Broken Nation Australians in the Great War by Joan Beaumont - USED

Winner of the 2014 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Australian History; winner of the History Prize in the 2014 NSW Premier’s History Award; winner of the History Award in the 2014 Queensland Literary Awards.

The Australian experience of war in all its complexity - from the homefront as well as the battlefront - as the men and women who experienced it chose to understand and remember it. The Great War was, for the majority of Australians, one that was fought at home. As casualties of this monstrous war mounted, they triggered a political crisis of unprecedented ferocity in Australian history. Faultlines emerged in the ensuing years that would forever change the political landscape, rendering Australia a broken nation. And yet, despite the deep sacrifices and in the face of a mounting death toll, most Australians continued to support the war. It was their resilience, their willingness to suffer economic hardship and their stoic acceptance of casualties that no modern democracy would tolerate that made the war effort possible. Joan Beaumont's BROKEN NATION is the first book to bring together all the dimensions of the Great War, in a narrative that weaves together brilliant scholarship with storytelling, bringing to life the young men in the battlefield trenches and their loved ones at home. We witness the fear and courage of the tens of thousands of soldiers, pace the war rooms of Australian command that dictated the direction of the war, and come to understand the deep sacrifices as death on an unprecedented scale mounts. BROKEN NATION brings lucid insight into the mass grief and pride that has made the memory of this terrible war central to the making of Australia. Accessible and authoritative, BROKEN NATION is the essential companion as Australians head towards the centenary of the Great War.