Great War - Anniversary 2014

I've just completed a manuscript - Coventry in the Great War - for publication in 2014. The book will commemorate the outbreak of the war on 4th August 1914 and the centenary of the event.

I knew nothing about the war when I began my research. Not a word about the conflict was uttered by teachers at my school. I knew more about Bosworth Field than the Somme, only war memorials in towns and cities prompting interest. 

In carrying out research for the book, I've been captivated and appalled in equal measure, the manipulation of young minds, the hysterical swell of patriotic fervour and the demonisation of the enemy being truly shocking. I've discovered resistant voices in the darkness warning of the dark abyss ahead, one lone MP reminding his braying audience that no war was ever just. One hundred years on, no observer can read the accounts of the wholesale slaughter without shivering with revulsion. Statistics shower the mind like shrapnel. In just one offensive, allied troops gained a few hundred yards, suffering more casualties in a few days than the combined British armies that conquered India and Canada. I found the accounts to be truly upsetting but one awful story really laid me low. Over 100 men were shot at dawn for various misdemeaners, one 14 year old boy who had lied about his age so he could join up being executed because he refused to wear his muddy cap! 

Back home in Coventry, the workforce toiled like slaves, thousands of young girls filling shells with high explosives. Encrusted with explosive yellow powder, they risked not only their complexions, some dying in hideous accidents, others fading away with diseased lungs. 

I've plotted the four and a half years of the conflict, reflecting on the changing mood of the people which is encapsulated in the lyrics of the popular songs of the period, jaunty jingoistic words about king and country giving way to tortured laments describing lonely mothers and widows and mouldering corpses.

I've tried to take a balanced and honest perspective of the conflict, hoping that in some small measure my narrative can contribute to the work of Coventry which is now known throughout the world as the City of Peace and Reconciliation.