The carnage of the Western Front was over surprisingly quickly

This book does not mess about. It tells the story of the fighting on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918, just like it says on the tin. It offers a proudly traditional military history, from the opening skirmishes, through the titanic clashes of the Marne and Verdun, the Somme and Ypres, on to the often overlooked Allied sweep to victory of the Hundred Days. It describes what happened when, where and why. There is no discussion of why the war was fought in the first place or of what the men thought they were fighting for. The war here, as it was for that generation, is simply an inescapable fact. We learn enough about the political context and manoeuvring in London, Paris and Berlin to explain events on the battlefield, but no more.

Nick Lloyd helps to prepare officers for higher command at the Joint Services Command and Staff College, Shrivenham, and it shows. He does not need to tell his students that war is hell, and he chooses not to thrust it down our throats, either. Occasionally the voice of an ordinary soldier reminds us that these are humans rather than chess pieces, but this is not a book about the experience of life in the trenches. Nor do we hear much about the home front, poets or shell-shock. Instead, Lloyd lets the facts tell their own story, giving us a seat in army headquarters to watch the generals as they try to fight their war.

That story has been thoroughly researched in volume after volume of the official histories, in memoirs and archives in three languages, and in the mass of specialist studies, compiled since the 1980s, which have analysed the first world war and its armies as never before.