The Weight of the West A German General's Refusal to Lose, 1918

The Weight of the West: A German General's Refusal to Lose, 1918
English | July 8, 2026 | ASIN: B0H852SJGF | 358 pages | Epub | 701.74 KB
April 1917. On the morning of his fifty-second birthday, General Erich Ludendorff sits at his desk in Kreuznach and watches a ridge he built to hold for years fall in a single morning. He will spend the next eighteen months trying to out-calculate a war that has stopped rewarding calculation.Four hundred miles away, a private named Georg Reuter is trying to describe, in letters home, what an army does to the ground it retreats across — and what it costs the men who watch it happen.The Weight of the West moves between the two of them: the general who reduces a war to arithmetic he can master, and the soldier whose testimony he reads, annotates, and files without ever quite letting it change what he does next. Through the German spring offensives of 1918, their collapse, and a Swedish exile spent writing an account of a war he still cannot bring himself to have lost, this is a novel about certainty — what it costs to hold onto it, and who pays for the holding.For readers of literary war fiction who want the command tent and the mud in the same book, and no easy comfort at the end of either.