Hundred Days: The Campaign that Ended World War I

Lloyd, of King’s College London, enters the upper tier of Great War historians with this admirable account of the war’s final campaign, “an incredible story of shot and shell, of battles on a scale almost unimaginable to modern generations.” The “Hundred Days,” from August 8 to November 11, 1918, featured a coordinated series of Allied attacks that pushed the Germans out of France and led the German government finally to seek peace. Lloyd’s unfailing eye for telling anecdotes vitalize his narrative, and he avoids objectifying incidents for the sake of titillation. To set the tone, he describes in unadorned prose the death, in action, of an ordinary British private on October 27, 1918, and the consequences for his family. The text brims with archival research, depicting French and British armies like “coiled springs, taut and alert; waiting to strike.” Lloyd depicts the American army as created from nothing but “hard work, improvisation, courage and determination.” He discusses the Western Front’s “powerful emotional and psychological pull,” and the slow-growing sense that its four-year agony might be ending. German soldiers faced “chaos, disorganization, shellfire and endless fighting” against Allied armies whose commanders were concerned at their own “exhausted state.” Germany, lacking resources, cracked first, its resistance ending “fitfully, in confusion, with a whimper.” But the Allies were too worn to complete their victory and November 11, 1918, while formally ending the war, only set the stage for “two decades of missed opportunities and appeasement.” (Feb.)