This is a

is CBS Eye on the World.

Here's John Bachelor.

The author Nick Loy, who is a reader of military and imperial history at Kings College in London.

His new book is The Western Front.

A History of the Great War, volume one.

There are two more to follow. This one is about the

battlefront that we think of as Trunche Warfare, the Great War at the time called

World War I now, 1914 to 1918. It begins with the German attack and we've discussed these

personalities. Now you can see the tension that they lived through in real time.

There was a plan called the Schleifen Plan to take Paris and it was

depending upon the right wing of the German army. The right wing. The left wing, the Germans have armies enough to deploy from

Alsace Lorraine to Verdun into the Marne Valley, the Marne River Valley all the way to Paris,

where they're going to punch through and swing around Paris and end the war.

And then, Nick, we go to the crisis at the Marne as you explicate, and I want to focus very carefully here,

Moltke's decision to ask Klukk commanding the right wing of the army, the first army.

There's, there are seven German armies and Kluk commands the first and he seems a very thorough

commander, very well chosen but Molka

decides in the course of the events of August into September

that Kluk should not envelop Paris and the French were preparing to defend

Paris to the last man including letting parts of the city burner be destroyed with an artillery barrage.

They were desperate despairing futile at this point if the Germans had ended Paris with the first army.

...