Very many large, laudable and learned books have been written about the Western Front, but there are not nearly as many of them as there are sensationalist and subjective ones. The present volume hopes to fall into neither of those two categories, but to present a short and compact overview that is accessible to the general reader, and which may serve as a springboard for further reading. It is also intended to offer a mainly ‘military’ explanation of what happened, including the place of the Western Front in the general history of ‘the art of war’. This means that on one hand we will not look closely at the higher diplomacy, politics and strategy of the war as a whole, nor at the evolution of other fronts. On the other hand we will leave to others the task of interpreting the horrors, the traumas and the poetry of trench life.
My narrative deals mainly with the English-speaking armies on the Western Front – the British, Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders, South Africans and Americans – although I hope that the Germans and French will not be relegated to the status merely of ‘walk-on parts’. Obviously during the period before 1 July 1916 it was those two nations which fought by far the major part of the war in the West, and they continued to fight many major battles with each other, without large-scale Anglo-Saxon intervention, right up to the very end. Nevertheless it remains true that the war entered a very different phase when the British ‘New Armies’ entered the fray in force on the Somme in the summer of 1916. Both the modernity and the intensity of the fighting would grow inexorably during the next two years, as the allies became stronger and the Germans gradually wilted. There would be setbacks along the way, notably the German spring offensives of 1918, but it was clear that France no longer stood alone, and would eventually clear the invader out of her lands.
Paddy Griffith
Withington, May 2007