To the Last Man: Spring 1918 - Hardcover

Beautifully written, spectacularly researched account of the almost end of the Great War by the author of 1915: The Death of Innocence (1995). Macdonald, who has written six other books on aspects of WWI, weaves together the forgotten voices of the war to create a comprehensive picture that offers a perspective unlike the ones provided by such contemporary historians as John Keegan or Niall Ferguson, both of whom focus on the larger activities and implications of the war. Macdonald uses the official history only as background to the accounts of the enlisted men, and often their stories run counter to the official record. To the Last Man concentrates on the massive German offensive of March 1918, an attempt to turn the tide of the war. Freed up from hostilities on the Eastern Front by a Russia that was wracked by revolution and threatened in France by a soon-to-arrive American army, the Germans launched what was to be their last effort to break the stalemate in their favor with a massive attack on France. Throughout the narrative the oral testimonies of the officers and soldiers punctuate MacDonald's clear recounting of the history and present haunting memories of the war to end all warstales such as the memory of a British brigadier general walking through a portion of the battlefield where his son died and questioning ``how it was possible that any troops could attack such a position in broad daylight on a lovely July morning.'' The ultimate account of the end of the Great War and a poignant reminder that the best military history doesn't forget the soldiers who fought and those who died. (16 pages photos, not seen; 17 maps) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

This has been a good year for books on the First World War. Macdonald's oral history of the last German offensive of the war is a great complement to John Keegan's comprehensive The First World War and Niall Ferguson's revisionist The Pity of War. Macdonald (They Called It Passchendaele, etc.) has spent many years interviewing British and Canadian veterans of WWI. Her large archive alone is an important achievement, but from this raw material she has gone on to cobble a number of remarkable books. This, the latest, focuses on one of the most deadly and strategically important confrontations of the war: the Second Battle of the Somme, in which the Allied command ordered the field commanders to resist the German attack "to the last round and the last man." Macdonald is particularly skilled at presenting war from the standpoint of those directly involved in its bloody business. At the same time, she never fails to set events in their proper historical, political and military context. Unlike her previous books, this volume includes a significant amount of first-person testimony from German soldiers culled from an impressive private collection of accounts gathered by American publisher Richard Baumgartner in 1981. As Macdonald points out, "the stories of some of those German boys are mirror images of those of their British counterpartsAsome of whom, indeed, must have been literally within yards of them." Macdonald's uncompromising narrative brings the bloody dawn of the century into vivid, humane relief. 60 b&w photos; 17 maps. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.