With keen attention to the personalities of leaders in London, Berlin, Paris, and Saint Petersburg, Barbara Tuchman organizes the elements of a complex, multifaceted reality into a compelling drama of national ambitions and individual egos (among them General Joseph Joffre of France; Lord Kitchener, the British war minister; and the German generals von Moltke and von Kluck). As she charts the opening gambits of the war and the strategies and tactics of the early encounters, she offers incisive, illuminating accounts of the frontline advances and backchannel maneuverings that led to the Allied pursuit of the German battle cruiser Goeben through the Mediterranean, the German invasion of Belgium, the Battle of Liège, the burning of the city of Louvain, and, eventually, the tragedy of the Marne. Winston Churchill characterized the first thirty days of World War I as “a drama never surpassed.” The Guns of August tells us why.
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