Hundred Days by Nick Lloyd
| Hundred Days by Nick Lloyd | |
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| Category: History | |
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Reviewer: Lesley Mason
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| Summary: As a general reader I found this account of the end of the Great War somewhat hard work - but for those with specific interest in the military detail, it earns its stars. | |
| Buy? Maybe | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 279 | Date: November 2013 |
| Publisher: Penguin Viking | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 9780670920068 | |
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Nick Lloyd is a historian. Well, actually he's a lecturer in Defence Studies at Kings College London - based at the Joint Services Command and Staff College in Shrivenham, Wiltshire.
That means that he teaches military history to military men, men who might want to learn something from it (one hopes).
Amazing what you can learn from books before you've even opened the book. I had no idea that there was such a place as the JSC college, but Shrivenham, Wiltshire just screamed MoD so obviously I had to go look it up. This is what they say of themselves: The mission of the Defence Studies Department (DSD) of King's College London is to provide world-class professional military education to the UK Armed Services at the JSCSC. In a 21st century world characterised by complex uncertainty, the Armed Services recognise the imperative for their officers to understand military history as well as issues of contemporary and future defence and international security at the postgraduate level.
Can't argue with that.
So what is to be learned from the last hundred days of the Great War?
To be fair, having read the book, I'm not entirely sure.
The book was inspired by the author's great uncle, one Private Tom Cotterill who died at Gouzeaucourt on 27th September 1918. His death was just one among thousands. It occurred during a battle that was entirely insignificant and yet also entirely typical of the fighting that took place in the run up to the end of the conflict. It is the personal connection that brought Lloyd to write the story of the Hundred Days, but it is also a story that needed to be written.
As he tells us Between 18 July and 11 November the Allies sustained upwards of 700,000 casualties while the Germans lost at least another 760,000 men and yet very little has been written about it. The massive slaughter of the early years is what has received the attention… somehow the fact of those attrition rates not diminishing seems to have been overlooked.
As we approach the centenary of the start of the conflict we can expect a flurry of WWI material to be hitting the publishers over the next four years and no doubt the end-game will now also have its time under the microscope.
As a general reader, I hope for something that will hold my attention better than Lloyd's offering does.
I say that not as an outright criticism of the book, per se, but purely as a warning to those who may not be interested in the minutiae of military strategy.
This is one of those cases where it is easy to be mis-led by the blurb. The book is sold as a 'personal' history – not of one man, but of many – but still on the strength of the personal, the experience, the human response to being there. But on that level it doesn't quite deliver. For all the quotations from letters, from later interviews, from published works, of the people who were involved – from the high-ranking officers and politicians down to the lowly privates in the trenches and farmyards on both sides – it doesn't quite work on that level.
In a way that's inevitable. The whole point is to tell the full story of the Hundred Days and that means sweeping across half of Europe, backwards and forwards along the battle line and away from it into the war-rooms and wardrooms of governments and military leaders. It isn't possible to do that and at the same time stay with one or two individuals long enough to feel for them.
If we put that aside however and look at the book as a text book analysis of what was happening on those battlefields and how and why (which, to be fair, is Lloyd's day-job) then it comes much more into its own.
That's not the kind of book I was looking for, so I'm probably not the best person to analyse its quality on that score. What I can say is that I got lost in the detail – so there must be lots of it.
I couldn't keep track of the places and the flow of the lines held and lost. But that's because I didn't care enough to trace these for myself on the series of maps provided for that purpose.
I did enjoy (I'm sure that's the wrong word!) the vignettes of life on the front, from the poets who could see beauty in the worst of worlds to the ordinary farm boys writing home because they'd promised to but who didn't really have anything to say. Getting much the same picture from the poor squaddies in the opposing lines is what we need more of, more of the understanding that our similarities are always greater than our differences.
Tank warfare was in its infancy at this time, and I'm always astonished to discover just how small these things were. And how inefficient. How hopeless in most terrains. Small advantages, however, could prove decisive.
Of course, significant discussion is dedicated to the role of the Americans after their late entry into the conflict. Was it decisive?
Who knows? Lloyd appears to say Yes and No. If I've understood his argument properly the Allies would have defeated the Germans, as much because the Germans were losing as because the Allies were winning. Attrition would have secured the victory but , according to assessments at the time, not until probably the summer of 1919. The boost given by the American contingents speeded up the process if nothing else.
Lloyd is clear that the yanks did not win the war. They were welcome joiners. Their troops were fresh, they were strong, they were physically larger than many of the Europeans on both sides. But they weren't battle-hardened, they weren't trained in the realities of the way the war was actually being fought (as opposed to how it should have been being fought). They were, in other words, both an asset and a liability. More of the former than the latter.
And then of course there is the final point that wars are seldom won or lost on the battlefield but in the negotiation chambers of the powers that be. Due attention is also given to what the politicians were saying, and what they were believing. The impact of the personality of the likes of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, of Haig and Pershing, upon the decisions they made gets its own share of analysis.
This wasn't the book I was expecting and to be honest I found it hard work. I'd say it isn't one for the generalist.
That said, I do think that all in all Hundred Days probably succeeds in its aims to shine a searchlight over the end of the War and if nothing else should stimulate interest in reading more about the forgotten final aspects of the conflict that changed the world forever in more ways than any before or since.
For a much more personal take on the war The Reluctant Tommy: An Extraordinary Memoir of the First World War by Ronald Skirth and Duncan Barrett comes recommended.
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