The German Officer Corps 1890-1914

Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968. First Edition. Octavo. 23cm. Publisher's navy blue cloth titled in gilt to spine. Dustajacket. [xxix]; 242pp. Clean and strong, very light wear to corners and minor bumping at spine ends; internally clean and fresh; in a bright pink dustjacket with some light sunning to the spine and a little soiling and edgewear. A very good, bright copy.

A highly authoritative investigation of the social and military structures at play in Kaiser Wilhem's Germany in the 20 years prior to WW1. The analysis suggests that the highly stratified and tradition obsessed camaraderie of the Germanic military officer classes resulted in an army structure utterly out of touch with modern requirements and requiring considerable reform and adaptation before being fit for wartime purpose. The question remains whether or not this was a universal factor of turn of the 19th century militaries leading into the unnecessary inferno of carnage that was the trench butchery of WW1; it was Douglas Haig, after all, who said that the British military could safely rely on cavalry, as always, and that a handful of machine guns per battalion would be more than sufficient. When everybody in charge is fighting with long obsolete tactics, it's always a teenage paper hanger from Battersea who pays the full price.