Germany's invasion of France in August 1914 represented a threat to the great power status of both Britain and France. The countries had no history of cooperation, yet the entente they had created in 1904 proceeded by trial and error, via recriminations, to win a war of unprecedented scale and ferocity. Elizabeth Greenhalgh details the civil-military relations on each side, the political and military relations between the two powers, the maritime and industrial collaboration that were indispensable to an industrialized war effort and the Allied prosecution of war on the western front.

Ferdinand Foch ended the First World War as Marshal of France and supreme commander of the Allied armies on the Western Front. Foch in Command is a pioneering study of his contribution to the Allied victory. Elizabeth Greenhalgh uses contemporary notebooks, letters and documents from previously under-studied archives to chart how the artillery officer, who had never commanded troops in battle when the war began, learned to fight the enemy, to cope with difficult colleagues and Allies, and to manoeuvre through the political minefield of civil-military relations. She offers valuable insights...

This is a comprehensive new history of the French army's critical contribution to the Great War. Ranging across all fronts, Elizabeth Greenhalgh examines the French army's achievements and failures and sets these in the context of the difficulties of coalition warfare and the relative strengths and weaknesses of the enemy forces it faced. Drawing from new archival sources, she reveals the challenges of dealing with and replenishing a mass conscript army in the face of slaughter on an unprecedented scale, and shows how, through trials and defeats, French generals and their troops learned to...