THE Great War will stand as one of the greatest conflicts in human history. In four years and three months ten million men died. . . over twenty million were wounded. . . the flower of Europe's manhood became the legendary 'lost generation'. 'The war to end all wars', an epic of sacrifice and endurance, witnessed a remarkable contribution by Southern Rhodesia, and this book describes the part played in that war by this young and extraordinary nation. Many parts of the world remained peaceful backwaters in the years 1914-18, but Southern Rhodesia was not among those nations which remained aloof. Rhodesians patriotically flocked to war in August 1914, impatient to get to the battle-fronts lest the British Army really did occupy Berlin before Christmas. Hundreds of them died or were maimed in this romantic pursuit of the glory of war; illusions were shattered like the bodies of the victims, and few who survived were unmarked by the nightmare through which they had lived. The Western Front has cast its eerie spell over images of the Great War: the shell-pocked mud of Passchendaele, the endless futility of the Somme, the sinister mists of gas seeping across the moonscape of no-man's-land. But the war was spread across half the globe, and black and white Rhodesians also stormed into battle in the dunes of South West Africa, in the thorn scrub of diseaseridden East Africa, in Palestine, Bulgaria, in the air and at sea. The war accelerated the emergence of a Rhodesian nation; only a minority of those who fought had been born in the country, but they identified themselves as Rhodesians and banded together into Rhodesian units, some of them tiny, whenever they could, and fought and died as comrades from their distant homeland.

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1980, 1st Edition. NEW. Ships from UK office

 

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