Author: B. Cory Kilvert, Jr.
ISBN# 1-4184-5658-6
Published by Author House

The following review was submitted by:   Kathryn Atwood Click Here To View More Of Kathryn's Reviews

It would not be an exaggeration to call B. Cory Kilvert, Jr. the Shelby
Foote of "The Great War." The attention to detail in Kilvert's book, Echoes
of Armageddon, 1914-1918,  is so striking, there is sometimes the sense (as
was the case with Foote in relation to the Civil War)  that Kilvert was not
only circling high above the battlefields, marking every troop movement of
every battle, but that he was also a fly on the wall, listening firsthand
to the blustering European heads of state who started  the catastrophe now
known as World War One.

Kilvert wasn't actually present, but he had a few other advantages at his
disposal that give his book a tremendous sense of time and place: a massive
personal library containing thousands of books on British military history,
medals from eight British soldiers and officers killed in the war, and an
insatiable curiosity which compelled him to uncover the details of their
lives and deaths.

The result is not only a masterpiece of organized information on the
prelude to and significant battles of World War One, but because each
chapter focuses on the life, military career, and death of a single man,
this global tragedy is given a face. Eight faces, to be exact.  Knowing
that Private Albert Armitage, who was married for a mere two months before
the war began, fathered a child he never met, or that the mother of Captain
William Thomas Payne-Gallwey became a recluse after her son's death, brings
the massive carnage of the war to particularly tragic but comprehensible
terms.  Each chapter ends, not only with a photo, but with a moving and
almost poetic account of Kilvert's visit to each man's grave or memorial.

Although Kilvert's book is a masterpiece on many levels, it's not exactly a
piece of great literature.  Kilvert is a passionate researcher,  not
necessarily an exceptional writer.  He is, however, a straightforward and
eminently readable one, and his book, while not claiming pretensions to
literary grandeur, reverberates with so much immediacy that it distinctly
deserves a place on the shelf with the greatest books on "The Great War."