Back to the Front: An Accidental Historian Walks the Trenches of World War I

by Stephen O'Shea

World War I is beyond the memory of almost everyone alive today. Yet it has left as deep a scar on the imaginative landscape of our century as it has on the land where it was fought. Nowhere is that more evident than on the Western Front―the sinuous, deadly line of trenches that stretched from the coast of Belgium to the border of France and Switzerland, a narrow swath of land in which so many million lives were lost. For journalist Stephen O'Shea, the legacy of the Great War is personal (both his grandfathers fought on the front lines) and cultural. Stunned by viewing the "immense wound" still visible on the battlefield of the Somme, and feeling that "history is too important to be left to the professionals," he set out to walk the entire 450 miles through no-man's-land to discover for himself and for his generation the meaning of the war. Back to the Front is a remarkable combination of vivid history and opinionated travel writing. As his walk progresses, O'Shea recreates the shocking battles of the Western Front, many now legendary―Passchendaele, the Somme, the Argonne, Verdun―and offers an impassioned perspective on the war, the state of the land, and the cultivation of memory. His consummate skill with words and details brings alive the players, famous and faceless, on that horrific stage, and makes us aware of why the Great War, indeed history itself, still matters. An evocative fusion of past and present, Back to the Front will resonate, for all who read it, as few other books on war ever have.

Genres: History, World War I, Travel, Nonfiction, War, Memoir, European History

216 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[Jeffrey Keeten · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen’s Five-Nines Poem
He was killed in battle on November 4th, 1918. His parents learned of his death just as the bells announcing the Armistice rang on November 11th. He is considered Britain's greatest war poet.

Wilfred Owen

Stephen O’Shea, a self-proclaimed accidental historian, took a job teaching English in France and while there developed an interest in the World War One trenches. Both his Irish grandfathers donned British uniforms to fight in the trenches. One volunteered and the other was part of the draft. They both survived the war, but one great-uncle of O’Shea’s on his mother’s side was killed in battle at age twenty. History becomes more personal if you can tie your blood to it, but only if you can feel the pull of your own ancestral history.

It starts out as just a tentative trip to see the trenches. A peek really, just to see if there is anything worth seeing. This turns into a ten year full blown obsession as O’Shea starts to read everything he can get his hands on about the war, and culminates in a determination to walk all 450 miles of World War One trenches. As we follow along with O’Shea he gives us a quick rundown of what happened in each geographical section of the trenches. He gives us numbers of the dead, gruesome, atrocious, unbelievable numbers.

Top Five Bloodiest Conflicts of WW1.
1. Hundred Days Offensive, this was a series of offensives that broke the German line and forced them to move back to the Hindenburg entrenchments in a last ditch effort to protect the homeland. This effectively ends the war and crushes the German Empire but at a cost of 1,855,369 casualties. Fall 1918.

2. Spring Offensive the German Army is in desperate straits with such a depleted manpower that they are at this point putting young boys and old men in the front lines. The Germans make a massive push in the hopes that they can overrun the Allied before those waves of American troops can arrive. Basically the Germans overrun their supply lines, running out of necessary things like bullets, and the Allies were able to dig in and hold on. After all the Americans are coming. The Americans are coming. Casualties 1,539,715. Spring 1918.


The Battle of the Somme

3. The Battle of the Somme, an event that should never be forgotten by the British. They lost over 60,000 men in one day. Sir Douglas “The Butcher” Haig was criticized heavily for his decision to send his men into heavy machine gun fire with no objective obtained. Casualties 1,219,201. November 1916.

Before the war is over Haig will have the deaths of hundreds of thousands of British soldiers lives laid at his doorstep. There are statues of Haig at Whitehall and Edinburgh Castle, so there doesn’t seem to have been any hard feelings. As it turns out it wasn’t Haig’s fault. No indeed. It was the fault of the British Worker.

”A scapegoat was needed for the reversal of fortune. Since the generals John French and Douglas Haig, could not very well blame themselves and didn’t dare blame the thousands they had just sent to their deaths, it was thought best to lay the whole thing at the doorstep of the British worker. There had not been enough artillery shells, army spokesmen declared, because the British worker was a shirker who spent all his time getting drunk.”

4. The Battle of Verdun was to symbolize for the French what the Somme symbolized for the British...the horrors of war. The Germans attacked with the sole objective of killing as many French as possible with the hopes that it would break their morale and shorten the war. The French dug in and the famous battle cry They Shall Not Pass was born in the blood and misery of this conflict. Casualties 976,000. February-December 1916.

5. Battle of Passchendaele. It rained and rained creating a bog of mud that buried tanks and drowned men. David Lloyd George publicly condemned the waste of this battle and the poor leadership. After months of slender movements back and forth finally the Canadian Corp broke through and took the town of Passchendaele ending the conflict. Casualties 848,614. July to November 1917.


The Battle in the mud at Passchendaele.

Farmers when they returned to try to reclaim the land after the war kept churning up bodies from their shallow graves with every turn of the plow. Still, today, they have what they call their Iron Harvest every time they till a field. Unexploded bombs and unidentifiable pieces of steel rest against fence posts at the edges of the fields. There are areas like Zona Rouge that are unclaimable. The terrain is still a nightmare.

”The physical destruction of the guerre de quatorze in France was appalling: 319,269 houses obliterated; 313,675 houses seriously damaged; 1,699 villages annihilated; 707 villages three-quarters destroyed; 1,656 villages half-destroyed; 20,603 factories leveled; 31,650 miles of road wrecked; 4,875 bridges blown; 4,297,800 acres of farmland and 2,060,000 acres of uncultivated land poisoned, dug up, shelled, mined, befouled, littered, and stained with a toxic, soupy mix of decaying corpses and rotting horse flesh.”

Break of Day in the Trenches
The darkness crumbles away
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet's poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies,
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver -what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in men's veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe,
Just a little white with the dust.

Isaac Rosenberg was a British war poet killed at dawn April 1st, 1918 on the Western Front in France.

Isaac Rosenberg

When the Americans arrive they also bring a contingent of Black servicemen with them. They have to serve separate, but with equal chance to die of course.

”Black units were transferred to French command, thereby sparing white American units from having to go to war alongside them. The German, true to the itinerary that would make them within a generation the most noxiously racist nation to have ever lived, protested over having to fight black American troops on the Front.”


African American Soldiers WW1. Photo taken 1919 "Some of the colored men of the 369th (15th N.Y.) who won the Croix de Guerre for gallantry in action."

It seems to me that we missed a wonderful opportunity to win the war. If it was a point of honor for the Germans not to fight black troops then why didn’t we just march those men right down their throats.

I know we Americans grow up learning that the “shot heard round the world” happened at Concord, Massachusetts in 1775, but in 1914 a young man of 19, a revolutionary, a member of the Black Hand by the name of Gavrilo Princip shot and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand heir to the Austro-Hungarian Throne. The Archduke’s death, provided the spark to start a war that would put 67 million men in uniform and kill one out of every sixth man who served. That one shot was truly heard around the world and led to the deaths of over 16,000,000 people from nearly thirty different nations.

This book is only 194 pages, but Stephen O’Shea packs those pages not only with historical information, but also with his personal observations of current conditions of this landscape torn apart by war. My notes were extensive and I barely scratched the surface of what O’Shea conveyed to me. He did find his great-uncle who died on the Somme and shares a cemetery with Raymond Asquith, eldest son of Herbert Henry Asquith the prime minister deposed by David Lloyd George.

23914 Private
T. Conlon
Royal Dublin Fusiliers
6th September 1916 Age 20

I still cannot shake of the superstition that the only past that is real, that exists at all, is the one contained within the memories of living people. When they die, the past they hold within them simply vanishes, and those of us who come after cannot inherit their experience, only preserve the myth of its existence. We can mark the spot where the cliff was washed away by the sea, but we cannot repair the wound the sea has made. From The Russian Album by Michael Ignatieff

[GoldGato · Rating 4 out of 5]

World War I has ended up like a sports team that makes it to the championship game, then loses to World War II. Close, but no trophy. The Great War has always intrigued me, ever since I first visited London and saw the many poppies strewn about the war monuments. It took me a bit to realize it all started with the first World War, which was simply hellacious, but more centered on soldier annihilation than on civilian.

This book knocks off a couple of birds with one throw: Provide a history of the Great War while also providing a travelogue on the French and Belgian towns along the great trenches that defined the battle lines. In my opinion, the book succeeds on both counts. Suddenly, the strange reasoning for the start of the war is understandable, while various towns are traversed by the author.

The reader is constantly getting a history lesson while learning that shards of old artillery can still be found along the route, due to the massive damage done via weaponry. In a way, it's a bit frightening, but when it gets a bit depressing (Europe did its best to destroy itself), the author zooms back to travel writing and the reader is rescued from thoughts of war, while thinking about that fantastic meal the author is describing.

Book Season = Winter (beware of hidden shrapnel)

[Lawrence · Rating 1 out of 5]

I suspect that when John Stuart Mill first cited his brilliant quotation regarding war he had people like the author of this book in mind. For those who have forgotten this powerful quotation:

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things:the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse.
A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."

Reject this book like you would someone with a communicable disease.

[N Hemming · Rating 1 out of 5]

Since two of my passions are history and hiking, this seemed like the book for me, but oh how I was disappointed. The author ought not to claim himself an 'accidental historian' as he is no historian of any kind. Rather, he regurgitates the received wisdom on the Great War dating from the 1960s, which is an un-analytical reaction to the the tragedy, waste and slaughter of 1914-18 and is in complete ignorance of the logistical, technical and tactical realities of the period - which ironically, is the same criticism that its proponents lay against the generals. Here is not the place to discuss all of that, but the curious can consult a wealth of good scholarship from the past 30 years or so: something our 'accidental historian' clearly did not trouble himself with. Journalists and the popular media still routinely recount the 'lions led by donkeys' myth, but you will have to search long and hard for any reputable modern historian to agree with it.
O'Shea's book is a vehicle for his homespun thoughts and prejudices - which seem to go far beyond his loathing of Haig, et al. If you want to learn and understand anything about the war, you could scarcely start at a worse place than this simplistic and un-scholarly polemic, which is not helped in its narrative by the inevitable tension between geographical and temporal progress, for example, how a discussion of the Battle of the Frontiers - the opening move of August 1914 comes right at the end of the book, when the hiker finally arrives in that part of the front. As for O'Shea's prejudices, I have no quibble with his evidently left wing perspective, but he then proceeds to insult just about everybody. Maybe this explains why he didn't bother to study recent historians, since he implies that any interest in the subject that delves beyond 'lions led by donkeys' is the preserve of geeks, bigots, arms fetishists and extreme nationalists.
Where this book does succeed to some extent, is as a travelogue. The idea itself, of walking the whole of the Western Front is a fine one - something I'd be tempted to myself but for the fact that it would seem to entail far too much mileage walking along roads, some of them rather busy, instead of quiet byways and footpaths. Perhaps the most interesting part of the narrative, is the discussion of walking the very quiet sectors, where apart from the establishment of trench lines, practically nothing ever happened and to where battle weary units could be rotated to recover from the horrors of the more active zones. No doubt it will come as a revelation to many non-specialists that such quiet sectors of the front existed at all. Even as a travelogue though, the writing is full of negativity; one could get the impression that along the whole 450 mile journey, there are no nice towns or pleasant people to be encountered. Actually visit the Western Front in person and you will find for yourself a more positive impression of place and humanity!
All in all then, I cannot recommend this book. Mr. O'Shea's idea of the long distance hike is a compelling one which could appeal to many people, I think. If so, instead of this book the would-be traveller would be far better off reading a selection of good history books, obtaining the various travel guides on the subject and studying the maps. Then go and create your own journey.

[Margo Laurie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a travel memoir of the Western Front, which the author Stephen O'Shea walked in 1986 and kept revisiting for the next decade, with anecdotes of hitchhiking, disappointing hotel food, snatches of conversations, and the atmosphere of the First World War battlefields 70 years later, mixed in with a fair bit of history, snippets of classic war poetry, and righteous anger about needless deaths and foolhardy military leadership.

These elements don't always gel together easily - and perhaps that's part of the point. There is a critique of battlefield tourism, even as the author participates in it, yet also a dazed wonder at the world moving on, as when he finds a Belgium theme park at the site of a war tragedy. Something about the style & tone of the book is a bit confrontational and restless - as if the author was deeply unsettled by the topic, both obsessive and discontented by it. Thus, it is quite a 'choppy' read, but there are some wonderful lines and observations.

A few quotes that stood out:

"Perhaps my going out to the Front is an exercise in doomed voyeurism. Might it not be possible that there is nothing to see? That you can't go back to where you've never been?" (p.111)

"Fortunately this is a cinematic countryside and the lights have dimmed" (p. 139)

"The young are out in force downtown... I sit in a cafe and put my feet up, content to forget the truly awful pizza I've just ingested by watching the passing parade of tanned rondeurs. This is a serious scene. Oh, to give up walking and own a cosmetics counter in Lens - I could retire on the memories. A movie theater empties a wave of adolescent hipsters onto the sidewalk, and soon the air fills with the electric crackle of a French crowd exchanging quadruple social kisses. Souped-up subcompacts roar out of parking lots, voices rise and fall as car radios pass within earshot. From one, I hear the familiar drone of 'Papa Don't Preach'. Only then do I remember where I am. The Western Front." (p.66)

The book includes a poem by Alfred Lichtenstein 'Abschied' ('Off to the Front'), sensitively translated by Timothy P. Morrow, which I had not read before, and am glad to have discovered.

The reason I sought out 'Back to the Front' is that it was praised by Terry Castle in a wonderful essay she wrote for the London Review of Books reflecting on her own travels on the Western Front, which is free to read here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v24/n...

[David Allen Hines · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderfully well-written book that details the author's walks along the remains of the Western Front trenches of World War I during the early 1990s. The author's ancestors served in the Great War, and he sought to gain insight to their experiences during one of the most brutal conflicts of human history. Although I have long studied World War I, I was surprised to learn that after then nearly 80 years the writer was able to easily find remains of the trenches and pill boxes and constantly see pieces of barbed wire, helmets, shrapnel and other debris all over the place. The writing is excellent and engaging and he provides historical anecdotes and snippets that place his experiences in the context of the war and the present culture of the cities and villages he passes through. He speaks of the many monuments, many worn and nearly forgotten, that he passes by and seeing war cemetery after war cemetery. One of my own ancestors fought in the battle of the Argonne and lays buried in one of those cemeteries. I have read many books on World War I and this is one of the most unique, well-written and moving books on the war I have read. Highly recommended.

[Marsha · Rating 4 out of 5]

O'Shea decides to walk the trenches of WWI and describes the battles fought therefrom. His journey becomes a scathing sendup of inept generals who sacrificed hundreds of thousands of men to futile assaults on impregnable enemy positions, largely due to the trench system itself. O'Shea's sympathies lie with the common soldier, among whom were relatives, who either perished or were severely wounded or damaged by the conflict. The book was increasingly difficult to read, as slaughter upon slaughter unfolded in our imaginations, for mile upon mile of French and Belgian territory. The horror is relieved by O'Shea's descriptions of the towns/cities/country through which he walked. His writing is personable and engaging, inviting the reader to walk along with him. This technique made the subject all the more awful.

[Chris Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

O'Shea combines several themes in this book about his walking the World War I Western Front. At times he is: an historian who puzzles out the idea of memory and remembrance; a tour guide not only of the front but of the cultures and peoples inhabiting the area currently; a literary and poetry critic; a very good humorist and raconteur; and, most notably a pacifist who struggles for understanding of the slaughter that occurred along his way. It would be interesting to see how proponents of Haig, Kirchener, Joffre, Petain and Nieville and their political supporters would defend O'Shea's charges. It is well worth the read, and unlike many books these days, has maps that locate areas and towns discussed in the writing.

[Steven Gauthier · Rating 5 out of 5]

No exactly a history of trench warfare but far richer than just a walk in the Gallic woods, O’Shea exhibits a fine use of thought and poetic language. There must have lots of time to jot down thoughts as he trudged along.
One is left with plenty of unanswered questions about walking, the French, Germans, and Belgians of 1914-1920, and modern French country life but mostly these are questions that would never have occurred to us before reading BACK TO THE FRONT.
Obviously, not for everyone but I was never bored and I enjoyed the journey.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

O'Shea treks the 450 mile length of the WW I western front, and recounts the history of the war. It wasn't so much war as slaughter, with generals sending troops to their deaths - roughly 6 million of them - for little reason. Statues honoring these military leaders still remain standing in London and Paris.

[Joannie Johnston · Rating 3 out of 5]

This guy is sort of annoying because he makes no attempt at keeping his personal feelings about what happened where he is visiting out of his description...I agreed with him but it seems off putting for someone just reading about the locations of battlefields. But very cool read. I felt like I was there.

[Jim Woolwine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. A scathing commentary on military leadership. The author is not kind either to the locals in the villages he trudges through and, finally, to the French revisionist history that glorifies French military leadership and battlefield strategy beyond legitimate bounds. Les poilus sont les héros.

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

I couldn't get into the book, like I usually can in other books

[Ronald · Rating 4 out of 5]

Actually a reread from several years ago. While his writing is a little too more like a New Yorker piece, it was interesting. You can tell he is anti war.

[Dean · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting history of the trench warfare in WWI. The horrible cost of lives based on the ego of generals on both sides. The travelogue is from our modern viewpoint.

[Jim Boatwright · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was the worst book I ever read. So boring.

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

p.17 Having grown up Canadian, I feel at home whenever I encounter bickering over language.
p.85 Before that time (1916), the poet could write about the nobility of sacrifice, parsons about the divinity of the cause, and propagandists about the imminence of victory, with a fairly reasonable expectation that their readerships would believe them. After 1916, skepticism and cynicism emerged triumphant.
p.88 The magnitude of the screwup led the British brass to persevere in the hope that future achievement might erase present calamity.
p.161 Statues of French generals abound near the city ramparts, as a sort of provocation to historical decency.

The novel is a well-written journey through World War I battles and battlefields. Melding together a mix of history and travelogue, the novel combines these opposing genres to create an interesting trip through the stories and sites of the WWI trenches. The novel transitions seamlessly from the present to the epic engagements, blunders, and bravery of the past.

In recurring poignant episodes, the author the studies war memorials which are constant throughout the trenchline and recounts the human struggles which led the dedicated monument. As Mr. O'Shea is observing the memorial in vastly different ear, the author it impossible to reconcile the carnage with the commanders. The inability of commanders to adapt their tactics to the battlefield conditions is difficult to understand in hindsight; this chorus is a consistent refrain within the melody of the writing.

There are an impressive number of poems and poets presented within the novel. Many of the poems are written by soldiers in the trenches. The sheer volume of poetry amassed within the work is impressive, however, the historical detail cannot go without mention.

[Owen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a strange mixture of John Hillaby and Barabara Tuchman, with maybe a little Bruce Chatwin thrown in for good measure. I read it very quickly and thoroughly enjoyed it and was even a little peeved that I hadn't thought of it myself. (Fancy missing the opportunity of a book with a title like that!) There are a number of similar walks one can do, especially in Britain; I'm thinking of the walk along Hadrian's Wall in particular. Yet the notion of walking the old trench-lined area and no-man's land of Flanders is a terrific one. What an education! Fortunately for the reader, O'Shea has a competent writing hand as well, and I enjoyed the ramble he took me on.

O'Shea takes risks which, as far as this reader is concerned, nearly always come off. I was confident enough, reading the prose, to be willing to skip over any minor problems. Certainly there are no gaping wounds and nothing requiring major surgery. It seems to me I have read writing similar to this, which attempts to cut a swathe (and a swagger) through the language, while mistaking a pair of rather blunt pruning shears for a well-sharpened scythe. I congratulate this author on his use of the stone.

I can't say that it's much of a book when it comes to the war itself, but O'Shea never pretends it to be otherwise than a view at field level of what's left. If he gets a bit cross at times about some of the former silliness that took place there, who can blame him. It's a very good book and I'd be very proud to have written this.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting book on the Western Front. the author is of the "lions led by donkeys" school of people looking at the military history of WW1.

[Tony Brewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the best non-academic books written by a non-historian about a topic I've ever read, and it is a huge topic (WWI of course). O'Shea literally and figuratively covers a lot of ground. It is extremely well-written and yes, poetic even. Very sharp and inward-facing. His asides are often where the historical details are kept rather than in the main telling. This is not "war porn," a consumption of war memorabilia O'Shea often bashes. Instead it comes across as a very personal journey, rather than a grand mission, and I think *that* is the neat trick here: O'Shea in a sense becomes a "Byng Boy" (Canadian foot soldier in the Great War), tramping the length of the Western Front in order to find some meaning beyond "good war/bad war," which is how most historians and politicians pass their opinions on to posterity. O'Shea's is a first-person, boots-on-the-ground, un-embedded view, and we may never get this kind of war POV again. The French countryside in the 1980s was a beautiful stroll, for the most part. The sands of Iraq and Syria or the mountains of Afghanistan less so, n'est ce pas?

[dead letter office · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish I had read this when I was younger. I had a run-in with the law in 2003 and was put in jail for protesting the invasion of Iraq, which was executed on false pretenses. I knew then that what was happening was wrong, but I didn't have the vocabulary or the historical context to articulately explain, even to myself, exactly why. This book is a casual history and a memoir, but it is also quietly the most powerful anti-war book I have read--unforgiving of the lies and the liars that get us into these messes time after time after time. And so I wish I had read it at the time. Living alone in the South, surrounded by hostile strangers, charged with a felony, I was certain that what I was witnessing was wrong but deeply isolated and uncertain of my role and responsibility. It would have made me feel less alone to hear this author's voice and to know that older, wiser people knew what I suspected: military and political leaders are generationally untruthful, exploitative of the young, the idealistic, and the patriotic, and very often--to put it plainly--quite stupid.

[Mackay · Rating 3 out of 5]

A rather strange book - not quite history, not quite travel, not quiet memoir, not quite polemic. The book details Mr. O'Shea's walking trip along the Western Front from the Channel to the Swiss border (as well as some other trips to parts of the Front at other times). This reader isn't sure of the author's purposes or point; however, the writing is friendly, accessible, and descriptive. Someone who wanted a "lighter" introduction to WW 1 could do worse, I suppose - Mr. O'Shea is always good company.
Having been to several of the areas or places this book covers, I found it interesting to compare notes, as it were.
Still, the book left me with a curious feeling that it was unfinished - yes, he reached the last pillbox on the Swiss border, but what was the journey or the account in aid of? Hmm.

[Debra · Rating 4 out of 5]

A journalist wanders over the battlefields of WWI, showing us a personalized overview of the sadly misnamed "War to end all wars." Quite readable and accessible, it helps to have a bare basic knowledge of the action as he assumes such. Still his word pictures illuminate the history and strategy, sometimes horrifyingly so.

Written in an anecdotal style much like that used by Tony Horowitz or Bill Bryson, he covers the expected military and political history but also glosses over linguistic, literary and musical remnants of the war.

[Jan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Why. does a freelance journalist specialized in writing for fashion magznes spend several summers wandering from Nieuport on the Channel coast to the Swiss border following the outline of no mans land as it was in 1916? The reader is taken on a journey of personal reflectionon diverse subjects such as family, history, France and war. An ambitious forst book, where a more seasoned author and a sterner edition could have crafted an even more compelling tome.

[Nancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This potted history of the Western Front during WWI, using the device of the author's walking trip along the trench-line, resorts too much to the obvious and facile. His snarky comment: "Peter Mayle strung together a charming chain of cliches in his books on Provence," applies equally well to his own effort.

[Ecipullo · Rating 3 out of 5]

The descriptions of WWI were very moving. The author brings each section of his walk to life with the history of the awful death of the war. However, when O'Shea is walking or hitching from town to town he uses too many cliches and sarcastic descriptions.

[Glenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very insightful look at trench warfare in WW I by a journalist who walked the front line from the Channel to Switzerland. Decidedly anti-war, detailing the slaughter and the decision-making by leaders during the war. He walked it during the late 80's and 90's.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

A young man takes a backpacking journey along the Western front of World War I.

[Deedee]

940.4