Haig's Enemy: Crown Prince Rupprecht and Germany's War on the Western Front

"With the centenary of its end in November, 2018 has been a big year for commemorating World War I. On the way home from a wedding in Brabant I took my tween-aged kids to visit some of the cemeteries and sites in Flanders and Northern France and cried buckets watching Testament of Youth on TV. But because of my British education, I’ve only ever heard about World War I from the British side. This is a fantastic book because it tells the military history of World War I through German eyes, specifically the eyes of one of the German generals, Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria. German unification had happened relatively recently so Bavaria had sensibilities and interests that did not correspond exactly with the Prussian Kaiser’s. It’s a tragic tale, because while Rupprecht comes across as a man who gets on and does his duty, he loses everything. I always find in biographies I overly identify with the protagonist, so by the end I was wishing the Germans would win the war. Ah, liberalism! I know it’s important, but I’ve never had a firm grasp on what the word actually means. It seems to mean opposite things on different sides of the Atlantic. I loved this book for basically teaching me about liberalism the only way that could really work for me: by holding my hand and taking me through the history of the word. Starting with the Ancient Romans, “the word stems from the Latin term liber , meaning both free and generous and liberalis , “befitting a freeborn person.”"