Round-up: 5 books for a Remembrance Day reading list

Lifesavers and Body Snatchers: Medical Care and the Struggle for Survival in the Great War

By Tim Cook

Allen Lane, 544 pages, $35.00

Given the number of books already published on the First World War, especially after its various centenaries were commemorated from 2014 to 2018, you might figure that there wasn’t much more to say. In particular, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Tim Cook, who has already written so extensively on the subject, would have much to add about the Canadian experience.

Remarkably, with “Lifesavers and Body Snatchers” he has.

In this book the focus is on the Canadian Medical Corps, which provides a different perspective on the sorts of damage done, from bullets and gas to artillery and shell shock. But the background is also well developed, with attention given to political infighting that was often quite bitter.

Cook has an unrivaled mastery of the archival sources and reveals here for the first time the program of harvesting body parts from fallen soldiers for medical study, without the knowledge or consent of the soldiers and their loved ones. “This was not grave robbing in the deep of night, but an open act of forcing dead soldiers to once again serve their country, having fallen in combat they were now to contribute to victories in future medical battles.”

Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921

By Antony Beevor

Viking, 576 pages, $51.00

Instead of revisiting more familiar battlefields, in his new book Antony Beevor looks at one of the most important, destructive, and least well-known conflicts of the twentieth century, the Russian Civil War. Often seen in the West as just a coda to the First World War, the fighting drew in armies from all over the world (including Canada) to finally settle the outcome of the Russian Revolution.

The action is very hard to keep straight, with numerous armies led by an odd assortment of generals moving about a vast landscape. This confusion, in turn, was one of the main reasons the Bolsheviks emerged triumphant, as the motley alliance against them had trouble pulling in the same direction. Beevor does a great job, though, using biographical sketchwork and telling anecdotes to pull it all into a coherent narrative that makes sense of the brutal and chaotic origins of Russia’s great tragedy.

Personality and Power: Builders and Destroyers of Modern Europe

By Ian Kershaw

Penguin, 492 pages, $41.00

Mussolini’s Daughter: The Most Dangerous Woman in Europe

By Caroline Moorehead

Random House, 405 pages, $25.95

Biography provides another entry point to our understanding of war.

Ian Kershaw, who wrote perhaps the definitive English-language biography of Adolf Hitler, takes a step back in “Personality and Power” to look at the “great man” theory of history as it applied to Europe in the 20th Century, considering figures from Lenin to Helmut Kohl as individuals who shaped not just European but world history at moments of war and crisis. As for whether they made their world or were made by it, you won’t be surprised that it ends up being a bit of both.

Caroline Moorehead goes in a different direction, taking us behind the scenes of the rise and fall of Italy’s Duce Benito Mussolini by focusing on the life of his first-born and favourite child, Edda.

Edda was very much her father’s daughter: a wilful wild child always chafing at any kind of control. She became a fascist cover girl (appearing on the cover of Time in 1939), and married a man who became Italy’s foreign minister, placing her at the centre of what was happening in the 1930s and ‘40s. Moorehead’s highly readable biography has almost nothing to say about Edda’s post-war life (she died in 1995), but for the war years it offers a fascinating mesh of the personal and the political.

Prisoners of the Castle

By Ben MacIntyre

Signal, 342 pages, $36.00

As well as being a chronicle of horrors, the Second World War also provided many thrilling stories of heroism and adventure, not all of them taking place on the battlefield. Ben MacIntyre, perhaps best known as the author of “Operation Mincemeat” (recently turned into a hit movie), revisits one of the most famous of these in this history of Colditz Prison, a converted castle which was used during the war to hold captured Allied officers who had proven to be high risk.

Of course, every prison story is an escape-from-prison story, and “Prisoners of the Castle” is no exception, as breaking out of the castle became a sort of high-stakes game fought not only between prisoners and guards but also between different national teams of inmates. Tunnels were dug, papers forged, uniforms made, and there was even an attempt at building a glider (that might have actually worked!).

Much has already been written about escaping Colditz, and it’s also been the inspiration for movies and a television series. MacIntyre tells the story well though, and lets us marvel again at all the ingenuity and resourcefulness on display.

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