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I am treading into unfamiliar waters by offering a review of Under the Devil's Eye for, although I greatly enjoy and, hopefully, profit by reading well written nonfiction history, this is the first book I have ever read that is classified specifically as military history. Details of battle tactics, deployment of fighting units, and employment of war materiel are rather far removed from my fields of interest. In brief, my comments on the book are those of a general reader, not a military historian so either consider or disregard them accordingly.
Why was my attention attracted to a military history book? The title intrigued me, and it dealt with a seldom-discussed theatre in World War I -- the Great War and the one in which my own father served in France but of which he seldom spoke. I wanted to learn a bit more of what he may have seen and experienced. To that end, I found Under the Devil's Eye worth nearly every minute I spent reading it.
References to specific military units and their deployment left me just a bit on the unenlightened side, primarily because they were all British units of which I have no knowledge and were being deployed in a geographical region of which I have little knowledge as well, making it difficult for me to relate to that information. However, such moments of relative confusion were rare, and even then the names of many such units are exciting to an American reader: the Black Watch, the King's Own, the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, the Royal Irish Rifles, the 1st Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, and on and on. The names stir the blood!
What held my interest throughout the entire book and was to me of the greatest value are the frequent quotations from soldiers' diaries and memoirs as well as from official unit diaries. These are priceless. The reader learns from what were first-hand, on-the-ground sources, and they paint all-too-vivid pictures of privation, of having to labor in oppressive sultry summer heat, of trying to survive not only enemy bullets but also freezing winter weather, of attempting to find some way to rest in a leaking tent pitched on mud in drenching rain, and of desperately hoping to survive while advancing over open fields raked with machine gun fire. Although the authors' avowed purpose in writing this book was to record and thereby honor in memory the travails of their countrymen laboring, suffering, and dying in a theatre of war not well covered in history books, I feel the book has achieved an even greater end by showing readers what the Great War was like from the viewpoint of the men who faced the enemy in a strange and inhospitable land.
By the way, have you watched the 1999 movie The Mummy directed by Stephen Sommers? At one point we find several protagonists flying over the desert in a World War I era biplane with a strange looking machine gun mounted aft. That equipment was more historically accurate than I suspected, and that is a Lewis Gun. Had I not come across Under the Devil's Eye I would likely have never known the name of that weapon. You just never know what new knowledge you'll take away from a good book!
Why was my attention attracted to a military history book? The title intrigued me, and it dealt with a seldom-discussed theatre in World War I -- the Great War and the one in which my own father served in France but of which he seldom spoke. I wanted to learn a bit more of what he may have seen and experienced. To that end, I found Under the Devil's Eye worth nearly every minute I spent reading it.
References to specific military units and their deployment left me just a bit on the unenlightened side, primarily because they were all British units of which I have no knowledge and were being deployed in a geographical region of which I have little knowledge as well, making it difficult for me to relate to that information. However, such moments of relative confusion were rare, and even then the names of many such units are exciting to an American reader: the Black Watch, the King's Own, the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, the Royal Irish Rifles, the 1st Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, and on and on. The names stir the blood!
What held my interest throughout the entire book and was to me of the greatest value are the frequent quotations from soldiers' diaries and memoirs as well as from official unit diaries. These are priceless. The reader learns from what were first-hand, on-the-ground sources, and they paint all-too-vivid pictures of privation, of having to labor in oppressive sultry summer heat, of trying to survive not only enemy bullets but also freezing winter weather, of attempting to find some way to rest in a leaking tent pitched on mud in drenching rain, and of desperately hoping to survive while advancing over open fields raked with machine gun fire. Although the authors' avowed purpose in writing this book was to record and thereby honor in memory the travails of their countrymen laboring, suffering, and dying in a theatre of war not well covered in history books, I feel the book has achieved an even greater end by showing readers what the Great War was like from the viewpoint of the men who faced the enemy in a strange and inhospitable land.
By the way, have you watched the 1999 movie The Mummy directed by Stephen Sommers? At one point we find several protagonists flying over the desert in a World War I era biplane with a strange looking machine gun mounted aft. That equipment was more historically accurate than I suspected, and that is a Lewis Gun. Had I not come across Under the Devil's Eye I would likely have never known the name of that weapon. You just never know what new knowledge you'll take away from a good book!
