Remarkable ... Richard van Emden is a World War I specialist who has found a niche, little explored, charting the personal contacts between Britons and Germans and their feelings about each other as the war progressed … Makes you think rather differently about the so-called 'Great War For Civilisation'

Daily Mail

Richard Van Emden's tour-de-force of research casts a fascinating new light on the human face of the Great War, allowing us into the strangest of meetings between British and German enemies in the trenches, behind the lines and on the home front ... Extraordinary and often inspirational stories of comradeship between foes ... Among many compelling photographs in this book, there is a grainy and heartbreaking image of a bowed and broken British prisoner tied to a post and left in the snow

Richard Kemp, a former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, The Times

From the horrors of the First World War battlefields are tales of extraordinary camaraderie between British and German soldiers

Daily Express

In Meeting the Enemy, the historian Richard Van Emden shifts his focus from the grim fields of the First World War to the small, all but unknown instances of compassion across enemy lines

New Statesman

Richard van Emden uncovers myriad encounters between German and British forces ... Van Emden's tales of friendship and honour between enemies only heighten the mystery of how these men slaughtered each other in their millions for four years

Metro