The commander of the BEF's view of the Great War
This book, written by Sir John French, concerns his period of command during the first period of the Great War. Predictably, as in many commander's memoirs it displays much partiality as to his own actions and those of others. This is particularly noteworthy since the consensus view of the history of the time does not judge-with much justification-French kindly. At the outbreak of the war French was the obvious choice for command and his views accorded with the government establishment if not with more forward thinking military men under his command. Fast moving German offensives revealed French's military strategy with its faith in inflexible defensive strongpoints to be hopelessly out of date. Events overtook him and were it not for Smith-Dorrien's aggressive action during the First Battle of Mons-for which seemingly French never forgave him-the BEF could easily have been overwhelmed. French became increasing out of touch and indecisive and was replaced in 1915 by Haig. This book is far from a balanced history, but is an important account of how a nineteenth century soldier saw his twentieth century war. It also contains much factual information on the dispositions of troops and actions in what was a fluid stage of the conflict.

An insightful account of the devastating impact of the Great War, upon the already fragile British colonial African state of Northern Rhodesia. Deploying extensive archival and rare evidence from surviving African veterans, it investigates African resistance at this time.

The Avant-Garde in Interwar England addresses modernism's ties to tradition, commerce, nationalism, and spirituality through an analysis of the assimilation of visual modernism in England between 1910 and 1939. During this period, a debate raged across the nation concerning the purpose of art in society. On one side were the aesthetic formalists, led by members of London's Bloomsbury Group, who thought art was autonomous from everyday life. On the other were England's so-called medieval modernists, many of them from the provincial North, who maintained that art had direct social functions and moral consequences. As Michael T. Saler demonstrates in this fascinating volume, the heated exchange between these two camps would ultimately set the terms for how modern art was perceived by the British public.
Histories of English modernism have usually emphasized the seminal role played by the Bloomsbury Group in introducing, celebrating, and defining modernism, but Saler's study instead argues that, during the watershed years between the World Wars, modern art was most often understood in the terms laid out by the medieval modernists. As the name implies, these artists and intellectuals closely associated modernism with the art of the Middle Ages, building on the ideas of John Ruskin, William Morris, and other nineteenth-century romantic medievalists. In their view, modernism was a spiritual, national, and economic movement, a new and different artistic sensibility that was destined to revitalize England's culture as well as its commercial exports when applied to advertising and industrial design.
This book, then, concerns the busy intersection of art, trade, and national identity in the early decades of twentieth-century England. Specifically, it explores the life and work of Frank Pick, managing director of the London Underground, whose famous patronage of modern artists, architects, and designers was guided by a desire to unite nineteenth-century arts and crafts with twentieth-century industry and mass culture. As one of the foremost adherents of medieval modernism, Pick converted London's primary public transportation system into the culminating project of the arts and crafts movement. But how should today's readers regard Pick's achievement? What can we say of the legacy of this visionary patron who sought to transform the whole of sprawling London into a post-impressionist work of art? And was medieval modernism itself a movement of pioneers or dreamers? In its bold engagement with such questions, The Avant-Garde in Interwar England will surely appeal to students of modernism, twentieth-century art, the cultural history of England, and urban history.

The epic battle of the Marine Fusiliers in the Great War
The men of the French Fusiliers Marins were always bound to draw public attention because irrespective of their proud military tradition, which often had them fighting alongside the celebrated French Foreign Legion, their distinctive uniform set them apart from the ordinary 'poilus' of the French infantry. The 'naval style' uniform of the men with their characteristic jaunty red pompomed hats and their officers in naval finery made them a unit guaranteed to draw attention and inspire admiration and romance. The role of this unit should not be confused with that of British Royal Marines. They were not intended to be sea going soldiers but to serve as land based infantry primarily in defence of naval stations and in campaigns where amphibious landings and naval support was essential. In the opening stages of the First World War between the middle of October and the middle of November 1914, these remarkable troops fought at Dixmude in Flanders, against the overwhelming tide of the German Army, in a fierce action that upheld their finest traditions, but all but annihilated them. This book is the account of that battle.
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.

In Jewish Integration in the German Army in the First World War David J. Fine offers a surprising portrayal of Jewish officers in the German army as integrated and comfortably identified as both Jews and Germans. Fine explores how both Judaism and Christianity were experienced by Jewish soldiers at the front, making an important contribution to the study of the experience of religion in war. Fine shows how the encounter of German Jewish soldiers with the old world of the shtetl on the eastern front tested both their German and Jewish identities. Finally, utilizing published and unpublished sources including letters, diaries, memoirs, military service records, press accounts, photographs, drawings and tomb stone inscriptions, the author argues that antisemitism was not a primary factor in the war experience of Jewish soldiers.

In this book, seven internationally renowned experts on Japanese and Asian history have come together to investigate, with innovative methodological approaches, various aspects of the Japanese experience during and after the First World War.

The importance of the Italian front in the First World War is often overlooked. Nor is it realised that British troops fought in Italy. The Forgotten Front demonstrates Italy's vital contribution to the Allied effort, including Lloyd George's plan to secure overall victory by an offensive on this front. Although his grand scheme was frustrated, British troops were committed to the theatre and played a real part in holding the Italian line and in the final victory of 1918. George H. Cassar, in an account that is original, scholarly and readable, covers both the strategic considerations and the actual fighting.
Faced by stalemate on the Western Front, Lloyd George argued strongly in 1917 for a joint Allied campaign in Italy to defeat Austria-Hungary. Knocking Germany's principal ally out of the war would lead in turn to the collapse of Germany itself. While his plan had real attractions, it also begged many questions. These allowed Haig and Robertson to join the French high command to thwarting it. The disastrous Italian defeat at Caporetto in October 1917 led, however, to the deployment of a British corps in Italy under Sir Herbert Plumer, which bolstered the Italians at a critical juncture. Subsequently led by the Earl of Cavan, British troops fought gallantly at the battle of Asiago in February to March 1918 and contributed significantly to the final defeat of Austria-Hungary at Vittorio Veneto in October.

This transnational, interdisciplinary study argues for the use of comics as a primary source. In recuperating currently unknown or neglected strips the authors demonstrate that these examples, produced during the World Wars, act as an important cultural record, providing, amongst other information, a barometer for contemporary popular thinking.

The New Nationalism and the First World War is an edited volume dedicated to a transnational study of the features of the turn-of-the-century nationalism, its manifestations in social and political arenas and the arts, and its influence on the development of the global-scale conflict that was the First World War.

Cautious Crusade explores how Americans viewed Nazi Germany during World War II, the extent to which the public opposed the president's vision for planning both Germany's defeat and future, and how opinion and policy interacted as the Roosevelt administration grappled with various aspects of the German problem during this period.

The American, his motor car and the cavalry in its last great conflict
This essential Leonaur Original, combines two works by American author Frederic Coleman, and has been published to coincide with the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Coleman, an American member of the Royal Automobile Club, together with a number of like minded volunteers, offered his own motor vehicle and services as a driver to the war effort. In 1914 they and their collection of superior cars arrived at the Western Front to be used as chauffeurs and couriers by staff and regimental officers of division and brigade. For many the Great War means massive armies locked in a war of attrition fought over a ' No Man's Land ' fringed with barbed wire behind which helmeted soldiers cowered in squalid trenches. For much of the war that image is accurate, but it was not always so. In the early stages infantry marched, cavalry charged and artillery was pulled into action by horsepower, just as it had been for hundreds of years. The invading Imperial German Army, superior in numbers and equipment of every kind, swept through Belgium and France as the allied armies fought and retired before its might. Coleman was allocated to the 2nd Cavalry Brigade of De Lisle as part of Allenby's First Cavalry Division. He kept a meticulous diary that enabled him to write these well crafted and detailed books full of anecdote, narrative and action. 'President' Coleman (as he was christened by the cavalry) was an eyewitness in the very heart of the conflict and in the company of the officers and men of the British Army's cavalry regiments he takes the reader from the campaigns of 1914 and the retreat from Mons to the war of stalemate of 1915. His descriptions of cavalry in action on the field of battle are riveting. Aside from his fascinating insights into some of the last campaigns of mounted soldiers, Coleman also provides the reader with a thrilling account of his own adventures with his trusty and almost indestructible motor car.
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.

Short Flights With the Cloud Cavalry
by "Spin"
Cavalry of the Clouds
by "Contact"
Air Combat over the trenches by those who fought
The first hand accounts of the experiences of men in time of war always make fascinating reading. Their stories are, of course, always as varied as the individuals concerned and the eras to which they belonged, whether they were soldiers, sailors or airmen, the branch of their service, their nationalities, the conflict in which they were participants and in which theatre they fought. This is what makes military history so fascinating. Sometimes many men report a common experience that abided for decades. Occasionally we hear, across time, the voices of a few notable men who fought their own war in their own special way and once their time had past history would never know their like again. That is especially true of the pilots of the First World war. The machinery of flight was a new technology. The aircraft were raw, basic, flimsy and unproven machines and both they and the brave men who piloted them were fighting their first conflict while learning and evolving their skills and equipment, quite literally, as they fought and died. The dogfight days of the early biplanes, triplanes and early mono winged fighters would be short, but their images together with those of the iconic airships which they ultimately destroyed will remain indelibly imprinted on the history of conflict and the development of man's mastery of the air. Heroes to a man, these trailblazers were almost always young, carefree, well educated and modest young men full of the joy of living and commitment to their aircraft and to flying. This special Leonaur edition contains the writings of two such men from the Royal Air Force, written anonymously during wartime, which take the reader back to those dangerous and epic delays of aerial combat over the muddy trenches of the Western Front in Europe during the Great War. Available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket for collectors.

The 'shark killers' of the U. S. fleet
The United States of America entered the First World War in April 1917, though its support for the allied war effort had, of course, been immensely influential in terms of the provision of material up to that point. The direct intervention of America in the war, with its vast resources of military personnel and equipment, backed by a huge manufacturing capacity, was inevitably pivotal. This account, part history, part anecdotal and part first hand account, was written shortly before the end of the conflict and describes in some detail the endeavours of the United States Navy during the war at sea in general and, more particularly, how it dealt with the omnipresent menace of the, 'German Shark'-the U Boats of the German Navy. This hidden undersea threat bore directly on America's role in the war. Men and vitally needed supplies had to traverse the Atlantic in merchant vessels to reach Europe. They were perilously exposed to the depredations of the German submarine force whose task it was to prevent them reaching their destinations. This well written and engaging book takes the reader to war on the United States Navy destroyers and with the navy pilots of early military aircraft whose task it was to pursue and destroy U-Boats in order to protect the vulnerable convoys of merchantmen on the high seas. Many interesting engagements, duels and sinkings are described in compelling detail from first hand experience. An essential book for all those particularly interested in submarine and anti-submarine warfare or the Great War generally.
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.

Provides an account of war veterans and their associations which spanned French politics. Their work is distinguished from other European veterans' organizations by their commitment to civic rather than military virtues. The author has prepared a new introduction for this English edition."

This is the first full scholarly history of the French Foreign Ministry - the Quai d'Orsay - in the years between the Fashoda Crisis and the First World War. In this intensively researched study, M. B. Hayne examines the bureaucratic machinery of the Quai d'Orsay, its policies, and its personnel. He explores the ideas and influence of leading diplomats and administrators, their prejudices, and their aims; and traces the often complex relationships between successive Foreign Ministers and the functionaries of the Quai d'Orsay. Dr Hayne's analysis throws much light on French policy and actions during the July Crisis, and makes a significant contribution to the debate over the origins of the First World War.

Ranging from soldiers reading newspapers at the front to authors' responses to the war, this book sheds new light on the reading habits and preferences of men and women, combatants and civilians, during the First World War. This is the first study of the conflict from the perspective of readers.

Letters from under the Guns
Observation Posts, a special Leonaur book, brings together two books by Dawson concerning warfare as experienced by the men in the trenches during the First World War on the Western Front. 'Carry On' and its sequel 'Living Bayonets' are based on the author's time as an artillery officer and principally comprise his letters to his family. Dawson was an intelligent, thoughtful correspondent who in fine prose has left posterity an intimate 'gunner's' view of the Great War making this book an essential source work for students of the period. This good value 'two-in-one' Leonaur edition enables collectors to own these uncommon and related accounts in a single, value-for-money volume.
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.

In April 1917, the United States embarked on its first overseas war - with no history of conscription, an army smaller than Bulgaria's, just two hundred agents in its federal Bureau of Investigation, and a political culture that saw little role for the federal government other than delivering the mail. Uncle Sam Wants You tells the dramatic story of the mobilization of the American homefront in World War I. In the absence of a strong federal government, Americans mobilized the Progressive Era's vibrant civil society by drawing on a political culture that stressed duty, obligation, and responsibility over rights and freedoms. In clubs, schools, churches, and workplaces, Americans governed each other during the war. But the heated temper of war quickly unleashed coercion on an unprecedented scale, making wartime America the scene of some of American history's most drastic political violence. Solving this problem prompted Americans to turn over increasing amounts of power to the federal government, giving rise to the modern American state of the twentieth century. Whether they were some of the four million men drafted under the Selective Service Act or the tens of millions of homefront volunteers - or counted themselves among the thousand of conscientious objectors, anti-war radicals, or German enemy aliens, Americans of the World War I era created a new American state - and new ways of being American citizens. Based on a rich array of sources bringing together political leaders and ordinary Americans, Uncle Sam Wants You offers a vivid and provocative new interpretation of American policial history.