As it's Remembrance Day today, I wanted to honour the fallen and the veterans by writing this post. It may not be much, but some things shouldn't be forgotten.
In case anyone doesn't know what Remembrance Day is, the concise explanation is that November 11th marks the day when WWI officially ended back in 1918, and later on, it honours/remembers those who have died in any conflict.
With that in mind, if anyone feels the urge to pick up a book in relation to WWI, here's five books you could consider.
Lest we forget.
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
Description from Goodreads
One by one the boys begin to fall...In 1914 a room full of German schoolboys, fresh-faced and idealistic, are goaded by their schoolmaster to troop off to the 'glorious war'. With the fire and patriotism of youth they sign up. What follows is the moving story of a young 'unknown soldier' experiencing the horror and disillusionment of life in the trenches.
At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop
Description from Goodreads
Alfa Ndiaye is a Senegalese man who, never before having left his village, finds himself fighting as a so-called “Chocolat” soldier with the French army during World War I. When his friend Mademba Diop, in the same regiment, is seriously injured in battle, Diop begs Alfa to kill him and spare him the pain of a long and agonizing death in No Man’s Land.Unable to commit this mercy killing, madness creeps into Alfa’s mind as he comes to see this refusal as a cruel moment of cowardice. Anxious to avenge the death of his friend and find forgiveness for himself, he begins a macabre ritual: every night he sneaks across enemy lines to find and murder a blue-eyed German soldier, and every night he returns to base, unharmed, with the German’s severed hand. At first his comrades look at Alfa’s deeds with admiration, but soon rumors begin to circulate that this super soldier isn’t a hero, but a sorcerer, a soul-eater. Plans are hatched to get Alfa away from the front, and to separate him from his growing collection of hands, but how does one reason with a demon, and how far will Alfa go to make amends to his dead friend?
Peppered with bullets and black magic, this remarkable novel fills in a forgotten chapter in the history of World War I. Blending oral storytelling traditions with the gritty, day-to-day, journalistic horror of life in the trenches, David Diop's At Night All Blood is Black is a dazzling tale of a man’s descent into madness.
Selected by students across France to win the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, David Diop’s English-language, historical fiction debut At Night All Blood is Black is a “powerful, hypnotic, and dark novel” (Livres Hebdo) of terror and transformation in the trenches of the First World War.
Flo of the Somme: The Mercy Dogs of WWI by Hilary Robinson & Martin Impey
Description from Goodreads
Mercy dog, Flo, has more to contend with than racing across the dangerous battlefield of the Somme. Can she get her medical kit to the injured? Can she lead Ray, the stretcher-bearer, and his donkey to them in time? Depicting the key landmarks of the Somme, this story pays tribute to the remarkable bravery of the animals who played their part during World War One.
World War One British Poets: Brooke, Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg and Others edited by Candace Ward
Description from Goodreads
Ironically, the horrors of World War One produced a splendid flowering of British verse as young poets, many of them combatants, confronted their own morality, the death of dear friends, the loss of innocence, the failure of civilization, and the madness of war itself.This volume contains a rich selection of poems from that time by Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, and others known especially for their war poetry — as well as poems by such major poets as Robert Graves, Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, Robert Bridges, and Rudyard Kipling.
Included among a wealth of memorable verses are Rupert Brooke's "The Soldier," Wilfred Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth," "In the Pink" by Siegfried Sassoon, "In Flanders Fields" by Lieut. Col. McCrae, Robert Bridges' "To the United States of America," Thomas Hardy's "In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations,'" Robert Graves’s “A Dead Boche,” as well as works by Walter de la Mare, May Wedderburn Cannan, Ivor Gurney, Alice Meynell, and Edward Thomas.
Moving and powerful, this carefully chosen collection offers today's readers an excellent overview of the broad range of verse produced as poets responded to the carnage on the fields of Belgium and France.
Wilfred Owen - Poems selected by Jon Stallworthy
Description from Goodreads
Wilfred Owen is perhaps the most remembered of the First World War poets, writing some of the most powerful denouncements of the horrors and hypocricies of war. Here, Jon Stallworthy selects his favourite poems.
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