A Storm in Flanders: The Ypres Salient, 1914-1918: Tragedy and Triumph on the Western Front [Paperback]

Groom recounts the major details of each major battle around Ypres, primarily from the perspective of the British, whose professional army was virtually annihilated in the first year of fighting. His cheif protagonist is General Sir Douglas Haig, who led the British Army through most of the war. Groom's treatment of haig is pretty fair; he praises the General and faults him when necessary, though most of the other commanders around Ypres are not given the same treatment. They are generally characterized as competent (Plumer) or incompetent (Gough). The German command, as deadly as their defense was against repeated British attacks, are typically considered emotional and less than competent for the job they were sent to do.

In general, Groom doesn't present any new ideas about these men, finding (as many other historians do) fault in the commanders for being uncreative, unrealistic (in that even after years of stalemate, many thought that one great assault could break the enemy lines and win the war) and wasteful, though he does seem to realize that there wasn't much alternative to attrition, and that attrition strategy is what ultimately won the war, albeit at a terrible cost.

Groom does his best work when recounting the plight of the common soldier, particularly the Kitchener armies that manned the front after the British regulars and territorials were ground up by the salient. Their story, and those of their German counterparts (who included many of Germany's college students), shed light on the true tragedy of Ypres. Hundreds of thousands of common men blown to smithereens by artillery or hurled against enemy positions across barely-traversable no-man's land, all while seeing neither gain in ground nor possiblity of survival. Groom's descriptions of the terrible conditions in the salient is amazing, it is described as a place where men lived in mud and filth, the dead lay unburied, all while the high probablity of death by any one of a number of means hung overhead. The personal accounts of soldiers and other personnel (there is one from a woman who sponsored a hospital that was absolutely horrifying) make for some very compelling reading.

The one complaint I have with this book is Groom's willingness to dumb things down, which is possibly an attempt to educate his American audience on matter which they may know little about, but is not at all necessary.

Ultimately, this book is pretty informative. While it is basically the short version of the battle from a military standpoint, it more than makes up for this with its description of life in the trenches and the toll Ypres took on the common soldier.