A Popular History of the Great War, Vol. III

Opening

The companion to the collection's Volume IV — the same six-volume, red-cloth history of the First World War that the Amalgamated Press sold to the interwar household. This is Volume III, and its year is the war's darkest middle: The Allies at Bay — 1916.

The Object

Identical in dress to its fellow: red cloth blocked in black with a heavy field-gun on the front board, the spine gilt-lettered Hammerton at the head and The Allies at Bay 1916 / Volume 3 at the foot around a rising-sun-and-torch device. The title page repeats the house formula — edited by Sir J. A. Hammerton, “complete in six volumes with about 1000 maps & illustrations,” London, The Fleetway House, “printed in Great Britain by The Amalgamated Press, Ltd.” Its Literary Contents run to twenty-nine chapters and its List of Plates past sixty images.

The Editor

As across the set, the editor is Sir John Alexander Hammerton (1871–1949) — the Dictionary of National Biography's “most successful creator of large-scale works of reference in the history of publishing,” wartime co-editor of the Amalgamated Press's The Great War and, by 1932, a knight for services to literature. The whole enterprise is Hammerton's genius for the affordable subscriber's set applied to the memory of the war itself.

The Allies at Bay

Volume III holds 1916, the year the Western Front became a slaughterhouse of attrition. Its chapters cover the ten-month agony of Verdun and the opening of the Somme — with its own chapter on “The Coming of the Tanks,” the first use of the tank in war; the great naval clash at Jutland; the Easter Rising in Dublin; the Coming of Conscription; the fall of Kut in Mesopotamia; the Arab Revolt in the Hejaz; and Rumania's entry and swift defeat. The plate list — The End of the Queen Mary at Jutland, The Coming of the Tanks, British Soldiers in Action in Dublin, Mackensen Entering Bukarest — is a picture-index of the year the war ground almost to stalemate.

The World It Came From

Like its companion, this is popular print culture doing public memory: the war sold volume by volume, bound in bright cloth for the family shelf. It belongs with the collection's Volume IV of the same set, the Odhams Fifty Amazing Stories of the Great War, and the News Chronicle Gilbert & Sullivan part-work — the interwar Fleet Street machine at work.

This Copy

Honest reading condition — Fair. The red cloth is rubbed and sunned, the spine frayed at head and tail and along the joints, and the paper toned, but the volume is sound and complete with its title page, contents and plate lists. No ownership inscription. From the February 2026 lot of twenty-seven books.

Why It Matters

Inexpensive on its own, its value here is documentary and cumulative: paired with the collection's Volume IV it begins to reconstruct the six-volume set, and it stands as a specimen of how interwar Britain remembered the Great War through the mass-market part-work of Sir John Hammerton and the Amalgamated Press. Its subject — 1916, the year of Verdun, the Somme, Jutland and the first tank — is the war at its most terrible and most decisive-of-nothing.