The year is 1904. Anglo-German relations are tense, but King Edward VII may be able to patch things up with the ever-volatile Kaiser Wilhelm when he visits Germany. However, a junior German Guards officer has just written a language-training book with incendiary remarks about the British which will certainly cause…
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Before the war, German military intelligence assessment of other countries was handled by the individual country and specialist departments of the Great General Staff. So, for instance, the Third Department covered France and Britain. Any coordination of these assessments was handled by officers above departmental level, meaning the Chief of…
Leave a CommentOr rather, ‘Who’s in a picture?’ The cover photo of Holding Out – which was found for me by my cousin Justin Lyon – is a slightly cropped version of a photograph from Corbis Historical/Getty Images. Their caption is: Field Marshal General von Hindenburg and General of Infantry Otto von…
Leave a CommentWhen you go home, tell them of us and sayFor your tomorrow, we gave our today. In memory of Captain Comrie Cowan, MC and Bar, company commander, 16th Battalion The Royal Scots, seriously wounded at Arras on 7 April 1917, aged 20. My grandfather. Captain Charlie Cowan, company commander, 12th…
Leave a CommentA few years ago, I co-edited this translation of the 1930 German official monograph on the first day of the battle of Amiens, Die Katastrophe des 8. August 1918. My role was to fine tune the translation and to write the editor’s introduction, which you can find here. The book was…
2 CommentsThis is a chapter I contributed to an edited book published back in 2014. In it, I analyse the relationship between the constitutionally separate parts of the German army, the Prussian, Bavarian, Saxon and Württemberg contingents. This is part of a bigger German political scene, the Kaiserreich’s dynamic between centralising…
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