The Killing Season

"The First Battle of Ypres, waged in the fall of 1914, changed how wars are fought. This decisive battle denied Germany a quick victory as they failed to capture the Channel ports, ensuring World War I would carry on for years. It not only extended the war but defined it, and in novelistic prose Robert Cowley delves into the human experience of this weeks-long pitched battle that gave birth to 'no man's land,' that spectral space of shattered trees and pockmarked earth: battlegrounds where thousands of men fought to gain thirty feet of territory--only to lose it again the next day. As battle lines became entrenched, Cowley reveals a crucial, overlooked 'What if?' of history: the afternoon when the Germans hesitated to attack the depleted British forces and lost their best chance of winning the Western Front"

Robert Cowley is an authority on American and European military history whose writing spans the Civil War to World War II. He has held several senior positions in book and magazine publishing and is the founding editor of the award-winning MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. Cowley has also written and edited three collections of essays in counterfactual history known as What If?, and he is the author of the forthcoming book The Killing Season, a history of the first Battle of Ypres and the beginning of World War I. As part of his research, he drove and walked the entire length of the Western Front. He lives in Newport, Rhode Island.