Before Endeavors Fade:
A Guide to the Battlefields
of the First World War

Book Review

by Don Featherstone

by Rose E.B. Coombs 136 pages; innumerable photographs and maps. Battle of Britain Prints International Ltd. £ 2.50p.

Readers will recall my recent report of a visit to the World War I battlefields of the Western Front and will have gathered that I found them as fascinating yet sobering as anything I can recall. Yet this short visit provided only an introduction to a subject so vast that it has quite obviously become the overwhelming interest of the author (Special Collections Officer to the Imperial War Museum as it has to Brigadier Denis O'Flaherty who conducted our tour. This fine book not only gives chapter and verse for every principal action and event in France and Belgium but adds vital information and interest in the form of dozens of "then and now" photographs and maps. To visit a battlefield is always exciting, to tramp the same fields armed with the sort of information contained in this book turns it into an unforgetable experience. At the price in this day and age, Miss Coombs book is wonderful value and I doubt if anyone will read it without finding that her enthusiasm has infected them with the desire to follow in her footsteps - and with relatively cheap ferries and the availability of cars it is no difficult matter for a group of friends to band together and make just such a journey

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© Copyright 1976 by Donald Featherstone.
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