Book Description

Excerpt from The Marne Battle-Fields (1914) For the benefit of tourists who wish to visit the battle-fields and mutilated towns of France we have tried to produce a work combining a practical guide and a history. Such a visit should be a pilgrimage, not merely a journey across the ravaged land. Seeing is not enough, one must understand; a ruin is more moving when one knows what has caused it; a stretch of country which might seem dull and uninteresting to the unenlightened eye, becomes transformed at the thought of the battles which have raged there. We have therefore prefaced the description of our journeys by a short account of the events which took place on the ground covered by this guide, and we have done our best to make this account quite clear by the use of many illustrations and maps. In the course of the description we give a brief military commentary on the numerous views and panoramas contained in the book. When we come across a place that is interesting either from an archaeological or an artistic point of view, there we halt, even though the war has passed it by, that the tourist may realise that it was to preserve this heritage of history and beauty intact, that so many of our heroes have fallen. Our readers will not find any attempt at literary effect in these pages; the truth is too beautiful and tragic to be altered for the sake of embellishing the story; we have therefore carefully sifted the great volume of evidence available, and selected only that obtained from official documents or reliable eye-witnesses. This book appears before the end of the war, but the country over which it leads the reader has long been freed. The wealth of illustration in this work allows the intending tourist to make a preliminary trip in imagination, until such time as circumstances permit of his undertaking the journey in reality, beneath the sunny skies of France. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.