Proclaimer Blog
Some books what I read (1)
Summer is my reading time. Not Christian books, particularly. I load up the kindle (cheaper and lighter than loading the suitcase) with some novels, biographies and histories and off on holiday I go. Mrs R says I rarely emerge from behind a book on holiday. I don’t think that’s quite true, but I do enjoy switching off by reading. And even though I don’t take Christian books away (I spend all year reading them!) I do try and reflect in a Christian way on what I’m reading. Here are three of the highlights amongst some of more trashy novels!
First, I really enjoyed Mud, Blood and Poppycock by Gordon Corrigan. It’s the second time I’ve read this book and it was every bit as good. It’s a series of relatively short chapters debunking various WWI myths – one example will suffice, the idea that troops spent months on end in sodden trenches. The average number of days in the front trench for any regiment was just under 4 days. Some call this kind of history revisionist, but as it happens, Corrigan shows how the original understanding of the war was like this – revised only in the 1930s following Basil Liddell Hart’s history of the war.
As we were stopping off at the Somme on the way home, it was fascinating – not least that battle which understood from an Anglocentric point of view made little sense, but when seen in the light of what was happening at Verdun – though immensely costly – made perfect military sense. Interestingly, this was also the view of the Somme museum at Thiepval.
I liked the book, because I like history and I like military history. But it did get me thinking of how events and people (especially Haig) can be misrepresented so easily. I guess we as evangelical Christians are often on the wrong end of such misrepresentations and find it frustrating when the media, for example, portray us unfairly.
There is not much, perhaps, that we can do about that. We need to be prepared for it. But we must be careful not to do the same to those we stand against. It is very easy to misrepresent others. Christian integrity and truthfulness demands that we do not.