The First World War

[Beirut]

There's a tendency, in the UK at least to regard ww1 as a futile, terrible war that was fought by poorly qualified generals and a living hell for all troops involved. It's almost a folk memory really.

I've been reading a lot of revisionist texts on ww1 recently that debunk some of these myths, so I'd try to avoid these cliches in your work if you're going to talk about the rest of the allies' war prior to 1917.

What have you been reading? Sounds interesting.

Out of interest have you got an idea about chapter headings yet?

That's where I am right now. There's an initial opening chapter outlying the purpose of the book and a very general view of the war as a whole. After that - right now actually - I'm trying to merge pre-war European history, say from the Franco-Prussian war, up to the initial declarations of war in 1914, and do it in a way that's both accurate and interesting for the lay person to read. No small task. At least not for me.

After that it would be how the initial confrontations in the west muddled into trench warfare. Then it gets busy and tougher for me to focus. There's explaining the industrial nature of the war, the new technologies, and an overview of the "classic" big battles of attrition that everyone associates with The Great War. Then there's the blockade of Germany, the Russians, the US involvement. And of course the Renault FT-17 tank hmy grandfather served in. The effort could go on well past my death if I don't focus.

My target audience is people who know little to nothing of the war and whose only interest in it would be that our grandfather was there, so I have to be careful not to go on any tangents about minutia. Mind you, at fifteen-thousanbd words there's not a lot of room for minutia.