Thread: World War I
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Old 07-17-2014, 02:40 PM   #33
Araucaria
Bibliophile
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I have some (actually some quite considerable) hesitation in suggesting parts of Henry Williamson's fictionalised autobiography, A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight.

There are five volumes (out of fifteen in the Chronicle) - How Dear Is Life, A Fox Under My Cloak, The Golden Virgin, Love and the Loveless, and A Test to Destruction which cover the years of the first world war. Williamson himself was in the trenches of the western front, and his own account of the Christmas Day truce of 1914 is one of the main historical documents relating to what happened.

The books have a real immediacy: they are one of the most substantial accounts of what WWI was like from the pen of someone who was actually there. They also have a certain literary quality (which you might or might not like) and are by no means a glorification of the war or even of Williamson's own part in it.

My hesitation arises from the fact that Williamson's own WWI experiences made him believe that anything was better than another European war, and that Hitler was one of the good guys working to prevent one (a belief Williamson appears to have held right to the end of his life in 1977).

The books are available in Kindle editions, but you might find it cheaper to look for second-hand paperbacks via AbeBooks (etc).
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