Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914-1918

Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914-1918. By Alexander Watson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-521-8801-2. Map. Illustrations. Table. Glossary. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xv, 288. $99.00.

For more than four years, mdlions of European lived and died in a narrow zone running from the North Sea to the Swiss border. The experience of the Western Front, in all its brutality, casts a long shadow across the twentieth century. In this ambitious and compelling monograph, Alexander Watson proposes to explain how the personnel of two enemy armies, the British and the German, coped with the stresses of combat. In the end, one of those armies buckled and collapsed under the strain. Watson, in seeking to understand this result, reminds us that such an ending was not foreordained.

At the heart of his study is an effort to study soldier behavior from a "psychological rather than sociological or military institutional" perspective (p. 5). Watson is interested in survival strategies, gleaned from experience in the particular conditions of the Western...