Blade of a Sword

The enthralling story of the German 73rd Fusilier Regiment, the regiment of Ernst Jünger, author of the renowned Storm of Steel, as it fought through the major campaigns of World War I’s Western Front.Combining traditional military history with a trench-­level soldier’s view of the Great War, Dr Matthias Strohn tracks the experiences of an elite German regiment throughout the conflict, following the men who fought and died in the service of what would ultimately prove to be a futile cause. The German 73rd Fusilier Regiment spent the whole of World War I on the Western Front and was one of the Imperial German Army’s most elite units. Starting with the occupation of Liège, it took part in nearly every major campaign in the West, including the Champagne offensives, the Somme, Vimy Ridge, Passchendaele and the Operation Michael offensives. Using the personal accounts of the soldiers themselves, including Ernst Jünger, author of Storm of Steel, this engrossing story of a regiment at war presents the horror of trench warfare on a human scale, through the eyes of ordinary men-at-arms, as they fought for honour and survival in military history’s most brutal theatre of combat.

Dr Matthias Strohn has published widely on 20th-century German and European military history and is an expert on the German army in World War I and the inter-war period. He was educated at the universities of Münster (Germany) and Oxford. He has lectured at Oxford University and the Joint Services Command and Staff College at Shrivenham. Since 2006 he has been a lecturer in the Department of War Studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and in 2011 he was also made a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Buckingham. He holds a commission in the German army and is currently a member of the military attaché reserve. He lives in Surrey, UK.