The Flower of Battle: How Britain Wrote the Great War

by Hugh Cecil

The numbers tell only part of the story - more than half a million Britons killed in four years of war on the Western Front. The rest of the story - what the Great War of 1914-1918 did to those it didn't kill - had to wait until the survivors found their voices and began to write the narratives that are all we can know of what they endured.
The Flower of How Britain Wrote the Great War tells the lives of a dozen of these writers, many hugely successful in their day but forgotten now. They came from all levels of British society and went off to very different wars - the nightmare of the trenches in France, staff work well behind the lines, ministering to those who had witnessed living hell. Hugh Cecil's brilliantly researched portraits of these eleven men and one woman give us a new understanding of the challenge they all faced - to make sense of a world that seemed to have gone insane.
There is no better one-volume history of Britain's war. But The Flower of Battle is not only a record of suffering, it is also a testament to the power of literature as a redemptive act. In the lives of these dozen writers Cecil has found a common courage, a refusal to succumb to despair, a faith that any horror can be understood, if one can only find the words for it.

440 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1996