The Unknown Soldier

by NeilHanson (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2005

  $7.41

  This is the fascinating and moving story of how the grave of the Unknown Soldier and the ritual of Remembrance Day came to be.
  During the Great War, three men -- one British, one American and one German -- give their lives in the battlefields of Flanders. Neil Hanson traces each soldier from recruitment, in the naive, optimistic belief that the war would be over in a matter of weeks, to the appalling reality of trench warfare with the stench of death permeating from mass graves bubbling up from beneath the battlefields, and finally, to the waiting, worrying and grieving of their families at home when the dreaded telegram missing, believed dead arrives.
  The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier examines what happened to the soldiers whose bodies were unrecoverable, and the valiant effort of Reverend David Railton, a priest serving at the frontline with the London Regiment, who convinced Prime Minister Lloyd George to create a symbolic burial of one unknown soldier so that all who had lost brothers, sons and fathers could grieve at the grave in the hope that the unknown soldier was their beloved.
  Hanson's book culminates on a modern Remembrance Day and the ritual of commemoration.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2005

  $3.29

  Of all the million British dead of the First World War, only one - the Unknown Soldier - was ever returned to his native land. An anonymous symbol of all those lost without trace in the carnage of the battlefields, he was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey amid an outpouring of grief that brought the whole nation to a standstill, far outweighing even the emotion that was to greet the death of Princess Diana over eighty years later. Inspired by this example, almost every combatant nation buried its own Unknown Soldier and the graves became the focus of a pilgrimage that still continues today. Drawing on largely unpublished letters and diaries, Neil Hanson has resurrected the lives and experiences of three unknown soldiers - a Briton, a German and an American. Nothing is invented or exaggerated; every word is based on the testimony of those who fought, those who died and those who mourned at home. Few books have ever shown the terrible reality of warfare in such compelling, unforgettable detail, or told such a moving story of human life and loss. The rare insight into these three soldiers' lives reveals the Great War in all its horror and tragedy. Amid all their sufferings, the common humanity of the men and their loved ones shines through. Each soldier lives on in the memory of his family to this day. They stand at the head of a ghost army three million strong, all of whom have no known grave. Their story is the story of the Unknown Soldier.