Morale is a fragile thing. Its creation and maintenance are among the most important duties that can fall to a commander and neither Joffre nor Nivelle devoted as much thought to this issue as it dese...
In the second week of June, two second-lieutenants were shot by firing squads drawn from their own companies, for allegedly failing to press home their attacks. Orders also went out that battalions ab...
In all the odium the British generals have attracted, it should be noticed that it was the British, not the French or the Germans, who created the tank and brought it into action and in so doing chang...
In all his battles, Haig never seems to have appreciated that there came a time when he had obtained or achieved all he could hope for and that to press on would either throw away his success to date...
Haig wanted Fourth Army to achieve a breakthrough of the first and second lines in the first phase; Rawlinson thought that if his men took the German first line in the first phase they would be doing...
Despite arguments between Easterners, who wanted an offensive anywhere but France, and Westerners, who believed that an offensive anywhere else was a waste of effort, it was generally accepted that th...
By the turn of the century, all-out attacks by hosts of valiant French infantry, rather on the style employed by the Imperial Guard at Waterloo, were the received wisdom in French military circles, an...
The men of the French Army have never been short of guts. Clad in their brilliant uniforms, carrying swords and wearing white gloves, the officers of this gallant army led their men into the German ma...
The large numbers attacking in the early hours of 1 July - 64 battalions, mostly in line - was of no advantage, since they simply offered a large target to the enemy guns. As a result, this 'extended...
The aim of the Somme battle was no longer an attempt at a breakthrough to Bapaume but an attempt to write down the strength of the German field army and kill German soldiers - in other words, attritio...
The British infantry assault on the German positions north of the Somme began at 0730 hrs on 1 July 1916. A force of some 120,000 British soldiers of Fourth and Third Armies assaulted the German line...
Sufficiency of artillery depended not only on the number of guns provided but on the width of the front attacked. The guns-per-yards-of-front ratio was crucial; to expand the latter, it was necessary...
When evidence reached Joffre's ears that the men were complaining, that untenable positions were being given up or that attacks were not being pressed home with their former élan, his answer was not t...
Von Falkenhayn's plan for Verdun, however flawed in execution, was at least possible; he did not intend to gain ground, penetrate the enemy defences or take Verdun. He simply wanted to kill soldiers,...
There was, of course, another alternative to this endless, pointless killing - peace. Achieving peace depended on a recognition by all the participants that the war was not worth fighting, or that all...
There was, however, a deeper failure, a failure to realize that the current conventional tactics were not working. The focus was on solving the shortages of men and guns and of increasing the weight o...
The orders given to the troops were not the result of stupidity or ignorance but attempts to cope with the hard and oft-repeated fact that there was no way of communicating with those troops once they...
The generals were now two years into this war and it should have been - and indeed was - glaringly apparent that the methods being employed to attack the enemy lines, be they British, French or German...
The defence of Verdun and the French Republic was a splendid cause but that alone was not enough; it needed to be a two-way commitment - and what did the Republic care for them, the infantry soldiers...
The battle at Verdun can best be imagined as some monstrous ball game, in which two teams of giants push a boulder to and fro across impossible terrain. For months the Germans had pushed the French so...