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Informationen zum Autor Robert Cowley is an authority on American and European military history whose writing spans the Civil War to World War II. He has held several senior positions in book and magazine publishing and is the founding editor of the award-winning MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History . Cowley has also written and edited three collections of essays in counterfactual history known as What If? , and he is the author of the forthcoming book The Killing Season , a history of the first Battle of Ypres and the beginning of World War I. As part of his research, he drove and walked the entire length of the Western Front. He lives in Newport, Rhode Island. Klappentext "The First Battle of Ypres, waged in the fall of 1914, changed how wars are fought. This decisive battle denied Germany a quick victory as they failed to capture the Channel ports, ensuring World War I would carry on for years. It not only extended the war but defined it, and in novelistic prose Robert Cowley delves into the human experience of this weeks-long pitched battle that gave birth to 'no man's land,' that spectral space of shattered trees and pockmarked earth: battlegrounds where thousands of men fought to gain thirty feet of territory--only to lose it again the next day. As battle lines became entrenched, Cowley reveals a crucial, overlooked 'What if?' of history: the afternoon when the Germans hesitated to attack the depleted British forces and lost their best chance of winning the Western Front" Leseprobe I The Shadow of Schlieffen Prologue August 20, 1914 Near Charleroi, Belgium “There was a moment in the experience of every man in the war, when he realized suddenly the magnitude of the forces he was pitted against. It might come soon or it might come late, it might be screamed out with the distraught voice of a frenzied imagination, or whispered with the ashen lips of fear, but inevitably the time came when a cold hand gripped each man’s heart.” For Edward L. Spears, a twenty-eight-year-old lieutenant in the 11th Hussars, that moment came early, on a summer evening in 1914. Spears was something of an exotic bird in his own army: He spoke fluent French. He had been born in France and had lived there until his Anglo-Irish parents divorced. He was then raised in Ireland; at sixteen and a half, he joined the British cavalry. Army intelligence made use of the young officer’s language skills. He devised and compiled an Anglo-French codebook and translated French tactical handbooks. His fellow officers regarded him as too brainy for his own good—and, indeed, as Max Egremont, his biographer, writes, Spears was “an outsider in both countries: not quite English and certainly not French.” Late in the spring of 1914, the British War Office sent him to Paris to work with the French in the Ministry of War, posing as a civilian; he also ran agents in Belgium. He packed a uniform, just in case. By the beginning of August, Great Britain found itself swept up in a continental war, which soon became a world one. London chose Spears to serve as a liaison officer with Gen. Charles Lanrezac’s Fifth Army. Spears’s appointment was crucial because he would also act as the principal connection with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) that would take up position to the left of the Fifth. Soon he was on his way to Rethel, Lanrezac’s headquarters in the forest of the Ardennes. Spears always claimed that he was the first British officer to reach the Western Front and to see action of any kind. During one of his first days at Rethel, German cavalry scouts chased, and nearly caught, the car in which he was riding. Only a chauffeur’s quick-thinking U-turn and a high-speed dash away from the galloping horsemen saved him from capture. On the evening of August 20, a Thursday, Spears sat with a French officer on a grassy hills...
