World War One: A Narrative

Philip Warner, who died recently after a notable career as a military historian and obituarist for Britain's Daily Telegraph, was a national treasure. He re-invented the almost-lost art of the newspaper obituary, and his glorious and often hilarious accounts of the extraordinary lives of the veterans of Britain's wars and empires help account for that newspaper being by far the most successful of Britain's quality newspapers. He managaed to resuscicate the idea of the hero and pay due tribute to the ancient Roman virtue of courage, while never losing his sense of the ridiculous. This book was the result of a lifetime of research into the British army, and is robustly written with the flair of born journalist. Naturally, it focuses on the Western Front, on the appalling casualties and grimmest of battles, as an essentially civilian nation learned the dreadful lessons of modern, industrial war. But learn them they did, and Warner pays due tribute to the remarkable resilience with which the raw British recruits survived the painful learning curve of their own generals, and slowly established a moral dominance over what had been the finest and best-trained army in the world. The British victories of the final three months of the war, starting with the attack of August 8, 1918, (which the German chief of staff General Ludendorff wrote in his diary was "the black day of the German field army") are splendidly recounted. This is strongly recommended as a single-volume narrative, and should take its place alongside Liddell Hart, Cyril Falls and John Keegan as fine examples of the British school of military history.