Vimy Ridge

Lace up your trench boots and adjust your sense of proportion. Vimy Ridge (1968) by Alexander McKee—a Pan Books field brief in paperback khaki—marches straight to the escarpment where maps grow teeth and weather develops a grudge. McKee is that rare battlefield guide who can count sandbags without losing the poetry, delivering a study of the April 1917 operation that feels at once forensic and faintly incredulous: they planned this, then did it, and somehow it worked.

This isn’t a bugle solo; it’s an audit. McKee disassembles the legend into moving parts—tunnels and tapes, creeping barrages and rehearsal trenches, model layouts and meticulous timetable arithmetic—then reassembles it until the famous panorama is something you can hold in your hand. He keeps the myth honest and the facts humane: the Canadian Corps in a choreography of grim precision, the artillery clocking its steps like a metronome with shrapnel, the weather sulking and being ignored. The result: a ridge wrestled from the landscape by planning so fussy it borders on art.

Inside, expect:

• Pre-battle homework: maps that behave like crosswords, aerial photos with secrets, and staff work done with an almost domestic neatness.

• The assault in motion: lines advancing under a creeping barrage that acts like a stern chaperone, keeping everyone on schedule and alive.

• Counter-attack etiquette: how to repel with manners, hold with menace, and write it all down legibly afterward.

• Aftermath without trumpet: what taking a ridge actually buys you (ground, morale, arguments), and what it costs.

McKee’s tone is brisk, unsentimental, and occasionally arch—like a staff officer who has learned to laugh without moving his lips. He notes the heroics, yes, but also the plodding genius of preparation: tapes on the ground, models in chalk, men rehearsing until muscle memory knew the way better than fear. You come for the famous skyline; you stay for the logistics that made it possible.

Why this copy? It arrives via the cheerfully plain-spoken depot Crappy Old Books in Condition: Good—translation: square spine, clean text, light shelf history. The kind of paperback that has seen a rucksack and lived to brief again. No trench rot, no loose signatures—just a serviceable veteran with crisp orders.

Vital stats for your orderly room:

• Title: Vimy Ridge

• Author: Alexander McKee

• Publisher: Pan Books, 1968

• ISBN: 0330020242

• Condition: Good (dependable; lightly campaign-worn)

• Vendor: Crappy Old Books—the name digs a trench; the stock holds the line.

Buy it for the legend; keep it for the method. McKee shows how a ridge is taken not by romance but by angles, timings, and a choir of guns that can read a watch. By the end, you’ll be nodding at contour lines like old friends, suspicious of any battle plan that doesn’t include rehearsal, and newly convinced that sometimes the most heroic thing on a battlefield is a decent timetable.

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