1914: Fight The Good Fight
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...About the AuthorAllan Mallinson is a former infantry and cavalry officer of thirty-five years' service worldwide. He is the author of the Matthew Hervey series of novels; Light Dragoons, a history of four regiments of British Cavalry, one of which he commanded; and The Making of the British Army, a history of the Army from the Civil War to the present-day War on Terror. He writes on defence matters for The Times, the Daily Telegraph and is a regular reviewer for The Times, the Spectator and the Literary Review.Date Published 29th August 2013