0,49 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
H. C. McNeile's 'Men, Women and Guns' is a compelling exploration of human relationships set against the backdrop of the tumultuous world of early 20th-century warfare. The narrative intertwines romance, betrayal, and the exuberance of life, reflecting McNeile's characteristic wit and sharp social commentary. The book is rendered in a vivid prose style that captures the tension of both personal and external conflicts, revealing the emotional landscapes of its characters while simultaneously critiquing societal norms of the period. With its blend of adventure and introspection, McNeile offers readers a nuanced perspective on the complexities of love and loyalty amidst the chaos of gunfire and conflict. H. C. McNeile, writing under the pen name 'Sapper,' was a distinguished British author and war veteran whose experiences profoundly shaped his literary voice. His firsthand encounters in World War I inform the authenticity of the military elements in the novel, while his keen understanding of human nature allows him to craft multifaceted characters that resonate with readers. His background in engineering and love for storytelling informed his unique narrative style that balances action with emotional depth. ' seri, Men, Women and Guns' is a must-read for those interested in historical fiction that delves into the human psyche against the backdrop of global conflict. McNeile's unique ability to weave dramatic tension with psychological insight makes this work not only entertaining but deeply thought-provoking. Readers will find themselves captivated by its themes of resilience and vulnerability in the face of adversity. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
Ähnliche
Men, Women and Guns
Table of Contents
Introduction
At the meeting point of everyday attachments and the impersonal violence of mechanized conflict, Men, Women and Guns follows the pressures that war exerts on duty, affection, and identity, tracing how individuals discover endurance, humor, fear, generosity, and blind chance at close quarters while the guns—ever-present, anonymous, and unarguable—shape the terms on which men at the front and women at home confront a world suddenly reordered by necessity, risk, and resolve, and in which small decisions, brittle courtesies, and flashes of defiance can matter as much as planned maneuvers and official proclamations.
Written by H. C. McNeile, better known by his pen name Sapper, this book belongs to the tradition of First World War fiction and was first published during the conflict in the mid-1910s. It is a collection rather than a single narrative, and its episodes are largely rooted in wartime Britain and the Western Front. The pieces carry the immediacy of a serving officer’s perspective and speak to a contemporary readership encountering modern war in real time. As such, it occupies a significant place among early literary responses to the Great War’s new scale, tempo, and technology.
Readers encounter a succession of compact stories that illuminate soldiers’ routines, sudden crises, and the home front’s quiet endurance. The writing balances brisk movement with attentive observation, favoring swift sketches over elaborate plotting. McNeile’s voice is direct and unfussy, often dryly humorous yet alert to fatigue, decency, and the oddities of chance. The result is a mosaic of scenes that emphasizes texture and feeling—mud, noise, waiting, fleeting companionship—more than grand pronouncements. The experience is immersive without being ornate, an invitation to watch people navigate constraint and contingency under circumstances that repeatedly narrow options and reveal character.
Stylistically, the book leans on understatement and speed: clipped exchanges, firm pacing, and an eye for the telling detail rather than the exhaustive inventory. Action sits alongside reflection, with transitions that resemble the abruptness of wartime life—periods of lull punctured by spike and scramble. The mood ranges from wry resilience to sober acceptance, and the prose rarely lingers on self-pity. McNeile writes as someone who trusts readers to supply context from a shared present, which lends the pieces a documentary edge while retaining the elasticity and selectivity of fiction.
Several themes course through the collection. Comradeship is tested and affirmed in small acts: responsibility, improvisation, and quiet competence under strain. Duty is considered not as slogan but as a habit of mind that must coexist with fear, boredom, and longing. The title signals an interest in gendered experience during war: how men’s roles are defined by martial structures and how women’s lives, agency, and burdens are reshaped by absence, danger, and service at a remove. Class and character intersect, yet the guns—stand-ins for machinery and system—reduce distinctions, reminding all that modern war levels plans and reputations alike.
Encountered today, the book offers more than period color. It prompts readers to question what counts as heroism, how institutions cultivate or blunt judgment, and what kinds of stories make extreme situations legible without simplifying them. Its emphasis on the ordinary within the extraordinary—letters, jokes, habits, mishaps—complicates easy narratives of glory or futility. The collection also reflects attitudes of its time, and engaging it critically means noticing both its sympathy for individuals and the constraints of its era’s social assumptions. That tension gives the book value as literature and as a historical artifact of wartime imagination.
Approached as a sequence of sharp, self-contained vignettes, Men, Women and Guns rewards attentive reading with tonal variety and an authentic sense of immediacy. It neither romanticizes nor dwells morbidly; instead, it treats peril and patience as everyday facts and lets character emerge through choice under pressure. For those interested in war writing, short fiction, or the evolution of modern British prose, it offers a compact, accessible entry point. For others, it remains a poised study in how large forces filter into small moments—and how people, in meeting them, discover who they are.
Synopsis
Men, Women and Guns is a collection of short wartime sketches by H. C. McNeile, drawing on his service to depict the British experience on the Western Front. The pieces are linked by recurring settings and concerns rather than a single plot, offering frontline scenes, moments behind the lines, and glimpses of the home front. The tone remains restrained and matter-of-fact, emphasizing procedure and routine alongside danger. The book aims to record how soldiers, civilians, and medical staff met the wars demands, presenting varied facets of service and sacrifice without polemic. Its episodes accumulate to form a composite portrait of a conflict lived day by day.
Early chapters introduce the reader to the movement of men toward the front, from mobilization and embarkation to crowded billets in French villages. The first arrival in the trenches brings a practical survey of posts, parapets, and dugouts, along with the strict rituals of stand-to, rations, and sentry duty. A first bombardment emphasizes the unfamiliar language of shells and the measured calm expected of officers and men. Through concise vignettes, the collection establishes the rhythm of trench life: mud, fatigue, and enforced patience offset by strict timetables and careful planning. The atmosphere is watchful rather than sensational, marked by discipline and wary learning.
Subsequent stories move into no-mans-land, following patrols that cut wire, probe enemy defenses, and gather information under cover of darkness. Sniper alleys and listening posts heighten the sense of risk in routine tasks, where a whispered order or a misstep can decide an outcome. Small-unit decisions are shown to hinge on experience and restraint as much as courage. The pieces describe how instructions are passed along, how signals are arranged, and how men move soundlessly through cratered ground. These episodes focus on method and teamwork, highlighting the unseen labor behind any reported success while maintaining a tight focus on the immediate, tangible demands of each mission.
Character sketches arise naturally from duty. A seasoned sergeant, a newly minted subaltern, a methodical sapper, and a practical medical officer illustrate the armys interlocking roles. Humor, often dry and unannounced, accompanies scenes of improvisation: trench repairs after rain, rations salvaged amid shellfire, and the endless quest for warmth. The stories pause for detailsetter writing, jam tins turned into tools, and small rituals that structure endurance. Engineering tasks appear frequently: wiring parties, dugout shoring, and mine prevention. These portraits emphasize competence over heroics, presenting men whose identities are shaped by habits, trade knowledge, and the steady acceptance of responsibility.
The women of the title appear in chapters that balance the frontline focus. Nurses and ambulance drivers are shown managing casualties with composure, their work described through procedure, triage, and the pressure of time. Correspondence threads link the front to drawing rooms and factory floors, evoking the anxieties of families and fiances who wait and economize. Encounters during short leaves are restrained and brief, bounded by timetables and unspoken limits. The book avoids melodrama, observing how women sustain organizations, morale, and logistics while navigating absence and uncertainty. Together, these scenes broaden the canvas, showing the wars demands distributed across hospitals, depots, and homes.
Guns are central both as weapons and as systems. Artillery batteries are depicted through the routines of laying, ranging, and recording targets, with attention to maps, bearings, and reports from observers. Counter-battery fire, trench mortars, and creeping barrages appear as coordinated results of calculation and practice rather than spectacle. Supply lines, ammunition columns, and signal lines receive careful notice, underscoring how artillery depends on steady inputs and communication. The language remains practical: calibration, corrections, and timings. These sections convey how guns shape every other arms day, their presence felt in the schedule of raids, the caution of movements, and the sudden quiet that precedes an attack.
Between actions, the narrative turns to villages and billets. Estaminets, barns, and farmyards offer temporary shelter and a rhythm of rest that contrasts with the front. French civilians, innkeepers, and laborers appear in quick, respectful sketches, their lives adapted to interruption and scarcity. Military police, interpreters, and intelligence officers enter briefly as the machinery that keeps order and gathers information. Rumors and alarms circulate but are treated soberly. The emphasis remains on coexistence: requisitions accounted for, billets inspected, and partings conducted without ceremony. These interludes place the line within a broader landscape of work, habit, and enforced resilience.
Later pieces return to operations of larger scale, where artillery programs, wiring maps, and relief schedules converge on set hours. The confusion of attack is conveyed through runners, broken telephones, and the practical limits of visibility. Leadership is shown as presence and timing: knowing when to hold, when to push a patrol, and when to consolidate. Casualty handling, from field dressings to ambulance bearers, is described with attention to sequence rather than sentiment. Outcomes are reported with economy, and the narrative resists dramatization. The emphasis falls on coordination, loss absorbed, and tasks resumed, reflecting an army that measures progress in yards, lists, and returns.
The collection closes by reaffirming its central thread: duty carried out through procedure, cooperation, and endurance. Men, women, and guns are presented as parts of a single effort, their roles intertwined across trenches, wards, billets, and batteries. Without argument or flourish, the books final pages leave the impression of work unfinished and ongoing. Small ceremonies, such as a relief completed or a letter answered, stand in for resolution. The overall message is consistent: the war is lived in exact tasks and quiet decisions, and its story is best told through the everyday steadiness of those who meet its demands.
Historical Context
Set largely on the Western Front during the opening two years of the First World War, Men, Women and Guns inhabits the trench lines that stretched from the North Sea to the Swiss frontier. Its locales echo recognizable British sectors in Flanders and northern France—villages near Ypres, Armentières, and Loos—along with billets, estaminets, casualty stations, and railheads that sustained the British Expeditionary Force (BEF). The time frame centers on 1914–1916, when static warfare, artillery preponderance, and engineering labor defined the conflict. Occasional scenes on the British home front—railway platforms, hospitals, recruitment offices—reveal the social reach of the war beyond the firing line and furnish the civilian counterpoint to front-line experience.
The conflict’s outbreak in 1914 shaped every aspect of the book’s world. Following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914 and the chain of mobilizations, Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August to uphold Belgian neutrality. The BEF, under Sir John French, landed at Boulogne and Le Havre, fought at Mons (23 August), retreated, then helped halt the Germans on the Marne (6–12 September) before the Aisne entrenchments and the Race to the Sea created a continuous front. McNeile’s narratives mirror this transition from movement to entrenchment, frequently depicting Royal Engineers improvising demolitions, bridges, and fieldworks as the army adapted to a new, static, industrial mode of fighting.
The Ypres Salient, contested in 1914–1915, was pivotal. At the Second Battle of Ypres (22 April–25 May 1915), German forces released chlorine gas near Langemarck–St. Julien, collapsing French colonial lines; Canadian and British units held under extreme pressure. British Empire casualties approached 59,000; the medieval Cloth Hall and much of Ypres were shelled into ruins. Anti-gas measures evolved rapidly—from improvised urine-soaked pads to the PH helmet (mid-1915) and, later, the box respirator. McNeile, a serving Royal Engineers officer invalided after front-line duty, channels that environment: his episodes evoke gas alarms, mined positions at Hooge and Zillebeke, and the precarious geometry of a salient where artillery observation and enfilade fire were relentless.
The Battle of Loos (25 September–18 October 1915) was Britain’s largest offensive to date and its first use of chlorine gas. Attacking with Kitchener’s New Army alongside regulars, the BEF captured Loos-en-Gohelle but failed to exploit gains; British casualties exceeded 59,000, and command failures contributed to Sir John French’s replacement by Sir Douglas Haig in December 1915. Simultaneously, underground warfare intensified: specialist Tunnelling Companies of the Royal Engineers, created from February 1915 (initially numbered 170–185), fought mine duels at the Hohenzollern Redoubt, Givenchy, and Hill 60. The book reflects these realities through sappers’ claustrophobic labor, cratered landscapes, and the fraught, wind-dependent uncertainties surrounding gas and artillery preparation.
Trench warfare’s systematization in 1915–1916 created a distinctive operational ecology. Front, support, and reserve lines—linked by communication trenches—were buttressed with sandbags, revetments, duckboards, and wire; typical parapet heights exceeded two meters to counter shrapnel and small-arms fire. Routine alternated between stand-to, ration parties, wiring, patrols, and raids. Weapons included the SMLE Mk III rifle, Vickers and Lewis guns, Mills bomb No. 5 (1915), 18-pounder guns, and 4.5-inch howitzers; communications relied on field telephones, runners, and pigeons. McNeile’s stories dwell on wiring parties, listening posts, registration of guns, and barrage timetables, conveying how engineering, logistics, and artillery, rather than maneuver, governed survival and minor tactical success.
Mobilization on the British home front underpinned the front line. Lord Kitchener’s recruitment (1914–1915) produced “Pals” battalions such as the Accrington Pals (11th East Lancashire, raised September 1914). The 1915 Shell Crisis—after Neuve Chapelle and Aubers Ridge—spurred the Ministry of Munitions under David Lloyd George (June 1915) and the Munitions of War Act to regulate labor and expand production; women entered armaments plants in vast numbers at Woolwich, Sheffield, and elsewhere. The Defence of the Realm Act (8 August 1914) tightened censorship and public controls, while VAD nurses staffed hospitals from Boulogne to Étaples. The book’s “women” are nurses, relatives, and war workers, their appearances framing letters, convalescence, and leave—social dimensions inseparable from the guns’ demands.
Casualty care and the recognition of psychological injury transformed wartime institutions. The Royal Army Medical Corps organized evacuation from Regimental Aid Posts to Advanced Dressing Stations, then Casualty Clearing Stations and base hospitals; antiseptic techniques like the Carrel–Dakin method (1915) and the Brodie steel helmet (late 1915) curtailed infection and head wounds. Charles S. Myers popularized the term “shell shock” in 1915, catalyzing debates over neurasthenia, treatment, and duty. McNeile’s vignettes foreground stretcher-bearers, surgeons, and convalescents, acknowledging both the medicalization of mass injury and the ambiguous status of psychological trauma. In doing so, the stories preserve a record of the war’s new pathologies and the institutions hastily built to confront them.
As social and political critique, the book underscores the dissonance between patriotic exhortation and industrialized attrition. By juxtaposing stoic front-line labor with the pressures of censorship, labor controls, and bereavement at home, it interrogates assumptions about class privilege and the burden borne by rank-and-file soldiers and women war workers. Officer–other rank interactions test inherited hierarchies, while depictions of logistical scarcity, muddled orders, and the costs of gas or mining hint at systemic shortcomings without polemic. The cumulative portrait critiques complacency and romanticized war-making, insisting on administrative competence, social solidarity, and responsibility across classes as the only ethical counterweights to the era’s mechanized violence.
