1914: Fight the Good Fight: Britain, the Army and the Coming of the First World War - Couverture souple

Mallinson, Allan

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0593067614 ISBN 13 : 9780593067611

Editeur : Bantam Press, 2013

A propos du livre

Quatrième de couverture :

In Sarajevo, on 28 June 1914, the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip fired two deadly shots into the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand's car. The assassination created a diplomatic cat's cradle - statesmen, ambassadors and soldiers manoeuvred within a tangle of ambiguous treaties, ill-defined ententes and inflexible military plans. It was a snarl that pleased the warlike and confounded the peaceable; and for a time it paralysed the uncommitted too, not least Britain.

In just a month, however, the huge conscript armies of Continental Europe were on the march: the Russians into East Prussia and Austrian Galicia, the Germans towards Paris. But in its haste to knock France out of the war before turning to face Russia, Germany invaded Belgium: a nation whose neutrality Britain was obliged to defend under the terms of an uncertain treaty signed seventy-five years earlier in a very different age.

And by the middle of August 1914 the British Expeditionary Force, comprising a hundred thousand regular troops, had arrived in France to fight on the left of the French line. Popular opinion was that this war would be 'over by Christmas', but through the failure of the French high command to comprehend the German military's strength and intentions, 'the Old Contemptibles' of the BEF found themselves standing in the path of an enemy army many times their number, their heroic resistance passed into the annals of war.

In this vivid, compelling and rigorously researched new history, Allan Mallinson, one of Britain's foremost military historians and defence commentators, former soldier and author of The Making of the British Army, examines the century-long path that led to war, and the vital first month of fighting in Belgium and France - a conflict of movement before the stalemate of the trenches - and speculates, tantalizingly, on what might have been had wiser political and military counsels prevailed.

Présentation de l'éditeur :

'No part of the Great War compares in interest with its opening', wrote Churchill. 'The measured, silent drawing together of gigantic forces, the uncertainty of their movements and positions, the number of unknown and unknowable facts made the first collision a drama never surpassed.in fact the War was decided in the first twenty days of fighting, and all that happened afterwards consisted in battles which, however formidable and devastating, were but desperate and vain appeals against the decision of fate.'

In this major new history, one of Britain's foremost military historians and defence experts tackles the origins - and the opening first few weeks of fighting - of what would become known as 'the war to end all wars'. Intensely researched and convincingly argued, Allan Mallinson explores and explains the grand strategic shift that occurred in the century before the war, the British Army's regeneration after its drubbings in its fight against the Boer in South Africa, its almost calamitous experience of the first twenty days' fighting in Flanders to the point at which the British Expeditionary Force - the 'Old Contemptibles' - took up the pick and the spade in the middle of September 1914. For it was then that the war changed from one of rapid and brutal movement into the now familiar image of the trenches and the coming of the Territorials, Kitchener's 'Pals', and ultimately the conscripts - and of course the poets. And with them, that terrible sense of the pity and of the futility.

Mallinson brings his experience as a professional soldier to bear on the individuals, circumstances and events and the result is a vivid, compelling new history of the beginnings of the Great War that speculates - tantalizingly - on what might have been...

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Bantam Press
• Date d'édition: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0593067614
• ISBN 13: 9780593067611
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 528