 I'm Professor Greg Kennedy from the Defense Studies Department, one of Nick's colleagues, and it's a great pleasure for me to be here tonight to introduce him and his new book and with us tonight we have also his publisher, Daniel Crue, and Nick is going to do about 20 minutes or so and then open it up to a bit of Q&A. So I hope you enjoy the evening and again thank you very much for taking the time to be with us. So Nick Lloyds, a reader here in the Defense Studies Department in Military and Imperial History at Kings College London and we're based out at the Defense Academy Trivenham. He's a widely published historian of the Great War and has written on many histories on the Battle of Luce, the Hundred Days, as well as Passchendaele. And today we're here for the launch of the first in a trilogy of the Western Front in the first book in that he joins us today then via Zoom obviously and can discuss the book for a bit and then open it up and he's going to tell you about his kind of aims and objectives with the book and what he hopes to achieve with it and then you'll be happy to take any questions. Can I ask please if you can ask your questions using the Q&A function and we'll start there and then we'll see how the day progresses and we may move over to the raise hand function depending on how many people we have coming in. So I'm going to ask Daniel to take over to the microphone and he has a bit of stuff he wants to tell you about the book and publishing. So Daniel over to you. Thanks Greg. Yes, I am Daniel Crue. I'm Publishing Director at Biking, part of Penguin Madam House and I want to say how filled I am and how full we all are to be publishing Nick's book today, The Western Front and in his virtual world that we're living at the moment it gives me particularly great pleasure to actually be able to hold up a physical copy of the book and show you. It's absolutely fantastic and Nick as he always does has dug deep into the documents on all sides and especially has looked at the leaders to produce an account that is comprehensive and gripping and often moving and perhaps most remarkably has managed to create a single narrative out of the huge number of people and places and events that make up The Western Front. As a brief footnote he's done this while keeping to the contracted length and delivery date which publishers will tell you isn't always the case with authors. So Nick is a model author and maybe you think I'm bound to say that because I'm the publisher but I can point you to the review in The Times that said Nick Lloyd has written a tour de force of scholarship analysis and narration. Lloyd is well on the way to writing a definitive history of the First World War and as Greg said indeed we're thrilled that Nick's writing also in the trilogy on The Eastern Front and The Wider War. So I hope next time we can raise a glass in person but in the meantime tonight rather than selling the book here I will post the link to the book in the chat function in a moment and I will raise a glass over Zoom and say cheers to Nick and now over to you. Thanks very much. Thanks very much everybody. I hope you can hear me. Thanks for coming. Obviously as Daniel said it would be very nice to do this in person but Zoom offers us different functionality and it's great to be able to do this. So yeah no this is a big day you know this is the volume I have in my hand it's very handsome volume and it's big it's heavy it's really really thick as you can see it's a fair it's a fair chunk of text and yeah I started in 2017 I'd finished the book on Passchendaele which I know some of you may have read and you know we were going back and forth about what to do and you know I thought we need to do something bigger and something more general and the Western Front opened up really and I thought as soon as I sort of came into my head it wasn't one of those sort of you know I woke up from a dream but I woke up one morning I thought there was something something going on there so I thought we should do the Western Front because there's no there isn't in my view any really particularly strong histories of the Western Front as a whole. There are a handful of books that concentrate solely on the Western Front in the First World War but again I think they have limitations and I think there were a number of things I wanted to do to do with this which was really to tell the story from all of the main sides so we've got you know you've got the Germans in there you've got the French in there you've got the British in there and you've got the Americans in there so you've got the whole package and to go through all of those different perspectives was really what I wanted to do so you know I think a lot of the books on the Western Front are essentially campaign or battle histories no I've done this you know I've written on Passchendaele I've written on Luz you get a lot of books on the psalm you get a couple books on Verdun you get books on 1918 books on 1915 books on 1914 but often there there aren't books that go through the whole campaign the whole four years of the Western Front so I thought that would be a really really cool thing to do and again to incorporate the entire picture so we have the whole French War we have the German War we have the British War and we have the American War and so you see the whole thing emerge and I wanted to write a narrative history and I'm very fortunate with my publisher that they let me do what I wanted to do which is it is very rare and very welcome so I'm very glad that Daniel allowed me to do what I wanted to do which is really to write a narrative of the of the military operational side of things so it focuses solely really on the war that is for the generals the technology the tactics the strategy and tells that story over four years and I think that was really interesting for me because I'd concentrated on elements of the Western Front but having to do the whole thing so what you'll see is the book is split into three sections the first section begins in August 1914 and goes to basically the end of 1915 and that is a predominantly German French struggle the British are in it a little bit they get slightly more important as 1915 goes on but broadly it's the French and the Germans the second part it takes you from the beginning of 1916 so you have a whole of 1916 and you begin to see the balance start to shift so the British become more important as their army grows and as the French rely on them much more and you go through Verdun you go through some those great big attritional trench battles that you know have so sort of captured the imagination of people who had to become synonymous with trench warfare and the first world war and the second part ends with the Nevelle offensive in April and May of 1917 now this is a part I found particularly fascinating because it's when the French realize they are running out of men and they're really going to struggle but they they have a new commander in chief Robert Nevelle who seems to have something he seems to have an ability to get results he is brought in and that a lot of faith is placed in Nevelle and of course Nevelle gets things quite badly wrong and leaves the the French army really on a knife edge in the spring of 1917 and it's at that point where the allies really on the western front on the verge of collapse and you have the twin shifts of the Russian Revolution and the American entry which really changed the balance in the war but the French really hit a low point in the spring of 1917 have the mutinies of the French army and then we have the final part of the book which is the longest part of the book and that takes you from the spring well sort of the early summer of 1917 all the way to the armistice in November 1918 and this begins with the arrival of General Jean Pershing the American commander-in-chief in France so it marks a different shift where the French the British and now the Americans are working out what they need to do how they're going to fight and they don't agree on pretty much anything and then you have the final act of the western front which is the German spring offensive of 1918 this is where things come full circle where the German German army have tried to win in 1940 and not just failed they haven't got to Paris they haven't broken the French army but now the Russians are out of the war there is a window of opportunity for the Germans to strike and that is what they do they say we've got to strike now before the Americans are in strength so they they kick off in March 1918 and that's the sort of final phase of the war where you see the war really changing and developing a lot in 1918 so and that of course all goes all the way to the armistice so I think there was you know there's a number of things I wanted to do with the book which was concentrate you know on the generals and that operational level of war how they coped and I think there are a number of things people will hopefully get from the book is the it's a scale of the challenge in the First World War for for all sides you know they're coping with you know an enormous array of challenges technological challenges difficulties of logistics difficulties of trying to work at what they should be doing and you know actually what I want people to do really if if they read the book is to essentially put themselves in the position of those generals and just think you know how would I have done it how would I have gone about breaking the stalemate what would I have done and there'll be people you like in there there'll be people you dislike in the book there'll be people you think you like and then you they turn out to get it all wrong and so I think the characters of the individuals was really something I wanted to get across because I think too often the generals are seen as rather sort of cardboard cut out figures without personality or without character or without sort of you know family and and and sort of an emotional life and you do see that with a number of individuals in the book and I think trying to bring these people to life I think is essential we can judge them of course some of them do really well some of them do really badly some of them just sort of muddle along but you see it all in the span of the four years and I think one of the strengths of the book is that if you're doing an individual campaign study or battle study you don't get this but if you're doing the whole span of the western front you see people rise and fall some people come in really strong and they burn out and get sacked and they go away you never hear from them other people gradually build a career and a reputation and then lose it or they don't do very well they don't do very well and suddenly they get it right towards the end of the war so you do see the rise and fall it's almost like a kind of game of thrones where you see the rivalries you see the the fortune that smiles on certain individuals and not others and so you get that with the kind of study that I did again over the four years so you know I hope people get from the book just a narrative where you can you can sort of go and see and sit beside the generals as they try and work out you know how they're going to cope with these problems how they're going to achieve what they need to achieve the pressures that they're under and again some of them do well some of them don't do very well but I think we wouldn't necessarily be any different now if we were in that situation so it was great fun to write it was really challenging um but I you know I hope people just get a real sense of what the war was like for those individuals and they can make their own minds up they can go through it and then say well you know who do I think was the best or who do I think was the worst so you know it was really fun to write and um you know I'm I'm cracking on now with Eastern Front uh so we're we're moving to volume two which I was really pleased to do that with they didn't emerge immediately as soon as we got the contract through for for Western Front and I started getting into it I thought you know what um I gotta do I gotta do the whole thing now so I think the next logical step was the Eastern Front which again it's not a war that I've had any real experience of I know the Western Front quite well but Eastern Front is a totally different kettle of fish but absolutely a completely different war in many ways but a war that was again really central to what was going on between those years and then of course we'll we'll look to to the you know expand out further to the war in Africa in the Middle East so that's the sort of plan really so you know I guess the whole the whole idea is to produce three individual volumes you can read these volumes um you know individually but hopefully together they will produce a comprehensive history of the war so you know that's really what I've tried to do and yeah it's wonderful I mean any author will know once you get your hands on a copy of the actual real thing it's it's a real fantastic moment so it's um yeah I'm really pleased really pleased and it's great to be able to share this with you so um enough of me um if you have questions you can put them in the Q&A I think we have already a few and then once we've gone through the Q&A questions we can have some hands up if you have any okay we've got some questions I'll try and deal with them is the Belgian side covered well the Belgians are covered a little bit the best Belgians get covered in the early phase of the war so you the first chapter includes the bombardment of Liege and the capture of Gerard Le Man who was the defender of Liege the Belgians are involved in the early stages but then of course they they take a real secondary seat to the if you like the major powers on the western front the the French predominantly then the British and then of course the Americans I think it's very important to include the Americans as well um and the other forces involve Russian Italian Portuguese well you won't find too much of them I do get I do get a mention of the Portuguese the Portuguese expeditionary force is sent to the western front in 1917 and they do play a rather infamous role in 1918 which I won't go into too much detail but they are in there um there are two I think two brigades of Russians that that go on the western front in 1917 um didn't have space to cover them unfortunately given how I mean I don't know how many brigades are on the western front but covering individual brigades is quite different it's quite difficult when I can't even cover armies entire armies on the book but um there we go um Alan all right so my question which of the generals does Nick like and dislike having got to know them so well um well I think if you do read the book uh without sort of trying to spoil things I think um you know I think there are a few generals I think really really do very well I think um my my admiration for Herbert Plumer is is is very clear you read my passion Dale book you'll know that I think he's really really good um of the French generals I think there's a few that really stand out um I think got to say Ferdinand Foch I think he's he's he's something about him which really is quite strong because there's a there's a kind of um there's a steel within his character which means he can carry on and broadly get it right and I think that's really the test of these generals can they get it right basic can they get it most of it right at the time can they make the big calls and I think Foch does I've got a great deal of admiration also for the French commander-in-chief Philippe Petain who you know was a national hero in the war for his defense of Verdun but he does bring something different to French generalship and he has a he has a way with things which is remarkable he has a a kind of a real feel for what you can and cannot do in trench warfare uh you're not going to be able to achieve certain things and by 1950 he knows pretty much that the French cannot break through which is one of the big themes of the book he knows they can't do it so he advocates attacking trench lines discurring trench lines moving the guns up and doing it much more slowly and in an avowedly attritional manner so Petain wants to kill Germans not break through because he doesn't think they can do it and you so that see these two debates quite strongly um and it filters through to the British as well so you have people like Rawlinsen who commands fourth army on the psalm it comes to the same conclusions as Petain around the same time a little bit later um that they can't break through they need to do something different so if i find this dichotomy really fascinating so i think you know Petain's problem is he gets too pessimistic in 1918 whereas Foch is not so those two are real kind of polls apart i think one of the French generals once said that if you could fuse Foch and Petain together you would have the perfect general but of course you you can't um okay um got actually loads of questions um what was the most surprising thing you learned from your research for this book um i don't know really um i mean i think i'm pretty you know i know a bit about the west of front i've written a few books on it so i was kind of aware of what i wanted to do i think you know i think the extent of the french war effort is important to bear in mind you know what what they were trying to do and how well they did and how you know the burden that they played and the burden they they had for so long i think which which english language audiences have never really appreciated i think so i was always aware of that and and you know i wanted to bring that out in the book because so that was really fascinating for me to learn about the french army and really trying to get into that sort of side of things um indians and what is your view on them generally well the indian core of course plays an important role in 1914 and 1915 in uh you know holding the line at a particularly perilous moment so the indian core you know play a vital role in in stabilizing the western front uh in the british expeditionary force and that should never be forgotten and uh they are justly remembered for that there was no other troops available to the british empire and it just goes to show how stretch the british wear in that early period of the war where they they start from a very small reserve of manpower or trained manpower and have to expand rapidly so you know if you think indeed before the war at the staff college they had like blue sky thinking plans about how many divisions the british would fight in war this is like 1912 and the the the case study example is six divisions that's the most you'd ever deploy by 1916 the british have got 60 divisions so they're just mass expansion nobody knows what they're doing but anyway um do i draw any conclusions at the end well i like to think that i do but again i i don't want to over face the reader in a way and i do think it's up to readers themselves to make their own minds up about these generals and about the war and i do think it is important to to just let the story tell itself without trying to fix a big argument on the book i think people need to reflect on it and you know just think what what they do and if they want to be critical of the generals or the war that's absolutely fine um you know i just wanted to tell the stories i saw it really and and let that you know let that kind of just wash over people and see see how it goes how about the forces of the dominions canada in particular and their leader curry well um you know i've written on this before and i think i have a great admiration for curry who commanded the canadian corps in uh in late 1970 and 1918 he's probably one of the best generals of the war obviously he doesn't get to uh army level like not command of an army you could argue that canadians are kind of an army but um so he's not tested the very highest levels but that's hardly his fault what he does is very very good and i think what curry has is like what petan has which is a wonderful feel for what infantry can achieve and cannot achieve on the battlefield and i think some commanders which again you'll meet in the book don't have that they just don't really have the feel or the touch of the battlefield and i think that the best commanders on the west and front do and they know immediately what the limits to which they can push their units and i think that's a really important element of of any general but particularly in the first world war ben the british army that beat the germans in the hundred days was greatly transformed from the bf at mons in 1914 what do you think was the success factors that enabled this remarkable adaptation well i think that's a great question and i think there's a whole range of factors which again we can't get into here but it's a sort of it's a culmination of a whole revolution in military affairs the you know the development of tanks the continued evolution of air power the integration of artillery a kind of imagination and i always think it's always worth remembering that the british show an inventiveness and a ruthlessness and a determination in the first world war that they very rarely show since or before they really get it right in 1918 so i think there's a number of factors which produces this adaptation and innovation it's the lessons of hard struggles the willingness to try willingness to actually put a lot of these things into practice that they learned so i think there's a you know again other people have written them on innovation in the first world war than i than myself so i think that's definitely worth thinking about if you'd like to learn more about it but yeah there's lots of stuff going on and it just sort of clicks in 1918 where it hadn't clicked for so long it finally it finally goes well they know what they're doing in 1918 they know what can be achieved they know what can't be achieved they don't in earlier years they didn't know that so um peter haig is a very controversial figure which side you come down on without giving too much away yes haig is very controversial the most controversial commander in british military history if not all military history um i have been critical of haig so you know if if people are you know i'm thinking that it's going to be too pro haig or too anti haig i can't i tend to come down sort of in the middle on haig haig is not one of my favorite commanders and certainly when i started researching the first world war i wanted to like haig i wanted to be able to adopt a kind of very defensive position on haig um but my my line on haig you'll find this in my passion tale book i think haig has many strengths strong he's determined he is you know he is not like he's not morally fragile or emotional he's strong firm committed works very hard has a good grasp of the army but i think fundamentally haig doesn't really ever get the battlefields and i contrast him quite strongly with with curry now curry comes to the western front with like his background is not like haig he was a failed real estate broker and a teacher um he comes to the western front and he goes right i need to learn so i'm going to get all the best people around me and i need to learn for what it's like because i don't know what it's like so his mind is open and he sucks all the information in and he realizes very quickly that the western front is all about logistics preparation artillery fire so he gets it all in haig approaches the western front from the perspective that i i have i know everything about war i have been trained i i know it so whatever is out there must conform to what i know so therefore this is what we need to do and if out there reality doesn't conform to it then we just keep going so haig's is a very different perspective and i think that's why haig struggles sometimes because there's no real excuse for the first day on the psalm i call that one of the great mistakes of the war uh where he sees just far too ambitious and over optimistic about what can be achieved and this is i've discussed this about haig in my lose book which is the difficult thing about haig is that on the one hand he writes reports where he's very clear on the um the limitations of what the british have we don't have enough guns we don't have trained band power the enemy's defenses are very very very very very you know difficult and then a week later he's talking about breaking the line and the cavalry are going to go through to leal and so you have this real shift with haig which i think has been underappreciated so i think haig has strengths but i don't think he's one of the great commanders of the war that's that's my perspective i think there are other better commanders if but again haig has his defenders and i suspect he always will but i leave that to you guys to see what you think um simon you said that you focus at the operational level and have you been able to join your conclusions as to whether the allies understood and were able to conduct operational art during the final campaigns of 1918 yeah i wrote an article on this for british army review um yep operational art exists in 1918 and the british and the french and the americans do it and they do it significantly better than the germans they're able to coordinate lots of different activity into a operational model which works so i think there's no doubt about it some people um say that operational art does not exist in the first war this is not true it does exist and it uh by 1918 you see the the origins of real sort of modern modern operational art what are your views on the war in the air was it relevant absolutely it's vital it's really really important indeed it's probably been underplayed the importance of the air has been um probably underestimated in histories of the war and i was very conscious of trying to put more emphasis on the air because by 1918 you can't do a lot without air power it's remarkable so you know the british the the royal air force they are photographing the british sector of the western front twice a day every day by 1918 and that's all fully integrated with artillery and infantry so it's remarkable so the the role that air plays is crucial and i i think that's a great question that's a great point um mark did your opinions of the generals change at all in the course of the writing of the book um yeah i think i was pretty open minded in terms of you know i'm well aware of the debates pro and against of the generals there were some generals that i thought i would i really wanted to like i really wanted to be better than maybe they were i got a soft spot for robert nevel which you might find in the book i you know he's a commander that we desperately need a modern study of i kind of felt very sorry for him because he gets it wrong in 1917 and it's it's pretty bad what happens but i kind of liked him and i wanted him to be successful but of course it's not but uh yeah um alec does your book cover the sometimes strenuous relationship between civilian governments and the high commands example haig and loy george yeah yeah we do that we have that certainly in the early phases of the war there's a lot of on the french so you've got the french war minister mille ronde and and the french cabinet trying the french government trying to get more um you know more power and trying to actually rest control of the war from the general so there's a lot about the french struggle for control of the war effort and um and that's crucial of course we got haig and loy george in there you've got that in there so that that's definitely an element to it which i think you know really complicates the picture and answer the sort of game of thrones type feel you get the push and pull and the change and gradually the civilians sort of reassert their control as the war goes on um david nice to see you in here um could you say something about the german high command and its part in losing the war for example to the eastern generals hindenburg and ludendorff lose the war because they did not understand the dynamics of the western front that's a great question um i think there's there's a line uh as hindenburg and ludendorff they've been on the eastern front since 1914 and they come to the western front in 1916 and i think they realize straight away that this is not like it is in the east but there's there's a quotation from ludendorff when they decide to attack in the west in 1918 where he says you know we we're gonna do it like we did in russia we we we hack a hole the rest follows we break the line and we get him going and then we'll finish it um i'm not entirely sure that it's necessarily the eastern front i think it's just ludendorff's character um you know his character is a gambler and he wants total victory so you know he has that window of opportunity and he's a gambler and he takes it it's a disastrous decision but these are the people i think they can't really envisage a german victory that is not total it's like we either win or we lose we can't there's not like a middle position where we we gain something but make some political concessions i mean say belgium or whatever um but but yeah that's that's uh that's a great question um just a few more left um having knocked russia out of the war in late 1917 was ludendorff's spring offensive in 1918 the wrong strategy for the german stop yes it was it was i can understand why ludendorff did it yeah um but i think the germ the germans need to do in 1918 is uh is stop and and say to the you know build their defensive lines in the west and uh make some concessions on belgium make some concessions well maybe if maybe not an alsace lorraine but certainly on belgium if they make real political if they essentially accept an independent belgium they withdraw their forces from the western front and they they they go back to 1914 borders in the west i think it's very difficult the americans and the the british to continue fighting it's it would be really hard if they made that combination of the bringing all the troops back from the east digging in political concessions i think that's that's much more difficult for the allies to do and the germans win in the eastern front um but you know it is all counterfactual so you know we don't know but clearly it's very difficult i think for the germans to win in 1918 have variety factors the mobility they just don't have the power they're up against three major powers the americans the french and the british they're just not strong enough um neil um and what is your view of the british uh political military relationship during the war i think that's a great question and you know it's it's one of those things that's so friction you know it's so much it's so sort of fractious and so difficult and that you can't get over the lawy george's war memoirs and the version of the generals and the incompetence of the generals and so it it feels very fractious and feels very um broken in many ways and there's an enormous amount of problems that british having actually working out what the generals can do what the role of politicians and civilians is how far the civilians can can go what the general should be doing so i think this is inevitable in a total war so i'm not necessarily saying it was it was broken i think by 1918 it's different but i think it's very difficult to get past the just the frustrations of those involved and the absolutely terrible relations they have of each other robertson lord george haig um and how that's really you know that kind of echoes on into into the post war years i think um cool should haig have been replaced by monash as david lord george allegedly considered um of course monash was the you know very decorated australian corps commander i think what i'd heard um was that he wanted to replace haig with a kind of dream team of curry canadian with monash as his chief of staff which would have been very interesting had he done that in 1918 um counter factual isn't it um monash had no experience curry had no experience of army command or of over a national continuing command so it's a huge risk to do um i i think other other people would say for hands i think plumber would have been a better choice uh but ultimately uh you know david lord george doesn't feel confident enough to make the change and haig survives for long enough to get through to the end um but again the war in 1918 is very different and haig is better when he's doing less so when haig is involved in alliance politics and structuring of the bf he's he's pretty good he's solid he defends the interests of the british when he's involved in devising the preliminary bombardment for the psalm and working out what infantry can what infantry objective should take he's not very good um when in 1918 he's a different commander so i think that i don't know whether that comes across in the book but i certainly hope it does um why do you say you tried hard to like general surely you would want to be totally dispassionate yeah i i think you have to be you have to try to be dispassionate i i try to like them in a sense because i think the the press they've had is so poor so i think we're our initial responses that these these people are incompetent and and and call us and you know they don't know what they're doing so i think you have to be able to um you know try and see both perspectives and and some i'd really liked some i thought were you know their reputations were deserved so again i leave it up to readers decide where they go with it steven given the success of the hundred days how far do you explore the contribution made by the substantial increase in munitions production which contributed to the success of the hundred days yeah that's in there you know that the munitions stuff and they enormous um again not just munitions but you know the amount of type of different guns but also the kind of the things they do with the weaponry which i think is really crucial um so i talk about the the switch to neutralizing fire by like 1917 which is really important because they it's not just not just they have more weaponry that they're using it a different way and using it in a much more imaginative way and a much more um it's much more modern in the way that they see the the 3d battlefield and the way they try and fight in depth um so i think the you know the industrials the story of the industrial revolution if you will the industrial chemical revolution behind the war is is kind of a referred to a bleakly it's not a main storyline but it's there and you can gradually see um certainly in the allied attacks you know the number of shells and guns and they just keeps increasing through the war and that's remarkable by 1917 the amount of stuff they can throw at the enemy defences is just just insane um had not unrestricted you but were for come about so without the american presence would the outcome of war have been the same or just taken longer for the axis to lose i think that's a really interesting one um i don't think the british and french can win without american support they don't think they can win um and they don't they can't win in a number of ways but i think that the the american involvement comes at a crucial time because when you know the french are at the lowest ebb and the americans enter the war now clearly the americans aren't haven't built an army yet but it's that lifeline that the americans provide in the spring of 1917 which is vital without that i don't see the french surviving into 1918 or at least they will collapse in 1918 um so again the americans are vital um and i think that that really needs to be emphasized so i think you know the decision by the germans to go for unrestricted marine warfare i think is an indication of how hard they've been pressed in 1916 and they don't want to do that again but as a strategic decision it's cataclysmic and of course there's a total underestimation of the americans the sort of feel that they're not real people they're not they're not going to do anything they're just a bunch of cowboys uh and lewd north has that and a lot of other generals do there's a real underestimation of the americans and that's you know that's absolutely fatal to the german war effort so yeah without the americans the allies will collapse in 1918 i think um alex what was the most enjoyable topic in the book that got you to write about was there anything that really challenged your preconceptions um what was the most enjoyable topic um i found it though the the least enjoyable was writing about the stuff i've already written about so writing about like the battle of passion dale and stuff that i've done and the hundred days in a certain degree i kind of done it and i felt i'd written it so i i didn't want to repeat myself so i found that most difficult i find the most interesting my favorite bit i think is the um i think my favorite bit is the is the spring is the sort of uh the the second part of the book when we're right in the middle of it and the french try and break through i really like i really enjoyed that because it's a it's a part of the war i didn't really know a lot about so i found that really really compelling and and really you know a really important part of the story of the western front and and again you know how the allies are able to turn it around in 1918 you have a favorite part of the western front to visit today and if so why um yeah i mean look it's all special it's all very very special um you know i think you know i've been there many many times i mean i like i like vimeo ridge i think vimeo ridge is really special i think it's a fantastic memorial it's a fantastic place to go um but i mean eeper is great you know it's a town to go to it's fantastic so you know that that has that town has a special i think place in and i think all of our hearts you've been to the western front so i think when you go there you know you you know you've arrived so i think eeper was probably one of my one of my very favorite places all right then i've gone through all the q and a questions um greg did you have any comments or i'm just gonna say that instead of typing if there is still anybody out there in the audience that had a question i wanted to ask we can go to and move to the the raise hand function instead of getting people to to type again i had a question though for your neck as you were kind of thinking and conceptualizing the book um what did you use how did you actually define the west because that obviously you got the book coming out on the eastern front and you're going to do africa in the middle east so this whole kind of idea of of what is the western front and then you know having to look at the bulkens salonica italy you know where what what kind of arguments did you have in your head as to how things were going to work as you were getting this idea of the western front in your mind yeah i mean i think it's yeah that's that's a really good question i've been having that you know the question of you know what's the eastern i think the east what's the eastern front is more of an obvious well no more of a difficult question i think the western front you've got obviously the war in france and belgium and that's barely self-contained but i think the reason it's so important is because you've got you know four major powers locking heads there and that's you know that was really there's so much to do on the western front there's so many battles it's almost constant fighting for four and a half years so you know there really wasn't any room for anything else but there's obviously elements of naval warfare and the submarine campaign which which are very much related to the western front so i didn't necessarily have a lot of debates about the western front i was it was going to be the french the british the americans it was going to do i've had more debates about you know the eastern front and it's which essentially includes the bulkens and italy um because i think in some ways i think the books are this book is in some ways it's france's war um and i think the eastern front it's more like austria-hungary's war and the final volume we've been more like turkey's war they're the states that really are the the center of those kind of those theaters um one of the reason i wanted to do the the theater specific was i think if you don't like if you did maybe a book on you know you could do a history the whole history of the first war in one volume but i think one of the drawbacks from that is you're constantly moving between fonts so you've got you know what's happening on the mar and then you have to move to tannenberg and then you have to move to you know the british in ypres and then you have to move to turkey and then you have to move so you're constantly moving about whereas if you have western front you have a sole focus on these individuals and the war that they fight um and that's what i think is quite useful so you're not you know there is mentions of what's going on the eastern front which of course you know it is affects what happens in the west but you have the consistent focus on their war and the way they fight it so you know i i hope if people read this then they'll really enjoy the next volume because that's all the stuff i didn't get to talk about and you'll actually see what happens when ludendorff and hinderberger in the eastern front because they you know ludendorff appears in 1914 in the book and then disappears and it suddenly appears again so there's a question in the chat had the french been overrun and had to leave the war was it known what were the british plans would they continue and what were plans of others involved i think i think that the question depends on the time when this is if it's 1940 i think the war's over if the french collapsed and the british can't do anything they just got to go to bull or you know get the next ferry home um i think if the french collapsed in 1970 again i don't suppose there are any plans i've not come across any plans i mean you would have probably had some kind of level of evacuation or something but i mean again considering the supreme war council is not created until the end of 17 and you don't have a allied supreme commander until march of 1918 so you know what happens is is is highly dependent the british are entirely dependent on the french for that in that sense so there are no plans i think if it's in 1918 i think because of the role of the americans then even if the french um really struggle which they do by the end of the war then the war can continue because of the american involvement um but really i think throughout most of the war i think certainly until 1918 if the french collapse anytime until 1918 i think the war is over um i don't see how the british can do it the british can't do it on their own um they have to have that major partner um so if the french collapse the british are facing certain defeat i think great question yeah you'd mentioned operational art and kind of combined ops i just wondered whether you'd spent any time looking at that particularly the kind of the last phases joint ops yeah i think you know that all feeds into the the idea of 1918 being quite different in terms of what's going on and i think you do get a sense of that as or as the germans run out of ideas by 1918 they've done the storm troopers they've done the infiltration tactics they've done the short bombardments and that's really yet they don't really know where to go whereas the allies are doing all kinds of crazy stuff they're they're integrating tanks with aircraft you know they've got loads of that integration and that fully combined thing is where they're going the way they can coordinate it all together in mobile warfare so i think that by the end of the war you see a real like like a gear change where things really go um and the war ends and of course they got all these crazy plans or what happens in 1919 what they were going to do but whereas i think the germans really struggle they they can't really fight the war in that way so they they got nowhere us to go whereas the allies can do all kinds of stuff if the war carries on in that 1919 technologically sorry paul he's got a question for us yeah um hello can can you hear yep um on that last point the difference surely is to do with uh brute industrial advantage the germans can't do uh plan 1919 because they can't produce enough tanks or or aircraft it's really not about necessarily their lack of strategic originality but but that that's not the point i was usually going to ask it's back to this question about um bad choices between or dilemmas between the east and the west and front i have seen it argue that there was a fundamental german decision in early 1916 after significant success against the russians to decide to go west for the verdant campaign uh allegedly could falkenhayn didn't think he could achieve a strategic result in russia uh in 1916 um but the results were yeah i i just got i think you got cut it off there paul um i'll just take that if i may i think um i think you're absolutely right i mean the falkenhayn is the german supreme commander from september 1914 and he is focused on the west he believes that victory will only come in the west and is not impressed by the calls to win in russia doesn't think it can be done always believes the russians can always retreat they can always evade a grand decisive battle uh he forces into the east in 1915 because the the austrians are in real trouble so he has to so he mats a series of limited campaigns in 1915 uh it pushes the russians back essentially breaks the russian army goes into syria conquers syria and then as soon as he's free in the in the east he's got a free hand he moves west and he believes that he's going to fight a new kind of battle against against the french so he's gonna he's going to fight verdant and break the french army at verdant and then and then the plan is that then the allies will launch a horrid relief offensive which will fail badly and then the germans will counter the counter attack and win that's falkenhayn's plan which of course does not work because he's underestimated the french army um and he's he's not capable of doing the level of attrition that you would need to win but verdant is a very very interesting battle which you know we talk about in the book great well i think i don't see any other questions or hands coming up so it is now approaching 20 after six so i think uh unless anybody charges to the four and puts their head over the top as a were now i am going to thank first of all you the audience for attending here with us tonight and to uh participating with the the book launch and then of course nick thank you and uh daniel and nick thank you very much for for fielding the questions and presenting us with the opportunity to engage with the new book and i wish you all the best of luck with the sales and the continued success of it and thank you all for joining us tonight thanks gregg thanks everyone for coming um hope you have a great evening cheers take care stay safe