Ebony Ww1 Charger

Ebony is based on a famous WWI charger that belonged to General Chapelle. The story opens with his birth in the stable of Hansall Manor where his arrival is greeted by family and staff. When he is four he goes to war with his mother, master and groom. The crossing is hazardous and terrifying for them and their equine comrades down in the hold of the ship. One by one the family and staff leave. Sally the parlour maid goes into the dangerous business of munitions. Bob the boot-boy runs away to join up. Jessica the General's daughter becomes a VAD. Only Molly, the fortune-telling cook, the General's wife and an old servant, are left. The horse hospitals at the front were provided and run by the Blue Cross Animals' Hospital entirely on voluntary donations. Everything possible was done for the horses. Lady Hamsall, along with many others in the country, worked incessantly to provide everything the horses needed. Ebony finally triumphs with his famous charge through the front line. 'Our Dumb Friends League' was the early name of the Blue Cross. Hopefully this story of Ebony might help his descendents today.

Everyone's heard about Black Beauty, probably the greatest horse that ever lived. But what about the rest of his family? Here we meet some of his other extraordinary relations, each with an amazing story to tell. There's his brother, Black Ebony, who is involved in a terrible mining accident; his great niece, Black Princess, a heroine in World War One; and then there's Black Velvet, a distant relation whose life as a show jumper is about to change dramatically.

“An exceptionally vivid memoir of a French soldier’s experience of the First World War.”—Max Hastings, New York Times bestselling author Along with millions of other Frenchmen, Louis Barthas, a thirty-five-year-old barrelmaker from a small wine-growing town, was conscripted to fight the Germans in the opening days of World War I. Corporal Barthas spent the next four years in near-ceaseless combat, wherever the French army fought its fiercest battles: Artois, Flanders, Champagne, Verdun, the Somme, the Argonne. First published in France in 1978, this excellent new translation brings Barthas’ wartime writings to English-language readers for the first time. His notebooks and letters represent the quintessential memoir of a “poilu,” or “hairy one,” as the untidy, unshaven French infantryman of the fighting trenches was familiarly known. Upon Barthas’ return home in 1919, he painstakingly transcribed his day-to-day writings into nineteen notebooks, preserving not only his own story but also the larger story of the unnumbered soldiers who never returned. Recounting bloody battles and endless exhaustion, the deaths of comrades, the infuriating incompetence and tyranny of his own officers, Barthas also describes spontaneous acts of camaraderie between French poilus and their German foes in trenches just a few paces apart. An eloquent witness and keen observer, Barthas takes his readers directly into the heart of the Great War. “This is clearly one of the most readable and indispensable accounts of the death of the glory of war.”—The Daily Beast (“Hot Reads”)

The vivid story of the young Americans who fought and died in the aerial battles of World War I. Samuel Hynes's The Unsubstantial Air is a chronicle of war that is more than a military history; it traces the lives and deaths of the young Americans who fought in the skies over Europe in World War I. Using letters, journals, and memoirs, it speaks in their voices and answers primal questions: What was it like to be there? What was it like to fly those planes, to fight, to kill? The volunteer fliers were often privileged young men—the sort of college athletes and Ivy League students who might appear in an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, and sometimes did. For them, a war in the air would be like a college reunion. Others were roughnecks from farms and ranches, for whom it would all be strange. Together they would make one Air Service and fight one bitter, costly war. A wartime pilot himself, the memoirist and critic Samuel Hynes tells these young men's saga as the story of a generation. He shows how they dreamed of adventure and glory, and how they learned the realities of a pilot's life, the hardships and the danger, and how they came to know both the beauty of flight and the constant presence of death. They gasp in wonder at the world seen from a plane, struggle to keep their hands from freezing in open-air cockpits, party with actresses and aristocrats, and search for their friends' bodies on the battlefield. Their romantic war becomes more than that—it becomes a harsh but often thrilling new reality.

The life and times of the thirty-second President who was reelected four times.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the mistreatment of black Americans. In this 'precise and eloquent work' - as described in its Pulitzer Prize citation - Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history - an 'Age of Neoslavery' that thrived in the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II. Using a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Blackmon unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude thereafter. By turns moving, sobering and shocking, this unprecedented account reveals these stories, the companies that profited the most from neoslavery, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.