To the Last Man

This has been a good year for books on the First World War. Macdonald's oral history of the last German offensive of the war is a great complement to John Keegan's comprehensive The First World War and Niall Ferguson's revisionist The Pity of War. Macdonald (They Called It Passchendaele, etc.) has spent many years interviewing British and Canadian veterans of WWI. Her large archive alone is an important achievement, but from this raw material she has gone on to cobble a number of remarkable books. This, the latest, focuses on one of the most deadly and strategically important confrontations of the war: the Second Battle of the Somme, in which the Allied command ordered the field commanders to resist the German attack ""to the last round and the last man."" Macdonald is particularly skilled at presenting war from the standpoint of those directly involved in its bloody business. At the same time, she never fails to set events in their proper historical, political and military context. Unlike her previous books, this volume includes a significant amount of first-person testimony from German soldiers culled from an impressive private collection of accounts gathered by American publisher Richard Baumgartner in 1981. As Macdonald points out, ""the stories of some of those German boys are mirror images of those of their British counterparts--some of whom, indeed, must have been literally within yards of them."" Macdonald's uncompromising narrative brings the bloody dawn of the century into vivid, humane relief. 60 b&w photos; 17 maps. (Nov.)