The history of the conquest of Gaul, it has been said, would be far more obscure if twenty of Caesar's generals had written commentaries. In June 1940 the armies of France, Great Britain and Belgium succumbed to the onslaught of the German armies in less than six weeks. How this could have come about has hardly been illuminated by the accusations and counter-accusations of prominent French politicians and senior officers. The crossfire of charges is as blinding as a hailstorm.This ...

This classic WWI memoir by a decorated infantryman and historian presents a vivid account of life in the trenches on the Western Front.During World War One, Major Guy Chapman, OBE MC, served in the Royal Fusiliers and was awarded the Military Cross for his bravery. Joining soon after war was declared, Chapman was stationed in France and fought in the Battle of Arras.When Chapman's memoir, A Passionate Prodigality, was first published in 1933 it was...

Legal systems like to think of themselves as impartial and fair, dispensing the objective morality of Justice. But, from time to time, a court of law can be as political, prejudiced, and biased as any other arm of the State. The classic instance is the story of the trials of Alfred Dreyfus.In December 1894 a French military tribunal found Alfred Dreyfus guilty of high treason. Dreyfus was a Jew; the War Office was determined that at all costs the honour and good name of the Army mu...

**A SUNDAY TIMES, THE TIMES, DAILY TELEGRAPH, NEW STATESMAN, SPECTATOR, FINANCIAL TIMES, TLS BOOK OF THE YEAR'Masterly ... awesome reading ... an outstanding biography' Max Hastings, Sunday TimesThe definitive biography of the greatest French statesman of modern times**In six weeks in the early summer of 1940, France was over-run by German troops and quickly surrendered. The French government of Marshal Pétain sued for peace and signed an a...

In what is one of the finest autobiographies to come out of the First World War, the distinguished poet Edmund Blunden records his experiences as an infantry subaltern in France and Flanders. Blunden took part in the disastrous battles of the Somme, Ypres and Passchendaele, describing the latter as 'murder, not only to the troops, but to their singing faiths and hopes'. In his compassionate yet unsentimental prose, he tells of the heroism and despair found among the officers. Blunden's poe...

Intelligent, ambitious and a rising star in the French artillery, Captain Alfred Dreyfus appeared to have everything: family, money, and the prospect of a post on the General Staff. But his rapid rise had also made him enemies - many of them aristocratic officers in the army's High Command who resented him because he was middle-class, meritocratic and a Jew.In October 1894, the torn fragments of an unsigned memo containing military secrets were retrieved by a cleaning lady from the...

The battle of Verdun lasted ten months. It was a battle in which at least 700,000 men fell, along a front of fifteen miles. Its aim was less to defeat the enemy than bleed him to death and a battleground whose once fertile terrain is even now a haunted wilderness. Alistair Horne's classic work, continuously in print for over fifty years, is a profoundly moving, sympathetic study of the battle and the men who fought there. It shows that Verdun is a key to understanding the First World War t...

Post liberation Paris – an epoch charged with political and conflicting emotions. Liberation was greeted with joy but marked by recriminations and the trauma of purges. The feverish intellectual arguments of the young took place amidst the mundane reality of hunger and fuel shortages. This is a stunning historical account of one of the most stimulating periods in twentieth century French history.

“An impressive source book on the conflict, high on information and data.”—Journal of the Society for Army Historical ResearchSeptember 7, 1812, is by itself one of the most cataclysmic days in the history of war: 74,000 casualties at the Battle of Borodino. And this was well before the invention of weaspons of mass destruction like machine guns or breech-loading rifles.In this detailed study of one of the most fascinating military campaigns in his...

This is Bill Cull's unforgettable story of his experiences in WW1: he fought at Gallipoli and on the Western Front where he was captured by the Germans and was a POW until the end of the war.Captain William Cull fought the First World War from both sides of the wire. As a young infantry officer on the Allied side of the Western Front, Cull frequently led patrols out into No Man's Land and raids on the German trenches. He took part in bitter fighting on the Somme at Pozi res, and in...

In this “engrossing,” (The New Yorker) vivid, and intensively researched volume, esteemed Napoleon scholar David Chandler outlines the military strategy that led the famous French emperor to his greatest victories—and to his ultimate downfall.Napoleonic war was nothing if not complex—an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of moves and intentions, which by themselves went a long way towards baffling and dazing his conventionally minded opponents into that state of d...

Adams served as a lieutenant in the 1st Battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers and was stationed on the Western Front, primarily in the trenches of the Somme. In this memoir, he documents the daily life of a soldier, focusing on the mundane routines, camaraderie, and the moments of terror faced by men living in the trenches. Through his detailed and often stark writing, Adams captures the contrast between long periods of waiting and sudden bursts of violence that characterized trench warfa...