Has anyone read “The Great war” or “Gallipoli” By Les Carlyon?
I think there well written and descriptive using survivors accounts of their memories of the war. It mainly focuses on the Australian perspective.
But would it have been as applicable to the text?
The Proud Tower describes the subject matter i.e a changing world in which the blind arrogance of imperialism and ancient monarchies, on the eve of decline, face the growing threat of an upstart, German militaristic state. Where old enmities are forgotten and new alliances are born.
“The diplomatic origins, so-called, of the War are only the fever chart of the patient; they do not tell us what caused the fever. To probe for underlying causes and deeper forces one must operate within the framework of a whole society and try to discover what moved the people in it.”
–Barbara W. Tuchman
The fateful quarter-century leading up to the World War I was a time when the world of Privilege still existed in Olympian luxury and the world of Protest was heaving in its pain, its power, and its hate. The age was the climax of a century of the most accelerated rate of change in history, a cataclysmic shaping of destiny.
In The Proud Tower, Barbara Tuchman concentrates on society rather than the state. With an artist’s selectivity, Tuchman bings to vivid life the people, places, and events that shaped the years leading up to the Great War: the Edwardian aristocracy and the end of their reign; the Anarchists of Europe and America, who voiced the protest of the oppressed; Germany, as portrayed through the figure of the self-depicted Hero, Richard Strauss; the sudden gorgeous blaze of Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet and Stravinsky’s music; the Dreyfus Affair; the two Peace Conferences at the Hague; and, finally, the youth, ideals, enthusiasm, and tragedy of Socialism, epitomized in the moment when the heroic Jean Jaurès was shot to death on the night the War began and an epoch ended.
“Tuchman [was] a distinguished historian who [wrote] her books with a rare combination of impeccable scholarship and literary polish. . . . It would be impossible to read The Proud Tower without pleasure and admiration.”
–The New York Times
“Tuchman proved inThe Guns of August that she could write better military history than most men. In this sequel, she tells her story with cool wit and warm understanding, eschewing both the sweeping generalizations of a Toynbee and the minute-by-minute simplicisms of a Walter Lord.”
–Time
The Guns of August brings it all to a head (A brilliant, fever chart, as described above), and goes on to describe the first battles of the war up until the stalemate of the trenches. I would think your suggestions more applicable here (and how different a war it was as compared with those pictures we see everywhere of the war in the trenches.) However, The Guns of August is evocative - and sells.
Sorry for the late response. I seem to have overlooked it. 
Sassoon sent an open letter to The Thunderer (The Times) crticizing the government for conducting an aggressive war. Normally, he would have been court martialed for cowardice, but as he had already earned an MC that would have been difficult. Their solution was to proclaim him insane. He was committed to the same establishment as Owen and they became friends. Owen admired both Sassoon and graves, but in the end, Owen, in my opinion, developed into a far better poet.
Graves visited Sassoon to persuade him to return to his regiment, The Royal Welch Fusiliers, in which they both served as officers.
Graves gives an account of this in his book ‘Goodbye To All That’
http://www.enotes.com/goodbye-all
Sassoon in his biography.
Pat Barker covers in depth in her book/movie ‘Regeneration’
http://www.freud.org.uk/warneuroses.html
http://www.mediacircus.net/regeneration.html
Clips on Youtube
Has anyone read the book “Medical Services: Casualties and Medical Statistics” from 1931? It sounds like it contains considerable info on casualty statistics from the war.
I’ve read a fair number of books on WWI, including an entire encyclopedia. And the best books I’ve read, by far, are two very recent ones, both by the same author, Tim Cook. The first is At the Sharp End: Canadians Fighting the Great War 1914-1916 and then the very recently released book (I think it came out this November or December)…Shock Troops: Canadians Fighting the Great War 1917-1918.
Now I am Canadian, so I may find the history and politics more interesting because of that, but the main reason I love these books is the amount of detail he uses to capture what it is like for the soldier…what life was like, both in and out of the trenches (they only got 2-weeks of leave a year!) He’s read thousands of letters and memoirs and included the best and most interesting stories captured in them. Many a great letter quote that captures the mood and essense of the men during these awful times. Everything from field punishments, VD on leave, getting beaten by NCO instead of getting written up, to grousing about not enough rum before an attack. And the attack details are clear and yet entirely from the individuals perspective so you really get a sense of what happened.
Awesome. Just awesome.
I’ll give one of many interesting stories: 4 guys are taking cover in a shell hole, one drink water from a canteen, another holding his rifle out, trying to keep it clear from mud when a massive shell screams into their hole and blows them all out of it, literally, throwing them in different directions. The guy with the canteen has his canteen shedded with a massive hole in it. The rifle was cut into two pieces. And all 4 dazed men got up, inspected themselves and found not a hole in any of them.
I recommend “Forgotten Voices of the Great War” …true accounts told by the soldiers themselves. A definite eye-opener.