About the Author
Nicholas Best was the Financial Time's fiction critic for 10 years.
Séries
Obras por Nicholas Best
The Greatest Day in History: How, on the Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month, the First World War… (2008) 115 exemplares
Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II (2012) 109 exemplares
Trafalger 2 exemplares
Associated Works
Etiquetado
Conhecimento Comum
- Sexo
- male
- Nacionalidade
- UK
- Locais de residência
- Kenya
Dublin, Ireland
Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, UK - Educação
- Trinity College, Dublin
- Ocupações
- journalist
- Organizações
- Grenadier Guards
Membros
Críticas
Listas
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Estatísticas
- Obras
- 25
- Also by
- 1
- Membros
- 683
- Popularidade
- #37,041
- Avaliação
- 3.6
- Críticas
- 6
- ISBN
- 49
- Línguas
- 4
After a chapter a day for the 4-10 November, there are four chapters covering the 11th: early morning; 11am; afternoon; and evening. Fighting continued right up until 11am: "In scores of different places along the front line, soldiers were still fighting and dying as the hands moved towards 11 o’clock. Some had no idea the war was about to stop. Others did know, but didn’t care. They still had ammunition to fire off, objectives to take, friends and family to avenge. Others just carried on fighting because that was what they had been ordered to do. The habit died hard in men who had never done anything else." But sometimes this was conscious: "A shameful number of American majors and colonels had chosen to press on regardless, rather than call their men off and risk damaging their careers. They were still sending troops into action, knowing perfectly well that the fighting would stop in a couple of hours and any further sacrifice was needless. They would rather their men died than have a permanent black mark on their promotion prospects". On the other hand, many held back, not wanting to risk death at the last moment. Over 2,700 men were killed on the Western Front on 11 November (not all of them before 11am, some fighting continued afterwards due to ignorance of the Armistice, or even just due to a stopped watch). They included: Private George Ellison, who was hit by and died at ten to eleven, almost certainly the last British fatality of the war; while Canadian Private George Price was killed by a shot at two minutes to eleven.
This was a great and hugely readable account and very far from being a dry military history (unlike some histories of the Great War I have read).… (mais)