In 1976 one of the 'Pals Battalions' veterans said to me: "No one could write a book about the First World War unless he had been in it, because he could not possible imagine what it was like" So, I did not try to write a book about the First World War. I merely recorded the things that those old soldiers told me and what they wrote in their reports and in their letters to loved ones. This is their story, not mine.