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Circa: 2008
Collector Bookstore is a retailer of new books located in Leavenworth, Kansas. We specialize in price guides and reference books for the antiques and collectibles industry. The First World War has left an almost indelible mark on history, with battles such as the Somme and Passchendaele becoming watchwords for suffering unsurpassed. Five million men of the British Empire bore arms in this great conflict; almost a million were to lose their lives, and a great many more were scarred for life, physically and emotionally. As the last veterans pass away, so direct memory of life in the trenches will pass with them; in future, only archives and published accounts will be available to those wishing to find out what it was really like to be a British soldier Tommy Atkins in the War. Yet what is missing from the growing literature of the Great War is an appreciation of what the objects so closely associated with four years of warfare 'in the trenches' really looked like, how they were used, and what they meant to Tommy himself. This book fills the gap, providing a visual reference that is usually only provided by the contents of museum cases.
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| Through a multitude of original surviving objects of Tommy's life the recruiting posters and patriotic song-sheets, uniforms and weapons, postcards and keepsakes, barbed wire and hand grenades, amongst others Peter Doyle tells the story of what it was really like to serve as an infantryman in the Great War, principally on the Western Front, but also in the other `sideshows' across the world. Through an exploration of what anthropologists and archaeologists call `material culture' it recounts the story of Tommy Atkins, from enlistment to demobilization, from trenches to memorials and creates a unique visual encyclopaedia of the time. |
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