well-aimed kicking given to D'Annunzio is amusing. Faint praise is not what this book deserves, however. It deserves to be read, and read especially by those whose sole exposure to WW1 history is the Western Front. They will learn something, even if it may be different to the lessons of Ypres and the Somme.

The Italian Great War and the roots of Facism , 07 Sep 2008
I have just finished reading "The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1918 by Mark Thompson which is a study of a 1st World War front that is often forgotten but where Italy lost 689, 000 solders( Britain lost 662,000 + 140, 000 reported as missing). That we tend to associate the infantry war with the plains of Flanders and Russia reveals the common myth as this part of the struggle was mountain warfare albeit also with trenches.

The conduct of the war exposed the weak hold of liberal structures and politics on the Italian population and the defeat of victory quickly let in 20 years of fascist government. The collapse of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, and take over the successor national states by the communists has made it difficult to get a sense of what really went on: Italians and other non Germanic nationals did fight for the Emperor, many of the feature of Fascism (a puppet parliament, a muzzled press, a romantic nationalism, a militarised state) had their roots on the political conduct of the war.

What made the book an interesting read is that Mark Thomas does more then hold to the historical arc of the events from the turmoil in Italy leading to its ripping up of a long standing agreement to be allied with the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary ( It took on a secret 30 pieces of silver territorial deal with the Allies). And ending with the desperate mad dash to occupy land vacated by the collapsing Hapsburg armies-it made the most of the cock-up where as the armistice agreement ended the war one day earlier for Austria-Hungary. What he does is switch the narrative in cinematographic terms from wide/long shots, medium to close-ups as the narrative unfolds. So we take the long view at the ideas affecting Italian practice in politics, art and military such as Romantic Vitalism or the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche. Or the impact of how Italian unification actually unfolded. We then have medium shot accounts of how individual battles unfolded from both of the combatant's perspectives or the power struggles and conduct at military and political levels. And finally the close-up accounts of artists, reporters, and survivors that expose the official accounts or help to explain the mindset of the elites.

It was this rounded and varied explanation that held my attention, as I tended to wander in the step by step of accounts of the battles(my attention span rather then the quality of the writing, although these are necessary to understand the appalling and arrogant way that the soldiers were used. For example, Military discipline justified the ancient Roman practice of randomly killing 1 in 10 solders if the platoon had infringed any rules which could be just turning up late from leave. The fact, with no interest shown in the reason was enough for summary execution. This is because the Italian army leadership took the most extreme view of all the armed forces in the 1st world war that the solders were only cannon fodder to do the will of the supreme commander. An attitude they paid for when Austria-Hungarian forces with direct support of Germany developed a forerunner of Blitzkrieg and took back all the territory fought over in the past three years and swept down to the pre 1866 national boundaries.

The resource imbalance between the foes and the deteriorating political realties for the Central Powers meant that this could not be turned into a knock-out blow. But with Russia out and embroiled in Revolution and no significant Allied victories, the collapse of the Central Powers as Germany struggled to avoid the fate of Austria- Hungary created the German Nazis myth of a stab in the back. It also confirmed the lack of democratic populist support for liberalism.

So why should you read this book? Well it gives you a clear account of one part of the wider First World War front that is only now becoming clear and even possible to study. (Attempts to clear the names of those summarily executed is still politically sensitive in Italy.) But a more important reason is that it offers insights into the conduct of events now. If History has anything to teach, its that we the ordinary people wont get a true picture what our masters have been doing in our name until we are pushing up the daisies.. In knowing what was going on behind closed doors then, we can question what the media, cultural elites, military strategists, politicians are doing now. But of course if you think we have the straight line on the War on Terror, then give it a miss.


Somme Mud - we remember them, 30 Nov 2008
I was interested when I saw this book as my grandfather was at the Somme but would never speak of it. I had heard about it in history and seen a few television programs but I was interested to learn about it from the mind and voice of one who was there.

Once started the book is very hard to put down. My respect for my grandfather and those who went off to fight this war has grown tremendously.

A must read for those wishing to know about those unsung heroes who gave their all.

A book that should be read, 19 Nov 2008
wait on whilst the dead men are buried. A shallow grave marked by a rifle stuck up in the mud is all that can be done. It gives some satisfaction to do that, although we are well aware the men so buried will be thrown up and reburied by shellfire time after time until the fighting shifts on from here. Some day they may have real graves. What a lot to look forward to! It's as well their people can't fully realize what finding a soldier's grave really means.

If there is one book that everyone should read on warfare, or just a book that should be read, this is it. Edward Lynch left Australia on 22nd August 1916 as a young man of 18 volunteering to serve on the Western Front. He returned to his homeland in 1919, lived through three of the most turbulent years of modern history.

In 1921 he started to write of his experiences, twenty one school exercise books full. The initial idea was to publish the story, but due to circumstances at the time this never happened. After his death the volumes resurfaced when Edward's grandson Mike Lynch passed the volumes to the editor Will Davies.

The result is a story that stands with any of the so called `classics' of the Great War and is superior to most. The story is that of a young private `Nulla' and his experience of some of the fiercest fighting in the area of the Somme from late 1916 through to 1918.

The descriptions of actions including the firing of the mines on the Messines Ridge, tanks and the start of air re-supply. Interspersed are the personal asides, food contaminated with gas, the mod swings that effected individuals, the flashes of humour, including the description of Janker's for going AWOL, cleaning the trace chains of artillery harness, `We spent a whole day cleaning trace chains and polishing each link with spit sand and blasphemy'.

Technically the book is very accurate, the story can be followed on maps, trench maps and panoramas, giving a wider understanding of small actions that took place during the period. The book draws few if any conclusions as to the rights and wrongs of the conflict, it praises and castigates offices, men and the enemy as the situation demands.

This book is something special; Edward Lynch deserves a place amongst the revered author's of the Great War, an accolade he deserved but never got.


Faction?, 26 Sep 2008
Having read many WWI books recently, I'm afraid that as I read I increasingly got the feeling that this was just too much of a novel. Faction. Whilst it is clearly based on his real experiences, I felt that there was just too much embroidery, and then you are left wondering 'well how much of this can I really believe?'. Many books of memoirs were written just after the First World War and many Publishers were bored with the prospect of yet another. Doubtless writers felt that they had to 'spice it up' a little. I felt disappointed after I'd finished it. I've read War novels that I've found more believable. Sorry. Perhaps his war record was just as he says.

Somme Mud - Goodbye to All that revisited?, 30 Aug 2008
The story is of Nulla and his regular close nit cast of characters - Longun, Darky, Snow, Farmer, Jacob and others.

The book covers some territory covered before. Most similarly by Robert Graves book - Goodbye to all that.

Lynch does not delve deeply into the reasons for the war - which obviously contrasts with Graves. However Lynch does not shy away from describing the horror of the conflict.

He mostly provides an illuminating insight of the (very effective) fighting capacity of the AIF. They are ruthless killers of "Fritz" - no more ruthlessly described as when a German Brass band spotted on an opposite hill about to enter a French village are clinically shot up.

A lot of the book talks humorously of events but sometimes a paragraph brings up his inner thoughts in startlingly relief:

"We remember when these two marched ahead of us carrying not canes but their lives, and leading us not to a sit-down dinner but to assault Fritz trenches or pill-boxes, or those deadly machine-gun nests from which so many of our mates collected their R.I.P.

Some of us remember, too, when these two were just diggers in the ranks following on after other leaders who have since passed on. Some home to Australia maimed in body in spirit, soured and seared, or happy to have got out of it all at any cost. Others who found their last long resting place in the slimy Somme mud, or amid the utter desolation that is Flanders. Others still whose remains lie shattered and scattered in the hundred tiny graves that house all that is left of a man who caught the burst of a 9.2"

His war was about mates and luck - and plenty of both. His prose is sincere and direct - I suspect rather like the man and his mates.


Outstanding WW1 Memoir, 22 Jul 2008
This is a great memoir, instantly ranking with book such as frank Richard's Old Soldiers Never Die as among the most evocative voices of the Great War as seen by the PBI. Lynch was an Australian, fighting with the 45th Battalion AIF from late 1916 to the end of the war. The centrepieces of this book are the descriptions of hand to hand trench fighting, which are raw and immediate. The most chilling description (apart from numerous descriptions of shellfire) are the images of the Somme battlefield in the freezing winter of 1916-1917, with casualties still frozen into the postures of brutal trench combat.

This is the Great War memoir of our time, if such as statement isn't something of a paradox. Lynch's Australian sensibility, his cheerful challenges to authority and the democratic flavour of Anzac `mateship' are more attuned to a 20th century sensibility than some of the more literary laments to the `futility' of the war in the 1920s and 1930s. (The attitudes to other races in the opening chapter are shocking but not surprising for a memoir of the time; their omission would have been a pointless and historically dishonest piece of editing).

A singular and powerfully important memoir of 1914-1918.

The Great War and Italy, 12 Nov 2008
I fully agree with what the other reviewers have said about this book, which is a marvellous overview of the Italian front during 1915-18. Not only a military history - though it is that, of course, but also a political and cultural history. And not only of the Italian experience, even though that is the main focus, but also of "the other side", the multi-national Habsburg empire. The outnumbered Austrian army (with bosnians and croats strongly represented here) fought well on the Italian front, in contrast with other theatres.

The author gives a balanced, beautifully written, exciting and very moving account of this not-so-known part of the Great War: how Italy tumbled into it 1915, the desperate and futile fighting along the Isonzo, the debacle of Caporetto, the recovery and the peace settlement eventually leading to the establishment of fascism. The author is very much inside his material, and the book has a very strong sense both of time and of place. At times it reminded me of Alistair Horne or John Keegan. Strongly recommended, and not only to military history buffs!

A fascinating history of a forgotten front, 10 Oct 2008
For those of you who have read Hemingway's Farewell to Arms, you would be aware that the a war was fought on the Italian Front during the Great War. However, because so much is written about the Western Front, Gallipoli and even the Eastern Front, it is easy to forget this part of the war. Thompson, however, has brought together a book which seeks to redress this balance - and in my opinion it does so beautifully.

Unlike many dry history books, Thompson paints a picture of suffering, confusion and unbelievable bravery from a front which claimed millions of lives over the course of the War. Many of us know how the advent of technology brought about countless deaths on the Western Front, but countless more were lost on the Italian front due to the adherence to out of date tactics and ideas, and a futile attempt to gain land towards which many of the soliders fighting felt very little.

The book doesn't just provide names and dates. It also explores the politics, poetry and society which emerged out of the fray. It is easy to read, well researched and engaging without alienating the reader in any way. For a comprehensive understanding of an under represented period of history, you couldn't do much better.

Learn about what you were not told, 15 Sep 2008
In the UK, were are taught about the First World War. We are taught about the trenches, the slaughter and the waste. Mostly, were are taught about the British and Commonwealth soldier's experience on the Western Front. 'The White War' teaches the English reader about what they are not taught - the Italian/Austrian front.

After declaring war on Austria-Hungary for dubious territorial reasons, Italy sent hundreds of thousands of men to their deaths on the rocks of Carso near Trieste. Men, indeed, who were most likely to be peasants from places such as Calabria in the south, who barely had the vaguest idea of 'Italy' or what they were ordered to fight for. Thomson details the grim experience and grimmer treatment of these men from their superiors. The Commander-in-Chief of the Italian Army, Luigi Cadorna, even practiced the Roman-era punishment of decimation for retreating or mutineering troops. Nor was Cadorna a particularly successful commander, often conceding vast losses for pointless gains soon lost. He was replaced, eventually, but too late to save the Italian effort.

Thompson shows that this war, though being triggered by that infamous shooting in Sarajevo, was propagandised as a continuation of the Risorgimento (the 19th Century unification of Italy), even though Italy had only a partial claim to Trieste, and very little to the majority-Germanophone South Tyrol.

The writer does all this well, and even the digressions into Italian war literature (no doubt inserted as a counterpoint to Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, 'Dulce et Decorum est' school) are fairly tolerable - though the well-aimed kicking given to D'Annunzio is amusing. Faint praise is not what this book deserves, however. It deserves to be read, and read especially by those whose sole exposure to WW1 history is the Western Front. They will learn something, even if it may be different to the lessons of Ypres and the Somme.

The Italian Great War and the roots of Facism , 07 Sep 2008
I have just finished reading "The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1918 by Mark Thompson which is a study of a 1st World War front that is often forgotten but where Italy lost 689, 000 solders( Britain lost 662,000 + 140, 000 reported as missing). That we tend to associate the infantry war with the plains of Flanders and Russia reveals the common myth as this part of the struggle was mountain warfare albeit also with trenches.

The conduct of the war exposed the weak hold of liberal structures and politics on the Italian population and the defeat of victory quickly let in 20 years of fascist government. The collapse of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, and take over the successor national states by the communists has made it difficult to get a sense of what really went on: Italians and other non Germanic nationals did fight for the Emperor, many of the feature of Fascism (a puppet parliament, a muzzled press, a romantic nationalism, a militarised state) had their roots on the political conduct of the war.

What made the book an interesting read is that Mark Thomas does more then hold to the historical arc of the events from the turmoil in Italy leading to its ripping up of a long standing agreement to be allied with the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary ( It took on a secret 30 pieces of silver territorial deal with the Allies). And ending with the desperate mad dash to occupy land vacated by the collapsing Hapsburg armies-it made the most of the cock-up where as the armistice agreement ended the war one day earlier for Austria-Hungary. What he does is switch the narrative in cinematographic terms from wide/long shots, medium to close-ups as the narrative unfolds. So we take the long view at the ideas affecting Italian practice in politics, art and military such as Romantic Vitalism or the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche. Or the impact of how Italian unification actually unfolded. We then have medium shot accounts of how individual battles unfolded from both of the combatant's perspectives or the power struggles and conduct at military and political levels. And finally the close-up accounts of artists, reporters, and survivors that expose the official accounts or help to explain the mindset of the elites.

It was this rounded and varied explanation that held my attention, as I tended to wander in the step by step of accounts of the battles(my attention span rather then the quality of the writing, although these are necessary to understand the appalling and arrogant way that the soldiers were used. For example, Military discipline justified the ancient Roman practice of randomly killing 1 in 10 solders if the platoon had infringed any rules which could be just turning up late from leave. The fact, with no interest shown in the reason was enough for summary execution. This is because the Italian army leadership took the most extreme view of all the armed forces in the 1st world war that the solders were only cannon fodder to do the will of the supreme commander. An attitude they paid for when Austria-Hungarian forces with direct support of Germany developed a forerunner of Blitzkrieg and took back all the territory fought over in the past three years and swept down to the pre 1866 national boundaries.

The resource imbalance between the foes and the deteriorating political realties for the Central Powers meant that this could not be turned into a knock-out blow. But with Russia out and embroiled in Revolution and no significant Allied victories, the collapse of the Central Powers as Germany struggled to avoid the fate of Austria- Hungary created the German Nazis myth of a stab in the back. It also confirmed the lack of democratic populist support for liberalism.

So why should you read this book? Well it gives you a clear account of one part of the wider First World War front that is only now becoming clear and even possible to study. (Attempts to clear the names of those summarily executed is still politically sensitive in Italy.) But a more important reason is that it offers insights into the conduct of events now. If History has anything to teach, its that we the ordinary people wont get a true picture what our masters have been doing in our name until we are pushing up the daisies.. In knowing what was going on behind closed doors then, we can question what the media, cultural elites, military strategists, politicians are doing now. But of course if you think we have the straight line on the War on Terror, then give it a miss.


Somme Mud - we remember them, 30 Nov 2008
I was interested when I saw this book as my grandfather was at the Somme but would never speak of it. I had heard about it in history and seen a few television programs but I was interested to learn about it from the mind and voice of one who was there.

Once started the book is very hard to put down. My respect for my grandfather and those who went off to fight this war has grown tremendously.

A must read for those wishing to know about those unsung heroes who gave their all.

A book that should be read, 19 Nov 2008
wait on whilst the dead men are buried. A shallow grave marked by a rifle stuck up in the mud is all that can be done. It gives some satisfaction to do that, although we are well aware the men so buried will be thrown up and reburied by shellfire time after time until the fighting shifts on from here. Some day they may have real graves. What a lot to look forward to! It's as well their people can't fully realize what finding a soldier's grave really means.

If there is one book that everyone should read on warfare, or just a book that should be read, this is it. Edward Lynch left Australia on 22nd August 1916 as a young man of 18 volunteering to serve on the Western Front. He returned to his homeland in 1919, lived through three of the most turbulent years of modern history.

In 1921 he started to write of his experiences, twenty one school exercise books full. The initial idea was to publish the story, but due to circumstances at the time this never happened. After his death the volumes resurfaced when Edward's grandson Mike Lynch passed the volumes to the editor Will Davies.

The result is a story that stands with any of the so called `classics' of the Great War and is superior to most. The story is that of a young private `Nulla' and his experience of some of the fiercest fighting in the area of the Somme from late 1916 through to 1918.

The descriptions of actions including the firing of the mines on the Messines Ridge, tanks and the start of air re-supply. Interspersed are the personal asides, food contaminated with gas, the mod swings that effected individuals, the flashes of humour, including the description of Janker's for going AWOL, cleaning the trace chains of artillery harness, `We spent a whole day cleaning trace chains and polishing each link with spit sand and blasphemy'.

Technically the book is very accurate, the story can be followed on maps, trench maps and panoramas, giving a wider understanding of small actions that took place during the period. The book draws few if any conclusions as to the rights and wrongs of the conflict, it praises and castigates offices, men and the enemy as the situation demands.

This book is something special; Edward Lynch deserves a place amongst the revered author's of the Great War, an accolade he deserved but never got.


Faction?, 26 Sep 2008
Having read many WWI books recently, I'm afraid that as I read I increasingly got the feeling that this was just too much of a novel. Faction. Whilst it is clearly based on his real experiences, I felt that there was just too much embroidery, and then you are left wondering 'well how much of this can I really believe?'. Many books of memoirs were written just after the First World War and many Publishers were bored with the prospect of yet another. Doubtless writers felt that they had to 'spice it up' a little. I felt disappointed after I'd finished it. I've read War novels that I've found more believable. Sorry. Perhaps his war record was just as he says.

Somme Mud - Goodbye to All that revisited?, 30 Aug 2008
The story is of Nulla and his regular close nit cast of characters - Longun, Darky, Snow, Farmer, Jacob and others.

The book covers some territory covered before. Most similarly by Robert Graves book - Goodbye to all that.

Lynch does not delve deeply into the reasons for the war - which obviously contrasts with Graves. However Lynch does not shy away from describing the horror of the conflict.

He mostly provides an illuminating insight of the (very effective) fighting capacity of the AIF. They are ruthless killers of "Fritz" - no more ruthlessly described as when a German Brass band spotted on an opposite hill about to enter a French village are clinically shot up.

A lot of the book talks humorously of events but sometimes a paragraph brings up his inner thoughts in startlingly relief:

"We remember when these two marched ahead of us carrying not canes but their lives, and leading us not to a sit-down dinner but to assault Fritz trenches or pill-boxes, or those deadly machine-gun nests from which so many of our mates collected their R.I.P.

Some of us remember, too, when these two were just diggers in the ranks following on after other leaders who have since passed on. Some home to Australia maimed in body in spirit, soured and seared, or happy to have got out of it all at any cost. Others who found their last long resting place in the slimy Somme mud, or amid the utter desolation that is Flanders. Others still whose remains lie shattered and scattered in the hundred tiny graves that house all that is left of a man who caught the burst of a 9.2"

His war was about mates and luck - and plenty of both. His prose is sincere and direct - I suspect rather like the man and his mates.


Outstanding WW1 Memoir, 22 Jul 2008
This is a great memoir, instantly ranking with book such as frank Richard's Old Soldiers Never Die as among the most evocative voices of the Great War as seen by the PBI. Lynch was an Australian, fighting with the 45th Battalion AIF from late 1916 to the end of the war. The centrepieces of this book are the descriptions of hand to hand trench fighting, which are raw and immediate. The most chilling description (apart from numerous descriptions of shellfire) are the images of the Somme battlefield in the freezing winter of 1916-1917, with casualties still frozen into the postures of brutal trench combat.

This is the Great War memoir of our time, if such as statement isn't something of a paradox. Lynch's Australian sensibility, his cheerful challenges to authority and the democratic flavour of Anzac `mateship' are more attuned to a 20th century sensibility than some of the more literary laments to the `futility' of the war in the 1920s and 1930s. (The attitudes to other races in the opening chapter are shocking but not surprising for a memoir of the time; their omission would have been a pointless and historically dishonest piece of editing).

A singular and powerfully important memoir of 1914-1918.


Outstanding, 28 Nov 2008
When it comes to buying something really exciting about the Great War then you will not do any better than Peter Barton's epic book. It shows a genuine commitment to furthering interest in the War by producing fascinating new material and to the highest standard. The panoramas alone are good enough to take your breath away, but the text and the intergrated images are superb; I can't imagine the amount of effort that went into this book. However, the results make the purchase worth every penny. Well done Mr Barton.

The Great War and Italy, 12 Nov 2008
I fully agree with what the other reviewers have said about this book, which is a marvellous overview of the Italian front during 1915-18. Not only a military history - though it is that, of course, but also a political and cultural history. And not only of the Italian experience, even though that is the main focus, but also of "the other side", the multi-national Habsburg empire. The outnumbered Austrian army (with bosnians and croats strongly represented here) fought well on the Italian front, in contrast with other theatres.

The author gives a balanced, beautifully written, exciting and very moving account of this not-so-known part of the Great War: how Italy tumbled into it 1915, the desperate and futile fighting along the Isonzo, the debacle of Caporetto, the recovery and the peace settlement eventually leading to the establishment of fascism. The author is very much inside his material, and the book has a very strong sense both of time and of place. At times it reminded me of Alistair Horne or John Keegan. Strongly recommended, and not only to military history buffs!

A fascinating history of a forgotten front, 10 Oct 2008
For those of you who have read Hemingway's Farewell to Arms, you would be aware that the a war was fought on the Italian Front during the Great War. However, because so much is written about the Western Front, Gallipoli and even the Eastern Front, it is easy to forget this part of the war. Thompson, however, has brought together a book which seeks to redress this balance - and in my opinion it does so beautifully.

Unlike many dry history books, Thompson paints a picture of suffering, confusion and unbelievable bravery from a front which claimed millions of lives over the course of the War. Many of us know how the advent of technology brought about countless deaths on the Western Front, but countless more were lost on the Italian front due to the adherence to out of date tactics and ideas, and a futile attempt to gain land towards which many of the soliders fighting felt very little.

The book doesn't just provide names and dates. It also explores the politics, poetry and society which emerged out of the fray. It is easy to read, well researched and engaging without alienating the reader in any way. For a comprehensive understanding of an under represented period of history, you couldn't do much better.

Learn about what you were not told, 15 Sep 2008
In the UK, were are taught about the First World War. We are taught about the trenches, the slaughter and the waste. Mostly, were are taught about the British and Commonwealth soldier's experience on the Western Front. 'The White War' teaches the English reader about what they are not taught - the Italian/Austrian front.

After declaring war on Austria-Hungary for dubious territorial reasons, Italy sent hundreds of thousands of men to their deaths on the rocks of Carso near Trieste. Men, indeed, who were most likely to be peasants from places such as Calabria in the south, who barely had the vaguest idea of 'Italy' or what they were ordered to fight for. Thomson details the grim experience and grimmer treatment of these men from their superiors. The Commander-in-Chief of the Italian Army, Luigi Cadorna, even practiced the Roman-era punishment of decimation for retreating or mutineering troops. Nor was Cadorna a particularly successful commander, often conceding vast losses for pointless gains soon lost. He was replaced, eventually, but too late to save the Italian effort.

Thompson shows that this war, though being triggered by that infamous shooting in Sarajevo, was propagandised as a continuation of the Risorgimento (the 19th Century unification of Italy), even though Italy had only a partial claim to Trieste, and very little to the majority-Germanophone South Tyrol.

The writer does all this well, and even the digressions into Italian war literature (no doubt inserted as a counterpoint to Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, 'Dulce et Decorum est' school) are fairly tolerable - though the well-aimed kicking given to D'Annunzio is amusing. Faint praise is not what this book deserves, however. It deserves to be read, and read especially by those whose sole exposure to WW1 history is the Western Front. They will learn something, even if it may be different to the lessons of Ypres and the Somme.

The Italian Great War and the roots of Facism , 07 Sep 2008
I have just finished reading "The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1918 by Mark Thompson which is a study of a 1st World War front that is often forgotten but where Italy lost 689, 000 solders( Britain lost 662,000 + 140, 000 reported as missing). That we tend to associate the infantry war with the plains of Flanders and Russia reveals the common myth as this part of the struggle was mountain warfare albeit also with trenches.

The conduct of the war exposed the weak hold of liberal structures and politics on the Italian population and the defeat of victory quickly let in 20 years of fascist government. The collapse of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, and take over the successor national states by the communists has made it difficult to get a sense of what really went on: Italians and other non Germanic nationals did fight for the Emperor, many of the feature of Fascism (a puppet parliament, a muzzled press, a romantic nationalism, a militarised state) had their roots on the political conduct of the war.

What made the book an interesting read is that Mark Thomas does more then hold to the historical arc of the events from the turmoil in Italy leading to its ripping up of a long standing agreement to be allied with the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary ( It took on a secret 30 pieces of silver territorial deal with the Allies). And ending with the desperate mad dash to occupy land vacated by the collapsing Hapsburg armies-it made the most of the cock-up where as the armistice agreement ended the war one day earlier for Austria-Hungary. What he does is switch the narrative in cinematographic terms from wide/long shots, medium to close-ups as the narrative unfolds. So we take the long view at the ideas affecting Italian practice in politics, art and military such as Romantic Vitalism or the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche. Or the impact of how Italian unification actually unfolded. We then have medium shot accounts of how individual battles unfolded from both of the combatant's perspectives or the power struggles and conduct at military and political levels. And finally the close-up accounts of artists, reporters, and survivors that expose the official accounts or help to explain the mindset of the elites.

It was this rounded and varied explanation that held my attention, as I tended to wander in the step by step of accounts of the battles(my attention span rather then the quality of the writing, although these are necessary to understand the appalling and arrogant way that the soldiers were used. For example, Military discipline justified the ancient Roman practice of randomly killing 1 in 10 solders if the platoon had infringed any rules which could be just turning up late from leave. The fact, with no interest shown in the reason was enough for summary execution. This is because the Italian army leadership took the most extreme view of all the armed forces in the 1st world war that the solders were only cannon fodder to do the will of the supreme commander. An attitude they paid for when Austria-Hungarian forces with direct support of Germany developed a forerunner of Blitzkrieg and took back all the territory fought over in the past three years and swept down to the pre 1866 national boundaries.

The resource imbalance between the foes and the deteriorating political realties for the Central Powers meant that this could not be turned into a knock-out blow. But with Russia out and embroiled in Revolution and no significant Allied victories, the collapse of the Central Powers as Germany struggled to avoid the fate of Austria- Hungary created the German Nazis myth of a stab in the back. It also confirmed the lack of democratic populist support for liberalism.

So why should you read this book? Well it gives you a clear account of one part of the wider First World War front that is only now becoming clear and even possible to study. (Attempts to clear the names of those summarily executed is still politically sensitive in Italy.) But a more important reason is that it offers insights into the conduct of events now. If History has anything to teach, its that we the ordinary people wont get a true picture what our masters have been doing in our name until we are pushing up the daisies.. In knowing what was going on behind closed doors then, we can question what the media, cultural elites, military strategists, politicians are doing now. But of course if you think we have the straight line on the War on Terror, then give it a miss.


Somme Mud - we remember them, 30 Nov 2008
I was interested when I saw this book as my grandfather was at the Somme but would never speak of it. I had heard about it in history and seen a few television programs but I was interested to learn about it from the mind and voice of one who was there.

Once started the book is very hard to put down. My respect for my grandfather and those who went off to fight this war has grown tremendously.

A must read for those wishing to know about those unsung heroes who gave their all.

A book that should be read, 19 Nov 2008
wait on whilst the dead men are buried. A shallow grave marked by a rifle stuck up in the mud is all that can be done. It gives some satisfaction to do that, although we are well aware the men so buried will be thrown up and reburied by shellfire time after time until the fighting shifts on from here. Some day they may have real graves. What a lot to look forward to! It's as well their people can't fully realize what finding a soldier's grave really means.

If there is one book that everyone should read on warfare, or just a book that should be read, this is it. Edward Lynch left Australia on 22nd August 1916 as a young man of 18 volunteering to serve on the Western Front. He returned to his homeland in 1919, lived through three of the most turbulent years of modern history.

In 1921 he started to write of his experiences, twenty one school exercise books full. The initial idea was to publish the story, but due to circumstances at the time this never happened. After his death the volumes resurfaced when Edward's grandson Mike Lynch passed the volumes to the editor Will Davies.

The result is a story that stands with any of the so called `classics' of the Great War and is superior to most. The story is that of a young private `Nulla' and his experience of some of the fiercest fighting in the area of the Somme from late 1916 through to 1918.

The descriptions of actions including the firing of the mines on the Messines Ridge, tanks and the start of air re-supply. Interspersed are the personal asides, food contaminated with gas, the mod swings that effected individuals, the flashes of humour, including the description of Janker's for going AWOL, cleaning the trace chains of artillery harness, `We spent a whole day cleaning trace chains and polishing each link with spit sand and blasphemy'.

Technically the book is very accurate, the story can be followed on maps, trench maps and panoramas, giving a wider understanding of small actions that took place during the period. The book draws few if any conclusions as to the rights and wrongs of the conflict, it praises and castigates offices, men and the enemy as the situation demands.

This book is something special; Edward Lynch deserves a place amongst the revered author's of the Great War, an accolade he deserved but never got.


Faction?, 26 Sep 2008
Having read many WWI books recently, I'm afraid that as I read I increasingly got the feeling that this was just too much of a novel. Faction. Whilst it is clearly based on his real experiences, I felt that there was just too much embroidery, and then you are left wondering 'well how much of this can I really believe?'. Many books of memoirs were written just after the First World War and many Publishers were bored with the prospect of yet another. Doubtless writers felt that they had to 'spice it up' a little. I felt disappointed after I'd finished it. I've read War novels that I've found more believable. Sorry. Perhaps his war record was just as he says.

Somme Mud - Goodbye to All that revisited?, 30 Aug 2008
The story is of Nulla and his regular close nit cast of characters - Longun, Darky, Snow, Farmer, Jacob and others.

The book covers some territory covered before. Most similarly by Robert Graves book - Goodbye to all that.

Lynch does not delve deeply into the reasons for the war - which obviously contrasts with Graves. However Lynch does not shy away from describing the horror of the conflict.

He mostly provides an illuminating insight of the (very effective) fighting capacity of the AIF. They are ruthless killers of "Fritz" - no more ruthlessly described as when a German Brass band spotted on an opposite hill about to enter a French village are clinically shot up.

A lot of the book talks humorously of events but sometimes a paragraph brings up his inner thoughts in startlingly relief:

"We remember when these two marched ahead of us carrying not canes but their lives, and leading us not to a sit-down dinner but to assault Fritz trenches or pill-boxes, or those deadly machine-gun nests from which so many of our mates collected their R.I.P.

Some of us remember, too, when these two were just diggers in the ranks following on after other leaders who have since passed on. Some home to Australia maimed in body in spirit, soured and seared, or happy to have got out of it all at any cost. Others who found their last long resting place in the slimy Somme mud, or amid the utter desolation that is Flanders. Others still whose remains lie shattered and scattered in the hundred tiny graves that house all that is left of a man who caught the burst of a 9.2"

His war was about mates and luck - and plenty of both. His prose is sincere and direct - I suspect rather like the man and his mates.


Outstanding WW1 Memoir, 22 Jul 2008
This is a great memoir, instantly ranking with book such as frank Richard's Old Soldiers Never Die as among the most evocative voices of the Great War as seen by the PBI. Lynch was an Australian, fighting with the 45th Battalion AIF from late 1916 to the end of the war. The centrepieces of this book are the descriptions of hand to hand trench fighting, which are raw and immediate. The most chilling description (apart from numerous descriptions of shellfire) are the images of the Somme battlefield in the freezing winter of 1916-1917, with casualties still frozen into the postures of brutal trench combat.

This is the Great War memoir of our time, if such as statement isn't something of a paradox. Lynch's Australian sensibility, his cheerful challenges to authority and the democratic flavour of Anzac `mateship' are more attuned to a 20th century sensibility than some of the more literary laments to the `futility' of the war in the 1920s and 1930s. (The attitudes to other races in the opening chapter are shocking but not surprising for a memoir of the time; their omission would have been a pointless and historically dishonest piece of editing).

A singular and powerfully important memoir of 1914-1918.


Outstanding, 28 Nov 2008
When it comes to buying something really exciting about the Great War then you will not do any better than Peter Barton's epic book. It shows a genuine commitment to furthering interest in the War by producing fascinating new material and to the highest standard. The panoramas alone are good enough to take your breath away, but the text and the intergrated images are superb; I can't imagine the amount of effort that went into this book. However, the results make the purchase worth every penny. Well done Mr Barton.

A fantastic book!, 08 Feb 2008
Quite simply one of the best books on the Great War I have ever read. Beautifully written and with a wealth of photos and diagrams it transports you back to the dark days of the Salient.
Buy it.

Terrific book!, 15 Jan 2008
As other reviwers have said, this is superbly researched and put together. The mix of original photos and plans with modern photos of the tunnels and dugouts as they appear now, plus the combination of eyewitness comments and authors' commentary make this a superb production. Having visited mine craters and a few dugouts and the tunnel system at Vimy, this book made me appreciate more fully the scale and organisation of this activity on both sides. Highly recommended.

A must for Great War enthusiasts!, 01 Feb 2007
There is no doubt, that many excellent books have been written and published on the wide ranging and different aspects of the Great War, these include both general as well as specialist publications which are aimed at either the general reader or expert or often both. I have personally read many books on this tragic conflict, some I find fascinating, others are rather run of the mill and are possibly recycled from previous publications. This splendid title is however one that shines out and I am sure, it will be of tremendous interest to a wide audience of both amateur and professional military historians, researchers and general readers alike.

The war beneath the "killing fields" of the Western Front has in my opinion until now been overshadowed and often neglected by authors and publishers by what took place above the ground. This truly magnificent book will, without a doubt do much to draw attention to the skilful , yet unseen game of "cat and mouse" that was taking place in the damp and dirty tunnels underground.

I can honestly say that this volume made interesting reading and succeeded in stimulating my own interest in carrying out further research into this fascinating aspect of the Great War. The authors (all tunnelling experts), have in fact been inundated with enquiries on this subject since the publication of Sebastian Faulke's "Birdsong" and have as a result carried out over twenty five years painstaking research, excavations and investigation to be able to produce this brilliant title.

The book is packed with a tremendous amount of gripping information and is backed up with a host of colourful maps, in excess of 450 colour as well as black and white photographs and many highly detailed and professional diagrams. Many of the photographs are unique and will keep the reader engrossed like I was for many hours.

If there is one book to buy on this intriguing subject, this is it - I am sure you will not be disappointed!


Compelling, thorough and beautifully presented, 14 Aug 2005
This is a beautiful book about an awful subject. It is put together with great care and skill and carries the reader through. I am not particularly a war buff but I found this unputdownable. It is clearly a labour of love and the years of work that have gone into it have created an absolutely marvelous book.

Forget Birdsong!, 10 Nov 2004
Whilst the common reader will not mind (or indeed know) Birdsong borrows wholesale from older accounts, this definitive tome accurately depicts a) how WW1 underground warfare was fought on the Western Front b) presents illustrated eye-witness accounts of previous unpublished work and c) how 30 years of research on the battlefield by the authors, mostly for the first time, has discovered significant parts of the tunnel system, with Flanders Fields geology preserving artifacts and systems to a unique degree.

There are plentiful contemporary diagrams and photographs of projected operations as well as modern colour photographs of the author's investigations. The three author's different specialties avoids the common author bias of single author books, with the eye for detail giving the military and amateur enthusiast alike a mass of information.

A must for the military and amateur enthusiast at a very reasonable hardback price, this book fills a gap of a little known but highly important theatre of operations, little known due to the secrecy involved in wartime mining.

The Great War and Italy, 12 Nov 2008
I fully agree with what the other reviewers have said about this book, which is a marvellous overview of the Italian front during 1915-18. Not only a military history - though it is that, of course, but also a political and cultural history. And not only of the Italian experience, even though that is the main focus, but also of "the other side", the multi-national Habsburg empire. The outnumbered Austrian army (with bosnians and croats strongly represented here) fought well on the Italian front, in contrast with other theatres.

The author gives a balanced, beautifully written, exciting and very moving account of this not-so-known part of the Great War: how Italy tumbled into it 1915, the desperate and futile fighting along the Isonzo, the debacle of Caporetto, the recovery and the peace settlement eventually leading to the establishment of fascism. The author is very much inside his material, and the book has a very strong sense both of time and of place. At times it reminded me of Alistair Horne or John Keegan. Strongly recommended, and not only to military history buffs!

A fascinating history of a forgotten front, 10 Oct 2008
For those of you who have read Hemingway's Farewell to Arms, you would be aware that the a war was fought on the Italian Front during the Great War. However, because so much is written about the Western Front, Gallipoli and even the Eastern Front, it is easy to forget this part of the war. Thompson, however, has brought together a book which seeks to redress this balance - and in my opinion it does so beautifully.

Unlike many dry history books, Thompson paints a picture of suffering, confusion and unbelievable bravery from a front which claimed millions of lives over the course of the War. Many of us know how the advent of technology brought about countless deaths on the Western Front, but countless more were lost on the Italian front due to the adherence to out of date tactics and ideas, and a futile attempt to gain land towards which many of the soliders fighting felt very little.

The book doesn't just provide names and dates. It also explores the politics, poetry and society which emerged out of the fray. It is easy to read, well researched and engaging without alienating the reader in any way. For a comprehensive understanding of an under represented period of history, you couldn't do much better.

Learn about what you were not told, 15 Sep 2008
In the UK, were are taught about the First World War. We are taught about the trenches, the slaughter and the waste. Mostly, were are taught about the British and Commonwealth soldier's experience on the Western Front. 'The White War' teaches the English reader about what they are not taught - the Italian/Austrian front.

After declaring war on Austria-Hungary for dubious territorial reasons, Italy sent hundreds of thousands of men to their deaths on the rocks of Carso near Trieste. Men, indeed, who were most likely to be peasants from places such as Calabria in the south, who barely had the vaguest idea of 'Italy' or what they were ordered to fight for. Thomson details the grim experience and grimmer treatment of these men from their superiors. The Commander-in-Chief of the Italian Army, Luigi Cadorna, even practiced the Roman-era punishment of decimation for retreating or mutineering troops. Nor was Cadorna a particularly successful commander, often conceding vast losses for pointless gains soon lost. He was replaced, eventually, but too late to save the Italian effort.

Thompson shows that this war, though being triggered by that infamous shooting in Sarajevo, was propagandised as a continuation of the Risorgimento (the 19th Century unification of Italy), even though Italy had only a partial claim to Trieste, and very little to the majority-Germanophone South Tyrol.

The writer does all this well, and even the digressions into Italian war literature (no doubt inserted as a counterpoint to Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, 'Dulce et Decorum est' school) are fairly tolerable - though the well-aimed kicking given to D'Annunzio is amusing. Faint praise is not what this book deserves, however. It deserves to be read, and read especially by those whose sole exposure to WW1 history is the Western Front. They will learn something, even if it may be different to the lessons of Ypres and the Somme.

The Italian Great War and the roots of Facism , 07 Sep 2008
I have just finished reading "The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1918 by Mark Thompson which is a study of a 1st World War front that is often forgotten but where Italy lost 689, 000 solders( Britain lost 662,000 + 140, 000 reported as missing). That we tend to associate the infantry war with the plains of Flanders and Russia reveals the common myth as this part of the struggle was mountain warfare albeit also with trenches.

The conduct of the war exposed the weak hold of liberal structures and politics on the Italian population and the defeat of victory quickly let in 20 years of fascist government. The collapse of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, and take over the successor national states by the communists has made it difficult to get a sense of what really went on: Italians and other non Germanic nationals did fight for the Emperor, many of the feature of Fascism (a puppet parliament, a muzzled press, a romantic nationalism, a militarised state) had their roots on the political conduct of the war.

What made the book an interesting read is that Mark Thomas does more then hold to the historical arc of the events from the turmoil in Italy leading to its ripping up of a long standing agreement to be allied with the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary ( It took on a secret 30 pieces of silver territorial deal with the Allies). And ending with the desperate mad dash to occupy land vacated by the collapsing Hapsburg armies-it made the most of the cock-up where as the armistice agreement ended the war one day earlier for Austria-Hungary. What he does is switch the narrative in cinematographic terms from wide/long shots, medium to close-ups as the narrative unfolds. So we take the long view at the ideas affecting Italian practice in politics, art and military such as Romantic Vitalism or the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche. Or the impact of how Italian unification actually unfolded. We then have medium shot accounts of how individual battles unfolded from both of the combatant's perspectives or the power struggles and conduct at military and political levels. And finally the close-up accounts of artists, reporters, and survivors that expose the official accounts or help to explain the mindset of the elites.

It was this rounded and varied explanation that held my attention, as I tended to wander in the step by step of accounts of the battles(my attention span rather then the quality of the writing, although these are necessary to understand the appalling and arrogant way that the soldiers were used. For example, Military discipline justified the ancient Roman practice of randomly killing 1 in 10 solders if the platoon had infringed any rules which could be just turning up late from leave. The fact, with no interest shown in the reason was enough for summary execution. This is because the Italian army leadership took the most extreme view of all the armed forces in the 1st world war that the solders were only cannon fodder to do the will of the supreme commander. An attitude they paid for when Austria-Hungarian forces with direct support of Germany developed a forerunner of Blitzkrieg and took back all the territory fought over in the past three years and swept down to the pre 1866 national boundaries.

The resource imbalance between the foes and the deteriorating political realties for the Central Powers meant that this could not be turned into a knock-out blow. But with Russia out and embroiled in Revolution and no significant Allied victories, the collapse of the Central Powers as Germany struggled to avoid the fate of Austria- Hungary created the German Nazis myth of a stab in the back. It also confirmed the lack of democratic populist support for liberalism.

So why should you read this book? Well it gives you a clear account of one part of the wider First World War front that is only now becoming clear and even possible to study. (Attempts to clear the names of those summarily executed is still politically sensitive in Italy.) But a more important reason is that it offers insights into the conduct of events now. If History has anything to teach, its that we the ordinary people wont get a true picture what our masters have been doing in our name until we are pushing up the daisies.. In knowing what was going on behind closed doors then, we can question what the media, cultural elites, military strategists, politicians are doing now. But of course if you think we have the straight line on the War on Terror, then give it a miss.


Somme Mud - we remember them, 30 Nov 2008
I was interested when I saw this book as my grandfather was at the Somme but would never speak of it. I had heard about it in history and seen a few television programs but I was interested to learn about it from the mind and voice of one who was there.

Once started the book is very hard to put down. My respect for my grandfather and those who went off to fight this war has grown tremendously.

A must read for those wishing to know about those unsung heroes who gave their all.

A book that should be read, 19 Nov 2008
wait on whilst the dead men are buried. A shallow grave marked by a rifle stuck up in the mud is all that can be done. It gives some satisfaction to do that, although we are well aware the men so buried will be thrown up and reburied by shellfire time after time until the fighting shifts on from here. Some day they may have real graves. What a lot to look forward to! It's as well their people can't fully realize what finding a soldier's grave really means.

If there is one book that everyone should read on warfare, or just a book that should be read, this is it. Edward Lynch left Australia on 22nd August 1916 as a young man of 18 volunteering to serve on the Western Front. He returned to his homeland in 1919, lived through three of the most turbulent years of modern history.

In 1921 he started to write of his experiences, twenty one school exercise books full. The initial idea was to publish the story, but due to circumstances at the time this never happened. After his death the volumes resurfaced when Edward's grandson Mike Lynch passed the volumes to the editor Will Davies.

The result is a story that stands with any of the so called `classics' of the Great War and is superior to most. The story is that of a young private `Nulla' and his experience of some of the fiercest fighting in the area of the Somme from late 1916 through to 1918.

The descriptions of actions including the firing of the mines on the Messines Ridge, tanks and the start of air re-supply. Interspersed are the personal asides, food contaminated with gas, the mod swings that effected individuals, the flashes of humour, including the description of Janker's for going AWOL, cleaning the trace chains of artillery harness, `We spent a whole day cleaning trace chains and polishing each link with spit sand and blasphemy'.

Technically the book is very accurate, the story can be followed on maps, trench maps and panoramas, giving a wider understanding of small actions that took place during the period. The book draws few if any conclusions as to the rights and wrongs of the conflict, it praises and castigates offices, men and the enemy as the situation demands.

This book is something special; Edward Lynch deserves a place amongst the revered author's of the Great War, an accolade he deserved but never got.


Faction?, 26 Sep 2008
Having read many WWI books recently, I'm afraid that as I read I increasingly got the feeling that this was just too much of a novel. Faction. Whilst it is clearly based on his real experiences, I felt that there was just too much embroidery, and then you are left wondering 'well how much of this can I really believe?'. Many books of memoirs were written just after the First World War and many Publishers were bored with the prospect of yet another. Doubtless writers felt that they had to 'spice it up' a little. I felt disappointed after I'd finished it. I've read War novels that I've found more believable. Sorry. Perhaps his war record was just as he says.

Somme Mud - Goodbye to All that revisited?, 30 Aug 2008
The story is of Nulla and his regular close nit cast of characters - Longun, Darky, Snow, Farmer, Jacob and others.

The book covers some territory covered before. Most similarly by Robert Graves book - Goodbye to all that.

Lynch does not delve deeply into the reasons for the war - which obviously contrasts with Graves. However Lynch does not shy away from describing the horror of the conflict.

He mostly provides an illuminating insight of the (very effective) fighting capacity of the AIF. They are ruthless killers of "Fritz" - no more ruthlessly described as when a German Brass band spotted on an opposite hill about to enter a French village are clinically shot up.

A lot of the book talks humorously of events but sometimes a paragraph brings up his inner thoughts in startlingly relief:

"We remember when these two marched ahead of us carrying not canes but their lives, and leading us not to a sit-down dinner but to assault Fritz trenches or pill-boxes, or those deadly machine-gun nests from which so many of our mates collected their R.I.P.

Some of us remember, too, when these two were just diggers in the ranks following on after other leaders who have since passed on. Some home to Australia maimed in body in spirit, soured and seared, or happy to have got out of it all at any cost. Others who found their last long resting place in the slimy Somme mud, or amid the utter desolation that is Flanders. Others still whose remains lie shattered and scattered in the hundred tiny graves that house all that is left of a man who caught the burst of a 9.2"

His war was about mates and luck - and plenty of both. His prose is sincere and direct - I suspect rather like the man and his mates.


Outstanding WW1 Memoir, 22 Jul 2008
This is a great memoir, instantly ranking with book such as frank Richard's Old Soldiers Never Die as among the most evocative voices of the Great War as seen by the PBI. Lynch was an Australian, fighting with the 45th Battalion AIF from late 1916 to the end of the war. The centrepieces of this book are the descriptions of hand to hand trench fighting, which are raw and immediate. The most chilling description (apart from numerous descriptions of shellfire) are the images of the Somme battlefield in the freezing winter of 1916-1917, with casualties still frozen into the postures of brutal trench combat.

This is the Great War memoir of our time, if such as statement isn't something of a paradox. Lynch's Australian sensibility, his cheerful challenges to authority and the democratic flavour of Anzac `mateship' are more attuned to a 20th century sensibility than some of the more literary laments to the `futility' of the war in the 1920s and 1930s. (The attitudes to other races in the opening chapter are shocking but not surprising for a memoir of the time; their omission would have been a pointless and historically dishonest piece of editing).

A singular and powerfully important memoir of 1914-1918.


Outstanding, 28 Nov 2008
When it comes to buying something really exciting about the Great War then you will not do any better than Peter Barton's epic book. It shows a genuine commitment to furthering interest in the War by producing fascinating new material and to the highest standard. The panoramas alone are good enough to take your breath away, but the text and the intergrated images are superb; I can't imagine the amount of effort that went into this book. However, the results make the purchase worth every penny. Well done Mr Barton.

A fantastic book!, 08 Feb 2008
Quite simply one of the best books on the Great War I have ever read. Beautifully written and with a wealth of photos and diagrams it transports you back to the dark days of the Salient.
Buy it.

Terrific book!, 15 Jan 2008
As other reviwers have said, this is superbly researched and put together. The mix of original photos and plans with modern photos of the tunnels and dugouts as they appear now, plus the combination of eyewitness comments and authors' commentary make this a superb production. Having visited mine craters and a few dugouts and the tunnel system at Vimy, this book made me appreciate more fully the scale and organisation of this activity on both sides. Highly recommended.

A must for Great War enthusiasts!, 01 Feb 2007
There is no doubt, that many excellent books have been written and published on the wide ranging and different aspects of the Great War, these include both general as well as specialist publications which are aimed at either the general reader or expert or often both. I have personally read many books on this tragic conflict, some I find fascinating, others are rather run of the mill and are possibly recycled from previous publications. This splendid title is however one that shines out and I am sure, it will be of tremendous interest to a wide audience of both amateur and professional military historians, researchers and general readers alike.

The war beneath the "killing fields" of the Western Front has in my opinion until now been overshadowed and often neglected by authors and publishers by what took place above the ground. This truly magnificent book will, without a doubt do much to draw attention to the skilful , yet unseen game of "cat and mouse" that was taking place in the damp and dirty tunnels underground.

I can honestly say that this volume made interesting reading and succeeded in stimulating my own interest in carrying out further research into this fascinating aspect of the Great War. The authors (all tunnelling experts), have in fact been inundated with enquiries on this subject since the publication of Sebastian Faulke's "Birdsong" and have as a result carried out over twenty five years painstaking research, excavations and investigation to be able to produce this brilliant title.

The book is packed with a tremendous amount of gripping information and is backed up with a host of colourful maps, in excess of 450 colour as well as black and white photographs and many highly detailed and professional diagrams. Many of the photographs are unique and will keep the reader engrossed like I was for many hours.

If there is one book to buy on this intriguing subject, this is it - I am sure you will not be disappointed!


Compelling, thorough and beautifully presented, 14 Aug 2005
This is a beautiful book about an awful subject. It is put together with great care and skill and carries the reader through. I am not particularly a war buff but I found this unputdownable. It is clearly a labour of love and the years of work that have gone into it have created an absolutely marvelous book.

Forget Birdsong!, 10 Nov 2004
Whilst the common reader will not mind (or indeed know) Birdsong borrows wholesale from older accounts, this definitive tome accurately depicts a) how WW1 underground warfare was fought on the Western Front b) presents illustrated eye-witness accounts of previous unpublished work and c) how 30 years of research on the battlefield by the authors, mostly for the first time, has discovered significant parts of the tunnel system, with Flanders Fields geology preserving artifacts and systems to a unique degree.

There are plentiful contemporary diagrams and photographs of projected operations as well as modern colour photographs of the author's investigations. The three author's different specialties avoids the common author bias of single author books, with the eye for detail giving the military and amateur enthusiast alike a mass of information.

A must for the military and amateur enthusiast at a very reasonable hardback price, this book fills a gap of a little known but highly important theatre of operations, little known due to the secrecy involved in wartime mining.

Truly outstanding, 26 Sep 2008
This is one of those books I could not put down - every time I have read it! Simply outstanding. Enlightening to read the story from the other side. I understand there are some people who doubt it's complete authenticity. I found it absolutely gripping. This is a must for anyone reading about WWI. Probably the best book I've read on WWI.

Sheer onomatopoeia , 01 Sep 2008
The introduction is sheer onomatopoeia - simply brilliant. This is not a critique of war; it's a highly readable diary of a born soldier. Honour and confidence in the fine, strapping young me of Germany means that Jünger just relates what happened to him: the 11 times over four years that he was shot or hit by shrapnel. It is, needless to say that it's a miracle he survived the whole war on the Western Front. He had so many near misses that he doesn't need to say war is a monster: it's (unwittingly?) implicit. The growing mechanisation of the war towards the end - tanks and bombing raids - is noted by Jünger, who laments that it was proof of the enemy's superiority. Is there a better first-hand account of WWI out there? I doubt it.

A good read. A Bad man., 01 Aug 2008
I enjoyed reading this (a couple of years back now), but what has stayed with me is a dislike of Junger. I can't be the only one to believe that he enjoyed fighting and killing other men, can I?

Still, a very good read and an antidote to all the revisionist claptrap that tends to hog the headlines. Junger saw his duty as to kill the eemy and took to it with single-minded determination. The translation is excellent.

You may also want to read "Old Soliders Never Die" by Frank Richards for the polar opposite- a fighting Tommy with a sense of humour who also survived the war.

Seriously younger, 22 Oct 2007
Along with All Quiet on the Western front it should be compulsory reading for any head of state, or government, considering war. A very modern book in tone, it's open and honest description of trench live in The Great War makes it a fresh read. I've read several books on more recent conflicts that feel more dated (I don't speak German, so the modern translation may play a part). Junger's depiction of events is vivid, when he finds his injured brother at the front it felt like a plot device from a novel, the only difference being it happened. His likening of being shelled to being tied to a post and having a sledgehammer repeatedly aimed at your head, but it just missing every time, is an image that will stay with me. As a memoir of an infantry leader I think it takes some beating.

Definitively 5 Stars, 16 Mar 2007
This is 'the' First World War memoir from the German perspective - and five stars is pretty well obligatory. Well written and highly informative. It has the grip of a novel - with telling observation, and unflinching depictions of a crucial moment in history.

The Great War and Italy, 12 Nov 2008
I fully agree with what the other reviewers have said about this book, which is a marvellous overview of the Italian front during 1915-18. Not only a military history - though it is that, of course, but also a political and cultural history. And not only of the Italian experience, even though that is the main focus, but also of "the other side", the multi-national Habsburg empire. The outnumbered Austrian army (with bosnians and croats strongly represented here) fought well on the Italian front, in contrast with other theatres.

The author gives a balanced, beautifully written, exciting and very moving account of this not-so-known part of the Great War: how Italy tumbled into it 1915, the desperate and futile fighting along the Isonzo, the debacle of Caporetto, the recovery and the peace settlement eventually leading to the establishment of fascism. The author is very much inside his material, and the book has a very strong sense both of time and of place. At times it reminded me of Alistair Horne or John Keegan. Strongly recommended, and not only to military history buffs!

A fascinating history of a forgotten front, 10 Oct 2008
For those of you who have read Hemingway's Farewell to Arms, you would be aware that the a war was fought on the Italian Front during the Great War. However, because so much is written about the Western Front, Gallipoli and even the Eastern Front, it is easy to forget this part of the war. Thompson, however, has brought together a book which seeks to redress this balance - and in my opinion it does so beautifully.

Unlike many dry history books, Thompson paints a picture of suffering, confusion and unbelievable bravery from a front which claimed millions of lives over the course of the War. Many of us know how the advent of technology brought about countless deaths on the Western Front, but countless more were lost on the Italian front due to the adherence to out of date tactics and ideas, and a futile attempt to gain land towards which many of the soliders fighting felt very little.

The book doesn't just provide names and dates. It also explores the politics, poetry and society which emerged out of the fray. It is easy to read, well researched and engaging without alienating the reader in any way. For a comprehensive understanding of an under represented period of history, you couldn't do much better.

Learn about what you were not told, 15 Sep 2008
In the UK, were are taught about the First World War. We are taught about the trenches, the slaughter and the waste. Mostly, were are taught about the British and Commonwealth soldier's experience on the Western Front. 'The White War' teaches the English reader about what they are not taught - the Italian/Austrian front.

After declaring war on Austria-Hungary for dubious territorial reasons, Italy sent hundreds of thousands of men to their deaths on the rocks of Carso near Trieste. Men, indeed, who were most likely to be peasants from places such as Calabria in the south, who barely had the vaguest idea of 'Italy' or what they were ordered to fight for. Thomson details the grim experience and grimmer treatment of these men from their superiors. The Commander-in-Chief of the Italian Army, Luigi Cadorna, even practiced the Roman-era punishment of decimation for retreating or mutineering troops. Nor was Cadorna a particularly successful commander, often conceding vast losses for pointless gains soon lost. He was replaced, eventually, but too late to save the Italian effort.

Thompson shows that this war, though being triggered by that infamous shooting in Sarajevo, was propagandised as a continuation of the Risorgimento (the 19th Century unification of Italy), even though Italy had only a partial claim to Trieste, and very little to the majority-Germanophone South Tyrol.

The writer does all this well, and even the digressions into Italian war literature (no doubt inserted as a counterpoint to Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, 'Dulce et Decorum est' school) are fairly tolerable - though the well-aimed kicking given to D'Annunzio is amusing. Faint praise is not what this book deserves, however. It deserves to be read, and read especially by those whose sole exposure to WW1 history is the Western Front. They will learn something, even if it may be different to the lessons of Ypres and the Somme.

The Italian Great War and the roots of Facism , 07 Sep 2008
I have just finished reading "The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1918 by Mark Thompson which is a study of a 1st World War front that is often forgotten but where Italy lost 689, 000 solders( Britain lost 662,000 + 140, 000 reported as missing). That we tend to associate the infantry war with the plains of Flanders and Russia reveals the common myth as this part of the struggle was mountain warfare albeit also with trenches.

The conduct of the war exposed the weak hold of liberal structures and politics on the Italian population and the defeat of victory quickly let in 20 years of fascist government. The collapse of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, and take over the successor national states by the communists has made it difficult to get a sense of what really went on: Italians and other non Germanic nationals did fight for the Emperor, many of the feature of Fascism (a puppet parliament, a muzzled press, a romantic nationalism, a militarised state) had their roots on the political conduct of the war.

What made the book an interesting read is that Mark Thomas does more then hold to the historical arc of the events from the turmoil in Italy leading to its ripping up of a long standing agreement to be allied with the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary ( It took on a secret 30 pieces of silver territorial deal with the Allies). And ending with the desperate mad dash to occupy land vacated by the collapsing Hapsburg armies-it made the most of the cock-up where as the armistice agreement ended the war one day earlier for Austria-Hungary. What he does is switch the narrative in cinematographic terms from wide/long shots, medium to close-ups as the narrative unfolds. So we take the long view at the ideas affecting Italian practice in politics, art and military such as Romantic Vitalism or the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche. Or the impact of how Italian unification actually unfolded. We then have medium shot accounts of how individual battles unfolded from both of the combatant's perspectives or the power struggles and conduct at military and political levels. And finally the close-up accounts of artists, reporters, and survivors that expose the official accounts or help to explain the mindset of the elites.

It was this rounded and varied explanation that held my attention, as I tended to wander in the step by step of accounts of the battles(my attention span rather then the quality of the writing, although these are necessary to understand the appalling and arrogant way that the soldiers were used. For example, Military discipline justified the ancient Roman practice of randomly killing 1 in 10 solders if the platoon had infringed any rules which could be just turning up late from leave. The fact, with no interest shown in the reason was enough for summary execution. This is because the Italian army leadership took the most extreme view of all the armed forces in the 1st world war that the solders were only cannon fodder to do the will of the supreme commander. An attitude they paid for when Austria-Hungarian forces with direct support of Germany developed a forerunner of Blitzkrieg and took back all the territory fought over in the past three years and swept down to the pre 1866 national boundaries.

The resource imbalance between the foes and the deteriorating political realties for the Central Powers meant that this could not be turned into a knock-out blow. But with Russia out and embroiled in Revolution and no significant Allied victories, the collapse of the Central Powers as Germany struggled to avoid the fate of Austria- Hungary created the German Nazis myth of a stab in the back. It also confirmed the lack of democratic populist support for liberalism.

So why should you read this book? Well it gives you a clear account of one part of the wider First World War front that is only now becoming clear and even possible to study. (Attempts to clear the names of those summarily executed is still politically sensitive in Italy.) But a more important reason is that it offers insights into the conduct of events now. If History has anything to teach, its that we the ordinary people wont get a true picture what our masters have been doing in our name until we are pushing up the daisies.. In knowing what was going on behind closed doors then, we can question what the media, cultural elites, military strategists, politicians are doing now. But of course if you think we have the straight line on the War on Terror, then give it a miss.


Somme Mud - we remember them, 30 Nov 2008
I was interested when I saw this book as my grandfather was at the Somme but would never speak of it. I had heard about it in history and seen a few television programs but I was interested to learn about it from the mind and voice of one who was there.

Once started the book is very hard to put down. My respect for my grandfather and those who went off to fight this war has grown tremendously.

A must read for those wishing to know about those unsung heroes who gave their all.

A book that should be read, 19 Nov 2008
wait on whilst the dead men are buried. A shallow grave marked by a rifle stuck up in the mud is all that can be done. It gives some satisfaction to do that, although we are well aware the men so buried will be thrown up and reburied by shellfire time after time until the fighting shifts on from here. Some day they may have real graves. What a lot to look forward to! It's as well their people can't fully realize what finding a soldier's grave really means.

If there is one book that everyone should read on warfare, or just a book that should be read, this is it. Edward Lynch left Australia on 22nd August 1916 as a young man of 18 volunteering to serve on the Western Front. He returned to his homeland in 1919, lived through three of the most turbulent years of modern history.

In 1921 he started to write of his experiences, twenty one school exercise books full. The initial idea was to publish the story, but due to circumstances at the time this never happened. After his death the volumes resurfaced when Edward's grandson Mike Lynch passed the volumes to the editor Will Davies.

The result is a story that stands with any of the so called `classics' of the Great War and is superior to most. The story is that of a young private `Nulla' and his experience of some of the fiercest fighting in the area of the Somme from late 1916 through to 1918.

The descriptions of actions including the firing of the mines on the Messines Ridge, tanks and the start of air re-supply. Interspersed are the personal asides, food contaminated with gas, the mod swings that effected individuals, the flashes of humour, including the description of Janker's for going AWOL, cleaning the trace chains of artillery harne