‘Good-morning, good morning!’ the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead,
And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
These lines from Siegfried Sassoon’s poem ‘The General’ were written in 1917.
Graham Goodlad analyses the battle that saved Paris but initiated four years of trench warfare.
In a new book, Robert Kershaw argues that the lack of a German perspective means we have only a partial understanding of the events of May-June 1940. Here, he explains what his research tells us about a battle that changed the tide of the Second World War.