Ypres

In a German war cemetery to the north-east of the Belgian town of Diksmuide is the grave of a young soldier called Peter Kollwitz. He once lay among the 1,500 dead of the Roggevelde cemetery and it was there, in 1932 – the same year that Lutyens’s memorial to the dead of the Somme was dedicated – that his mother, the great German printmaker and sculptor Käthe Kollwitz, placed at his graveside the two granite figures known as the ‘Grieving Parents’. There is, as the historian Jay Winter wrote, ‘no monument to the grief of those parents who lost their sons in the war more moving than this simple stone

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