THE TRAGEDY BEGINS: 3/8: Nick Lloyd, The Western Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 13 October 2024
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Western-Front-History-Great-1914-1918/dp/B09NS2DT8X
In this epic narrative history, the first volume in a groundbreaking trilogy on the Great War, the acclaimed military historian Nick Lloyd captures the horrific fighting on the Western Front beginning with the surprise German invasion of Belgium in August 1914 and taking us to the Armistice of November 1918. Drawing on French, British, German, and American sources, Lloyd weaves a kaleidoscopic chronicle of the Marne, Passchendaele, the Meuse-Argonne, and other critical battles, which reverberated across Europe and the wider war. From the trenches, where men as young as 17 suffered and died, to the headquarters behind the lines where Generals Haig, Joffre, Hindenburg, and Pershing developed their plans for battle, Lloyd gives us a view of the war both intimate and strategic, putting us amid the mud and smoke while at the same time depicting the larger stakes of every encounter. He shows us a dejected Kaiser Wilhelm II―soon to be eclipsed in power by his own generals―lamenting the botched Schlieffen Plan; French soldiers piling atop one another in the trenches of Verdun; British infantryman wandering through the frozen wilderness in the days after the Battle of the Somme; and General Erich Ludendorff pursuing a ruthless policy of total war, leading an eleventh-hour attack on Reims even as his men succumbed to the Spanish Flu.
1914
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBSi and the world. I'm John Bachelor with Nick Lloyd. A reader in military and |
| 0:06.1 | Imperial History at Kings College, his magnificent new storytelling is the |
| 0:10.6 | history of the Great War 14 to 18, |
| 0:13.6 | 1914 to 1918, on the Western Front, Belgium and France. |
| 0:18.8 | You think of this as trench warfare. |
| 0:21.4 | That was not the intention. However however it was the result of the opening stages of the war. |
| 0:27.5 | And the French determined a deal of what was to happen in their defense of Paris. We begin with the commander of the French |
| 0:35.8 | forces as the war opens. His name is Jafra. He is a man whom Nick describes as he does not panic he did not panic what do we need to know about |
| 0:47.1 | Jafra how his vision of the war took place Nick. |
| 0:52.2 | Yes I mean he's one of the great heroes of the Western Front, one of the great heroes of the French Army. |
| 0:57.0 | I know he's memorably described in Bobber Tuckman's Guns of August that you may have read. |
| 1:02.0 | He's quite a, you know, he's a figure that in some ways is quite unimpressive, he's an engineer, |
| 1:09.4 | he is not, he's not taught at the Staff College or he's not produced works of great military merit. |
| 1:16.0 | But he has a kind of earthiness and a connection to the army that I think is really important in 1914, |
| 1:22.0 | as well as under the shock of war Bethman, |
| 1:24.8 | sorry not Bethman Halva von Malta, German commander collapses essentially just can't take the |
| 1:31.5 | pressure. Joffre can and he is able to do what he can to defeat the Schlefin |
| 1:37.0 | plan and the German invasion and counter-attack at the Marne River in September 1914. |
| 1:41.0 | And Joffra's ability to essentially absorb punishment but to keep an eye |
| 1:47.0 | through all the chaos of war he just understands what is going on and he's able to react quickly. |
| 1:53.0 | And I think that's what marks him out for greatness, |
| 1:55.0 | certainly in 1914, is this ability not to lose his head, |
... |
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