![]() ![]() The 1969 satiric musical film Oh! What a Lovely War offered a dark comedic look at that conflict. The irony of World War I has provided fertile material for literature, beginning with the war poems of Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen, both soldiers who perished in the war, followed by Erich Maria Remarque’s classic All Quiet on the Western Front in 1929. ![]() And the celebration of the 1918 armistice was compromised by a flu pandemic. The romantic idealism with which British society approached that conflict, the anticipation of short skirmishes that would bring peace and produce war heroes, soon became the grim reality of trench warfare and gas masks, field hospitals and the realization that churches were hosting far more funerals than weddings. ![]() The British author had spent her teenage years in the East Sussex village of Rye, the setting for her novel which begins in 1914 during the summer before the beginning of the war that was touted as the one to end all wars. Helen Simonson followed the bestseller success of her 2010 debut novel Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand with a second book, The Summer Before the War. ![]()
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