First Battles On The Western Front

IT WAS IN THE third week of the war when the fighting began in the West — not yet fighting in trenches, but the rationale for their evolution was becoming daily more apparent. The Germans were marching through Belgium in a blaze of steel, khaki and horseback — a…

Special destiny

AS THE FIRST Battle of Ypres spluttered to a standstill, if not a conclusion, there is a widely held assumption that all was at least tolerably quiet on the Western Front. For those troops recently disgorged from battle and still able to walk, such an idea would have been a joke in bad taste. All…

The Game Book

IN THIS SIXTEENTH week of the war, the battle of Ypres climaxed, concluded and the Allies won. But contemporaries as well as later generations might well ask — and to what end? The war continued everywhere else and would, in time, return there as well.

The Battle For The Aisne

22nd to 28th September 1914

The best and the worst of men

THE DEADLY GAME of cat and mouse which had characterised the Western Front during the previous fortnight persisted. Ruined villages passed to and fro. Lombartzyde was back in German hands by 7 November, but not Klein-Zillebeke, for all the ferocity of the attack launched upon…

The agony of Antwerp

ALTHOUGH IT CANNOT have appeared thus at the time, there had been a logic to the story of the Western Front in the first two months of war. The Germans had stormed westwards and the allies had raced to block them. For a while, they had been forced to retreat (from Mons) and then it had been…

The Allies In Danger

NOW IN THE fifth week at war, Britain was losing ground. The retreat from Mons was continuing. Defeat for the Allies in the west was no longer just a possibility, but a serious likelihood. No word of this had yet reached the British public, and indeed only limited snippets arrived at the War…

Britain And France In Retreat

THE PARAMETERS of the war — geographical, strategic and moral — rolled back alarmingly in its fourth week. Blessed with hindsight, we easily forget that this was the week in which the British and French Armies were in full retreat. The British had lost the Battle for Le…

Settling old scores

THE LOGIC of events suggested that the moment for a decisive breakthrough in the West had passed.

The fact was grimly acknowledged by British and French, but absorbed by the Germans only with great reluctance. On 2 December, they tried to cross the Yser on rafts…

The triumph of the Worcesters

WE CALL IT First Ypres, but this misses something. There was nothing homogeneous in this contest, but rather a series of local actions in which small groups of men felt frequently abandoned and always alone. As they were.