Abstract
The German Army at Ypres is the fifth in a series of books, each of which tells the tale of a major battle (or battlefield) of the First World War from an exclusively German perspective. (Earlier books in the series dealt with the battles of Cambrai and Passchendaele, the fighting on the Somme during the first half of the war, and the long struggle for possession of Vimy Ridge.)
Like the other books in this series, The German Army at Ypres includes many substantial passages from memoirs written by German veterans of the battle. These excerpts, quite a few of which are drawn from hard-to-find works, allow the reader to look at any given engagement through the eyes of several different participants, each of whom occupied a different position in the hierarchy of the German forces at Ypres as well as a different location on the battlefield.
In selecting, translating, and placing passages from memoirs, the author makes particularly good use of the recollections of the Kriegsfreiwilligen, the (often well-educated) young men who found themselves fighting at Ypres a few short weeks after volunteering for service. While making clear that the legend of the song-filled students-in-arms is a poor reflection of either the composition or experience of most of the German units that fought at Ypres in 1914, he is far too wise to despise the testimony of observers who, in contrast to the vast majority of those who carried rifles or served artillery pieces in that battle, had both the skills and the inclination to reduce their experiences to writing.
The German Army at Ypres also includes a great deal of material from regimental histories. These indispensable sources, which many present-day students of Wilhelmine Germany dismiss as works of nationalist propaganda, might well be compared to the school yearbooks that have long been popular in so many parts of the English-speaking world. On the one hand, they are the stereotyped, cliché-ridden products of an industry devoted to a particularly rosy view of a generally miserable collective experience. On the other hand, they often provide information on events and personalities that cannot be found anywhere else.