The Western Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918

by Nick Lloyd

Overview

“A tour de force of scholarship, analysis and narration.… Lloyd is well on the way to writing a definitive history of the First World War.” —Lawrence James, Times

The Telegraph • Best Books of the Year
The Times of London • Best Books of the Year

A panoramic history of the savage combat on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918 that came to define modern warfare.

 

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324095118
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	06/11/2024
Pages:	720
Sales rank:	536,374
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Nick Lloyd is a professor of modern warfare at King’s College London and the author of four books on World War I, including Passchendaele and The Western Front. He lives in Cheltenham, England.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

List of Maps xiii

Glossary xiv

Preface xix

Prologue:'An act of hostility' 1

Part I 'War is not like manoeuvres': Liège to the Second Battle of Champagne (August 1914-November 1915)

1 'A vision of Attila' 9

2 'To the last extremity' 31

3 'Men of real worth' 55

4 'New conditions' 78

5 'A real bad business' 119

6 'Only inaction is shameful' 119

7 'No getting through' 138

Part 2 'Scales of fate': Verdun to the Second Battle of the Aisne (December 1915-May 1917)

8 'A place of execution' 161

9 'Costly and fatal toils' 181

10 'Hunted on all sides' 203

11 'The future is darker than ever' 223

12 'The face of a general in victory' 242

13 'A very serious decision' 260

14 'An entirely new situation' 278

15 'Tortured ground' 296

Part 3 'A matter of command': Messines Ridge to Compiègne (June 1917-November 1918)

16 'Patience and tenacity' 319

17 'Terrible butchery' 337

18 'Nothing but the war' 356

19 'The greatest effort we have made' 375

20 'I fear it means disaster' 394

21 'Hold the line at all hazards' 414

22 'It will be a glorious day' 433

23 'Keep steady' 454

24 'The full measure of victory' 475

Epilogue 495

Cast of Characters 503

Abbreviations 513

References 515

Select Bibliography 595

Index 613

Editorial Reviews

"There were many fronts in World War I, but the Western Front, where the industrialized great powers massed their men and resources, was the crucial one. Nick Lloyd has given us the most up-to-date account of the fighting there. He brings the key statesmen and generals to life, as well as the brutal combat from the first battles to the last. Lloyd crisply details the tactical and technological innovation that brought victory, as well as the coalition strategy, economic warfare, and home front management that boosted the Allies and disintegrated the Central Powers."

Geoffrey Wawro

"An admirably clear and judicious narrative of the battlefield course of events.… Lloyd’s book will be cherished by military history buffs."

Sunday Times - Max Hastings

★ 02/22/2021

In the sweeping first volume of a planned trilogy on WWI, historian Lloyd (Passchendaele: The Lost Victory of World War I) examines how the muddy battlefields of France and Belgium became “a bubbling, fermenting experiment in killing that changed the world.” He vividly describes artillery fire raining down on the fortresses of Liège in the war’s opening engagement, draws incisive profiles of commanders including German general Helmuth von Moltke (“there was always a strange, languid softness about ”), and recounts fierce debates among political and military leaders on both sides of the conflict over battlefield tactics and troop movements. Lloyd also details how new technologies including aerial surveillance and poison gas contributed to staggering casualty rates, and documents U.S. general John Pershing’s repeated refusals to integrate American troops into existing Allied ranks. Recounting weeks of tortured negotiations that followed the Meuse-Argonne offensive, Lloyd notes that Allied supreme leader Ferdinand Foch was “quite satisfied” with the conditions of the armistice, while Pershing and French general Henri Phillipe Pétain, the future head of Vichy France, would have preferred to keep fighting. Distinguished by its trenchant observations and massive level of detail marshaled into a fluid narrative, this is a sterling record of WWI’s most consequential theater. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"An enthralling read. Lloyd deftly guides us through a labyrinth of military detail while never allowing the pace of his narrative to slacken. His account of France’s role on the Western Front, often less well documented in Anglo-Saxon accounts, is particularly revealing. Most of us are familiar with the names of the generals involved, but Lloyd brings them sharply to life with his sensitive portrayal of their personalities, idiosyncrasies and relationships with one another. This is an endlessly complex subject to which Lloyd has brought welcome lucidity while never for one moment allowing us to forget the enormity of its tragedy."

Julia Boyd

"Although a non-specialist in the history of World War I, I have sought to learn as much as possible about that epochal calamity that cast a dark shadow over the subsequent century. At the core of a generation's agony was the Western Front, which I never fully understood until I read Nick Lloyd's comprehensive, lucid, and evocative narrative that made starkly clear what had previously been a confusing jumble."

James M. McPherson James M. McPherson

"This is a bold book. Nick Lloyd has written a tour de force of scholarship, analysis and narration… If this volume is anything to go by, Lloyd is well on the way to writing a definitive history of the First World War."

The Times - Laurence James

"This well-researched, well-written and cogently argued new analysis overturns all our assumptions and received wisdom about the fighting on the most important front of the Great War. Nick Lloyd deserves congratulation for having written what will undoubtedly now take its rightful place as the standard account of this vital theatre of the conflict."

Andrew Roberts

"Although a non-specialist in the history of World War I, I have sought to learn as much as possible about that epochal calamity that cast a dark shadow over the subsequent century. At the core of a generation's agony was the Western Front, which I never fully understood until I read Nick Lloyd's comprehensive, lucid, and evocative narrative that made starkly clear what had previously been a confusing jumble."

James M. McPherson

10/01/2020

A rising-star military historian at King's College London, Lloyd ambitiously covers the Western Front from 1914 to 1918, providing intimate detail and showing how the war led to significant technological and tactical advances.

Library Journal

2021-02-17
The first in a projected three-volume history of the bloody, chaotic “maelstrom” that was World War I.

After several well-received accounts of individual campaigns, including Passchendaele and Loos, historian Lloyd takes on the entire war, focusing this installment on the fighting in France and Belgium. Since this is a military history, the author skips over the Byzantine diplomatic maneuvers following the June 1914 assassination of the Austrian archduke and begins with the declarations of war in August. He adds an eight-page epilogue for events after the 1918 armistice. Most readers know that Germany opened with a massive invasion through neutral Belgium, a mission that nearly succeeded in capturing Paris but, after two months of slaughter, settled into a bloody stalemate along 400 miles of trenches extending from Belgium across France to Switzerland. With Germany ensconced in France, the Allied powers “had little choice but to attack,” writes Lloyd. “So they mounted a series of major offensives, each bigger than the last, to break up the trench network and return to mobile warfare.” Only in 1918 did Germany’s army, reinforced after Russia withdrew from the war, resume the offensive, which, like that in 1914, ended in a near miss. Many popular military histories focus on the common soldier, but Lloyd emphasizes senior commanders, all of whom were “trying to cope with a war that had shattered their lives as much as any other.” Though most top officials had numerous flaws, the author rejects their characterization “as ‘donkeys’ or ‘butchers’: unfeeling military aristocrats fighting the wrong kind of war.” The reality, as Lloyd demonstrates, was the usual messy picture of trial and error, with generals often learning from their mistakes and eager to adopt new technology. Tactics and firepower vastly improved throughout the war, but so did countermeasures. There are a few maps, but the author’s emphasis on battles and maneuvers will require close attention and, perhaps, a WWI atlas at hand.

Familiar ground, but Lloyd’s keen insights and engaging prose make the book a valuable addition to the literature.

Kirkus Reviews