New in children's books

THE WAR TO END ALL WARS
By Jack Batten, Tundra, 154 pages, $24.99, ages 10 and up

When Ray Goodyear, an 18-year-old member of the Newfoundland Regiment, died on Oct. 12, 1916, in the Somme district of northern France, it is quite possible that he never fired the bayonet-tipped rifle he had been trained to use for months previously. In his first engagement in a war he had longed to join, Goodyear, 900 other Newfoundlanders and tens of thousands of British infantrymen were part of an assault on a German-held position at Gueudecourt.

Six hundred yards of enemy territory were gained that day, 250 Germans were killed by the Newfoundlanders, and 120 of the Newfoundlanders died. Ray Goodyear's parents, the Goodyears of Grand Falls, Nfld., were fated to lose three of their five sons in the “war to end all wars.”

As Jack Batten writes, “When Ray joined the Newfoundland Regiment, he understood that the Germans were the evil enemy that must be beaten. In his own mind, he didn't need to know any more, and the origins of the war remained a mystery to him. He couldn't have answered the deeper questions: Why were millions of men killing one another? What brought nations into such terrible conflict with other nations? What started the Great War? Ray Goodyear, dead at 18, wouldn't have known.”

This superb book – with its high production values and a multitude of archival photographs, it's as handsome as it is informative – belongs in every school library and on every family bookshelf. In it, Batten answers the questions that Ray Goodyear didn't ask, and in doing so, makes history vivid, almost palpable, for readers of any age, not just the young adult audience for whom this book was ostensibly written.

Batten's elegant prose tracks the broad sweep of the war, beginning with the Byzantine web of treaties and alliances that were forged and broken prior to and following August, 1914, through the important land, sea and air battles, to the U.S. entry into the war in 1917, and on to the Germans' catastrophic losses and the eventual armistice on Nov. 11, 1918.

The quality that makes this book the outstanding achievement that it is, though, is Batten's detail-rich delineation of the particular, the depth of his reach into a character, an incident or a battle. There is, for instance, the psychological makeup of Kaiser Wilhelm II, whose pique at never being invited to France or Britain – by his relatives, in the case of the latter – contributed so importantly to his desire for war; the strategy and execution (on both sides) of the great naval battle of Jutland, and the roles, for better or worse, that British Admiral John Jellicoe and German Admiral Reinhard von Scheer played in it; the Canadians' victory at Vimy, masterminded by a failed Victoria real-estate dealer, the brilliant military strategist Arthur Currie; the formative events of Billy Bishop's life as well as his heroic exploits, among them his air battles with the “Red Baron,” Manfred von Richthofen.

Batten ends his book with a portrait of another First World War soldier, an Austrian serving in the German army: “He joined up in early August, 1914, eager to fight for German supremacy. The corporal was wounded at the Battle of the Somme, suffered from the effects of gas in the last battles at Ypres, and was awarded an Iron Cross. He came away from the war with a lust for revenge against the enemies that had inflicted defeat on Germany. The angry corporal's name was Adolf Hitler.”