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Title: Great Geography of the Great War
Review: An excellent introduction to the geography of the Great War. Until reading Back to the Front, I hadn't had a good mind-picture of the countryside that formed the stage for WW I. Whether reading fictional accounts or the occasional history, I found myself quite familiar with the names but not the spatial relationships of one great battle to the next. By actually walking the Western Front, O'Shea becomes a human reference point: his simple walking pace brought Ypres, Passchendaele, Vimy Ridge, Messines and all those familiar names into proportion. For example, Passchendaele is withing walking distance of Ypres; maybe 10 km away.The passage of time also is quite interesting. O'Shea walked and visited the Western Front some 70 to 80 years after. The Essex Farm Cemetery where McCrae was inspired to write "In Flanders Fields" is "almost in the shadow of a traffic cloverleaf."
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