Battles of the First World War Podcast · Mike Cunha

Fighting the Kaiser's War: The Saxons in Flanders 1914/1918

·1 hr 52 min·4 clips

Andrew Lucas joins the podcast to talk about Fighting the Kaiser's War: The Saxons in Flanders, 1914 through 1918. Jurgen Smicek, Lucas's coauthor, cannot join the interview, so the conversation starts with his background and the collecting that fed the book. Smicek was born in 1959, has lived in Dresden all his life, worked as a layout artist, and first became interested in the Great War after visiting Flanders in 1994. That visit led him to gather photographs, diaries, letters, and other material that now anchors the project. The conversation treats that archive with real care. Lucas explains that part of the book's appeal is seeing almost 100-year-old records as physical objects rather than abstract sources. The discussion then turns to the shape of the book itself. It is not a straight chronological march. Instead, Lucas says the book opens with a summary of the whole war from the Saxon point of view, covering the theaters and divisions needed to place Flanders in context. Lucas notes that the Saxons were active on nearly every European front, with only very small commitments in Italy and a relatively small one in Macedonia. After that overview, the book moves year by year through the major developments and the units present in each period, including their movements. From there, it settles into the individual divisions and corps that served in Flanders during those years. The team also had to decide what Flanders meant for the book. Their cutoff is practical rather than strictly geographic. They chose the northernmost section of the Western Front because they could not do justice to the whole front in 256 pages, and because that section offered the strongest material and the greatest interest for British readers. The boundary falls at the La Bassee Canal, even if some units extend beyond a neat textbook definition of Flanders. That approach keeps the narrative clear while still following the formations that matter. The closing part of the conversation returns to battlefield texture, including early trench photographs and the rough, improvised gear of the first trench-fighting weeks. Lucas and the host end with the sense that the book is built from people, places, and surviving objects rather than grand abstraction.

As heard by us

A measured look at Saxons in Flanders that favors sources, place, and careful military history.

This conversation focuses on the Saxons in Flanders, but its real draw is the way it makes a war readable through sources, places, and selection.

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Why you'd press play

If you want the Saxon war mapped clearly, press play.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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