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Distributed for Bodleian Library Publishing

If England Were Invaded

No fewer than two hundred thousand Germans were already upon English soil! The outlook grew blacker every hour.
 
Eight years before the onset of World War I, as national hysteria over the possibility of German spies in England reached its peak, journalist and prolific spy novelist William Le Queux penned The Invasion of 1910. Although it has since faded from public memory, at the time of its serialization, the novel was a tremendous success, selling more than one million copies and even inspiring an unauthorized, abridged German-language edition that altered the book’s ending.
           
If England Were Invaded restores this major work of “invasion literature” to print. Le Queux constructs a catastrophic scenario in which the German army has invaded England in a surprise attack on the coast. The story chillingly chronicles a war fought on the British homeland, with detailed accounts of battles involving real locations and real defense experts of the time. Throughout, Le Queux brings to life the domestic realities of a nation at war, from food shortages and failing financial institutions to the ever-present threat of espionage. One by one, strategic cities and counties in the novel—Birmingham, Manchester, and Suffolk—are abandoned to the German army until it stands poised to “advance upon and crush the complex city which is the pride and home of every Englishman—London.”
           
A truly entertaining read—complete with campaign maps and fictional proclamations from Kaiser Wilhelm II—If England Were Invaded also offers an incredible cautionary tale about a country that was not prepared for an attack and, in doing so, it shines a light on the common hopes and fears in England at the beginning of the twentieth century.

224 pages | 2 halftones | 5 x 8 | © 2014

Fiction


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Reviews

"This is the book that frightened the life out of many British people, proclaiming a German threat a decade ahead of the First World War."

Max Hastings, author of Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

Table of Contents

Introduction
 
Preface
 
Book I: The Attack
 
I. The Surprise
 
II. Effect in the City
 
III. News of the Enemy
 
IV. A Prophecy Fulfilled
 
V. State of Siege Declared
 
VI. How the Enemy Dealt the Blow
 
VII. Desperate Fighting in Essex
 
VIII. Defence at Last
 
IX. British Success at Royston
 
X. British Abandon Colchester
 
XI. Fierce Fighting at Chelmsford
 
Book II: The Siege of London
 
I. The Lines of London
 
II. Repulse of the Germans
 
III. Battle of Epping
 
IV. Bombardment of London
 
V. The Rain of Death
 
VI. Fall of London
 
VII. Germans Sacking the Banks
 
VIII. Defences of South London
 
IX. Revolts in Shoreditch and Islington
 
Book III: The Revenge
 
I. A Blow for Freedom
 
II. Scenes at Waterloo Bridge
 
III. Great British Victory
 
IV. Massacre of Germans in London
 
V. How the War Ended

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