The Killing Season: The Autumn of 1914, Ypres, and the Afternoon That Cost Germany a War - Hardcover

by Robert Cowley (Author)

An in-depth, authoritative account of the fall of 1914 on the Western Front and the First Battle of Ypres, a true turning point in World War I and in modern warfare--by the founding editor of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History

"A masterful and heartbreaking book . . . If you want to know how modern warfare began, The Killing Season is for you."--Geoffrey C. Ward, co-author of The Civil War, The War, and The Vietnam War

The Marne may have saved Paris and prevented a devastating setback for the Allies, but it did not spell eventual defeat for Germany. Ypres did.

The final months of 1914 were the bloodiest interval in a famously bloody war, a killing season. They ended with the First Battle of Ypres, a struggle in West Flanders, Belgium, whose importance has been too long overlooked--until now. Robert Cowley's fresh, novelistic account of this crucial period describes how German armies in France were poised to sweep north to capture the Channel ports and knock England out of the war--and were only held back by a brilliant improvisation from a cobbled-together handful of desperate British, French, and Belgian troops.

In a re-examination of events that have too long seemed set in stone, Cowley combines a wide array of source materials with sharp portrayals both of military leaders and of the men they led. We follow Albert of Belgium, the world's last warrior king; French General Ferdinand Foch, a former professor of military science; and Hendrik Geeraert, an alcoholic barge keeper, who pulled off Albert's literal last-ditch effort. Many other memorable characters emerge, including Sir John French, a British commander, who displayed his greatest talent for maneuver in the bedroom; along with both a young Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill.

The vast brawl of four armies in Flanders was a turning point that irrevocably changed the nature of modern warfare. In this visceral account, based on thirty years of research and picking up where Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August left off, Cowley details the crucial decisions that determined the outcome of the Great War--which may have been decided by a single, extraordinary afternoon.

Author Biography

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.