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Product Description
A Storm in Flanders is novelist and prizewinning historian Winston Groom's gripping history of the four-year battle for Ypres in Belgian Flanders, the pivotal engagement of World War I that would forever change the way the world fought -- and thought about -- war. This is Groom's account of what would become the most dreaded place on earth. In 1914, Germany launched an invasion of France through neutral Belgium -- and brought the wrath of the world upon itself. Ypres became a place of horror, heroism, and terrifying new tactics and technologies: poison gas, tanks, mines, air strikes, and the unspeakable misery of trench warfare. Drawing on the journals of the men and women who were there, Winston Groom has penned a breathtaking drama of politics, strategy, and the human heart. 16 pages of black-and-white historical photographs are featured.
Amazon.com Review
Novelist Winston Groom (Forrest Gump) brings his considerable skills as a storyteller and researcher to this gory tour of "the most notorious and dreaded place in all of the First World War, probably of any war in history." The Ypres salient, a small, hilly section of Belgium, witnessed the wholesale destruction of the old British professional army, "the Old Contemptibles"; it was the place where the great armies of England, France, and Germany were locked in a dance of death for four years, where "more than a million soldiers were shot, bayoneted, bludgeoned, bombed, grenaded, gassed, incinerated by flamethrowers, drowned in shell craters, smothered by caved-in trenches, obliterated by underground mines, or, more often than not, blown to pieces by artillery shells." Extraordinary moments occurred in that vast hell, including the renowned Christmas truce of 1914, when the armies set aside the killing for a few short hours, crossed the trenches, and celebrated together. But mostly the scenery was unbeautiful mud and blood, the makings of Groom's chilling canvas, one populated by the famed generals and ordinary soldiers who met in Flanders fields. The stuff of Groom's story will be familiar to readers of Liddell Hart, Keegan, and other scholars, and readers new to the history of the Great War will find it a memorable introduction. --Gregory McNamee
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