Book Review - France on Trial: the Case of Marshal Petain by Julian Jackson

 France on Trial: the Case of Marshal Petain by Julian Jackson

[NC]: Penguin Books, 2024 (first published 2023)       ISBN 9780141993096

This is a magnificent book. Lucid, well-written and informative, this blow-by-blow account of the trial of Philippe Petain is also an in-depth look at the pain that armistice, collaboration and Vichy caused the body politic of France from 1940-1944.

Petain's trial, which occurred in the period between VE day and VJ day in 1945, was for treason but the specific charges were rather convoluted. The prosecution tried to suggest that Petain was part of a pre-war conspiracy, which was fairly conclusively disproved. However, the trial struggled with the question of whether Vichy France was the legitimate government of France, and what part of Petain's actions constituted the treason with which he was charged - was it treason to sign the Armistice? was it treason to not move to Africa and continue the struggle from there? Was it treason to encourage French in Syria to fight the Allies? Was it treason to fire on Americans in Tunisia after they landed? Various people, including De Gaulle who would have preferred the trial to have occurred with Petain in absentia, had differing views on this question.

In the end, it seems to this reader, Petain's biggest crimes came to be meeting Hitler, and the encouragement he gave to Nazi power. However, his actual complicity in these words and meetings is in some doubt. In his late eighties, the trial revealed that often it was the  prime minister  Laval who was really pulling the levers, leaving Petain to be a figurehead. Of course the fact is that by remaining as figurehead, Petain gave these actions a legitimacy that came from his fame in World War One, which is possibly hard for a 21st century reader to gauge.

Another surprising aspect of the case is that very little time was spent discussing the mass deportation of hundreds of thousands of French to Germany to work in factories under appalling conditions, and almost no time spent discussing the fate of the Jewish people under Petain's government. These painful facts came out much later, in the long tail of Petainism, which Jackson describes well.

And what of Petain himself? He had returned from Germany (where he was taken when the war was being lost) to face the justice of the court, but famously said practically nothing during the trial. Whether this was due to his advanced age, or whether it was a tactic by the defence, or whether it was simply that the courtroom was so hot that he found it hard to stay awake (he wasn't alone there), it is hard to say.

Of course he was found guilty by the combined jury of parliamentarians and resisters, and was sentenced to death. De Gaulle instead put him in a prison on the Ile D'Yeu, where he died and was buried. The contested history of Petain, Vichy, and the actions of the French during World War Two are still being played out to this day. Petain has been the darling of the French right, but officially his memory is a political football - widely seen as the saviour of the French in the First World War, his actions in the Second are widely seen as shameful. Jackson explains this well.

Petain famously said in 1940 that he would give his body for France. In some ways he did so in the trial as well, as he absorbed the confusion and hatred that the French had about the previous years, and took it all on his head. He allowed De Gaulle to build a narrative of the French as a nation of resisters betrayed by Petain and his clique, a narrative which allowed the French to park the painful past and move forward free of guilt (of course, as always happens, this confected story fell apart in later years). Jackson's choice of title is apt.

From my reading of Alister Horne's book The Price of Glory it's clear that Petain was haunted by the terrible loss of life at Verdun, and it seems simple (too simple?) to posit that he did what he did in 1940 to stop it happening again. France had been traumatised by the First War, and were ready for someone to tell them it wouldn't happen again - they were pleased that Petain did that. They soon realised they had done a deal with a devil, and their regret and rage needed a focus, and Petain became that focus.

The Petain that comes out in Jackson's book is a person who wanted to do the right thing by his country, but beyond the armistice he didn't know what that was. He was hijacked and hoodwinked by those such as Laval who were more than happy to collaborate with the Germans for their ideological needs and, let's face it, for power and cupidity.

The France that comes out in Jackson's book is one that is divided, confused, and self-hating. Yet to come to terms with what had happened during the War, it gave Petain a trial that was divided and confused, with many of the participants hating the fact that they were involved in it.

Jackson has weaved all these threads into a wonderfully readable history, which is illuminating and enjoyable. A deserved winner of the Duff Cooper history prize, I can highly recommend it.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Passchendaele: the Story Behind the Tragic Victory of 1917 by Philip Warner

 Passchendaele: the Story Behind the Tragic Victory of 1917 by Philip Warner

London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1988 (first published 1987)    ISBN 0283997451

This book, for me, was like the curate's egg - good in parts. As a blow-by-blow account of the campaign to take the Passchedaele ridge near Ypres, the book is serviceable. As an insight into broader strategy it is patchy. As a definitive story of one of the bloodiest episodes of World War One it is definitely not the final word.

For those after a brief rundown of the battles that together become what we know as Passchendaele, the Wikipedia article is excellent. This book adds colour to  something like that article, but not much more meat from a historical perspective. Which is not to sell Warner's work short - He describes the actions that led to many of the Victoria Crosses won during the campaign, and his judicious use of letters and diaries adds an important element of verity to the book. I found his selections particularly interesting, as many of them were not the usual writings of soldiers or officers, but from medical staff and those at GHQ. 

So, we have a book that does a reasonable job of describing the progress of the battles, and effectively uses commentary of the time to tell us what it was like to be a part of the fighting and how soldiers survived the horror. It is when Warner moves to broader themes that I think this book struggles. 

Warner can't bring himself to decide whether Haig was a dunce, or just one among many other like-minded generals. What Warner fails to enunciate is just how Haig (or anyone else) would go about the battles of World War One differently. We can look back and pick holes in what happened, but with the knowledge and technology of the time, were there actually any alternatives to the type of mass attack that was normal during this campaign? Warner provides no conclusions, and does not, I think, emphasise that British tactics were indeed changing, and by the end of the battle they   had hit upon methods against which the Germans could not defend.

What Warner does emphasise is the effect of the weather on the progress of the battles, and on the misery suffered by those involved. He points out that the constant artillery barrages destroyed the intricate drainage system that was important in stopping the land becoming waterlogged. This was compounded by the unseasonal amount of rain that fell during most of the campaign. In the end, the mud became almost as much of an enemy as the Germans.

And what of the strategy behind this campaign? Warner is equivocal about Haig's stated reasons for going ahead with such a large campaign. He dismisses the aim of getting to the coast to capture the U-Boat bases as so much hot air, deprecates the idea of a battle of attrition, and grudgingly accepts that the British needed to take the pressure off the French after the mutinies of 1917. However, I think that all three of these strategies made sense at the time. Haig may have been getting a false idea of German capability and morale (Warner is particularly scathing of Charteris in this area), but Warner himself, in a chapter devoted to German reaction to the campaign, shows us that the continued onslaught of the British did almost crack the German lines, and will to resist. The campaign also stopped Ludendorff from moving troops to crush Russia, and from assisting Austria against the Italians. It is easy to criticize Haig, but his options were to work in the situation he was in, and with the information he had.

Passchendaele was a terrible disaster for so many. The casualties were appalling - over half a million casualties from July to November. Those casualties  included my great-grandfather, who was killed on 20 September 1917, in what came to be known as the Battle of Menin Road.  I, and many others like me, read to try and understand. Warner's book is useful in understanding what it may have been like to be in Flanders in 1917, but on the larger themes I would be looking elsewhere for satisfaction.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Crimea by Orlando Figes

 Crimea: the Last Crusade by Orlando Figes

London: Penguin, 2011 (first published 2010)    ISBN 9780141013503

Within ten kilometres of my home I can travel down Raglan Street, Cardigan Street and Malakoff Street on my way to either Redan or Sebastopol. If I like, I can drive a couple of hours west to Panmure, or if I chose to drive north-west I can have a coffee in St. Arnaud. If I drive south-east for an hour or so to Melbourne I can travel down Inkerman Street and Alma Road to the suburb of Balaclava. That all these names are linked to the Crimean War tells me not only the time period when these suburbs and streets were coming into being, but what a huge effect this conflict had on the public opinion of Britain and her empire at the time.

And yet who has heard of that war these days? Given the current Russian invasion of Ukraine, it is timely to revisit this period in history, for it can inform the bystander of some of the issues that underlie today's conflict. Thankfully, we can read this well-written book by that great student and historian of recent Russian history, Orlando Figes.

Figes not only writes about the tragedy of the fighting, but of the deeper religious, colonial and territorial claims that drove this war, as well as writing an interesting and useful chapter on the legacy of the war (and yes, a couple of the places listed above get a mention).

As Figes writes in his introduction "each power entered the Crimean War with its own motives." The Turks were fighting to hold on to their European empire. The British were fighting ostensibly to save the Turks from Russian aggression, but actually to try to contain Russia (whose expansion they feared), and garner more trade with Turkey. Napoleon III fought for the glory of France, and also perhaps to create a Europe of nation-states that would look to him as an elder statesman. 

And what of Russia? Well, as Figes states "As for the Tsar, Nicholas I, the man more than anyone responsible for the Crimean War, he was partly driven by inflated pride and arrogance, a result of having been tsar for twenty-seven years, partly by his sense of how a great power such as Russia should behave towards its weaker neighbours, and partly by a gross miscalculation about how the other powers would respond to his actions..." sounds kind of familiar, doesn't it...

Ostensibly the War began when Russia took umbrage at how the Turks were treating Christians in the Holy Land. This led the Tsar not only to bully Turkey, but to invade the Danubian delta, with an idea to "free" the Slav Christians from the Muslim yoke. His actions raised the ire of both Britain and France. Britain had long been concerned that Russia's access to the Black Sea was a strategic arrow pointed at the heart of British trade and power in the East. France was concerned not only for the continuation of Catholic Austria (with her quarrelsome Orthodox subjects), but also for the rights of Catholics in Palestine. Their concern for the plight of Turkey came a very poor last in this race of self-interest. And so both the British and the French sailed to the Crimea, where with their superior technology and better-trained armies they quickly put the port of Sevastopol to siege, and almost as quickly they began to lose huge amounts of soldiery to disease and cold. The viciousness of the fighting, both in the field at the Alma, Balaklava and Inkerman, and during the siege, is well-covered by Figes with apposite quotes from journals and newspaper reports from the time.

Figes also covers the politics of the War, especially in England, where newspaper reports for the first time played a big part in how the public reacted to and indeed shaped the policy of the Government. There were many aspects of the Crimean War that made it the first modern war - newspaper reporting, modern rifles (both the French and the English had them and the Russians did not, which turned the tide of many of the battles), and the development of modern logistics, which were needed for the British and French to continue the siege.

The siege of Sevastopol perhaps doesn't seem as present to English-speaking peoples who think about the Crimean War as the Charge of the Light Brigade or Florence Nightingale, but to the Russians, it is a sacred event and memory - similar in scope to the Australian view of Gallipoli. Figes points out in his epilogue how the partition of the USSR in 1991, which meant that the Crimea and Sevastopol were no longer part of Russia, was traumatic for the Russian people and for Putin, unbearable.

Yet for Alexander II, who succeeded his brother during the War, once Sevastopol had fallen there was little point in continuing a war he knew he could not win. While the English war party, led by Palmerston, wished not only to continue the War but to expand it, the English public, horrified at the loss of life, felt that the taking of Sevastopol meant victory was at hand and that the troops could come home. Napoleon similarly was looking for a way out, which the fall of Sevastopol gave him.

And so the peace conference, which included Austria as well as the four belligerents, tried to give something to everyone. Britain came out of it with a Black Sea that was Russian-fleet-free, France came out of it with the Austrian and Turkish empires intact, and a commitment to assistance in Italy, the Austrians  gained an assurance that their own Orthodox subjects would not be stirred to revolt by the Russians, and the Russians could save face through the assurance that Orthodox rights in the Holy Land would be upheld by the Ottoman Empire. For the Ottomans, despite being the victim of the Russian attack that began the war, very little good came from the "victory". Their territorial integrity was restored for the moment, but they were subject to many restrictions on how they could govern, mostly concerning giving freedoms to their Christian subjects. These freedoms, and the imposition of western "aid" and "trade", led to a backlash from more traditional parts of society, while the Christians continued to mobilize for independence, with the acquiescence, if not actual assistance, of most of Christian Europe

No-one knows how many died during the War, but estimates range up to 800,000 soldiers and civilians. Many of these people died horribly from wounds, disease or the cold. A lot of the deaths could have been prevented with proper hygiene and medical attention, which was sadly lacking in both the British and Russian armies. Figes records the advances made by those armies during the War, along with the quirks that siege warfare brought to the Crimea (if you had the money, you could buy French Champagne from Fortnum and Mason's at Balaklava, along with any other luxuries you might require).

That Figes manages to weave such stories through his narrative while still enlightening us about grand strategy and battles both on the field and back "home" is one of the strengths of this book. I can't think of a better way to get up to speed on a period of history that needs further exploration in these current times. Recommended.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Great War by Les Carlyon

 The Great War by Les Carlyon

Sydney: Picador, 2007  (First published 2006)           ISBN 9781405037990

It's only after finishing this book that I have realized why I have been feeling melancholy  for the last week. The Great War is a distillation of tragedy and waste: 800 pages of sadness. Les Carlyon used all of his skill to portray the story of the Australian Army on the Western Front, both from the view of the soldier at the front, and the commanders behind the lines, while also including vignettes that explain how the Australian experience fitted into the wider experience of War.

By the time Carlyon came to writing this book, he had already written a book about the Gallipoli Campaign. I do wonder about the choice of title: The Great War to my mind, is somewhat misleading given the subject matter. For this book is strictly a campaign history of the Australian forces from Fromelles - their first foray on the Western front - to the final act of the AIF, the taking of Montbrehain in October 1918. For many people my age Carlyon is better remembered as a journalist who mostly wrote about horse racing. The cognitive dissonance of who I thought Carlyon was and the misleading title of this book took me a little time to overcome. While not a pedant (well maybe a bit), I think the title was poorly chosen, especially as there is no blurb or any other material to alert the reader to the fact that this book is not actually a history of the whole of World War One.

Once I understood the limits of this book, I found it a good read. Carlyon not only writes well about the battles that the Australians fought, but uses his journalistic skill to provide a flavour of what it must have been like, using extracts from diaries and letters to give the reader a sense of the horrors, but also of the personalities of the Australian troops. He has ended most chapters with a view of the battlefields in the present day, contrasting the generally bucolic countryside of the 21st century with the vision of hell that most of it was in 1916-1918.

Like all histories of Australian exploits in the Great War, Carlyon is following in the footsteps of Charles Bean. While Carlyon is not a doe-eyed admirer of the official historian, quite often criticizing his conclusions and his distaste for General Monash, he is influenced as all writers have been by Bean's magnum opus. The Great War is mostly a history from the Battalion level, a narrative of small actions within the wider War.

Carlyon is more readable than Bean, and does try to provide some context for the Australian battles. He intersperses his battlefield descriptions with short essays on the strategic outlook and the political intrigues that swirled around the British forces during the War. He has much to say about Haig, Gough, Plumer, Lloyd George, Nivelle, Foch and Clemenceau. Most of it is not very flattering, and suited to Carlyon's story of the war. This causes him some problems during the book: Plumer is a genius at modern battle, until he isn't, Haig is a tongue-tied nincompoop until he is a rock of determination, and so on. The wish to characterize people simply is something that Carlyon tries to avoid throughout the book, but sometimes he can't help himself and his journalistic desire for a good story overwhelms the more nuanced narrative that may be closer to the truth.

The one character he does map with some complexity is Monash. Carlyon shows us that he was almost certainly the ablest officer in the Australian forces, but also points out clearly that there were others, both British and Colonial, who were his equal. Not only did he lead masterstrokes such as Hamel but there were also times when he pushed his men too far with too little support. What Carlyon shows is that Monash not only had a great tactical mind, he also had the ruthlessness required to sacrifice lives when he felt is was necessary.

While Carlyon describes battles well, there is very little in The Great War about the lives of the troops behind the lines, except when it can add an amusing anecdote to bring out the nature of the troops. Carlyon's descriptions of the AIF tend to follow the template of an army that was short on barrack-room discipline, but good at fighting - the mythical Aussie digger. There is a kernel of truth to all myths, and there is no doubt that the AIF had a more democratic nature than the British army as a whole, but sometimes the good story takes over from the duller reality.

I feel like I'm writing a bad review for this book, which is not my intention. The Great War is a very well written account of the Australian battlefield experience on the Western Front. Carlyon does well to bring out the waste and horror of war, and his trope of ending the chapters with a description of the countryside as it is today, perhaps also describing the cemeteries in which some of the soldiers he writes about lay, evokes the pity of war as well as any book I have read. 

The advantage, if I can call it that, of writing a book from the battalion view is that the writer does not have to linger too much on what it was all for. The final few pages lay out the Australian achievement on the Western Front - considerable territory captured, some vital battles, and an honorable part played in a bigger picture. By the end of the war, the AIF was dangerously low on numbers (Carlyon writes pithily and well on the two conscription campaigns run in Australia during the war, as he also does more generally on the machinations of Billy Hughes as Prime Minister, and Keith Murdoch as stirrer), but as one of the most experienced corps of troops on the front, was in demand as a shock force. By the time of its last battle it was spent - the war ended not a moment too soon for the Australians.

If, as a reader, you would like to know about the battles Australia fought on the Western Front, I can recommend The Great War. It's well-written, and gives just enough context to what was going on so that the uninitiated can understand where the Australians fitted into the bigger picture. The maps included in this paperback edition were at best adequate, but there are endnotes, bibliography and a reasonable index.

The strength of the book is in Carlyon's evocation of the average soldier: he is successful in helping the reader get into - as much as one can - the shoes of those who were there. While Gallipoli has become the overarching military myth of Australia, most Australians who died in World War One did so on the Western Front - even the term "digger" was coined on that front in 1917. The lasting effects of the War trickle down to the present day: my Great-Grandfather was killed at Menin Road, one of his brothers was invalided home to Australia in the same year, another had already been killed at Lone Pine, and his other brother, one of the original ANZACS, and someone who participated in every battle listed in this book except the last, was sent home early, one of only 6,000 left from those men who landed at ANZAC Cove in 1915. Their memory, and the memory of the trauma that they suffered, lingered in the minds of the family they had left, and has been passed down to the present day.

I can recommend this book.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Hubris: the Tragedy of War in the Twentieth Century by Alistair Horne

 Hubris: the Tragedy of War in the Twentieth Century by Alistair Horne

New York: Harper, 2015                    ISBN 9780062397805

Those few who regularly read my blog will know that I've read a few books written by Alistair Horne, and enjoyed them all. I enjoyed this one too, as it is well written and informative, but I must state that I found the premise of the book a little thin. Horne, in his introduction to Hubris, states his aim to be to show how that state of over-confidence can lead to disaster, and how, often after a great victory, hubris creeps in and infects (Horne likens it to a virus) the body politic and the body military and leads to inevitable downfall.

To illustrate his point he chooses key battles from the first half of the Twentieth Century, Tsushima, Nomonhan, Moscow, Midway, MacArthur in Korea, and the battle of Dien Bien Phu. His contention is that in each case it was hubris that led to defeat, and that victory could lead to the development of hubris in the winners. This theory is fairly self-evident to any serious student of military history, and Horne does not add significantly to thinking in this area in my opinion.

Nevertheless, he does show the links between Japan's victory in 1905 and their over-confidence in Mongolia in 1939 and at Midway in 1942. America's crushing of Japan can be argued to have instilled a sense of inevitability to the United States and MacArthur's view that the Korean War would lead to a speedy victory; and the similar racist views of the French (as well as their internecine bickering and arrogance) led them to grievously underestimate the Viet Minh and General Giap.

Although Horne only touches on them, to me two other themes loom large in this book - racism, and ruthlessness. Much of the hubris shown by the Russians, Germans, Americans and French was engendered by their racist view of their opponents. European commanders - and political leaders for that matter - had a very dim view of their Asian brothers. What is fascinating to see is how these views remained unchanged, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Japan in particular suffered from European scorn, despite destroying the Russian Fleet in 1905 and conquering Manchuria and Korea after that. This meant little to the Americans and British who continued to see the Japanese and other Asians as less than human.

This racism led directly to their hubris when facing the "Asian hordes", as did their lack of understanding of the ruthlessness of their foes. Both MacArthur, and the various French leaders in Indochina (the revolving door of French military leadership at the time surely didn't help their cause) looked at their opponents through their own eyes. They failed to understand that the North Koreans, Vietnamese and Chinese were prepared to sustain much greater casualties than their Western counterparts could bear, and, although they may not have had the latest technology, they had a greater will.

No-one was more ruthless than Stalin. Unlike his Western "comrades" of World War Two, he had no racist limits to his thinking, so when Japanese troops encroached on his Mongolian border, he threw in his best troops, his best tanks, and Zhukov, his best general. In fact, when it came to the battle of Nomonhan, it was the Japanese who underestimated their Slavic opponents - not racially, but ideologically. Stalin smashed them, as he eventually smashed Hitler. Hitler's hubris came from his victory in France, and his racially inspired theories that led him to think that the Russians were less than human. Stalin was prepared to not only destroy his country to deny it to Hitler, but send millions of his countrymen and women to their deaths to stop him.

While Hitler was just as ruthless than Stalin, he didn't have as many men to sacrifice, and so lost.

As always, Horne writes smoothly and well - Tsushima is fading into history, and Nomonhan has always been obscure, so to re-read the narratives of those battles is pleasing. Horne provides good context for those battles and the others he discusses. He uses his narrative flair to take the reader right into the history of each battle, but his theoretical strength is less gripping; at times the hubris angle seems tacked on, or an afterthought to his racing narrative history.

So, what to make of this book? As narrative history it's gripping, as a theoretical work less so. I note that some of this book first appeared in the Military History Quarterly, and that makes sense to me, as I think the issue with this book is the lack of connexion throughout the book. It seems that Horne may have thought of these episodes separately and tacked them together. Perhaps I'm doing him a dis-service but, for me, this book was less than I hoped for given how it was marketed, but still was a good read.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Price of Glory by Alistair Horne

 The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916 by Alistair Horne

Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964 (abridged)  (first published 1962)

Here in Australia we can often be very parochial; especially when it comes to our knowledge of the wars in which our people have taken part. Ask any Australian what they know about World War One, and you would of course expect to hear about Gallipoli, Villers Bretonneux, Bullecourt, Beersheba, and the final offensives. What you rarely hear is an understanding of where and how Australia's effort fitted in a broader sense with the wider struggle of the war. This parochialism was initiated by Bean, and has continued to this day. But let's step back for a moment...if you asked any German or French person about what they knew about World War One, they would surely mention Verdun, where - over ten months of fighting - more of their troops were lost than in any other battle, and where - while both the German and the French armies were destroyed - the Allies changed the strategic outlook of the war. By resisting the German hammer-blow, the French ensured Germany's eventual defeat in 1918.

As is often the case in histories of World War One, failures of the highest leadership feature prominently in Horne's retelling of the Verdun story. The initial pretence for the German offensive was a plan by Falkenhayn to "bleed white" the French army through an attack on the fortresses surrounding the town of Verdun, assuming that the French could not afford the psychological blow of their loss. However, as Horne points out, Falkenhayn was too cautious, and the very real chance of victory was crueled by his failure to follow up his initial success - bleeding an army white is not a strategic outcome for a battle, taking territory is, and the confusion between the two objectives became a thorn in the side of German planning throughout the battle. 

There was a supreme irony in targeting the forts of which the Germans were unaware: they were not heavily manned or gunned. The French, since the debacle of 1870, had embraced the notion of attack at all costs, and the strategy current in the early 1900s was that forts were just impedimentia. That thinking turned out to be wrong, at least in the case of Verdun, where a few French soldiers stationed in the forts held up German attacks not once, but on multiple occasions. This was only one of the failings of the French higher command, Joffre being too blase, Nivelle too gung-ho, and Petain, after initially halting the onslaught, succumbing to the increasing horror and depression that engulfed him as the casualties mounted.

The one thing the Germans did get right was that the French were going to not only try and hold their ground, but fight very hard for it. This led to the most bitter fighting of the entire war. The shellfire was absolutely horrific and, for the men who had to endure it, their lives were never the same again. Horne - a precursor to Antony Beevor in his vivid descriptions of battle - quotes veterans describing the battle as a living thing, an uncontrollable monster that devoured everything in its path.

The lack of concentration of forces by the Germans did lead to a battle that bled both armies dry: unfortunately for the Germans they were losing men at almost the same rate as the French, which they couldn't afford to do. Over time soldiers on both sides became less-and-less battle-worthy, which led directly to not only the French mutinies in 1917, but to the failure of the German Army when it mattered most in 1918.

Horne also points out the other lingering effects of Verdun - the investment of the French in the value of forts, leading directly to the Maginot line; and the investment of the Germans in the idea of concentration of forces to overcome such fortifications, leading directly to Blitzkrieg. These were the lessons learned by both sides, and put into place by those who had fought in the battle, which includes most German and French military - and many civilian - leaders of World War Two.

The horror that was Verdun saw the first use of phosgene gas (by the Germans) and the creeping barrage (by the French), and endless stories of heroic efforts by both French and German units, which are well described by Horne, who not only had access to the (great amount of) written material about the battle, but also to live interviews with veterans.

At the end of ten months of horrific fighting, casualties across both sides were slightly over three-quarters of a million men - the ground literally heaved with corpses when under fire...at the end of 1916 the front line was not much moved from the start of the year. Such was the type of warfare in 1914-18. 

It is actually impossible for the human mind to comprehend what the men who fought at Verdun went through - war is a different country, and those that never go there can only grasp at the fog and mist of what it is like by reading books such as this. Alistair Horne is a skilful writer, and The Price of Glory is a well thought-out history of what is the most horrific battle in a horrific war, with a fine balance drawn between the grand strategy of the leaders and the experience of the humble soldier. Although written over 50 years ago, this is still good reading today.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell