G. W. Pabst brought the war movie into a new era with his first sound film, a mercilessly realistic depiction of the nightmare that scarred a generation, in the director's native Germany and beyond. Digging into the trenches with four infantrymen stationed in France in the final months of World War I, Pabst illustrates the harrowing ordeals of battle with unprecedented naturalism, as the men are worn away in body and spirit by firefights, and the...

The notion of battles as the irreducible building blocks of war demands a single verdict of each campaign--victory, defeat, stalemate. But this kind of accounting leaves no room to record the nuances and twists of actual conflict. In Somme: Into the Breach, the noted military historian Hugh Sebag-Montefiore shows that by turning our focus to stories of the front line--to acts of heroism and moments of both terror and triumph--we can counter, and even...

The author of The Last of the Doughboys goes back to French battlegrounds of World War I to understand why memories of that war are so present in the minds and hearts of modern-day French people.

"Cornwall, 1920. Daniel Branwell has survived the First World War and returned to the small fishing town where he was born. Behind him are the trenches and the most intense relationship of his life. As he works on the land, struggling to make a living in the aftermath of war, he is drawn deeper and deeper into the traumas of the past and memories of his dearest friend and his first love. As the drama unfolds, Daniel is haunted by the terrible, unforeseen...

On July 1, 1916, the British Army launched the "Big Push" that was supposed to bring an end to the horrific stalemate on the Western Front between British, French, and German forces. What resulted was one of the greatest single human catastrophes in the history of warfare. Scrambling out of trenches in the face of German machine guns and artillery fire, the Allied Powers lost over twenty thousand soldiers that first day, but this "battle" would drag...

"Nearly 100 years ago, on October 4, 1918, on a muddy, poison gas-soaked hillside in France, the U.S. 26th Infantry Regiment jumped-off amidst a hail of shell fire and machine-gun fire to begin the final push to end World War I. For the next 39 days, with little respite, the regiment fought desperately against a determined, well-armed foe. This is the story of a single regiment in a successful, highly acclaimed "Regular Army" division, during the...

Documents the stories of a legendary World War I soldier and his fellow Medal of Honor-decorated patrol members, heralding their courageous capture of dozens of German adversaries in the Argonne Forest. October 8, 1918 was a banner day for heroes of the American Expeditionary Force. Thirteen men performed heroic deeds that would earn them Medals of Honor. Alvin Cullum York, a farmer from Tennessee, was said to have single-handedly killed two dozen...

Alvin C. York (1887--1964) -- devout Christian, conscientious objector, and reluctant hero of World War I -- is one of America's most famous and celebrated soldiers. Known to generations through Gary Cooper's Academy Award-winning portrayal in the 1941 film Sergeant York, York is credited with the capture of 132 German soldiers on October 8, 1918, in the Meuse-Argonne region of France -- a deed for which he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.At...