The Somme Battlefields: A Comprehensive Guide from Crecy to the Two World Wars

1st Viking edition 1991 1st print hardcover fine condition book in fine dw In stock shipped from our UK warehouse

³On the Somme battlefields of France,² writes Martin Middlebrook, ³nearly half a million human beings were killed or died of wounds, illness, or privation in two world wars.² In this moving volume, the authors provide a definitive guide to the cemeteries, memorials, and battlefields from the age of Crécy and Agincourt to the great Allied sweep that drove the Germans back in 1944. Brief chapters consider the routes from the Channel ports, the western Somme, and the towns of Amiens and Doullens, but the majority of the text covers the scenes of ferocious fighting in 1916 and 1918. Comrades buried soldiers where they fell, just behind the lines, in local French graveyards, around medical stations, and in ³concentration cemeteries.² The authors list each site, setting them in historical context. The result is a both a visitor¹s companion and a magnificent work of commemoration.