Product Description

Anthony Clayton is an acknowledged expert on the French military and his book is a major contribution to the study and understanding of the First World War. He reveals why and how the French army fought as it did. He profiles its senior commanders - Joffre, Petain, Nivelle and Foch - and analyses its major campaigns both on the Western Front and in the Near East and Africa. PATHS OF GLORY also considers in detail the officers, how they kept their trenches and how men from very different areas of France fought and died together. He scrutinises the make-up and performance of France's large colonial armies and investigates the mutinies of 1917. Ultimately, he reveals how the traumatic French experience of the 1914-18 war indelibly shaped a nation.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #212386 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

About the Author
Anthony Clayton was Senior Lecturer at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst for 29 years (1965-94). One of Britain's leading military historians, he was made a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Academiques in 1988 in recognition of his expertise in French military history.

Customer Reviews

The Greater Suffering
Most books on the Western Front are Anglo-Centric. It is therefore corrective to read a book which describes the war fought by 8.7 million Frenchmen, over fifty percent of whom suffered death or injury.

Equally painful is having to read the French view of the British contribution to the war effort.

To be fair, blame for this must rest not with the military, but with the pre-war political figures who (a) gave no unequivocal committments to France in the event of war, (b) left doubts at the highest level in Berlin as to Britain's likely participation, and (c) failed to prepare for a continental war until it had started!

As Clayton's work makes clear, the French bore the brunt of the war, and their suffering was horrendous.

A must read book, and not only for those of you interested in World War 1, but also for a greater understanding of the disaster that followed in 1940.

Cheese-Eating Victory Monkeys
France has had a bad time militarily since the Revolution. Napoleon lifted it up and dropped it down. His nephew did the same again resulting in the loss of Alsace-Lorraine (the subject that was never to be discussed and never to be forgotten). The great success of the Republics came to the Third Republic in the Great War yet it was a success extracted at great cost opening the way for the debacle of 1940. France and Russia had to keep the Entente fighting while Britain geared itself up for war (1915 and 1916). To both of those nations this must have seemed as long a time as the American equivalent did to Britain (1917 and 1918). This would have been hard enough but it was made worse by a new kind of warfare. No generals really knew how to fight this kind of war; they were feeling their way down a dark and bloody tunnel. French generals particularly (but not uniquely) seemed to have believed in the offensive and to believe that if pressed the other side would break first. As it happened no-one did break in the West until 1918, but before then the men of France were broken on the wheel of war.

Anthony Clayton (who has written excellent books on African warfare and the French decolonalisation wars) provides a good overview of this dreadful calvary. He does not dwell in great detail on the military operations (I recommend Doughty for that) but he describes them in sufficient detail and provides some excellent impressionistic material. One gets to feel the the process whereby France went from a cult of glorious death and the offensive through to the wounded state from which Maréchal Petain was to rescue it. But it was a damned close thing; and neither Britain nor America can be very proud of how much weight France was left to carry.

Which army really won the war?
As the other reviewer makes clear, this highlights the objective fact that, for most of the War, France bore the brunt of the fighting. The author also describes the singular hell of Verdun, a battle which remains relatively unknown to most Brits, who see 1916 as The Somme and not much else. Above all the book describes the state of the French army, warts and all, from the over-optimistic offensives of 1914 which cost the lives of experienced soldiers, through the mutinies of 1917, to the recovery under pressure of 1918. Above all it makes clear the extent to which, when the chips were down, the French did not give up, which makes a contrast to a number of British opinions (even now) of French military prowess. This book is a must if you wish to complement a knowledge of the British experience of the Western Front with a French aspect.