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foreword  War is a reactive business, a competition whose outcome is dependent not on some sort of absolute standard of excellence on the part of one side, but on the relative superiority of one side over another. It is this relationship—the dynamic between two opponents as each struggles to impose its will on the other— that should be at the heart of operational military history. But it rarely is. Military history, for all its massive progress in the past two or three decades, particularly in the English-speaking world, remains far too national—and even nationalistic —in its approach. If the serious study of military history as a self-contained subject has a significant agenda for the future, it is this—to be comparative. For no war and no front is this injunction more important or more pressing than for the First World War and its Western Front. The cycle of reaction and reaction between two coalitions, remarkably similar in their military organizations and in the technologies they employed, produced a conflict that was not as static as suggested by the immobility of the trenches which dominated the character of the fighting. It has now become axiomatic that“modern war”was conceived and developed through the experience of this titanic fight and the lessons it bequeathed. But the military history on which such arguments rest continues to be lopsided. English-language historians, not just Britons but also Americans, Australians, Canadians, and New Zealanders, have done more than those writing in French and German to deepen our understanding of the conduct of operations on the Western Front. However, their research is too often written from the perspective of one side only. It pays little or no attention to the sources available for the Germans, for what they tell us about German intentions, German reactions, or even German perspectives on British and French efforts. This gap is all the more extraordinary because the German official history of the war on land, Der Weltkrieg, is not a rare set of volumes, at least for the war up to the spring of 1917—a point it had reached with Volume XII, published in 1939. By then the pace of its authors was quickening: the events of 1914 had taken six volumes, those of 1915 three (and these are the basis for this translation), and those of 1916 two. Two more volumes appeared to take the story to November 1918. Being completed during the Second World War,Volumes XIII and XIV never gained wide circulation. Five hundred copies of each were reprinted in 1956 but did not sell out until 1975. Such disappointing sales were themselves indications of two phenomena. First, the Second World War had made the study of the First World War deeply unfashionable throughout Europe—a trend that only changed in Britain in 1964, after the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s outbreak, and in Germany not until the ninetieth anniversary in 2004—if then. Second, German military history after 1945, insofar as it survived at all, stepped away from the operational focus embraced by the General Staff historians of the Wilhelmine period, of which Der Weltkrieg was the final manifestation. This condition still pertains: operational military history does not have the respectability in German academic circles that it has now acquired in the English-speaking world. The British official history has been reprinted; the German has not been, despite the scarcity of Volumes XIII and XIV. These two arguments may be sufficient explanations for the neglect of the Der Weltkrieg in Germany, but they do not apply to English-speaking historians. Their reasons for not consulting it more frequently are, presumably, linguistic. For monoglot scholars, this translation will be a boon beyond measure. It has been fashionable to rubbish the work of the official historians of the First World War of all languages. Sir James Edmonds, whose labours on behalf of Britain were not completed until 1948, and who has been criticized by David French, Tim Travers , and Denis Winter—to cite three historians with very different perspectives— presided over an enterprise that may not conform to current expectations of historians but that nonetheless strove hard for objectivity. As Stephen Green has shown in Writing the Great War: Sir James Edmonds and the Official Histories 1915–1948 (2003), this was team writing avant la lettre. Draft narratives were compiled from the documents and then, in the search for balance, were circulated to the surviving participants for their comments. Edmonds’s...

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