Empires dicing with destruction
Non-FICTION: Towards the Flame: Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia. By Dominic Lieven . Allen Lane, €34. Reviewed by Dermot Bolger
The question of what the First World War was really about surely crossed the mind of Francis Ledwidge, pinned down in the slaughter on the Gallipoli sands. It surely perplexed the extraordinarily courageous Irish Jesuit, Willie Doyle, who knelt amid the fighting at Ypres to give absolution to dying men in their final agony until ...