Word: carlyon
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...Carlyon has spent eight years erecting his own monument to those half-forgotten men. He started with Gallipoli (2001), about the doomed campaign that launched the Anzac legend. Now, in The Great War (Macmillan; 860 pages), he looks at the Australians on the western front, the 750-km line of trenches that snaked through France and Belgium. In the national memory of the war, Gallipoli is the big event. Places like Fromelles, Bullecourt, Mont Saint Quentin are "hardly spoken of," Carlyon writes. Yet they should be bywords for valor?and tragedy. Most of the 324,000 volunteers who sailed...
...Conjuring them up among today's neat French farms was harder than on the barren cliffs of Anzac Cove. "You almost think, This couldn't be a killing ground, it's too pretty," says Carlyon, 64. A journalist of the old school, he believes in seeing what you write about. With history, he must be content to recreate things, like a detective at a crime scene. "You try to redraw the landscape," he writes. "You try to draw in trench lines ... and khaki bundles hung up on barbed wire." Near Ypres, he watched archaeologists probe the spot where...
...talks, Carlyon screws himself up in his chair, crossing his lean legs and leaning forward in emphasis. His writing style is resolutely plain. "I've got a fear of decoration," he says. "I hate adverbs." That mix of passion and clarity gives you the sense of being led through a dark landscape by a guide who's determined to make you see what it looks like in sunlight. In short takes "like scenes in a film," Carlyon plunges from the tranquil present to the midst of battle and back. "All is quiet, and the place speaks to you," he writes...
...four years it took him to research and write The Great War?"my subterranean world," he calls the seven-days-a-week slog?Carlyon spent more time with the men he wrote about than with his friends. "Reading their letters, you get to know them," he says, "and in a funny way it makes you very sad when you find out they're going to die." He was especially fond of Philip Schuler, a handsome, talented journalist who went to Gallipoli as a war correspondent, then enlisted in the Army and was sent to France. Writing home from Messines...
...racetrack used to be Carlyon's beat, but a visit to Gallipoli in 1998 left him "completely besotted with the place. I wanted to know more and more." For a writer, war offers an incomparable canvas, he says: "It's life and death. Everything's there." The titanic scale of the First World War and its domination by machines?artillery, bombs, tanks, planes, machine guns?only underscored the humanity of the combatants. For Carlyon the war was "the biggest tragedy in our history." But those who took part did "astonishing things," he writes?like the capture of the heavily defended...