The War in the Trenches

The war fought on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918 has no precedent in history. It was a war between two stubborn enemies, each dug into the wet earth of Northern France and Belgium and facing each other across a merciless no-man's land. In a single day of trench warfare the British lost more men than their battle casualties of the Crimean and Boer wars combined, and far more than their worst losses for any day in World War II. It was essentially a private's war, fought by the patriotic millions who responded to Kitchener's call to arms, only to find themselves butchered in the front line trenches that carved their way through Europe from the Channel coast to the Swiss border. It was also the first Commonwealth war and men from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, came to fight and die in their thousands. The author's compassionate account and the unique photographs and paintings that accompany the text spare nothing of this horror.
The narrative and the eye-witness accounts of veterans from Ypres, the Somme, Passchendaele and Cambrai show how sheer hopelessness produced magnificent strength, comradeship and even humour - typified by Bairnfather's cartoon figure of "Old Bill", the phlegmatic troglodyte who brought a smile to those facing the appalling, tragic squalor of the war in the trenches.