The Western Front evokes images of mud-spattered men in waterlogged
trenches, shielded from artillery blasts and machine-gun fire by a
few feet of dirt. This iconic setting was the most critical arena
of the Great War, a 400-mile combat zone stretching from Belgium to
Switzerland where more than three million Allied and German
soldiers struggled during four years of almost continuous combat.
It has persisted in our collective memory as a tragic waste of
human life and a symbol of the horrors of industrialized warfare.
In this epic narrative history, the first volume in a
groundbreaking trilogy on the Great War, acclaimed military
historian Nick Lloyd captures the horrific fighting on the Western
Front beginning with the surprise German invasion of Belgium in
August 1914 and taking us to the Armistice of November 1918.
Drawing on French, British, German, and American sources, Lloyd
weaves a kaleidoscopic chronicle of the Marne, Passchendaele, the
Meuse-Argonne, and other critical battles, which reverberated
across Europe and the wider war. From the trenches where men as
young as 17 suffered and died, to the headquarters behind the lines
where Generals Haig, Joffre, Hindenburg, and Pershing developed
their plans for battle, Lloyd gives us a view of the war both
intimate and strategic, putting us amid the mud and smoke while at
the same time depicting the larger stakes of every encounter. He
shows us a dejected Kaiser Wilhelm II-soon to be eclipsed in power
by his own generals-lamenting the botched Schlieffen Plan; French
soldiers piling atop one another in the trenches of Verdun; British
infantryman wandering through the frozen wilderness in the days
after the Battle of the Somme; and General Erich Ludendorff
pursuing a ruthless policy of total war, leading an eleventh-hour
attack on Reims even as his men succumbed to the Spanish Flu. As
Lloyd reveals, far from a site of attrition and stalemate, the
Western Front was a simmering, dynamic "cauldron of war" defined by
extraordinary scientific and tactical innovation. It was on the
Western Front that the modern technologies-machine guns, mortars,
grenades, and howitzers-were refined and developed into effective
killing machines. It was on the Western Front that chemical
warfare, in the form of poison gas, was first unleashed. And it was
on the Western Front that tanks and aircraft were introduced,
causing a dramatic shift away from nineteenth-century bayonet
tactics toward modern combined arms, reinforced by heavy artillery,
that forever changed the face of war. Brimming with vivid detail
and insight, The Western Front is a work in the tradition of
Barbara Tuchman and John Keegan, Rick Atkinson and Antony Beevor:
an authoritative portrait of modern warfare and its far-reaching
human and historical consequences.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
