I've been reading quite a few WWI books recently - but all on the shorter side and one was only 100 pages . Trying to make a dent in my unread WWI book pile. Reviews copied and pasted

They Shall Not Pass: The French Army on the Western Front 1914-1918 by Ian Sumner

>4.5/5 rounding down for goodreads.

>Overall very good, definitely worth a read if you are interested in WWI. Focuses a lot more on the personal accounts of soldiers, mainly accounts from the time (diaries, letters) not sources from after the war. There is a decent amount on combat but also on the day to day life in the trenches. There is some stuff about the thinking of the generals, to explain the logic behind the attacks, but this is secondary to the soldier's experiences. Because of the more personal, on the ground focus I thought it was accessible and that you don't need to know much about WWI to read this. It also isn't particularly long at 220 pages and 5 chapters - a chapter for each year which covers the main battles as well as a related broader topic like morale or discipline.

Douglas Haig: Defeat Into Victory by Gordon Corrigan

>3.5/5 rounding down for goodreads. I got it for £1 on a kindle deal and for that I'm happy with it.

>Very short, about 100 pages total. Enjoyable to read. Corrigan takes a VERY pro-Haig point of view, trying to defend Haig against his critics. His main argument is that Haig was a good leader but constrained by factors outside his control as Britain was the junior partner (on land) compared to the French. So the Somme campaign had to be fought to relieve Verdun and Passchendaele had to be fought to buy time for the French army to recover from the mutinies - and in the end these battles did more damage to the Germans than the British anyway. Corrigan also argues against the more personal criticisms of Haig, such as him not leading from close enough to the frontline or him not being interested in technology. I think he argues the case mostly well, although I happened to agree with this point of view before reading this, but he takes it a bit far in the other direction at times.

Just finished now Disputed Earth: Geology and Trench Warfare on the Western Front 1914-18 by Peter Doyle

>Charity shop find. Enjoyment 3/5 stars. Detail and info 4.5/5. Only read if you are very interested in the WWI Western Front. I'm quite into WWI and I still found it a bit of a struggle.

>It isn't that long at 230 pages plus another 50 for notes/sources. There are a lot of photographs, maps, diagrams - some from the time and some more recent and they tend to be pretty high quality (at least in the Uniform edition). There is plenty of info and lots of detail but it is rather dry to read and at times rather hard to read, but I don't know a lot about geology. There is a lot about how the different terrains (clay regions, chalky regions etc) responded to water (drainage, water levels. runoff etc) and how this affected the war, for things like mining, making dugouts and trenches, tanks etc. Even as a WWI nerd it started to get a bit repetitive reading about the different kinds of soil or clay and how wet it was.

I'm now doing a new thing of one kindle book, one physical book at the same time so I'm now reading The Zimmerman Telegram by Barbara Tuchman (Kindle) and I might start July 1914: Countdown to War by Sean McKeekin