Fai clic su di un'immagine per andare a Google Ricerca Libri.
Sto caricando le informazioni... A Passionate Prodigality: Fragments of Autobiography (Echoes of War Series)di Guy Chapman
Nessuno Sto caricando le informazioni...
Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro. Chapman wrote a very matter-of-fact, very laconic account of his service during the Great War. This book is often used by some WWI-hobbyists to prove that things weren't half-bad, that a lot was boredom, or marching to-and-fro, that the pacifists and oxbridge-veterans-turned-pacifists along with the liberals and lefties of the 1960s have it quite wrong. I can't say I am convinced. No, not at all. Chapman has a writing style as dry and stiff-lipped as tinder. If one is willing to overlook certain extremely distantly written passages for what they are, then yes, one might arrive at such ideas. However, I've read a few too many of these dry, distanced memoirs by now, and I've also read up on the effects of PTSD and PITS not to recognise what I am reading there. The horror makes it through quite intact when you know where to look: "...my eye caught something white and shining. I stooped. It was the last five joints of a spine. There was nothing else, no body, no flesh..." "...This area was strewn with dead. The dead had haversacks. The haversacks had socks...The allowance was two pairs per man...we acquired some thousands pairs of unauthorized socks..." "...One private ran across No-Man's-Land with an apron full of bombs, drew the pin of one, slung the whole lot into the trench and jumped in on top of them..." "...the privates were nearly all children, tired, hardly able to drag their laden shoulders after their aching legs. Here and there an exhausted boy trudged along with tears coursing down his face..." "...and there is a 'still' of the grey puzzled face of a boy, in the arms of two pals, who has been shot through the testicles, the scrotum swollen to the size of a polo ball..." Chapman's voice is so far detached that it sounds as if he is retelling a tale he read in a book in his early childhood, yet what he tells is quite often so gruesome, you--the reader--groan, and the very fact of this detachment alone makes this quite the reverse of what some people wish to make out of it, for he also peppers his account with at times quite vicious attacks on the upper echelons and their stupidity. Chapman was in a perfect position to observe exactly this, as he served for a long time as adjutant and intermediary between the NCOs and the general staff--not quite here and not quite there. As a consequence he could directly observe the blunders and arrogances committed and he had no compunction mentioning these in the very same acerbic, dry tone. This is one of the more important accounts of this war. 2208 A Passionate Prodigality: Fragments of Autobiography, by Guy Chapman (read 22 Apr 1989) The author, in 1965 a British history professor, in 1933 published this book, in which he tells of his time as an officer in the British Army from 1915 to 1918. He was at the front often, was never wounded, and he writes well. He did get back to England on leave occasionally, but this book dwells little on leave time. It is vivid and real and honest, and of course awful. In his 1966 foreword to this edition Chapman talks of Arnold Zweig's "great trilogy, the only 20th century novel to stand beside 'War and Peace'" but then does not name the books making up such trilogy! This book is an excellent book, even though I count 58 books I have read up to now (Apr 22, 1989) on World War One. nessuna recensione | aggiungi una recensione
This classic WWI memoir by a decorated infantryman and historian presents a vivid account of life in the trenches on the Western Front. During World War One, Major Guy Chapman, OBE MC, served in the Royal Fusiliers and was awarded the Military Cross for his bravery. Joining soon after war was declared, Chapman was stationed in France and fought in the Battle of Arras. When Chapman's memoir, A Passionate Prodigality, was first published in 1933 it was hailed as one of the finest English works to have come out of the Great War. Today it reads with a graphic immediacy, not merely in the descriptions of the shock and carnage of war, but in its evocation of the men who fought--"certain soldiers who have now become a small quantity of Christian dust." Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
Discussioni correntiNessunoCopertine popolari
Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)940.48142History and Geography Europe Europe Military History Of World War I Personal narratives, secret service Entente alliesClassificazione LCVotoMedia:
Sei tu?Diventa un autore di LibraryThing. |
- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA ( )