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Podcast: New Books in Western European Studies
Episode: Alex Mayhew, "Making Sense of the Great War: Crisis, Englishness, and Morale on the Western Front" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
Description: The First World War was an unprecedented crisis, with communities and societies enduring the unimaginable hardships of a prolonged conο¬ict on an industrial scale. In Belgium and France, the terrible capacity of modern weaponry destroyed the natural world and exposed previously held truths about military morale and tactics as falsehoods. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers suffered some of the worst conditions that combatants have ever faced. How did they survive? What did it mean to them? How did they perceive these events?Whilst the trenches of the Western Front have come to symbolise the futility and ho...