The baseline account of the war, most especially from the British point of view. BH was tremendously influential in the interpretation of the war, and his book is quite competent in outlining all the military areas of the conflict. As well as a serving officer from 1914 on, he spent the rest of his life as a prominent authority on the British Army in that conflict, and as a major force in public debate on the Army of Britain. His book is quite readable. This version of the book was published in 1934. ( )

In his [b:War Memoirs|720467|War Memoirs Of David Lloyd George|David Lloyd George|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/50x75-a91bf249278a81aabab721ef782c4a74.png|706709], [a:Lloyd George|1278911|David Lloyd George|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/m_50x66-82093808bca726cb3249a493fbd3bd0f.png] recalls a conversation with the French General de Castelnau as stalemate set in on the Western Front. “Had (Napoleon) been here”, de Castelnau observed, “he would have thought of the something else”. In fact, Napoleon’s conduct at Wagram, Borodino, and Waterloo suggests otherwise, but the belief took hold. As casualties on the Western Front ran into the hundreds of thousands for a single battle while the gains were measured in yards, some observers at the time and most observers since thought that there must be an alternative, we just had to find it. Those who persisted with the attacks in France and Belgium were guilty of callous stupidity; they should have been looking for the “something else”.

This book makes that argument better than any other. Understandably sickened by the Western Front, Liddell Hart developed the strategy of Indirect Approach, namely, avoiding the bulk of the enemy's forces and taking his flank or rear (see his book [b:Strategy|305909|Strategy|B.H. Liddell Hart|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347396282s/305909.jpg|3081541]). Offensives such as Loos, the Somme, or Third Ypres, where the bulk of the British army threw itself on the defences of the bulk of the German army, should have been avoided. Instead, Liddell Hart praises Gallipoli, in theory if not in practice, and Lawrence’s campaign in Arabia.

The trouble is, as [a:Richard Holmes|3002506|Richard Holmes|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1249593865p2/3002506.jpg] pointed out, that Liddell Hart “could produce no evidence that the destruction of railways in the Hejaz made the teacups rattle in Berlin”. And was the Indirect Approach not what the Schlieffen Plan was all about? It failed, and in doing so it left no room for further Indirect Approaches, only costly but irrelevant sideshows like Salonika. Where there was room for the Indirect Approach, on the Eastern Front, the front line swayed inconclusively this way and that for three years until the Tsarist regime collapsed from within. The Russian army was defeated as much by the uselessness of it's own leaders as by the good generalship of the Germans.

The tragic truth is that the “something else” did not exist militarily, only politically. This was beyond the purview of the generals to deliver, except in Germany where civil authority was more completely subordinated to military authority than elsewhere. To all intents and purposes Hindenburg and Ludendorff ran Germany by the end of the war, the same could not be said for Haig in Britain or even Foch in France. If politicians could not deliver peace the generals must deliver victory and to secure this there was no alternative to defeating the German army in the field. As horrible as the Western Front was, the “something else” on another battlefield is a chimera. ( )

Muy bueno. Escrito con estilo, ironía. Es más que una fría historia, sino que analiza los desarrollos y opina sobre las estrategias y los errores, como los aciertos, postulando críticas a los militares de la época, y a sus ideas. Reivindica a Napoleón. ( )