A Book Review: Back to the Front by Stephen O’Shea

With Back to the Front Stephen OShea has written a very interesting, non-fiction book that crosses a variety of genres. It is a cash in ones chips book, a personal journey, and an anecdotal business relationship of World state of war I. Instead suffering from a staggering number of facts, Back to the Front provides historical information on a much personal, more immediate level. It is the story of the Western Front it is also the story of discovering that story. Back to the Front tells the story of what OShea experienced while walking the route of the World War I trench lines from Nieuport, Belgium to the Swiss border 450 miles to the south and east.Throughout the summer of 1986 OShea walked through the length of the infamous no mans land that separated the German Army and the confederative Armies from 1914 through 1918. During his journey OShea recorded his thoughts, and collected bits of information and scraps of memories not hardly of his journey, but of the First World War a nd its impact and relationship to its future, our throw day. He augments these with detailed research not only of the battles of World War I, but with information of other wars that allows the reader to make comparisons with events he or she may be familiar with.OShea wrote Back to the Front in a simple, easy to read style. He seems to anticipate the readers experience and provide resolution to difficulties the reader may ingest. When he enters Ypres, that difficult to spell and harder to pronounce city in Belgium, OShea provides the pronunciation for the reader ee-pruh and provides an interesting anecdote where he claims the English occupying forces struggled with the same difficult and discrete to call it Wipers (OShea, 31).Back to the Front relates not only the details of his physical journey highlighted with interesting and amusing anecdotes, it provides graphic details of the enormity of the war. Some of these facts are staggering. To the baby boomers whose first war exper ience is Vietnam with its approximate fifty thousand United States troops killed and to later generations that have seen 3,000+ American deaths in Iraq, it is difficult to internalize how the French could have had 210,000 soldiers killed in the month of August 1914. Such tragic losses were not unusual in the Great War.Time and again the military leadership of France and England ordered soldiers prior in open attacks on the well entrenched German soldiers. Hundreds of thousands of men were killed as they bravely, but foolishly followed their orders. OShea tells of a German officer who described the British soldiers as lions led by donkeys (OShea, 30). Stephen OShea is a Canadian writer and journalist who has lived in Paris since the early 1980s. Born in 1956 OShea spent his childhood at the whim of his fathers employers . . . bopping from city to town to city every two or thee years (OShea, 3).Consequently he is like many members of the generation that lacks roots because of the mob ility the automobile provided to wedlock American families in the Twentieth Century. Previous to his walk across Europe, OShea had visited the site Battle of the Somme and had become aware just how little impact the war to balance all wars appeared to have on his generation, the Baby Boomers. OShea tries to overcome the position common to members of all generations that his generation is somehow special and that the experiences previous generations were of limited value and should be ignored and dismissed . . .as a sort of tedious overture humanity had to endure before the real divas stepped on stage (OShea, 2). He tries to overcome the attitude that if a thing is history, it is a loser. Been there, done that, lets move on (OShea, 1). What results is not a just history although one certainly learns history, nor is it just a travel book that describes far away places for the armchair traveler to enjoy. Back to the Front is the story of not only OSheas walk through the trenches, bu t it is the story of the Baby Boomer generation searching for its place in the world, but searching for its place in history.Undoubtedly, OSheas book is not unique, perhaps not even special, it is a book, well-nigh a generations search for its place in history. However it is a good book and a thoughtful book that should be read not only by Baby Boomers, but later generations as well when these generations approach middle age and are trying to locate their place in the past, present, and future. works Cited OShea, Stephen. Back to the Front An Accidental Historian Walks the Trenches of World War I. New York Walker and Company,1996.