The French Army and the First World War

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 adapt and develop techniques which eventually led to victory. In a unique account of the largest Allied army on the Western Front, she revises our understanding not only of wartime strategy and combat, but also of other crucial aspects of France's war, from mutinies and mail censorship to medical services, railways and weapons development.

Elizabeth Greenhalgh is a QE II Research Fellow (Australian Research Council), based in the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy, Canberra. She has published a large number of refereed articles on aspects of the Great War, and is the author of Victory through Coalition: Britain and France during the First World War (Cambridge, 2005). In 2007 this book won the accolade of a Choice magazine Outstanding Academic Title. In 2011 she published Foch in Command: The Forging of a First World War General (Cambridge, 2011) and a French translation appeared in September 2013. For many years she was editor of War and Society, the international peer-reviewed military history journal. She has considerable experience of working in French and other European archives, and has presented papers on the First World War at conferences in Australia, Britain, France, Canada and the United States. Currently she is working on a study of 1918 analysing, as its title states, How the Allies Won.