The first book to concentrate on what actually happened when enemies met face to face as human beings in the First World War, whether on the battlefield, as prisoners of war or as relatives of the fallen after the fighting was over
Richard van Emden has interviewed over 270 veterans of the Great War and has written fourteen books on the subject including Boy Soldiers of the Great War and The Last Fighting Tommy. He has also worked on more than a dozen television programmes on the First World War, including Britain’s Last Tommies, Britain’s Boy Soldiers, the award-winning Roses of No Man’s Land, and most recently, War Horse: The Real Story. He lives in West London.
Remarkable ... Richard van Emden is a World War I specialist who
has found a niche, little explored, charting the personal contacts
between Britons and Germans and their feelings about each other as
the war progressed … Makes you think rather differently about the
so-called ‘Great War For Civilisation’
*Daily Mail*
Richard Van Emden’s tour-de-force of research casts a fascinating
new light on the human face of the Great War, allowing us into the
strangest of meetings between British and German enemies in the
trenches, behind the lines and on the home front ... Extraordinary
and often inspirational stories of comradeship between foes ...
Among many compelling photographs in this book, there is a grainy
and heartbreaking image of a bowed and broken British prisoner tied
to a post and left in the snow
*Richard Kemp, a former commander of British forces in
Afghanistan, The Times*
From the horrors of the First World War battlefields are tales of
extraordinary camaraderie between British and German soldiers
*Daily Express*
In Meeting the Enemy, the historian Richard Van Emden shifts his
focus from the grim fields of the First World War to the small, all
but unknown instances of compassion across enemy lines
*New Statesman*
Richard van Emden uncovers myriad encounters between German and
British forces ... Van Emden’s tales of friendship and honour
between enemies only heighten the mystery of how these men
slaughtered each other in their millions for four years
*Metro*
Meeting the Enemy is a meticulously researched account of contacts
between the British and Germans during the war, mainly in the
trenches, but also as prisoners of war and as “enemy alien” wives.
It is full of fascinating information and will appeal particularly
to great war gluttons, the people who can’t get enough of this
stuff
*Observer*
An interesting chapter on what happened to those in mixed
Anglo-German marriages ... Van Emden wants to remind us that not
all was hellish: there was also humour, mutual baiting and
occasional easy-going relations. As well as direct contact during
the Christmas truces, this book explores indirect contacts, using
many unpublished letter and diaries
*Peter Conradi, Spectator*
A real cracker
*Literary Review*
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