The Wargamer

Brushes & Bayonets – Cartoons, Sketches and Paintings of World War I

Author: Lucinda Gosling

Publisher: Osprey Publishing

Reviewing Author: Jim Zabek

Let’s face it. Most coffee table books are generally bought to impress other people.  They sit around on a coffee table until a guest shows up and they immediately attract eye gaze because they’re usually the only thing interesting on an otherwise blank coffee table. The intent is obviously to impress; anyone who blows $30 on an oversized full color book about Machu Picchu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machu_Picchu) must be smart and cool right? 

I have bought a few coffee table books in my life and while they’re usually about something I really like, the fact is I think I was really secretly hoping to impress some chick with how suave and sophisticated I was. Fast forward through marriage and that item is checked off my list. So what do I need another coffee table book for?

In the case of Brushes & Bayonets, it’s not just “another” coffee table book. Yes, it’s oversized and would serve well as eye candy for the barren coffee table, but it is different in one very important manner: it is the kind of book *I* want to look at.

As the subtitle suggests, Brushes & Bayonets is a collection of illustrations from the First World War. Published to coincide with the 90^th anniversary of the Armistice, it includes over 250 illustrations, many of which haven’t been republished since they were first released during the war. This historical value alone is probably enough to attract any World War I buff, but there is more to Brushes & Bayonets than that. The Great War was the first major conflict of the 20^th Century, and also the last to be conducted without significant influence of motion pictures. As the author points out in her introduction, the First World War was an illustrator’s war, and illustrations were a primary medium of communication before the advent of motion pictures. Brushes & Bayonets focuses on some of the finest illustrations and takes the reader through a number of chapters including Over by Christmas, Business as Usual, Shoulder to Shoulder, and Venus & Mars, amongst others.

As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, and in Brushes & Bayonets there is a collection of pictures and captions, introduced by several pages and under the captions a brief explanation of the context and impact of the illustration. The combination is a powerful and often moving vignette of the war. I enjoy picking up Brushes & Bayonets to randomly flip through it, and I am often touched by the eloquence of the illustrations. It gives the reader a perspective on the war that no other medium can. Brushes & Bayonets acts as something of a time capsule, transporting me back to view the war as contemporaries would have seen it. The gamut of human emotion can be found here from humor to absurdity to uncertainty. 

As a result, readers who enjoy the First World War will find Brushes & Bayonets a must-have for its unique and compelling perspective. The perspective is almost completely British, but it is nonetheless universal in many of its truths.  The humanity expressed within its pages will make it interesting to military historians of any era and I consider it the kind of book that I want to have. If it happens to impress some guests in the process, that is only a secondary consideration. Buy this book for yourself and chances are you’ll be picking it up over and over again.