Englund - The beauty and the sorrow: an intimate history of the First World War

An unforgettable and unprecedented view of the war as seen by twenty people who took part in it but, were it not for Englunds remarkable job of unearthing and arranging their journals, letters, and memoirs, would probably have remained forever faceless, forgotten by time. Lets us in on astonishing details of the war one would be hard-pressed to find elsewhere. Shatters the mold A beautiful tribute.

San Francisco Chronicle

Conveys the wars complexity better than any of the grand histories so far written.

The Washington Post

Whether considered as history or as literatureit is, of course, bothThe Beauty and the Sorrow is radically original in form and epic in scope.

Geoff Dyer, author of The Missing of the Somme

A brilliant feat of retrospective journalism. Englunds deft collation provides insights into more than the carnage. This book fleshes out the grim statistics of the Great War. The eloquence of everyday participants will link the reader to the era when the origins of the ensuing centurys conflicts became apparent.

Publishers Weekly (starred)

An exquisite book. There are adventures and battles, of course, but also many moments of quiet contemplation with closely observed details of street scenes, restaurants, railway stations, and deserted battlefields. By turns pithy, lyrical, colorful, poignant, and endlessly absorbing.

Kirkus Reviews (starred)

A wonderfully wide and rich mosaic of personal experience from the First World War.

Antony Beevor, author of Stalingrad and D-Day: The Battle for Normandy

Englund covers a lot of ground in The Beauty and the Sorrow, geographically, topically, and in point of view. He succeeds in his goal to humanize the war.

The Dallas Morning News

Peter Englund is one of the finest writers of our time on the tactics, the killing and the psychology of war. In The Beauty and the Sorrow he superbly and humanely brings to life all the tragedy, chaos, death and gunsmoke of battle.

Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Stalin and Young Stalin

Powerful and compelling. Of the many books about the First World War this is among the most strikingly original. Almost every page of Englunds book is fresh and revelatory.

Daily Express (UK)

A literary as well as a historical achievement.

The Guardian (UK)

These lives are anything but ordinary, and the stories are absolutely riveting. A fresh, varied, thoroughly convincing picture of the war. There are some wonderful details. Englund has chosen his voices with great care, and the resulting picture of the war in the round, with all its sorrows but also its joys, is made all the more vivid by the eloquent translation from the Swedish by Peter Graves.

The Telegraph (UK)

[There are] hundreds of eerie, moving, upsetting, and surprising incidents from the First World War within this extraordinary book. Like a great novel, The Beauty and the Sorrow manages to be both more universal and more particular [than other books on WWI]. Peter Englund frees individual experience from the collective cloak of history and geography. The details build like a symphony. Englund writes with a calm clarity, beautifully conveyed by his translator.

Mail on Sunday (Five Stars; UK)

Anthologies of war reminiscences are often lazy stuff, mere compilations of extracted passages from diaries and letters. [But] Englunds choice of witnesses and his use of their material are admirably judged. This is an anthology well above the common run. This is a book about men and women living at the outer edge of human experience.

The Sunday Times (UK)

PETER ENGLUND
The Beauty and the Sorrow

Peter Englund received a Ph.D. in history at the University of Uppsala in Sweden. He has been given a number of literary prizes in his home country, including the most famous one, the August. In 2002 he was elected to the Swedish Academy (which awards the Nobel Prize in Literature), and in 2008 he was appointed its new Permanent Secretary. He has also worked as a war correspondent in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

www.peterenglund.com

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2012

Translation copyright 2011 by Peter Graves

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in slightly different form in Sweden as Stridens Sknhet Och Sorg by Atlantis, Stockholm, in 2009.
Copyright 2009 by Peter Englund. Subsequently published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Random House, Inc., New York, in 2011.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Englund, Peter, 1957
[Stridens sknhet och sorg. English]
The beauty and the sorrow : an intimate history of the First World War /
by Peter Englund. 1st. American ed.
p. cm.
Originally published in Sweden as Stridens Sknhet Och Sorg by
Atlantis, Stockholm, in 2009 [i.e. 2008].T.p. verso.
1. World War, 19141918Personal narratives. I. Title.
DA640.A2E5413 2011
940.30922dc23
2011020828

eISBN: 978-0-307-70138-1

Design by Soonyoung Kwon
Author photograph Mikael Gustavsen

www.vintagebooks.com

Cover photograph Mary Evans/Robert Hunt Collection
Cover design by Megan Wilson

v3.1_r1

This book is dedicated to the memory of

C ORPORAL J ARED W. K UBASAK

whom I met in the fall of 2005 while embedded with
the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Iraq,
and who was killed there in action
on December 12 the same year

All the suffering and torment wrought at places of execution, in torture chambers, madhouses, operating theatres, under the arches of bridges in late autumnall these are stubbornly imperishable, all these persist, are inaccessible but cling on, envious of everything that is, stuck in their own terrible reality. People would like to be allowed to forget much of it, their sleep gliding softly over these furrows in the brain, but dreams come and push sleep aside and fill in the picture again. And so they wake up breathless, let the light of a candle dissolve the darkness as they drink the comforting half-light as if it was sugared water. But, alas, the edge on which this security is balancing is a narrow one. Given the slightest little turn and their gaze slips away from the familiar and the friendly, and the contours that had so recently been comforting take the sharp outlines of an abyss of horror.

R AINER M ARIA R ILKE , Malte Laurids Brigge, 1910

The summer was more wonderful than ever and promised to become even more so, and we all looked out on the world without any cares. That last day in Baden I remember walking over the vine-clad hills with a friend and an old vine-grower saying to us: We havent had a summer like this for a long time. If this weather continues this years wine is going to be beyond compare. People will always remember the summer of 1914!