The leader of this improbable mission is Geoffrey Spicer-Simson whose navy career thus far had been distinguished by two sinkings. His seemingly impossible charge: to trek overland through the African bush hauling Mimi and Toutou—two forty-foot mahogany gunboats–with a band of cantankerous, insubordinate Scotsmen, Irishmen and Englishmen to defeat the Germans on Lake Tanganyika. With its powerfully evoked landscape, cast of hilariously colorful characters and remarkable story of hubris, ingenuity and perseverance, this incredibly bizarre story–inspiration for the classic film The African Queen–is history at its most entertaining and absorbing.

     Did events justify Lloyd George's claim in 1914 that the Kaiser could fall `by knocking away the props'; isolating Germany by defeating her partners? When Italy joined the Allies who was propping up whom? Were sideshows in the Balkans, Iraq and Palestine integral to the war's general strategy, or were they simply old imperial rivalries resumed by other means? A hundred years on, that moment in November 1918 when the fighting ceased on the Western Front is still remembered across nations: that symbolic eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. 'Victory 1918' examines the background to the Allied triumph and its aftermath. Might the Armistice in the forest of Compiegne have come sooner? Did American intervention have won the war and compromised the peace? How near did Germany come to denouncing the Armistice and resuming fighting in 1919? But 'Victory 1918' is not only concerned with what happened in France and Flanders. There were four armistices that autumn. The Great War was a global conflict, with battlefronts on three continents. Retracing the path to Compiegne through the four-year struggle allows the reader to consider if a broader strategic vision might have brought an earlier victory. 'Victory 1918' is a masterful survey of one of history's great turning points, and offers a fresh interpretation of the war which, more than any other, determined the character of the twentieth century. ALAN PALMER was Head of the History Department at Highgate School from 1953 to 1969, when he gave up his post to concentrate on historical writing and research. He has written some thirty narrative histories, historical reference books or biographies. In 1980 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

    Dr. Winter looks anew at the culture of commemoration and the ways in which communities endeavored to find collective solace after 1918. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning is a profound and moving book of great importance for the attempt to understand the course of European history during the first half of the twentieth century.