This past year I read and watched a lot of media about World War I, which is an era that I keep thinking about in part because of what we're currently going through globally. This is a book I got from the library when I decided to just request everything they had that had been written by Ben Macintyre after I read The Spy and the Traitor, and it really knocked me out.
It's structured as a mystery -- who betrayed these four British* soldiers hiding in a French village during WWI -- and while the question of who might have done that and why, and what proof we have one way or another a hundred years later, is certainly key to the narrative of the book, I found so much about the story to be fascinating. In particular, the inability to know and even less to believe what was happening in war just ten miles down the road, the horror when that reality came crashing into a small provincial town, the way the war was the worst elements of modernity obliterating the literal landscape of people's worlds -- all of it is explored and excavated in truly painful and awful ways. A great book that fucked me up and made me want to read so much more about this time.
*One of them was Irish, but technically for the time that meant he was considered to be British, but it still made me twitch every time the author collectively referred to them as such.
Grade: A
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