THE WESTERN FRONT 1914 - 1918 by Terraine, John

Lippincott, 1965, Philadelphia, US First edition, hard bound in dust jacket, 6x8, VG/- VG- condition, ( light foxing on inside of both paste downs), dj is price clipped, 231 pages, illus, maps, index. In The Western Front, John Terraine, whose massive and accomplished biography of Sir Douglas Haig was published in 1963, reflects with insight and compassion on the fighting of the Western Front in the First World War.Apart from his critical sketches of statesmen and soldiers of the time- Haig and Field Marshal Lord Plumer among them-the author touches on matters about which there is still argument and speculation: Was there, for instance, something deeper and far more widely spread than the imperfect thinking of one general or another, or one politician and his rival, which made the First World War such a deadlock? Why did Haig go on at Passchendaele when he had been advised by his generals what a hopeless business it was? Were the casualties on the Western Front so shocking, after all, when compared with, say, Napoleon's at Waterloo or those in some of our great Civil War battles?"Mr. Terraine rightly stresses," wrote the Times of London in its review of The Western Front, "that you can't win major wars without a shocking amount of bloodshed, and that it was the British Army, despite its losses on the Somme and at Ypres, which was the Allied sledgehammer of victory in 1918. Thus Mr. Terraine keeps the record straight.