- Paperback: 62 pages
- Publisher: Nabu Press (March 2010)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1148197966
- ISBN-13: 978-1148197968
- Product Dimensions: 18.9 x 24.6 x 0.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 141 g
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Product Details |
Product Description
Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.
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3.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)
3.0 out of 5 stars
Instructive for what it's not saying, April 19 2002
By Andrew S. Rogers - Published on Amazon.com
Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) was a British novelist, essayist, journalist, and playwright. Though not so well remembered -- at least on these shores -- as many of his contemporaries, it's not for want of effort, since he published something like 30 novels.When World War One began in 1914, Bennett was summoned -- along with other key British writers like Doyle, Hardy, Galsworthy, Belloc, Chesterton, Wells, and others -- to become part of what became known as the War Propaganda Board. This little book, the first of Bennett's two efforts for the WPB, was first published within months of the war's beginning, initially in the Saturday Evening Post, and then as a book on the Hodder & Stoughton imprint (the secretive WPB didn't publish under its own name, and its activities weren't revealed to the public until the 1930s).
The piece is instructive, not so much for what it tells us about British war aims, but for what it reveals about wartime propaganda.
The book has many of the clichés of the time -- arrogant Prussian aristocrats, docile German masses, 'the sinister Krupp family,' 'the monstrous chicane of the military caste against the people.' But at the same time, it is reserved, intellectual, and almost gentlemanly propaganda as compared to what came later in the war (lies about Belgian babies tossed in the air and skewered on German bayonets, and so on). In the second war, Churchill could quote an anonymous saying, 'The Hun is always at your throat or at your feet.' But here, instead of those later efforts to blame both wars on a pathological evil within the German people themselves, Bennett points the finger squarely at 'the grandiose German military legend, fostered by the German military caste and in turn by repercussion exciting that caste to a fury of arrogance.'
Bennett's tone becomes somewhat more fire breathing in the third and final chapter. But strangely, the 'Liberty!' so prominent in the title really appears only in the last paragraph, where he argues that the British have no desire to live as German slaves. As was typical at the time, his emphasis is much more on Britain as a state, honoring its commitments to France and Belgium, than on the ancient liberties of individual British men and women.
This is an interesting little tract, in all. The writing is unremarkable (as government war propaganda so often is). But as a window into the official British mindset at the start of the Great War, it's a useful little addition to the historian's shelf.
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