Having really enjoyed Tom Isitt’s Riding the Zone Rouge: The Tour of the Battlefields 1919 – Cycling’s Toughest-Ever Stage Race, a fascinating book telling the story of the 1919 cycle race held through the devastated battlefields of the Western Front and Tom’s own ride along the route, I was excited to see and start reading his latest book, Thunder in the Mountains: The First World War on the Italian Front.
I wanted to find out what Tom might make of my adventures along the Western Front and how I had written these up in The Road of Hope and Sorrow. I felt it would be worthwhile sharing what another author with an enduring interest in the Great War, and who is clearly also committed to the concept of exploring history by bike, might have to say.
Here are Tom’s comments:
I’ve read a dozen or so books about travelling the Western Front of the Great War, from an immediate post-war pilgrimage by Henry Williamson to more recent walks by notables such as Sir Anthony Seldon. I even wrote my own book about cycling the Western Front in the wheeltracks of the 1919 Circuit des Champs de Batailles bike race. I’ve visited the Western Front more than 20 times, and feel I know it quite well.
Many of these books follow an established pattern, interspersing a bit of Great War history with a lot of the author’s more or less interesting observations and anecdotes. So, when I received a review copy of The Road of Hope and Sorrow, I was interested, but not hopeful that it would add much to the genre. I was very wrong.
The first surprise was the size of the book, a large-format paperback with 536 pages, weighing 1.27kg. It definitely passes the “drop test” — it makes a hefty thud if you drop it on a coffee table. The next surprise was the sheer quantity and quality of photos, maps, and illustrations: more than two hundred contemporary photos and almost sixty archive images, thirty maps, nine war art reproductions by the likes of Anna Airy, Olive Mudie-Cooke, Paul Nash, Richard Jack and Otto Dix, and ten wonderful line-drawings by the author.
Nigel Bruce is clearly a very accomplished photographer, cartographer, and artist, and the design and layout of the book makes it feel more like a magazine than a book. It’s visually very appealing, and the text is broken up with First World War art, poetry, and tables laying out the progress of various battles in a very clear way.
With regards to the text, I’m not a Western Front expert so am in no position to critique the historical stuff, but I didn’t find any obvious howlers and Bruce’s words are authoritative, but not too dry. The same applies to his cycling narrative, which doesn’t get bogged down with the minutiae of the ride, but gives enough of a flavour to make me want to get back on my bike and head for France and Belgium. But in some ways the cycling is almost incidental, it doesn’t overwhelm the rest of the book, and this book would work equally well as a driving companion.
Another thing I really liked about The Road of Hope and Sorrow is each chapter begins with a sort of list of what’s in the chapter. This was very common in books published at the beginning of the 20th century, and is a nod in the direction of old-style publishing in a very modern-looking book.
It’s been quite a while since I read something that really wowed me, but The Road of Hope and Sorrow did just that. Some of his observations about the benefits of cycling the battlefields, and making maps of those battlefields, really struck a chord with me, and as I read it I felt that we are very like-minded battlefield tourists. The multi-talented Bruce has produced something very engaging, visually appealing, and readable.
Tom Isitt
Historian, explorer, photographer, and author of two recent books themed on exploring the Great War by bike:
- Riding the Zone Rouge: Cycling’s Toughest-Ever Stage Race (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2019)
- Thunder in the Mountains: The First World War on the Italian Front (Helion Books, 2026)
Once I have completed reading Thunder in the Mountains, I’ll add some of my thoughts here on this fascinating book. Perhaps the first thing to say is that Tom Isitt’s book is very welcome, indeed long overdue, as despite the political importance of the Italian Front and the vast human cost of the fighting in some of the most appalling conditions, in comparison with what is available for the Western Front, there is very little out there to inform and guide travellers wishing to explore the mountain battlefields and Great War history of the conflict between Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.