By the end of the year the French had suffered nearly a million casualties, the Germans 800,000 and 86,000 of the 120,000-strong BEF first sent to France had been killed or wounded.Oddly for a writer who likes to see himself as a debunker of myths, Sir Max is scathing in his judgments of the military leadership on all sides.
On May 24 German units were just crossing the canal defense line close to Dunkirk, the only remaining port by which the BEF could be evacuated, when an inexplicable order from German leader Adolf Hitler not only stopped their advance but actually called them back to the canal line.
Even before the Belgian capitulation, the British government had decided to evacuate the BEF by sea from Dunkirk, and the admiralty had been collecting every kind of small craft to help in bringing away the troops.
When war broke out, it was taken for granted that the small British Expeditionary Force (BEF) under Sir John French should be used as an adjunct to France's forces, more or less as the French might see fit.
While the French 5th Army was turning to attack Bülow, the BEF (between the 5th and the 6th armies) was still continuing its retreat for another day, but on September 9 Bülow learned that the British too had turned and were advancing into the gap between him and Kluck.
The BEF, accordingly, was deployed between La Bassée and Ypres, while on the left the Belgians who had wisely declined to participate in the projected attack continued the front along the Yser down to the Channel.
In preparing a counterattack against the German advance through Belgium, Joffre envisaged a pincer movement, with the French 3rd and 4th armies on the right and the 5th, supported by the BEF, on the left, to trap the Germans in the Meuse Ardennes area south of Liège.
But before these BFF's turn into BEFs, they shop.
What might result is some sort of mezzo forte and is equivalent to the notation 'sf in pp.' Composers of our time such as Wolfgang Rihm or Luciano Berio use that term.
After the failure of his first two attempts to turn the Germans' western flank (one on the Somme, the other near Arras), Joffre obstinately decided to try again yet farther north with the BEF which in any case was being moved northward from the Aisne.
Bhatia's British Edutrust Foundation BEFF) established Edutrust Academies Charitable Trust (EACT) to open and run a string of academies across England.
