The Great and Holy War offers the first look at how religion created and prolonged the First World War. At the one-hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the war, historian Philip Jenkins reveals the powerful religious dimensions of this modern-day crusade, a period that marked a traumatic crisis for Western civilization, with effects that echoed throughout the rest of the twentieth century.

The war was fought by the world's leading Christian nations, who presented the conflict as a holy war. Thanks to the emergence of modern media, a steady stream of patriotic and militaristic rhetoric was given to an unprecedented audience, using language that spoke of holy war and crusade, of apocalypse and Armageddon. But this rhetoric was not mere state propaganda. Jenkins reveals how the widespread belief in angels and apparitions, visions and the supernatural was a driving force throughout the war and shaped all three of the major religions--Christianity, Judaism and Islam--paving the way for modern views of religion and violence. The disappointed hopes and moral compromises that followed the war also shaped the political climate of the rest of the century, giving rise to such phenomena as Nazism, totalitarianism, and communism.

Connecting numerous remarkable incidents and characters--from Karl Barth to Carl Jung, the Christmas Truce to the Armenian Genocide--Jenkins creates a powerful and persuasive narrative that brings together global politics, history, and spiritual crisis as never before and shows how religion informed and motivated circumstances on all sides of the war.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, field artillery was a small, separate, unsupported branch of the U.S. Army. By the end of World War I, it had become the 'King of Battle,' a critical component of American military might. Million-Dollar Barrage tracks this transformation. Offering a detailed account of how American artillery crews trained, changed, adapted, and fought between 1907 and 1923, Justin G. Prince tells the story of the development of modern American field artillery - a tale stretching from the period when field artillery became an independent organization to when it became an equal branch of the U.S. Army. The field artillery entered the Great War as a relatively new branch. It separated from the Coast Artillery in 1907 and established a dedicated training school, the School of Fire at Fort Sill, in 1911. Prince describes the challenges this presented as issues of doctrine, technology, weapons development, and combat training intersected with the problems of a peacetime army with no good industrial base. His account, which draws on a wealth of sources, ranges from debates about U.S. artillery practices relative to those of Europe, to discussions of the training, equipping, and performance of the field artillery branch during the war. Prince follows the field artillery from its plunge into combat in April 1917 as an unprepared organization to its emergence that November as an effective fighting force, with the Meuse-Argonne Offensive proving the pivotal point in the branch's fortunes. Million-Dollar Barrage provides an unprecedented analysis of the ascendance of field artillery as a key factor in the nation's military dominance.

The cup that cheers
The First World War was considered the pinnacle in the development of warfare following the dawn of the industrial age. For the first time conflict on a global stage was fought on land, on and under the sea and in the skies. This war of the machines swept away swathes of humanity by the use of ruthlessly efficient means of slaughter. Every human resource was needed because it could not be waged solely by male armies on the fields of battle. This meant that the role of women in western society would be changed forever. Women became the industrial workforce, agricultural workers and the custodians of transport and logistics. Thousands more, from nurses to drivers, mechanics to entertainers, volunteered to provide essential services to support the fighting men on the front line. Many new and established organisations willingly put all their resources into the war effort. To the troops of the allied armies these volunteers-both men and women-were little short of angels, providing for body and spirit under the most difficult circumstances and their contribution to the morale of the soldiers in action cannot be over estimated. The Y. M. C. A was at the forefront of these activities, providing everything from essentials to much appreciated little luxuries, from the opportunity for a bath and shave to that mainstay of English or American life, a good, hot and much needed 'cuppa' tea or coffee, accompanied by a kind smile or a supportive word. This special Leonaur edition contains three accounts of these remarkably brave volunteers on the Western Front. Theirs was essential but often dangerous work and many of them made the ultimate sacrifice. This fascinating book relates an often unsung aspect of the Great War, but one which will be of enormous interest to those who require a complete understanding of the conflict and are interested in the changing role of women in the early years of the 20th century.
Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket; our hardbacks are cloth bound and feature gold foil lettering on their spines and fabric head and tail bands.

This is a major new history of the British army during the Great War written by three leading military historians. Ian Beckett, Timothy Bowman and Mark Connelly survey operations on the Western Front and throughout the rest of the world as well as the army's social history, pre-war and wartime planning and strategy, the maintenance of discipline and morale and the lasting legacy of the First World War on the army's development. They assess the strengths and weaknesses of the army between 1914 and 1918, engaging with key debates around the adequacy of British generalship and whether or not there was a significant 'learning curve' in terms of the development of operational art during the course of the war. Their findings show how, despite limitations of initiative and innovation amongst the high command, the British army did succeed in developing the effective combined arms warfare necessary for victory in 1918.