Chapter 1. The Start of the War and of the Western Front
1 For a collection of modern discussions see Richard F Hamilton and Holger H Herwig (eds), The Origins of World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). The classic account is Luigi Albertini, The Origins of the War of 1914, trans. Isabella Massey, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952).
2 The status of this as a firm ‘plan’ has recently been questioned by Terence Zuber, Inventing the Schlieffen Plan: German War Planning 1871–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
3 See the works of Gustave Le Bon; see especially R A Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology (London: SAGE, 1975), chapter 6. See also discussion in Paddy Griffith, Forward into Battle, (2nd edn, Swindon: Crowood Press, 1990), pp. 84–94.
Chapter 2. Late 1914 and the Battles of 1915: Birth of a New Style of Warfare
1 See commentary in J P Harris, Men, Ideas and Tanks: British Military Thought and Armoured Forces, 1903–39 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 4–8.
2 Tony Ashworth, Trench Warfare 1914–18: the Live and Let Live System (London: Macmillan, 1980).
3 Ibid., pp. 24–8 and passim.
4 1/4th battalion of the Berkshire regiment: ibid., p. 15.
5 Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (first published 1911; new edn, London: Brassey's, 1988).
Chapter 3. The Battle of Verdun, 1916
1 Bruce Gudmundsson, Stormtroop Tactics: Innovation in the German Army, 1914–18 (New York: Praeger, 1989).
2 Alistair Horne, The Price of Glory (London: Macmillan, 1962), p. 327; but Anthony Bruce, An Illustrated Companion to the First World War (London: Michael Joseph, 1989) puts the total casualties at 950,000 for both sides.
Chapter 4. The Battle of the Somme, 1916
1 These statistics have not stopped many commentators wrongly asserting that there were ‘60,000 dead’.
2 Harris, Men, Ideas and Tanks, p. 67.
3 The exact numbers are still disputed to this day, although the work of Sir Charles Oman retains its value: ‘The German losses on the Somme’, in Lord Sydenham of Combe (ed.), ‘The World Crisis’ by Winston Churchill: a Criticism (London, 1927).
4 See especially Christopher Duffy, Through German Eyes: the British and the Somme, 1916 (London: Weidenfeld, 2006).
5 The Storm of Steel (first English edn 1929; new edn, London: Constable, 1994), p. 107.
6 Ibid., p. 109.
7 Ibid., p.110.
8 A recent English-language study of French army morale is Leonard V Smith, Between Mutiny and Obedience: the Case of the French Fifth Infantry Division during World War I (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994).
9 English Mayflower edn, London, 1963.
10 Under Fire: the Story of a Squad (first published as Le Feu, 1917; English Everyman edn, London, 1926).
11 The first two lines of ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, in Brian Gardner (ed.), Up the Line to Death: the War Poets 1914–18 (first published 1964; Magnum edn, London, 1977), p. 136.
12 A striking analysis of the pre-war literary basis of the trench writings is Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).
13 Julian Putkowski and Julian Sykes, Shot at Dawn: Executions in World War One by Authority of the British Army Act (London: Leo Cooper, 1989). See also Julian Putkowski, British Army Mutineers 1914–1922 (London: Francis Boutle, 1998).
Chapter 7. The Bitter Winter of 1917–18
1 It was perhaps no coincidence that the Royal Air Force was founded at just this time, by the amalgamation of the Royal Flying Corps with the Royal Naval Air Service.
2 See James Sambrook, With the Rank and Pay of a Sapper: the 216th [Nuneaton] Army Troops Company, Royal Engineers, in the Great War (Nuneaton: Paddy Griffith Associates, 1998). An engaging account of some of the men who helped stop Ludendorff's March 1918 offensive outside Villers-Bretonneux, and went on to provide the essential bridging for Fourth Army's advances in the ‘Hundred Days’.
3 Joffre had been promoted into the marshalate, but out of his command, in December 1916. Petain would be made a marshal at the end of 1918.
Chapter 8. The Flashing Sword of the Counter-Offensive
1 Britain procured a total of some 55,000 aircraft in the war, or an average of 1,100 per month. Of these, she lost some 36,000 to all causes (65 per cent), including 4,000 in combat (7 per cent). The figures for Germany were slightly less and those for France rather more: see my Battle Tactics of the Western Front: the British Army's Art of Attack, 1916–18 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 252; Michael Cox and John Ellis, The World War I Databook (London: Aurum Press, 1993), pp. 254–61, 281.
Chapter 9. The American Contribution to Victory
1 The Myth of the Great War: A New Military History of World War One. How the Germans Won the Battles and How the Americans Saved the Allies (London: Profile Books, 2001).
2 Paul F Braim, The Test of Battle: the American Expeditionary Forces in the Meuse-Argonne Campaign (first published 1987; new edn, Shippensburg, PA: White Mane Books, 1998), p. 139, quoting Donald Smythe.
3 Cox and Ellis, The World War I Databook, pp. 269–70.
Chapter 10. The Western Front as a Historiographical Phenomenon
1 Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (first edn 1930; new edn, London: Faber & Faber, 1965).
2 i.e. All Saints' or All Hallows' Day, followed by All Souls’ Day. In Latin America this season is associated with ‘the day of the dead’.
3 London: Jonathan Cape.
4 William St Clair, The Road to St Julien: the Letters of a Stretcher-Bearer from the Great War, ed. John St Clair (Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 2004).
5 Joan Littlewood (ed.), Oh What a Lovely War (first published 1965; new edn, London: Methuen Drama, 2000).