What makes wars drag on and why do they end when they do? Here H. E. Goemans brings theoretical rigor and empirical depth to a long-standing question of securities studies. He explores how various government leaders assess the cost of war in terms of domestic politics and their own postwar fates. Goemans first develops the argument that two sides will wage war until both gain sufficient knowledge of the other's strengths and weaknesses so as to agree on the probable outcome of continued war. Yet the incentives that motivate leaders to then terminate war, Goemans maintains, can vary greatly depending on the type of government they represent. The author looks at democracies, dictatorships, and mixed regimes and compares the willingness among leaders to back out of wars or risk the costs of continued warfare.

Democracies, according to Goemans, will prefer to withdraw quickly from a war they are not winning in order to appease the populace. Autocracies will do likewise so as not to be overthrown by their internal enemies. Mixed regimes, which are made up of several competing groups and which exclude a substantial proportion of the people from access to power, will likely see little risk in continuing a losing war in the hope of turning the tide. Goemans explores the conditions and the reasoning behind this "gamble for resurrection" as well as other strategies, using rational choice theory, statistical analysis, and detailed case studies of Germany, Britain, France, and Russia during World War I. In so doing, he offers a new perspective of the Great War that integrates domestic politics, international politics, and battlefield developments.

In Reliving the Trenches, three plays written by returned soldiers who served in the Great War with the Canadian Expeditionary Force in France and Belgium appear in print for the first time. With a critical introduction that references the author's service files to establish the plays as memoirs, these plays are an important addition to Canadian literature of the Great War.Important but overlooked war memoirs that relive trench life and warfare as experienced by combat veterans, the three plays include The P.B.I., written and staged in 1920 by recently returned veterans at the University of Toronto. Parts of this play appeared in print in serial form in 1922. Glory Hole, written in 1929 by William Stabler Atkinson, and Dawn in Heaven, written and staged in Winnipeg in 1934 by Simon Jauvoish, have never been published. These plays impact Canadian literature and theatre history by revealing a body of previously unknown modernist writing, and they impact life writing studies by showing how memoirs can be concealed behind genre conventions. They offer fascinating details of the daily routines of the soldiers in the trenches by bringing them back to life in theatrical re-enactment.

Private Charles Smith had been dead for close to a century when Jonathan Hart discovered the soldier's small diary in the Baldwin Collection at the Toronto Public Library. The diary's first entry was marked 28 June 1915. After some research, Hart discovered that Charles Smith was an Anglo-Canadian, born in Kent, and that this diary was almost all that remained of this forgotten man, who like so many soldiers from ordinary families had lost his life in the First World War. In reading the diary, Hart discovered a voice full of life, and the presence of a rhythm, a cadence that urged him to bring forth the poetry in Smith's words. Unforgetting Private Charles Smith is the poetic setting of the words in Smith's diary, work undertaken by Hart with the intention of remembering Smith's life rather than commemorating his death.

From the bestselling, award-winning author of SKELLIG comes a vivid and moving story, beautifully illustrated, which commemorates the hundred-year anniversary of the end of the First World War.

"I am just a child," says John. "How can I be at war?"

It's 1918, and war is everywhere. John's dad is fighting in the trenches far away in France. His mum works in the munitions factory just along the road. His teacher says that John is fighting, too, that he is at war with enemy children in Germany.

One day, in the wild woods outside town, John has an impossible moment: a meeting with a German boy named Jan. John catches a glimpse of a better world, in which children like Jan and himself can come together, and scatter the seeds of peace.

Gorgeously illustrated by David Litchfield, this is a book to treasure.

Robert Graves, aged nineteen, left school within a week of the outbreak of World War I, and immediately volunteered with the Royal Welch Fusiliers. His experiences as a junior officer form the heart of this compelling autobiography. Beginning with an ironic overview of his Edwardian childhood, he proceeds to a tongue-in-cheek account of a young poet's life at public school (not helpful to be half-German, but handy to take up boxing), progressing to caricatures of military stereotypes he encounters in training, and the devastating farce of the War itself, the blundering and mismanagement, and the appalling human consequences. Graves's handling of the horrors of war is always deadpan, honest and unadorned. It is wholly in line with his sense of the absurd that his commanding officer should write to inform his parents that he had died of wounds during the battle of the Somme. He soon found that patriotism was meaningless to the men in the trenches; loyalty to comrades alive and dead drove him back to active service though still suffering from shell-shock. Goodbye to All That takes Graves through his convalescence in England, his efforts to protect the poet Siegfried Sassoon, a friend and fellow officer, from the consequences of his public denunciation of the war; marriage to artist and feminist Nancy Nicholson, postwar undergraduate years at Oxford and a decade as a struggling writer with four young children, beset with money problems and neurasthenia. It is written in a spirit of defiance as he prepared to put 'all that' behind him and begin a new life in Majorca with the American poet Laura Riding.

Paths out of the Apocalypse uses violence as a prism through which to investigate the profound social, cultural, and political changes experienced by (post-) Habsburg Central Europe during and immediately after the Great War. It compares attitudes toward, and experiences and practices of, physical violence in the mostly Czech-speaking territories of Bohemia and Moravia, the German-speaking territories that would constitute the Republic of Austria after 1918, and the mostly German-speaking region of South Tyrol. Based on research in national and local archives and copious secondary literature, the study argues that, in the context of total war, physical violence became a predominant means of conceptualizing and expressing social-political demands as well as a means of demarcating various notions of community and belonging. The authors apply an interdisciplinary understanding of violence informed by sociological and psychological theories as well as by rigorous empirical historiographical approach. First, they examine the most severe kind of physical violence - murder - against the backdrop of shifting scientific and media discourses during the war and its immediate aftermath. Second, the authors use numerous cases of collective violence, ranging from less serious everyday conflicts to massive hunger demonstrations and riots, to unravel its 'language', thus deciphering the attitudes and values shared among an ever-growing group of perpetrators. Paths out of the Apocalypse thus fundamentally rethinks some key topics currently debated in the scholarship on early twentieth-century Central Europe, the First World War, violence, nationalism, and modern European comparative social and cultural history.

During World War I, as young men journeyed overseas to battle, American women maintained the home front by knitting, fundraising, and conserving supplies. These became daily chores for young girls, but many longed to be part of a larger, more glorious war effort. A new genre of children's books entered the market, written specifically with the young girls of the war period in mind. Through fiction, girls could catch spies, cross battlefields, man machine guns, and blow up bridges. These adventurous heroines built the framework for the feminist revolution, creating avenues of leadership for women and inspiring individualism and self-discovery. The work presented here analyzes the powerful response to such literature, how it sparked the engagement of real girls in the United States and Allied war effort, as well as how it reflects their contemporaries' awareness of girls' importance.

Over 6.2 million sick and injured troops during the First World War were evacuated from the Western Front. Yet, despite almost every aspect of the First World War having been examined by historians in near forensic detail, very little has been unearthed concerning casualty evacuation - and the start of the long road to recovery. The provision of high-quality treatment and care is an important attribute in the maintenance of morale and the will to fight. Therefore, casualty evacuation deserves more attention, and this book does just that. This book is about how mass casualties were planned for, and then evacuated in an age before many modern medicines, stabilisation techniques and helicopters. The main purpose of this book is to examine the evacuation of casualties from the first days of the Battle of the Somme in July 1916. The aftermath of the opening day of this battle, on 1 July 1916, resulted in the highest number of British casualties in any single day. A situation that was to severely test the medical and evacuation services, over a number of days. The book is based upon primary research of the War Diaries of medical units, and in particular those of the medical officers of the ambulance trains. The author has analysed the activity of every hour of every ambulance train in the period of June and July 1916 in order to build a unique oversight of how the evacuation pipeline coped with the crisis. This analysis is revealed after the reader experiences how the army medical services capability and procedures evolved as the war continued. The reader is taken on a journey from the 1840's to 1914 as military medical science and the capability of the railway in sustaining war, and in evacuation, developed concurrently. Thereafter, attention shifts to the frantic efforts in late 1914 to introduce a means to evacuate casualties by train. As medics and logisticians become more organised processes are introduced to manage casualty evacuation, trains are constructed and shipped to France. Thereafter, the book explains the principles of the medical evacuation pipeline from the point of injury, to the Casualty Clearing Stations, ambulance trains and eventually, many hours to the rear, the base hospitals. The emphasis then shifts to the medical planning and organisation for the Battle of the Somme, including learning from the experiences of the Battle of Loos in September 1915. The focus then turns to the 1 July 1916 and the initial battle, the surge of wounded and how the evacuation pipeline coped with the unprecedented demand. The book reveals how the mass of injured humanity from 1 July hit the limited number of Casualty Clearing Stations and were packed into almost 50 trains on long journey and uncomfortable journeys to places of safety and eventual recovery. This book exposes the enormous logistical and physical effort involved in mass casualty evacuation and shows that despite the unprecedented number of casualties, every available ambulance train was optimised to recover the wounded. It challenges the theory that ambulance trains failed on the 1 July 1916, and shows that, crucially, the medical planners for this battle failed to anticipate what was, in fact, a predictable level of casualties. What is unclear, though, is had they accurately predicted the casualty rate whether it would have been possible to have evacuated the injured any more expeditiously.

Many people have the idea that the 'Great War' on the Western Front was simple, if ghastly, to fight - with few tactics, and unbroken, monotonous, trench lines as the main feature of the battlefield. In such a scenario the archetypal image of battle is of soldiers with rifles and bayonets charging each other in blind obedience to stupid repetitious orders.

Though undeniably bloody the war was in fact a ferment of new ideas and new weapons. Gas, flame throwers, super-heavy artillery, concrete bunkers, tanks, aircraft and other innovations were all introduced, whilst older notions such as barbed wire, machine guns and armour took on a new lease of life.

No single manual was ever enough to encompass 'modern war', and even before 1914 numerous publications were required. With the focus on the Western Front and the soldiers fighting there, this unique compendium collects together a huge variety of contemporary manuals, leaflets and booklets, and shows how although operations often failed, British commanders made attempts to devise new tactics and weaponry.

This remarkable new book reveals the hitherto unknown story of the soldiers who took the first tanks into action on the Somme battlefield in September 1916. Drawing on official records, contemporary newspaper reports and family memories, Stephen Pope provides a fascinating insight into the lives of First Tank Crewmen, covering their recruitment, scant training, rapid deployment and their premature use in battle. He then traces their inter-connected lives over the next two years as tanks played a key role in the defeat of the Germany Army in 1918. He reveals the story of their return to civilian life and their often difficult struggle to build a family life. Sadly many of the First Tank Crew died young, some due to injuries or illnesses developed as a result of their wartime service. Many of their marriages failed, some as a direct result of the stresses of the battlefield. Many were childless and few lived to see their grandchildren grow up. Amongst the stories revealed are those of the grandson of the social reformer Joseph Rowntree, the champion rose grower Bill Harkness; the Scottish chemist Stuart Hastie who introduced science into the whisky distilling process and the Liverpool school teacher Graham Nixon who tried to teach John Lennon mathematics. None of those who fought in the tanks achieved great fame for their actions and few revealed their wartime secrets to their families. However, many became pillars of their local communities, giving a life of service to those around them. This book tells the previously untold stories of bravery, determination and dedication by a group of unsung heroes. The author has used his contacts with more than fifty relatives of those who fought at the First Tank Action and used their input to provide a detailed description of their lives after the war. He has also gathered together many, previously unpublished pictures including many of the tankmen in France, and has revealed the backstory to several well known photographs. Above all, he has linked individual lives together to create a fascinating story of ordinary men who took part in extra-ordinary events. The story of The First Tank Crews is one well worth reading.

Recent discussion, academic publications and many of the national exhibitions relating to the Great War at sea have focussed on capital ships, Jutland and perhaps U-boats. Very little has been published about the crucial role played by fishermen, fishing vessels and coastal communities all round the British Isles. Yet fishermen and armed fishing craft were continually on the maritime front line throughout the conflict; they formed the backbone of the Auxiliary Patrol and were in constant action against-U-boats or engaged on unrelenting minesweeping duties. Approximately 3000 fishing vessels were requisitioned and armed by the Admiralty and more than 39,000 fishermen joined the Trawler Section of the Royal Naval Reserve. The class and cultural gap between working fishermen and many RN officers was enormous. This book examines the multifaceted role that fishermen and the fish trade played throughout the conflict. It examines the reasons why, in an age of dreadnoughts and other high-tech military equipment, so many fishermen and fishing vessels were called upon to play such a crucial role in the littoral war against mines and U-boats, not only around the British Isles but also off the coasts of various other theatres of war. It will analyse the nature of the fishing industry's war-time involvement and also the contribution that non-belligerent fishing vessels continued to play in maintaining the beleaguered nation's food supplies.

On the outbreak of war, the South Midland was the second strongest division in the Territorial Force (TF); by October 1914, it was considered to be the second most efficient of the TF's fourteen 1st Line formations. Like other TF divisions, its pre-war officers and other ranks came from a variety of urban and rural backgrounds, trades and professions, but in contrast to the Kitchener formations, all of its units had a history and tradition dating back to the mid-19th century at least. It became the third TF division to be despatched to the Western Front and, having spent 30 months in France and Belgium, it deployed to Italy as one of the British formations tasked to support the Italian Army. In the same way as the majority of British divisions, 48th (South Midland) Division was not an especially spectacular formation, with no particular or outstanding success to its name. It did suffer the indignity of having its commander sacked, but on the whole, it earned a reputation as a good, solid, reliable formation. This volume explains the division's pre-war difficulties in trying to raise, equip and train efficient units; it also assesses those units' successes and failures in their major engagements. It examines the extent to which the TF ethos and the division's local character were maintained during the course of the war and how well its various constituent units adapted to the tactical and operational evolution apparent within the British Army. The key elements of command and leadership - and what in modern conceptual doctrine is known as 'fighting power' - are analysed across the component units, with considerable attention also being paid to the essential roles played by the supporting arms. The book offers a comprehensive study of the character and activities of a reasonably typical TF division, but also of a formation which although competent and efficient, received few of the plaudits enjoyed by many of its fellow 'Saturday afternoon soldiers'.

Drawing on rehabilitation publications, novels by both famous and obscure American writers, and even the prosthetic masks of a classically trained sculptor, Great War Prostheses in American Literature and Culture addresses the ways in which prosthetic devices were designed, promoted, and depicted in America in the years during and after the First World War. The war's mechanized weaponry ushered in an entirely new relationship between organic bodies and the technology that could both cause, and attempt to remedy, hideous injuries. Such a relationship was also evident in the realm of prosthetic development, which by the second decade of the twentieth century promoted the belief that a prosthesis should be a spiritual extension of the person who possessed it. This spiritualized vision of prostheses proved particularly resonant in American postwar culture. Relying on some of the most recent developments in literary and disability studies, the book's six chapters explain how a prosthesis's spiritual promise was largely dependent on its ability to nullify an injury and help an amputee renew or even improve upon his prewar life. But if it proved too cumbersome, obtrusive, or painful, the device had the long-lasting power to efface or distort his 'spirit' or personality.

Drawing from newspapers, journals, government reports, and archival records, Terry Copp - one of Canada's leading military historians - tells the story of how citizens in Canada's largest city responded to the challenges of the First World War. Montreal at War addresses responses to the outbreak of war in Europe and the process of raising an army for service overseas. It details the shock of intense combat and heavy casualties, studies the mobilization of volunteers, and follows the experience of battalions from Montreal to the Battle of Vimy Ridge. Challenging long-held assumptions, Montreal at War aims to understand the war experience as it unfolded, approaching history from the perspective of those who lived through it.

When some drug dealers in Camden, New Jersey get blown away by a smooth operator who's impersonating a cop, the case falls to two bleary-eyed, wisecracking police vets. But before they can even begin, an FBI team swoops in, headed by bossy and humorless Roger Sorenson. He identifies the perp as James Sullivan, an attorney who dropped out of sight a few years ago and has been taking out criminals ever since. In bits and pieces, it's revealed that Sullivan's vigilantism stems from criminal activity of his former colleague Dennis O'Brien, whom Sullivan blames for the death of his wife.