General Joseph Joffre was the most important individual on the Allied side in the early years of the First World War, yet the French commander in chief and de facto allied generalissimo still lacks a modern English-language biography. He is at least the central character in this closely argued monograph on the strategic development of the Western Front campaign during the 1914 war of movement. If his British allies were not the biggest or the worst of Joffre's problems, they have attracted the most interest. Professor Prete has been studying this relationship for more than thirty years, and this book is only the first volume of a planned trilogy on that relationship during Joffre's period of command.

The bulk of the author's detailed archive work in French and British sources was clearly undertaken some decades ago, and unfortunately this shows in places in the manuscript. Chapter 7, for example, which analyzes the second Allied command crisis of October–November 1914, is based on an article originally published in 1983, and its conclusions are inevitably rather less fresh now than the author implies. His unfortunate solecism in this chapter that he is writing “seventy years” after the event (174) rather betrays this rehashing of older material. Inevitably over these decades other authors—this reviewer and George Cassar, in particular—have examined that same relationship in breadth and depth, although essentially from the British perspective.

Prete's retelling of events from Joffre's point of view does not radically reinterpret earlier assessments of the partnership's fluctuating fortunes and difficult moments. He competently charts the shift from an uncertain prewar diplomatic entente, in which the needy French were exasperated by British lack of commitment, into an extended wartime wrangle over the deployment and engagement of British military resources in France, in which for their demanding master the British were always too “slow, late, and unaggressive” (189). The primacy of French political imperatives, which Prete presents as the driving factor in their relationship with their allies, should not cause too much surprise: Clausewitz's famous dictum about politics and war applies in struggles between friends as well as in conflicts with enemies. Certainly Joffre by the end of 1914 would seem to have got the measure of his opposite number, Field Marshal Sir John French, partly with the connivance of his political chief and military rival in the British War Office, Field Marshal Lord Kitchener. Joffre comes across as a consummate politician who took advantage of the divisions among his allies and the political channel to London offered by his own government to force both French and Kitchener to subsume their own inclinations—equated with British interests—in the interest of alliance solidarity, if not always with good grace, then at least with common sense.

Prete has told this story well, in a clear, readable narrative, if one with a tendency to repetition in its thematic structure. If he completes the contemplated volumes on Joffre's command in 1915 and 1916, then it will mark an important and substantial work. Like this volume, it may hold few surprises for those familiar with the strategic history of the entente's war. Nonetheless, as an introduction to the theme they should prove invaluable.