9781446463505_

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 surpassedin 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.

On of Britains 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 Armys 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 spade in the middle of September 1914: for it was then that the war changed from one of rapid and brutal movement into the more familiar vision of trench warfare on Western Front. In this vivid, compelling new history, Malliinson brings his experience as a professional soldier to bear on the circumstances, events, actions and individuals and speculates tantalizingly on what might have been...

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