A generation raised on the British Empire confronted the unexpected horrors of modern war. Never were a nation's expectations so different from the coming clash of the First World War. Expecting a vigorous romp to victory, soldiers endured a brutal quagmire. Presenting letters & diaries of soldiers themselves, many unseen for nearly a hundred years, Smith allows men from Field Marshall "Douggy" Haig to plain Private Smith to have a clear voice. With enough narrative to recall how the Great War unfolded, a wealth of vivid detail brings the miserable life in the trenches back to life. What began with high hopes and horses ended with disillusion and tanks. From the build up at the beginning of the war until the immediate post-war reduction, Letters from the Front: Letters and Diaries from the BEF in Flanders and France 1914-1918 is enlivened with fascinating details and makes a moving, entertaining and informative read.

Presenting letters and diaries from soldiers at the Front of the First World War, this book offers a firsthand narrative of how the War unfolded as well as a wealth of vivid detail of life at the Front.

The Friends' Ambulance Unit (FAU) was created shortly after the outbreak of war. The idea of the unit's founder, Philip J. Baker, was that it would provide young Friends (Quakers) with the opportunity to serve their country without sacrificing their pacifist principles. The first volunteers went to Belgium on 31 October 1914, under the auspices of the Joint War Committee of the British Red Cross Society and the Order of St John of Jerusalem. The FAU made a sustained contribution to the military medical services of the Allied nations, establishing military hospitals, running ambulance convoys, and staffing hospital ships and ambulance trains, treating and transporting wounded men. Determined to bring succour to all those in need, the FAU also assisted civilians trapped in the war zone and living in desperate circumstances. Nowhere was this more acute than in the besieged and battered town of Ypres where thousands sheltered in the underground passage-ways of the towns ancient fortifications -- a subterranean population, 'hopeless, often lightless,' wrote Geoffrey Young, the Units young field commander, living on what they might and breeding disease. The Unit provided hospitals for the treatment of civilians, and worked intensively in the containment and treatment of the typhoid epidemic that swept the region, locating sufferers, providing them with medical care, and inoculating people against the disease. It played a major role in the purification of the town's contaminated drinking water, distributed milk for infants and food and clothing to the sick and needy. It helped found orphanages, made provision for schooling and organised gainful employment for refugees until, finally, it became responsible for the definitive evacuations of the civilian population.

The Battle of the Silver Helmets was an engagement orchestrated according to the previous successes of the cavalry of Frederick the Great. It was staged so that the magnificently equipped and trained German Fourth Cavalry Division would charge into glory, sabres rattling; instead, 24 German officers, 468 men, and 843 horses were lost during the eight separate charges conducted that day. The entire right wing of the Imperial German Army consisted of only nine cavalry brigades in the Schlieffen Plan, and in the battle of 12 August 1914, two of these brigades were catastrophically beaten. This battle has not yet been explored in the English language because it took place before the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) landed in the Channel ports and well before any American involvement. British historians have also generally focused on Germany s efforts to enter Belgium through the forts at Liège, which are east of Halen. However, the Battle of the Silver Helmets so impacted century-old cavalry tradition that large-scale charges would never again be attempted on the Western Front. Thoroughly researched and hugely revelatory, The Last Great Cavalry Charge is a blow-by-blow account of the moment that the cavalry went from a prestigious, pivotal role in German Army tactics to obsolescence in the face of newly mechanised infantry. It provides essential and moving insight into the wider socio-cultural repercussions of technical military innovations in the First World War.