Reviews for Patton At Bay

The average rating for Patton At Bay based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-02-11 00:00:00 Paul C. S. Chang This is how I imagined it all started. He was a journalist. Words being his profession, he read a lot of books. Readers like him (or us) at one point in their lives wonder if they can write well enough and lengthy enough to have a book published carrying their names as proud authors. The first problem, however, is what to write about. So he looked around him. There were his grandfather's few war memorabilia. His dead grandfather who had lived to more than a hundred, taciturn, seldom smiled, or talked to him. But he knew the old man fought during world war one. He just didn't know what exactly he did as he never talked about his war experiences. So this author decided this would be his book and started researching. (Books like this seem to follow a formula: the writer retraces the path taken by the object of his investigation, going to places the latter had been, digging up archives, interviewing old people who knew some things about the dead, checking diaries, greying letters, old newspaper reports, anything which had something to do with his quarry. Old pictures seem to be de rigueur also.) It was called as the Great War. It was great in all aspects of war, including in its stupidity. You know how it started. A minor potentate was assassinated and with this single death nations found reason enough to stage an orgy of bloodbaths across Europe which resulted to the death of millions, most of them young men in the prime of their lives. The manner this war was conducted even looked more foolish: the soldiers dug trenches, built fortifications and set up machine gun nests. They rain bombs on each other. On quieter days snipers shoot at those who make the mistake of peeping out of the trenches. One of these was the brilliant short story writer Hector Hugh Munro (aka "Saki") who, during that very dark morning of 14 November 1916 at the front was shot to death by a sniper after warning another soldier with his last words: "Put that bloody cigarette out." And when these burrowing men of war wanted to have more deaths they charge en masse to their adversaries' position upon a long whistle while the other side mows them down with enthusiastic machine gun fire. From the grandfather's younger pictures the reader will notice that he looked much like the author is now. He almost died during the war, but he did nothing spectacular. He trained, travelled to the war zone, positioned himself for assault during his first battle, charged when he heard the long whistle, was promptly hit by bullets, fell, left for dead, was found wounded but alive the next morning, treated for his wounds, sent home, raised a family, lived a peaceful, boring life, grew old and died in a nursing home. His grandson couldn't squeeze as much drama from that life so he ended up poking into the lives of his comrades in his unit, Company D, those who battled longer, did more heroic things, died after scoring kills by the dozen, or who had lived long after the war like him. Books like this have their fascination. One gets to stare at the pictures of long dead men, gets to know them, how they were then in the past one can only now just imagine, and then one wonders what life is really all about.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-05-09 00:00:00 Beast Beauty I've looked for a good World War I book for many years. Most were so dense or tedious that I gave up, relying more on poetry or novels to get a sense of that horrific time. James Carl Nelson gets to the heart of the American place in the war with this book, written as an homage to his late Grandpa, who was badly wounded in the wheat fields alongside the Paris-Soissons Road outside of Cantigny in June of 1918. James Nelson follows up on the AEF Company D infantry batallion that reflected in its diversity America filled with immigrants who returned to the 'old country' to serve their new country beneath a rain of Hun artillery and gas shells and bullets from the murderous Maxim guns. The book follows the arc of the war from Company D's beginnings in the Mexican Civil War, then the run up to the draft and deployment in France. Very readable and heartfelt, not too obsessed granular detail of military movements. I'm actually buying a copy to give to a military history buff for Christmas, I enjoyed it so much.