The many men, so beautiful!/ And they all dead did lie:/ And a thousand thousand slimy things/Lived on; and so did I.
Jan 16
The Killing Season: The Autumn of 1914, Ypres, and the Afternoon That Cost Germany the War by Robert Cowley (Random House, 2025)

Reviewed by Elizabeth Stice



Though written in 1834, Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” quoted in the title of this review, is all too apt for the Great War. A mariner on a ship has killed a kindly albatross, which has cost the crew the wind. Like those who started the Great War, his bad choice has destined all for “woe.” Soon the crew begins to dry out and languish:

Water, water, every where,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, every where,

Nor any drop to drink.

The very deep did rot: O Christ!

That ever this should be!

Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs

Upon the slimy sea.

This could be the cold and wet Flemish countryside, filled with water unsafe to drink, but slowly rotting away men’s feet. In the poem, all the crew except the mariner are taken by death. The bodies drop around him, but he lives on, much like the survivors in the trenches, traumatized by what he has seen and done.

The many men, so beautiful!

And they all dead did lie:

And a thousand thousand slimy things

Lived on; and so did I.



“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” can evoke the Great War because some of the images of the war have been so engraved in our minds that even after over a century almost anyone can picture the mud of Flanders, with its oozy clay, and the storms that swallowed men whole in their trenches. We can imagine a forlorn man walking across duckboards in a shell-scarred, sunken landscape. When we think about the Great War, we think of the waste of life and shake our heads about the “lions led by donkeys.”



Robert Cowley’s new book The Killing Season does not greatly depart from that familiar scene, but it is masterful nonetheless. The Killing Season is about the iconic first battle of Ypres, in the autumn of 1914. It was still the beginning of the Great War but the end of an open war fought outside of trenches. It was an incredibly costly battle, with the familiar mud and foolish generals. The British had 58,155 casualties (including 7,960 dead), the Belgians lost 18,522, and the Germans somewhere between 80,000 and 134,000. During the time of the battle, the French lost 104,000 men across the Western Front. As Cowley emphasizes at the beginning of his book, “more men died in the first four months of the Great War on the Western Front than in any comparable interval in the four-year struggle.” It was a veritable killing season.



The Killing Season is an incredibly descriptive work, weighing in just over 700 pages, but it is also fiercely analytic. The book has a clear argument, that the Battle of Ypres was a/the deciding point in the war and more significant than the Battle of the Marne, which is often more emphasized. Though the Battle of the Marne is credited with stopping the German advance, Cowley demonstrates the ways in which Ypres decisively ended the Schlieffen Plan and initiated trench warfare and the ways in which the Germans squandered an opportunity for victory, which meant the beginning of a slow defeat. Remarkable for its length, this book is an engaging and interesting read even for readers who have no strong feelings about the significance of Ypres versus the Marne.



The Killing Season is not kind to the war’s generals. Though in recent years, the war’s generals have been somewhat re-appraised by historians like Spencer Jones, Simon Robbins, and Dan Todman, Cowley considers most of them to have indeed been “donkeys,” which he demonstrates with anecdotes of their wartime leadership. Only three major leaders demonstrated excellence according to Cowley: Ferdinand Foch, King Albert of Belgium, and Fritz von Lossberg. Several leaders of lower-rank are highly praised in this book, though. And the lack of appreciation of leadership at lower levels is identified by Cowley as one of the causes of the German blunders at Ypres.



In contrast with German leadership in 1914, Cowley excels at crediting soldiers (and marines and sailors) at all ranks. This book has illuminating passages about major figures like Ferdinand Foch, John French, Erich von Falkenhayn, and Moltke the younger. But it also highlights the lives and service of men like Paul Maze, a French artist who rode a motorcycle for the British and did some scouting and translating. (He later wrote A Frenchman in Khaki.) There are numerous passages about the efforts of the Belgians to open the locks and inundate their own land and the heroism of Hendrik Geeraert, a barge captain who understood the canal system and was willing to risk death, over the course of several nights, to serve his country. By drawing on existing scholarship, official histories, diaries and journals published and unpublished, Cowley is remarkably able to describe the war and the men in it.



Despite engaging the world of so many of the Western Front tropes, Cowley describes and analyzes much that has been overlooked about the early days of the war. In many chapters, this book centers the Belgian experience and its leadership, which is very rare—despite the importance of Belgium. Just as Cowley draws attention to less known figures alongside the famous, he is able to emphasize the significance of smaller struggles like the Siege of Dixmude, comparing the efforts of the French Marines to the Spartan defense at the Battle of Thermopylae. This book offers insights into Churchill’s (and the Navy’s) role on the Western Front, before Gallipoli.



In 1914, much of the Entente world believed that the Germans had to be stopped, for the sake of civilization. Newspapers in the Entente world made much of German atrocities, much of which would be disregarded as propaganda after the war. Like historian Michael Howard, Cowley does not shy away from the nature of the German war effort. The Germans did commit atrocities in Belgium. Though driven by their fear of the franc-tireur, there is no disputing that Germans killed and assaulted civilians and pillaged towns. When the Germans entered Ypres, they demanded 70,000 francs, and when the town couldn’t come up with all of it, they broke into the post office and took the petty cash (though the later destruction of Cloth Hall and St. Martin’s Church was likely accidental). Cowley also very much blames the Germans for expanding the war beyond Serbia and Austria-Hungary, writing that “the Germans hijacked a war.” In particular, Cowley makes the case for Moltke the younger bearing a great deal of responsibility, writing, “no person in charge was more responsible for starting the Great War.”



Perhaps most damning for Cowley was the way that the Germans wasted their men. Though all armies were guilty of foolish attacks, in too many British accounts, the Germans who charged the trenches, shoulder to shoulder, were soon after described as dead lying “in heaps.” “Der Kindermord bei Ypern” were overwhelmingly young and inexperienced, 55% were under twenty, 80% under twenty-five and 95% single. The lives seem truly wasted, because the Germans had the initial advantage and the manpower, but failure of nerve and failure to understand the battlefield in the moment meant that the Germans did not seize their opportunity to effectively break a very thin Entente line, which was held heroically but very tenuously. The Killing Season makes very clear the German errors in these early days that ultimately cost them the war.



The emphasis on the waste of human life on the Western Front is familiar. The Killing Season is consistent with many of the works written after the war, which saw the conflict as a crisis of civilization. It seemed to be a self-destructive impulse across a continent, a moment of madness, a living example of Freud’s death instinct in action. How else to explain the mass murder perpetrated on both sides, often against their own soldiers through foolish commands? Vera Brittain would likely agree with the last portions of the book, which reflect on the war more broadly as a cultural crisis.



You might think that a work of military history covering the relatively familiar ground of the Western Front, with its cruelty and charnel smell, would not be especially captivating. You would be wrong. Cowley’s style is exceptional and his descriptions of people and battles is engaging. His approach involves covering traditional topics like tactics and generals and including maps, but also integrating minor figures, addressing emerging technologies, and his selection of quotes from primary sources is exceptional. The book, for all its 700 pages, is, at times, a page-turner, and proof that the Western Front continues to be not just an important site of the war but an important part of World War I study. This book is capable of engaging the wide audience it was written to reach.

The Killing Season will be released in February 2025.



Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history and assistant director of the honors program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. When she can, she reads and writes about World War I and she is the author of Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War (2023).

An extensive and well-written history of the first few months of the Great War in Europe. The author portrays both the battles and the characters effectively with gripping prose. His mastery of the topic is apparent. At times the book the difficult to put down because of the effective tension created by the author. Would recommend this book to anyone interested in military history and would definitely read another title by this author.

I have just concluded my reading of an ARC of "The Killing Season: The Autumn of 1914, Ypres and the Afternoon that Cost Germany a War," written by the noted military historian, Robert Cowley and published by Random House who graciously provided me with the ARC. It is, in my view, a "Tour de Force" in revisiting the often neglected mobile war that preceded trench warfare on the Western Front, It reads, in some ways, rather like an historiographical essay examining the current state of scholarship surrounding these events in the first few months of the war, with all of the lost opportunities that characterized that time. Those months were critical in leading to the stalemate which settled over the balance of the war until the U.S. entrance in significant numbers in 1918. The author is clearly well-versed in his sources and includes frequent critical but justified examinations of both Entente and Central Powers military doctrine and leadership as it evolved (devolved?) on the Western Front. Discussions of the partisan war, Allied propaganda and French and German stubborn persistence in half baked planning and the development of tactical doctrine is particularly illuminating. Many of you are familiar with Barbara Tuchman's "The Guns of August"; this book takes off, in great detail, precisely where the earlier text ends. It is recommended for every serious collection on World War I.

An in-depth coverage of the first few months of a war that would eventually change the face of Europe. Proposing a new event as the turning point for Germany during the war, this book is well worth a read for its fresh ideas.