GEN Edmond Buat & the Heavy Artillery Reserve: A Discussion with Xavier Lewis

Battles of the First World War Podcast

Mike Cunha

History

4.8 • 812 Ratings

🗓️ 19 March 2025

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

My good friend Xavier Lewis comes on the podcast to discuss his dissertation topic.

General Edmond Buat had an idea and devised a plan to defeat the German army on the Western front in World War I. A study of his diary, the notes he wrote and his later writings on German generals Ludendorff and Hindenburg, shows how his plan and the Réserve Générale de l’Artillerie Lourde (Heavy Artillery General Reserve, “RGAL”) he created constitute an incipient form of operational art as well as the basis for the French Army’s offensives in the summer of 1918.

Xavier’s research considers how Buat’s diary, his writings, and notes reveal his role in developing the plans for the 1918 offensives and how the RGAL was conceived as an instrument specially adapted for them. It also shows how those plans represented an important conceptual shift in operational thinking to find a new way to expel the German army from French territory. It focuses on the ideas behind the creation of the RGAL, not on the political, industrial and procurement aspects and seeks to plug a gap identified by historian Sir Michael Howard who complained that: "British military historians […] found it difficult to focus on an analysis of the operations themselves.”

Do listen for a great conversation.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The The
0:23.6	The Right. Do I press OK?
0:38.3	Yeah. Yeah. Okay. right do i press okay yeah yeah okay okay okay okay all right hey folks welcome to the battles of the
1:04.4	first world war podcast joining us today is my good friend xavier lewis i've said it in the past, and I will say it once more.
1:12.6	The internet can be a place from which such good comes. Xavier is just an example of this. He's
1:19.5	been listening to the podcast for a while, and a couple years ago, he reached out to me via email.
1:25.3	So within a few emails back and forth, we found out we were both enrolled in the
1:30.5	University of Birmingham, UK's Master in Military History Program, although he was about a year ahead of me.
1:38.6	You know, communication back and forth, and long story short, we lunch in a parisian suburb last summer the
1:47.5	restaurant where we ate you might be thinking it's the foche of course it was okay so this is super
1:54.3	cool um we're going to get into Xavier's background here in just a moment but to give you a flavor of
2:00.3	what you can study at the
2:02.5	University of Birmingham in the UK, today's talk is going to be Xavier's dissertation topic,
2:08.9	which was French Army General Buoyer and the creation of the French Army's heavy
2:16.5	artillery reserve, La Reserve,
2:18.1	the conceptual basis for the summer 1918 offensives, and an incipient form of operational art.
2:28.8	Folks, we're about to go deep, likely very nerdy.
2:32.6	So I want to get right to it. Xavier, welcome to the podcast.
2:37.9	Well, thank you for inviting me. Of course. All right. So Xavier, can you tell us a little bit about
2:45.4	yourself and your background? I was born in 1960 in England.
2:52.2	My father was English and my mother is French.
	...

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