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  • Published: 1 May 2007
  • ISBN: 9781845951092
  • Imprint: Pimlico
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $24.99
Categories:

Riding The Retreat

Mons to the Marne 1914 Revisited



In this extraordinary blend of military history and contemporary travelogue, Richard Holmes recounts his journey tracing the route along which the British retreated and the Germans advanced during one of the most dramatic military episodes of the First World War.

The retreat of the British Expeditionary Force from Mons in the early months of the First World War is one of the great dramas of European history. Blending his recreation of the military campaign with contemporary testimony and an account of his own ride over the route, Richard Holmes takes the reader on a unique journey - to glimpse the summer the old world ended.

  • Published: 1 May 2007
  • ISBN: 9781845951092
  • Imprint: Pimlico
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $24.99
Categories:

About the author

Richard Holmes

Richard Holmes was educated at Cambridge, Northern Illinois and Reading University. He was a member of the Department of War Studies at RMA Sandhurst between 1969 and 1985, when he left to command 2nd Battalion The Wessex Regiment. He was appointed Professor of Military and Security Studies at Cranfield University in 1995. Professor Holmes has written over a dozen books on military topics, is general editor of Oxford University Press's Companion to Military History and he has written and presented several television programmes, including two six-part BBC TWO series, War Walks I and War Walks II, as well as a series on the Western Front which was televised in the summer of 1999.

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Praise for Riding The Retreat

The author tells two stories in parallel: that of his own journey and a first-rate account of what happened eighty years before

Max Egremont, Evening Standard

A book that amuses yet haunts, brisk at one moment, melancholy the next... an effortless blend of past and present

Michael Sheridan, Independent on Sunday

Succeeds admirably in both parts: the travelogue weaves in and out, giving welcome relief from the sweat and fear, the sleeplessness, the fearful wounds and the killing... Masterly

Daily Telegraph