The Killing Season
A New History of Autumn 1914
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The Killing Season
Narrated by:
Paul Boehmer
Buy Now for ₹889.93
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Narrated by:
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Paul Boehmer
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Written by:
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Robert Cowley
An in-depth, authoritative account of the autumn of 1914 on the Western Front and the First Battle of Ypres, a true turning point in modern warfare.
The final months of 1914 were the bloodiest interval in a famously bloody war, a killing season. They ended with the First Battle of Ypres, a struggle in West Flanders, Belgium, the importance of which has been too long over-looked – until now.
Robert Cowley’s account of this crucial period describes how German armies in France were poised to sweep north to capture the Channel ports and knock England out of the war – and were only held back by a brilliant improvisation from a cobbled-together handful of desperate British, French and Belgium troops.
In a re-examination of events that have too long seemed set in stone, Cowley combines a wide array of source materials with sharp portrayals both of military leaders and the men they lead. We follow Albert of Belgium, the world’s last warrior king; French General Ferdinand Foch, a former professor of military science; and Hendrik Geeraert, an alcoholic barge keeper, who pulled off Albert’s literal last-ditch effort. Many other memorable characters emerge, including Sir John French along with both a young Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill.
The vast brawl of four armies in Flanders was a turning point that irrevocably changed the nature of modern warfare. In this visceral account, based on 30 years of research and picking up where Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August left off, Cowley details the crucial decisions that determined the outcome of the Great War – which may have been decided by a single, extraordinary afternoon.©2025 Robert Cowley (P)2025 Penguin Random House LLC
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Critic Reviews
The Killing Season has all the elements of an epic. A bloody, consequential battle, a cast of heroic characters, taut writing, superb research, and an unputdownable story, all make Robert Cowley’s a great book. It will stand as a classic of military history.
This is a masterful and heart-breaking book. If you want to know how modern warfare began, The Killing Season is for you.
Robert Cowley brilliantly brings to light how underappreciated British, Belgian, and French heroism – amid the modern world’s introduction to the horrific concert of shrapnel-spewing artillery, repeating rifles, and machine guns – blocked the German advance to sea... Revisionist and original military history at its finest.
[A] thrilling and compellingly readable account of the Battle of Ypres in October 1914… a magnificent, monumental achievement.
With a novelist’s eye for drama, and a historian’s mastery of detail, Cowley delivers a powerfully immersive experience for the reader, viscerally conveying the sheer folly of a conflict that decimated Europe.
Robert Cowley’s agonising account of the bloody struggle for Ypres… transports us to the very heart of the action.
Cowley provides a more balanced account of this period than is often the case in English accounts.
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