Nick Lloyd takes about 500 pages to describe the complete military engagement on the Western Front in WWI. This means that the core facts about the battles take centre stage, and there’s not an awful lot of room to go into detail, either at the level of the individual soldier, or unit, or more widely into the economic and political efforts of the home countries, although he does mention both in passing. Max Hasting’s book, Catastrophe, that I recently read about the beginning of the war, followed individual soldiers and civilians through the drama, to give a human perspective, but Lloyd doesn’t have space for this. I would also have liked more detail about how the technology of war evolved, particularly the aircraft and armour, but again, that would have made the book twice the size. However, as an overview of what actually happened from month to month on the ground, and especially the personalities and actions of military leaders it’s pretty good. He’s reasonably generous to Haig, in contrast to his public reputation as the donkey of “Lions led by Donkeys”. He’s admiring of Foch, and condemns Hindenburg and Ludendorff. Lloyd writes really well; the book never felt like a slog. Unfortunately WWI just isn’t that interesting a subject, unless your interest is abject human misery. Compared to the huge and varied geographical range of WWII, WWI in the west can really be summed up quite simply: Germany invades Belgium and France, gets stuck, and the British, French, and German armies kill each other in a relatively confined zone for four years. The development of particular military technologies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, especially machine guns and high explosive artillery, gave all the advantage to the defender. Sending unprotected human bodies into a storm of bullets and shrapnel had only one conclusion: massive industrial scale slaughter. Add to this the unrestricted and horrifying use of chemical weapons for additional hellishness. The technologies available in WWII, for both deep battle, with air power, and relative protection against the machine guns and artillery with tanks and other armoured vehicles, were only in their infancy by the end of the war. It’s the numbers in the book that are so unbelievable; ten thousand here, ten thousand there, just expended as cannon fodder. Over a million each for the main combatants dead and millions more maimed. And even for the survivors there was the ordeal of existing in a shattered and desolate landscape of mud and corpses. To win meant to exhaust the enemy before becoming exhausted. It was a close run thing, and both sides appeared to have the advantage at different times; such as the Germans after the Russian surrender, but then the arrival of the Americans tipped the scales back again. And all for what? To cause the wholescale collapse and ruin of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, the complete subjugation of Germany, and the total exhaustion of France and Britain. It was the time that Europe, in a spasm of insanity, committed collective suicide. It’s an object lesson of what happens when a military organisation takes control of a state. It’s function is to wage war, and with control of diplomacy and foreign policy that institutional urge is easily satisfied.