Bibliography of the Battle of the Somme: Part 2 [of 2]

Hardly had the fighting petered out on the Somme in November 1916 than one American reviewer, W. S. Rusk, was warning scholars that much writing about the Great War would be lost to the ‘winnowing flail of time’.(1)

This ‘winnowing’, Rusk continued, would close off ‘mirrors into the soul of man at the time of his greatest trial since he first reared his head above the level of the beast’.

Stirring stuff, but Rusk had a point, and one that in bibliographical terms was soon to be borne out in the case of the very volume Rusk was reviewing.

A Student in Arms was a best-seller throughout the English-speaking world during the Great War. It offered (and offers) a window on the vast ‘New Armies’ of Kitchener volunteers that sprang up in 1914 and 1915, and were to be blooded on the Somme. When, from the Battle of the Somme onwards, soldiers and their families no longer believed what they read in the newspapers, they did trust the man signing himself ‘A Student in Arms’, even though few know who he was.

For all that, the war over, A Student in Arms disappeared down the plughole of Great War bibliography in general and of that of the Somme in particular. How much writing by other authors, evidence of value to student and academic historians, has followed and awaits rediscovery?

The rehabilitation of Donald Hankey and the recovery of his papers, long assumed lost, begins with the chance purchase of a secondhand copy of A Student in Arms volume in a junkshop, itself now history. Web booksellers now supply a hunting ground for hitherto-unregarded Great War-period material that may provide the student with useful ‘fresh’ evidence, lines of inquiry, ideas for projects or – as in the case of A Student in Arms – lead to the recovery of documents that are contributions to Great War studies.

Rusk’s reflections upon ‘the winnowing flail of time’ arise from his reviewing of the first of the two collections of trench warfare-inspired reportage, reflections and dialogues upon Kitchener Army soldiering by an insider. The overall title, A Student in Arms, was the pen-name of the soldier-writer and Somme fatality Donald Hankey.

‘In the score or more of brilliant chapters’, writes Rusk in the florid, cloudy fashion of the time .... “the student [sic]” shows how the individual soldier, whether university graduate, cockney, or wastrel, is being transformed by the strange experience he is going through’.

Readers certainly took to Hankey’s original magazine articles and their collection in the April 1916 first volume of A Student in Arms (ASIA) and the second, a year later. Soldiers and civilians alike turned away from anodyne press reports from the Somme, and in their hundreds of thousands looked instead to Hankey to make sense of a war for which nothing in their history or religion had prepared them. 

Yet you will look in vain for either of the ASIA volumes in any of the three main Somme bibliographies, two published and one in manuscript. How do we come to lose sight of work that was of value to Hankey’s Great War contemporaries as it is to our understanding of the spirit in which the war was fought? Is it because academic and literary fashion came to view Hankey as a writer tainted by his work in helping people to see some point in his and their war? Perhaps surprisingly, no - or at least not directly.

Hankey was one of the ‘First Hundred Thousand’ Kitchener volunteers and between August 1914 and October 1916 he served as private, corporal, sergeant and then subaltern in one artillery and two infantry regiments. He was killed in action on the Somme at the age of 31, six months after the publication of his first collection of ASIA, the one Rusk reviewed.

Death in action catapulted Hankey into Rupert Brooke-class bestsellerdom throughout the English-speaking world.(2) Americans in particular warmed to what they saw as an incarnation of youthful self-sacrifice and forfeit of promise. Moreover, the ‘self-sacrifice’ was that of a well-born eyewitness who chronicled the new melting-pot of the trenches.(3)

This first ‘Series’ (collection) made it into the 1917 New York Times top five best-seller list. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Amory Blaine refers approvingly to ‘this fellow Donald Hankey’ in This Side of Paradise (1920).(4)

The first Student in Arms ‘series’, which appeared in April 1916, collected articles that had appeared in the Westminster Review and The Spectator. Hankey wrote most of them while recovering from a wound suffered during a hopeless daylight counter-attack at Hooge in July 1915, and then while training drafts for the Somme.

Back in France in time for the Somme battle, Hankey continued to write. He took part in and reported on the infantry assault of 1 July 1916. His writing now took a darker turn, and although the Army did not interfere, The Spectator began to reject articles from a star contributor. Most, but not all, of Hankey’s Somme-period material including some Spectator rejections, appears in the posthumously-published second ASIA in May 1917. Even then, there were excisions and no mention of the Somme.

Hankey’s work reached its vast audience in magazine articles in pamphlet and book form, as well as reprint in newspapers and other journals. Then were public readings to audiences in army camps, military hospitals, aboard ship and from civilian pulpits.

With the Somme, however, a nervous publisher was to tamper with Hankey’s despatches. Passages were excised, and so was any reference, even dates, to the battle. Worse still for Hankey’s bibliographical fortunes, unlike Rupert Brooke he had no Edward Marsh on hand to publish a valedictory biography during the war.

Hankey’s publisher, Melrose, had pressed Hilda Hankey, Donald’s sister and literary collaborator, to rush out the second, posthumous, ASIA. Melrose now urged her to write and complete a biography before war’s end. She failed in this, could find nobody else capable. Donald’s friends were away on active service or dead.

One result was that Donald Hankey remained a man and writer of mystery. A mere 13 years after Rusk’s warning, a highly-regarded bibliography of the Great War by a Somme veteran seems inadvertently to have helped consign ASIA in Arms to Rusk’s ‘winnowing flail’.

In War Books, Cyril Falls refers to ASIA as ‘a volume’, dating it ‘1916’.(5) Yet ASIA is not one ‘series/volume’ but two.

To complicate matters, Great War austerity dictated that both ‘series’ were bound so cheaply, drably and uniformly that, at first sight it can be accordingly hard to tell the 1916, pre-Somme Series One from the posthumous, post-Somme Series Two of 1917.

Reprints, new editions, differing formats and ‘selections from’ followed each other for the rest of the war and into the 1920s. So huge were sales of Series One for so long that they left Series Two in the shade. It is easy to mix up the two volumes, or to assume that there is only one. Falls could have done either. His recommendation of the ‘1916’ volume as ‘free of the facile optimism then in vogue’ may suggest that he mistakenly conflated the two books into one or perhaps was thinking only of the Somme-tinged second ‘Series’.

Lastly, Falls lists Hankey’s book not in the ‘History’ or ‘Reminiscence’ section but in ‘Fiction’. What category could be more likely to mislead the kind of historian who is more concerned with what other historians have written than with what was read at the time by the people who fought or endured the Great War?

Falls, however, does list under ‘Reminiscence’ an anonymous work purportedly by a German deserter. Yet the bibliographer finds it ‘hard to believe’ this author’s assertion ‘that the inhabitants of a village full of German troops should been lunatic enough to throw grenades out of windows upon infantry in the street’.(6)

Hankey’s writing from the Somme, however categorized, includes an account of how on 1 July 1916, he contrived to get past the field censors an account of what he saw and did on that opening day of the infantry assault, and the days immediately following.

The full story became freely and publicly-available only in 2014. As a precaution against censorship, Hankey posted sections of an article he entitled ‘A Diary’ to different addresses in England for collation by Hilda and then submission to The Spectator. The sections arrived unmeddled with, and were sent to the magazine, which set the article in type only to decide against using it.

The galley was returned to Hilda, who in 1917 passed it onto her brother’s publisher, Melrose, who by then was rushing out a second ‘Student’ volume to cash in on the enormous sales of the first.

One entry in the ‘A Diary’ manuscript that Melrose trimmed describes the scene that meets Hankey when, on 1 July 1916, the ammunition-carriers he is leading arrive in newly-taken German trenches. They are carrying supplies of grenades for the troops, by now under counter-attack.

Amid the chaos, Hankey notes ‘some men trying to slink away unnoticed [and] being brought back to duty by the angry voice of an officer’.

That second passage concerns the desolation he feels in days following as he helps bring in the wounded and the dead’. It may be ‘a sweet and honourable thing to die for one’s country’ he observes, but he could imagine ‘nothing more horrible’ than:

to suddenly feel the primitive passion for slaughter let loose in one, and to know that one was more than at liberty to give it full rein. Yet that is what makes the good soldier in a charge. It is that, more than anything, perhaps, which brings home what an abominable thing war is.

The expurgated version of ‘A Diary’ finally appeared as ‘A  Month’s Experiences’ in A Student in Arms Series Two in May 1917, five months after the official end of the Battle of the Somme, seven months after Hankey’s death and ten after the events described. The pacifist Laurence Housman restored the passage on ‘what an abominable thing war is’ in his 1930 War Letters of Fallen Englishmen. Hankey has two entries, the same as H. G Wells, in Anthology of Armageddon (1935).(7)

The evident absence of a link to the Somme may help to explain why ASIA does not figure in the first exclusively Somme bibliography, Arthur T. E. Bray’s The Battle of the Somme, 1916: A Bibliography (1967).

The impetus for Bray perhaps owes something to the interest that began to focus on the Somme in 1963 ahead of the 50th anniversary following the publication of John Terraine’s Douglas Haig: The Educated Soldier.(8)

Terraine argues that, revulsion at the casualties notwithstanding, the Somme was ‘a British victory’ given German ‘signs of defeat’. These ‘signs’ included the start made in September 1916 on a second line of defence (the ‘Hindenburg Line’), as well as the fateful declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare in January 1917.

The 1966 Somme centenary over, interest continued to develop with the success of John Harris’s novel Covenant with Death (1969), really getting under way with Martin MIddlebrook’s  The First Day on the Somme (1971). Middlebrook’s enduring success rests upon his blend of sound scholarship, even-handed judgement and well-researched eyewitness accounts from Somme survivors.

Bray hoped his Somme bibliography, listing 444 entries, would be ‘reasonably comprehensive’ but as he includes film and sound his collection is light on printed material.

John Keegan turned to Hankey for the Somme section of The Face of Battle (1976) as a man who ‘had spoken for his generation’ of New Army officers, and so ‘eases our understanding of why the thousands of the New Armies climbed so readily into No Man’s Land on July 1^st and trudged off behind their leaders’.(9)

Keegan is referring to ‘The Beloved Captain’, a paper collected in the pre-Somme Series One of ASIA that arises from an incident in Hankey’s experience not of 1916 and the Somme, but of 1915 and the Second Battle of Ypres. Charles Messenger was also to turn to Series One for evidence of which volunteers of 1914 were promoted to non-commissioned rank (‘ambitious youngsters or blustering bullies’).(10)

By 1989, when The Penguin Book of First World War Prose appeared, ‘futility’ and ‘disillusionment’ had long been attitudes fashionable in Eng. Lit. if not historianly circles.  That alone does not seem to explain the omission of Falls’ ‘Fiction’ writer, Hankey.

The value of ‘the Student’ as a writer and symbol to the people who fought or endured the Great War was indeed enough to taint him in some circles by 1989. Or might have been, had more post-1945 scholars read widely enough to know Hankey’s name or to have read his work.

The editors of The Penguin Book of First World War Prose, however – a poet and an academic – did not omit Hankey for doctrinal reasons. As the academic (Jon Glover) was later to explain, neither he nor his co-editor the poet had ever heard of Hankey, who, he said, ‘must have escaped the cultural sieve’.(11)

There is a reason for overlooking or omitting Hankey’s work, if perhaps a slender one, and available only to bibliographers who have actually read it. In his writing, Hankey delphically declared:

fact and fiction are mingled; but to the writer the fiction appears at least as true as the fact, for it is typical of fact – at least in intention’.(12)

That ‘mingling’ struck Falls as ‘a pretty good description of these earnest and thoughtful papers’, so the bibliographer entered ASIA in the ‘Fiction’ section of War Books. It can be hard to see where the ‘fiction’ comes into Hankey’s writing. Its use, like adoption of the pen-name, may have been to downplay his own part in events.(13)

Hankey first used the ‘A Student in Arms’ pen-name in a Spectator article, ‘The Honour of the Brigade’. This is the piece that may strike new readers as most fanciful.(14) It is an account of the men of an unnamed Kitchener unit who accepts without demur that ‘the honour of the brigade’ demands a hasty counter-attack in daylight to regain a lost position.(15)

An unnamed man is one of the many casualties and, wounded in the leg, crawls back under cover of night along a path ‘choked with corpses’. ‘Well, that was D.H. [Donald Hankey] himself’ wrote one survivor. Another, who did not know Hankey, observed that ‘The Honour of the Brigade’ article was ‘not one of fiction but a factual fact as I happened to be in this action’.(16) Signed only by the impromptu pen-name ‘Homesick’, this letter to The Spectator was pencilled on a field message-pad, and the writer’s address given only as ‘Flanders’.

Cultural sieve, winnowing flail or wartime censorship notwithstanding, work of Hankey’s value to the Great War generation might be supposed warrant inclusion into later and ampler Somme bibliographies than those of Falls and Bray. Not so, in the case of Fred R. van Hartesveldt and Gerald Gliddon’s collections (both 1966).(17)  

Pressure on bibliographers of the Somme has mounted exponentially since the 50th anniversary. Films, TV series, reviews and articles jostle in the Somme roll-call with book-length studies, published and unpublished. Bray has a total of entries, van Hartesveldt 704 and Gliddon, making freer use of TV, film and periodicals, 2,000.(18) By Somme centenary year, Google’s digital-rich tally reached 15,000.(19)

Gliddon writes that he could have listed ‘hundreds more’ books, had his researches not been dogged by so many volumes that ‘give nothing away in their titles’.(20) A Student in Arms is of course one such book. Both Gliddon and van Hartesveldt, however, do list a ‘Somme-less’ item, Graham Greenwell’s memoir, An Infant in Arms.(21) Now where could Greenwell have got the idea for that title from?

Hankey’s postwar bibliographical chances suffered a biographical setback even before the Armistice. Melrose pressed Hilda Hankey to rush-write a biography of her brother for publication before the war’s end and the slump he anticipated in war-interest material.  Hilda could neither bring herself to produce the biography nor, with so many of Donald’s friends away on active service or dead, could she find a civilian candidate able and to her liking.

Yet Hilda did hold her brother’s papers and solicit more. Unfortunately, she had not registered them by the time of her death (1948) and so the archive seemed to be lost. In 2003, an American scholar, James Kissane, published a synoptic study from published sources.(22) In fact, the Hankey archive had been recovered by then, although was not yet publicly-available. It was to form the basis of a successful DPhil and the first comprehensive and referenced critical biography. In 2015 Lord Hankey presented the archive to IWM.

The absence of A Student in Arms from Somme bibliography may indicate that there may be are other lacunae, ‘lost’ writers who, even now, could offer historians fresh material for research. The mesh of the Web is fine enough to catch if not categorize useful leavings from the ‘cultural sieve’ and ‘winnowing flail’.

Gliddon’s 1996 bibliography reproves Middlebrook twice over, once because although acclaimed as a ‘masterly account of the opening hours’ The First Day on the Somme ‘has often been criticized for concentrating on one day of a battle which lasted until mid-November 1916’.(23) That’s on p. 21 of Gliddon. Turn to p .4, however, and it is clear that one of those doing the criticizing is Gliddon himself. Middlebrook:

spawned a whole host of imitators but also distorted study of the battle and indeed of the Western Front. There are people who almost seem to wallow in this single-day disaster.

To Gliddon, 1 July 1916 is just one day of a 141-day battle. Middlebrook’s The First Day on the Somme and its 1991 companion guide to the Somme battlefields are two of the welcome centenary reissues.  So too is Mr and Mrs Holt’s Definitive Battlefield Guide to the Somme (1996).

A valuable adjunct to Middlebrook is Slaughter on the Somme, Martin Mace and John Grehan’s complete collection of British and Newfoundland unit war diaries for 1 July 1916 for every battalion that actually left its trenches. Unit diaries commonly vary widely in comprehensiveness, but such was the mayhem in 1 July that many entries are mere scribbles in pencil, and entire pages can be missing. No trace, alas, of Donald Hankey’s foray into the German first line.

Other, fuller entries, painstakingly transcribed by Mace and Grehan, are all too graphic. Northumberland Fusiliers move forward in waves, and are ‘instantly fired on by enemy’s MG and snipers':

The enemy stood upon their [trench] parapet and waved our men to come on and picked them off with rifle fire. The enemy’s fire was so intense that the advance was checked and the waves, or what was left of them, were forced to lie down.(24)

We also have a reprint of The First World War, Cyril Falls’ 1970 best-seller. Somme veterans tend to make more phlegmatic historians than those of today, and Falls sees beyond the carnage of the battle and points to results from the Somme such as the German admission of serious losses among experienced officers and under-officers, the first peace feelers and the retreat to the Hindenburg line. For Falls:

Only high hearts, splendid courage, and the enormous endurance of the flower of the nations of the British and French Empires engaged could have won the results obtained. Only wonderful powers of resistance by the Germans could have limited them to what they were.(25)

Simon Sebag Montefiore is hardly one of Glidden’s 1 July 1916 ‘wallowers’. In his Somme: Into the Breach, Montefiore applies the Middlebrook method to the entire battle, as well as drawing upon material from Australia, Germany and New Zealand that will be new to many British readers. He is also careful to strike a balance, his commentary matching what is happening on either side, and sees the battle as a ‘partial victory’.

The British and Dominion part in it might not have been as bloody as it was, Sebag-Montefiore allows, had the Fourth Army Commander, General Rawlinson, felt able to oppose Haig’s over-ambitious plans for an all-out assault. Rawlinson, however, owed Haig one for saving his skin in what otherwise could have been a career-ending scandal over the conduct of the first big British assault of the war at Neuve Chapelle in March 1915.

Sebag-Montefiore was helped in the planning of his book by the previous work of Andrew Macdonald, a New Zealander. For his own study of 1 July 1916 Macdonald borrows not just Middlebrook’s approach but also his title, while making use of archive material not available to Middlebrook in 1971. So too does Andrew Roberts, although he prefixes his title with Elegy

Richard Van Emden has ransacked a wide range of image and other archives for The Somme: The Epic Battle in the Soldiers’ Own Words and Photographs. Jolyon Fenwick’s ravishing photographic panoramas of the positions from which the 14 battalions in the first wave left on 1 July show the Lutyens Memorial to the Missing of the Somme encased in scaffolding for refurbishment ahead of the centenary. When the memorial was being built in 1929, Fenwick relates, three German dugouts were discovered, ‘each still equipped with unexploded bombs and shells’.(26)

‘Graphic’ in another way are two volumes of the vividly-illustrated journals of Jim Maultsaid, who kept a sketch book throughout the war. Mentioned briefly in The First Day on the Somme, Maultsaid was to be severely wounded on 1 July but recovered to be commissioned and survive the war.

Maultsaid’s journals bristle with sketches of trench fortifications, attacks and everyday living and dying that give a real feel for the texture of the battle and Maultsaid’s fighting spirit.  Oddly enough, one of the most arresting images is conjured up by a written entry. It is for 6 April 1916, and shows what the Somme front was like three months before the British even attacked:

They told me next morning. He {Willie Reid] died firing his machine gun. All that was found of him was his right hand clasping the trigger of his beloved gun [....] But Billy Boy I lived to revenge your death [....].(27)

Like Middlebrook, Ralph J.Whitehead is not an academic. He nonetheless has dine in-depth research into the German army on the Somme, and in particular he casualties and interrogation reports of Allied prisoners). Grouped under the title The Other Side of the Wire, this two-volume set is of benefit to all historians of the battle.

Andrew Roberts does not make use of Whitehead for Elegy: The First Day on the Somme but he does turn to another ‘indispensable’, Jack Sheldon’s The German Army on the Somme.

Sheldon is quite clear that British involvement in the Somme offensive came as a ‘serious shock’ to the German Supreme Command, whose planners had discounted such a possibility. British involvement came as hardly less of a shock to Haig, who did not want to fight on the Somme at all, or for that matter anywhere else in the summer of 1916. He had a vast volunteer army but ‘from top to bottom’ it was ‘deficient in both training and experience of battle’. Yet there was no choice; the German offensive at Verdun threatened to knock France out of the war.

Alan Mallinson concedes as much in Too Important for the Generals. On the Somme, Haig and the British Army ‘learned how to fight in same way as the Duke of Wellington said he had learned in Flanders in the 1790s – observing how not to do it’.

The Somme, Mallinson concludes, ‘indirectly’ ensured Germany could not win. The shock to Germany persuaded the Kaiser to permit unrestricted submarine warfare, and that was quickly followed by the declaration of war by the United States.

Mallinson also identifies one other result of the Somme (although the same could be said of Passchendaele). This he sees as a British tendency during World War Two to ‘over-correction’, reluctance to stand ground or to press attacks. Major-General Mungo Melvin takes up the theme taken in a paper in The Battle of the Somme, Matthias Strohn’s collection of modern British, German and US academic opinion.

Comparing British experience of the Second World War with that of the First World War, Melvin concludes ‘There is no escape from the simple fact that a high-intensity war against a first-class, formidable opponent will cost very great numbers of lives, however skilfully fought’.(28)

Finally, covering all of this in a short space, there is the The Somme: A Visual History. Edited by Anthony Richards, IWM’s Head of Documents and Sound, this is a shrewd, compelling blend of text and relevant, appropriately-sized image, concise, well-paced, clear and balanced.

The Somme: A Visual History ends with a remark made by an unnamed veteran, on the 50th anniversary.  He said ‘I think this anniversary will be the last. When it comes up to 75 years, we [veterans]’ll all be dead too, and the Somme will seem as abstract as Waterloo.’ 

100 years on, not much sign of that.

Notes

1. See W. S. Rusk, ‘A Student in Arms’, The Sewanee Review, 25 (1917), 507–8; discussed in Ross Davies, A Student in Arms: Donald Hankey and Edwardian Society at War (Farnham, 2014).Back to (1)
2. Hankey was killed at Lesboeufs/Le Transloy on 12 October 1916, as, five days later, was the poet Leslie Coulson. Hankey has no known grave.Back to (2)
3. Hankey (1884–1916) was the younger brother of Maurice, later the first Baron Hankey, (1877–1963). Maurice in 1916 was chief of the War Cabinet Secretariat. Donald, said Maurice, ‘had the extraordinary knack of saying all the things which I myself should have liked to say’.Back to (3)
4. See F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (New York, NY, 1948), pp. 152, 426.Back to (4)
5. Cyril Falls, War Books (London, 1930), p. 277. R. J .Wyatt’s later edition (London, 1989) lists five Great War bibliographies, and refers to a sixth that ‘needs to be published’. This is Fred Lake’s application for Library Association Fellowship, ‘Regimental Journals and other serial publications of the British Army, 1660–1981: an annotated bibliography in four volumes’. Lake has 1,984 entries and may be consulted at CILIP <www.cilip.org.uk> [accessed 17 November 2016].Back to (5)
6. A German Deserter’s War Experiences (1917), quoted in Falls, p.177.Back to (6)
7. Anthology of Armageddon, ed. Bernard Newman and I. O. Evans (London, 1935), pp. 36, 45.Back to (7)
8. John Terraine, Douglas Haig: The Educated Soldier (London, 1963).Back to (8)
9. John Keegan, The Face of Battle (London, 1976), pp. 276–7. Keegan – or indeed anybody else interested in the business of what people read during the Great War – did not have far to look. In 1956 Geoffrey Bles (London) had published Ronald Selby Wright’s one-volume collection of Hankey’s best-known writings, The Beloved Captain.  This gets Hankey’s pen-name wrong, citing ‘A Student at Arms’ instead of ‘in Arms’.Back to (9)
10. Charles Messenger, Call to Arms: The British Army 1914–18 (London, 1995).Back to (10)
11. In conversation with the writer. Jon Glover and Jon Silkin, The Penguin Book of First World War Prose (London, 1989).Back to (11)
12. Author’s Foreword, p. 15,. ASIA series one, Fifth Pocket Edition (London (1919).Back to (12)
13. Hankey saw himself a ‘Student’ of human nature, and wrote under a pen-name in order to discuss human and military virtues without inferring that he personally embodied them.  His readership was of men in the ranks as well as officers, and of civilians including the families of serving men.Back to (13)
14. 11 December 1915.Back to (14)
15. The counter-attack, on 30 June 1915, was by the 7^th/8^th Rifle Brigade at Hooge, from where the 8th had been dislodged overnight by the first use of flamethrowers against the British. The paper, one of two Hankey pieces, is reprinted as ‘Baptism of Blood’ in Anthology of Armageddon, pp. 45–7. A survivor of that night attack at Hooge was G. V. Carey, who refers to it in another of Falls’ choices, G. V Carey and H. S. Scott, An Outline History of the Great War (Cambridge, 1928), p. 46.Back to (15)
16. Letter signed only ‘Homesick’, 20 December 1915. Hankey archive, HA1/84.Back to (16)
17. Gerald Gliddon, Legacy of the Somme 1916: The Battle in Fact, Film and Fiction, (Stroud, 1996); Fred R. Van Hartesveldt, The Battles of the Somme, 1916: Historiography and Annotated Bibliography (Westport, CT, 1996).Back to (17)
18. Publishing in 1996, van Hartesveldt and Gliddon were unable to include a valuable combination of human source material and balanced commentary that appeared in the same year, Malcolm Brown’s The Imperial War Museum Book of the Somme.Back to (18)
19. `In 1935, Newman and Evans observed ‘to date some 20,000 books have been written about the war’.Back to (19)
20. Falls (1930) could find only one explicit ‘Somme’  title,  A. D Gristwood’s  novel Somme. Including also The Coward (London, 1927).Back to (20)
21. Graham Greenwell, An Infant in Arms: War Letters of a Company Officer (London, 1935, 1972).Back to (21)
22. James Kissane, Without Parade:  The Life and Work of Donald Hankey, “A Student in Arms" (Leicester, 2003). Ronald Budd produced a 147-page hagiography, The Story of Donald Hankey (London, 1931). The archive as it then stood was available to Budd, but he made scant use of it, his interest being in a conception of Hankey’s spiritual life.Back to (22)
23. I mistakenly attribute this remark in footnote 15 of part one of this article to Gliddon’s The Battle of the Somme (Stroud, 1996).Back to (23)
24. Mace & Grehan, p. x.Back to (24)
25. Falls, History, p. 178.Back to (25)
26. Fenwick, p. 69.Back to (26)
27. Ed. Barbara McClune, Star Shell Reflections 1914-1916 (Barnsley, 2015), p. 157.Back to (27)
28. Strohn, p. 224.Back to (28)

 

Some new issues and recent reprints:

The First Day on the Somme

Martin Middlebrook

Barnsley, Pen & Sword Military, 2016, ISBN: 9781473877160; 365pp.; Price £25.00

The Middlebrook Guide to the Somme Battlefields

Martin & Mary Middlebrook

Barnsley, Pen & Sword Military, 2016, ISBN: 9781473879072; 383pp.; Price  £14.99

Major & Mrs Holt’s Definitive Battlefield Guide, 7^th GPS Edition

Tonie & Valmai Holt

Barnsley, Pen & Sword Military, 2016, ISBN: 9781473887534; 364pp.; Price

£25.00

The First World War

Cyril Falls

Barnsley, Pen & Sword Military, 2014, ISBN: 9781473825499; 445pp.; Price £25.00

Star Shell Reflections 1914-1916, 1916-1918: The Illustrated Great War Diaries of Jim Maultsaid

Edited by Barbara McClune

Barnsley, Pen & Sword Military, 2015, 2016, ISBN: 9781473879072, 9781783463695; 198pp, 383pp.; Price £25.00 each

Somme: Into the Breach

Hugh Sebag-Montefiore

London, Viking, 2015, ISBN: 9780670918386, 607pp.; Price £25.00

Breakdown: the Crisis of Shellshock on the Somme, 1916

Taylor Downing

London, Little, Brown, 2016, ISBN 9781408706619; 399pp.; Price £25.00

The Somme: The Epic Battle in the Soldiers’ own Words and Photographs

Richard Van Emden

Barnsley, Pen & Sword Military, 2016, ISBN 9781473855212, 355pp.; Price  £25.00

Attrition: Fighting the First World War

William Philpott

London, Little Brown, 2014, ISBN 9781408703564, 400pp.: Price £14.99

Bloody Victory: The Sacrifice on the Somme and the Making of the Twentieth Century

William Philpott

London, Little Brown, 2009, ISBN 978140801089, 721pp.: Price £25.

Elegy: The First Day on the Somme

Andrew Roberts

Elegy: The First Day on the Somme

London, Head of Zeus, 2016, ISBN 9781784080020, 289pp.: Price ?

Andrew Macdonald

The First Day on the Somme

London, HarperCollins, 2016, ISBN 978177554040, 462pp: Price £15.99

The Other Side of the Wire, vols.i,ii

Ralph J. Whitehead

Solihull, Helion, 2013: ISBN 9781908916891, 481pp: Price £35; ISBN 9781907677120, 615pp: Price ?

The German Army on the Somme 1914-1916

Jack Sheldon

Barnsley, Pen & Sword, 2012, ISBN 9781844155132, 432pp: Price £19.99

Zero Hour: 110 Years On: Views from the Parapet of the Somme

Jolyon Fenwick

London, Profile, 2016, ISBN 9781781257081, 133pp.; Price £25.00

The Somme

Ed. Matthias Strohn

Oxford, Osprey, 2016, ISBN 9781472815569, 275pp.; Price £25.

Too Important for the Generals: Losing and Winning the First World War

Allan Mallinson

London, Bantam Press, 2016, ISBN 9780593058183, 375pp.; Price £25.

The 1916 Battle of the Somme Reconsidered

Peter Liddle

Barnsley, Pen & Sword Military, 2016, ISBN 9781783400515, 180pp.; Price £19.99