It was on the Western Front, the trench line stretching from the Swiss Frontier to the North Sea, that the majority of nearly nine million British and Dominion soldiers who enlisted for service during the First World War served, and where most of the 947,000 who were killed met their deaths.

This detailed but accessible account covers everything from how the front was created and the experiences of the British Army in France, to the battle of Verdun and the last hundred days of the war. Holmes’s concise and heartfelt narrative is illustrated with photographs, diagrams, maps and quotations that bring that inhuman four years of history to life.