By?Stephen Bull
Osprey Publishing,$24.95,272 Pages
?In the minds of many it is the bloody Western Front that epitomizes World War I of 1914-18, and the essential character of that archetype is the trench war.? Such is how author Stephen Bull?s masterpiece begins, and this tone of serious, informed reflection, and respect reverberated throughout the entire piece. How easy it is for my relatively modern generation to gloss over WWI as so many paragraphs in a textbook, not even able to comprehend the dirty, hazardous, extremely cramped quarters in which many soldiers?on both sides?lived for weeks, even months at a time. With?Trench Bull helps in giving as complete a picture possible, attacking the problem of writing such a book with all the tactics he described in its pages.
After explaining the military mindsets of the time, Bull instructs the reader on exactly how the sprawling mazes of tunnels, bunkers, and trenches were built, providing impressively-researched drawings and maps, along with an array of eyewitness quotations to make the included photographs all the more real. Despite the horrors and hardships described, there is an honorable sort of elegance in Bull?s writing which threads its way in the background of each scene and seems directly tied to the great mental fortitude the soldiers must have wielded in order tackle such a deadly game as trench warfare.
Reviewed by?Meredith Greene
Source: http://sacramentobookreview.com/history/trench-a-history-of-trench-warfare-on-the-western-front/
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