Publishers Weekly
★ 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.)
The Times - Laurence James
"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."
Sunday Times - Max Hastings
"An admirably clear and judicious narrative of the battlefield course of events.… Lloyd’s book will be cherished by military history buffs."
Andrew Roberts
"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."
Julia Boyd
"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."
James M. McPherson James M. McPherson
"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."
Geoffrey Wawro
"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."
James M. McPherson
"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."
Library Journal
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.
Kirkus Reviews
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.
