Product Description

The retreat of the British Expeditionary Force from Mons in the early months of the First World War is one of the great dramas of European history. Blending his recreation of the military campaign with contemporary testimony and an account of his own ride over the route, Richard Holmes takes the reader on a unique journey - to glimpse the summer the old world ended.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #239186 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

About the Author
Richard Holmes is Professor of Military and Security Studies at Cranfield University and the Royal Military College of Science. He was educated at Cambridge, Northern Illinois, and Reading Universities, and carried out his doctoral research on the French army of the Second Empire. For many years he taught military history at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. A celebrated military historian, Richard Holmes is the author of the best-selling and widely acclaimed Tommy and Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket. His dozen other books include Dusty Warriors, Sahib, The Western Front, The Little Field Marshal: Sir John French, The Road to Sedan, Firing Line, The Second World War in Photographs and Fatal Avenue: A Traveller's History of Northern France and Flanders (also published by Pimlico). He is general editor of The Oxford Companion to Military History and has presented eight BBC TV series, including 'War Walks', 'The Western Front' and 'Battlefields', and is famous for his hugely successful series 'Wellington: The Iron Duke' and 'Rebels and Redcoats'.

Customer Reviews

An exemplar of military history writing
Although this is one of Richard Holmes' earliest works and now re-released, 'Riding the Retreat' remains a unique amalgam of travel book and military history of the most enjoyable, if somewhat quirky, type. As a detailed view of the opening moves of August and September 1914, I can only praise this book. Both strategy and more detailed anecdotes are supported by snippets of archival material that may already be familiar to those who are devotees of Richard Holmes' other books. The nature of the BEF, its social structure and the individual battles are brought to life as Holmes and his companions explore the battlefields in a way as never before. But what is different is the often humourous stories of this, Professor Holmes' equestrian adventure with colleagues, covering the countryside in Belgium and France of the BEF's retreat. Details of saddle soreness, riding through fields and forests and the antics of his own horse jostle with a personal narrative that would grace any travelogue.

Professor Holmes' passion for the ordinary soldier comes to the fore as well as his respect for those coping with a conflict that was outside of all of their expectations. Admittedly I am a fan of Professor Holmes and his writing however I would personally recommend this as his finest work to date and, for me, this is the definitive history of those first weeks from the BEF's perspective.

Thoroughly recommended.

Richard Holmes' passion for history is without equal
A spectacular book. It takes the form of a travelogue about Holmes' own journey retracing the steps of the BEF (as the 1914 army was called) From preparing to go to France to the retreat from Mons. This book displays Holmes' total command of both historical fact and story telling. At no time does he become more important that his subject matter (so rare in travel writing), as he skilfully unravels what it must have been like to go to war in 1914, using diaries, letters and regimental biographies as well as first hand experiences, eighty years on. It is an absolutely riveting read.

"As the champagne flowed..."
I'll read this book again because the account of the retreat from Mons in the opening months of The Great War is excellent and deserves further study if, as I am, one is in the process of becoming a battlefields guide. Despite this book not being intended as an exhaustive account of the period August-September 1914, it is a very good primer for the retreat - in fact it's probably detailed enough for the majority of readers with a general interest in WW1. As usual with Richard Holmes, he adds colour to the picture with descriptions of earlier conflicts and events associated with the terrain he's traversing, from Roman times, through The Knights Templar to Marlborough & Wellington's campaigns.

One thing surprised me. In the preface to this 2007 edition he acknowledges ["mea maxima culpa"] the grave error of attributing the storming of Le Quesnoy to the Canadians rather than the Kiwis but the error is uncorrected in the text. If you know the setting for the 'escalade' and how the Kiwis managed it, you might well imagine Kiwis sticking pins into a wax model of the author, to this day.

Sadly, one thing that did not surprise me, because I find it all to prevelent in books of military history, where clear mapping is vital, was the poor quality of the maps. I'll wager that the originals have been substantially reduced down to fit the page and thus have become cramped and, in some cases, well nigh illegible. Place names and names of combat units are in an attractive but wholly unsuitable calligraphic script. The map of 'Mons. 23rd August 1914' looks like a spider's web that has been sprayed with ink - and then walked over by the spider. These maps are by Elizabeth Holmes.

Prof Holmes could do with some tuition in photography, too. The pix of his party on the trip are woeful. The great war photographer Robert Capa famously said, "If your pictures are not good enough, you're not close enough." He was talking about battlefield reportage but the maxim holds good for everyone else, too.

One of the things I'll be looking out for and making a note of - just for fun, rather than in pursuit of widening my own knowlwdge of WW1 - is how many times the phrase "as the champagne flowed.." occurs in this book.

I mention this because there is sizeable element of "what we did on our holidays" in Holmes's narrative. It's true to say that the account of the journey Holmes and his saddle-mates undertook is part of the story but I was just a tad uncomfortable with the extent of the quotidien details - the endless fettling required to keep a horse roadworthy, what he had for dinner, from aperitif to eau-de-vie and cigars, at various restaurants and gracious chateaux and country estates along the way. Despite being in the land of Pouilly-Fumé and Sancerre, there are repeated mentions of "Syvaner", clearly a Holmes favourite [at the time], which surprised me because it is the principle grape of the notorious Liebfraumilch, of which the less drunk the better.

Talking of drunk, there were also an alarming number of occasions on which the brigadier [as he now is] could not remember going to bed/who drove home/whether he was talking nonsense all night, followed by an equal number of regrettable hangovers next morning.

As for the horses - Holmes and pals definitely did it the hard way. Holmes's horse is terrified of dustbins and plastic bags caught in hedges. A gust of wind in trees makes one of the horses spook, rip the top rail off a fence and escape, dragging the rail with it accompanied by Holmes's horse, which was also tethered to the same rail. On another occasion the same horse ran off with a sizable stable door in tow. Another horse spooked in the roadway, threw its rider and pitched itself upside down into a ditch where it thrashed about on its back with its legs in the air. As Holmes so rightly says, "there's no fathoming the equine mind."

However, the account of the BEF's fighting march south is classic Holmes, full of strategic, tactical and personal detail. I've always found Holmes's writing shot through with compassion and sympathy when describing individuals in the actions he describes and this gives his account a generous humanity, whether dealing with the British or the German troops.

I've been poking a little fun at Prof Holmes's account of his ride through Belgium and France because it was on many occasions an equine version of "Three Men In A Boat" but there's no mistaking the quality and solidity of the military history in this eminently enjoyable book.