Echoes Of War :Flying Corps Headquarters 1914-1918&A Passionate Prodigality Book
$ 15.94
Description
Echoes Of War :Flying Corps Headquarters 1914-1918&A Passionate Prodigality Book. To hell with your generalised pity. A Passionate Prodigality by Guy Champan. Flying Corps Headquarters 1914-1918 by Maurice Baring One of the most unlikely midwives to the fledgling Royal Flying Corps was the literary, fashionable and unsoldierly figure of Maurice Baring. In 1914, aged 40, he obtained a commission in the Intelligence Corps, bought himself some khaki, got help with the tying of his puttees, and set off for France to be Private Secretary to the RFC's senior officer, a post held from 1915 by the redoubtable 'Boom' Trenchard. Flying Corps HQ, drawn from Baring's letters and diaries, describes the momentous and historic war years that forged the flying services, where Trenchard's resounding 'Make a note of that, Baring' became a well worn RFC expression. The embryo RAF was fortunate in Baring the staff officer, and also in having so witty and observant a writer to chronicle its early years. There is much here that is painful, but much too that is enlightening or downright funny, truly one of the mirrors of the 'lost generation' of the Great War. A Passionate Prodigality by Guy Champan When A Passionate Prodigality was first published in 1933 it was hailed as one of the finest English works to have come out of the Great War. Today, this memoir reads with a graphic immediacy, not merely in the descriptions of the filth and shock and carnage that characterised that struggle, but, particularly, in its evocation of men at war. Stylish, honest, and eloquent, A Passionate Prodigality is 'less a book than a living voice', demonstrating an important if little remembered truth: The poetry is not in the pity. To hell with your generalised pity. What the survivor remembers is not the fears he knew, the pains, but the faces and a few words of the men who were with him at the front...
