George Kerevan reviews Christopher Duffy's Through German Eyes: the British and the Somme 1916, which sounds like a corker. In the first 24 hours of that battle, Britain lost more men than in the Crimean, Boer, and Korean wars combined.
Duffy apparently takes us beyond the conventional saga of incompetent and bloody-minded command and tells a revolutionary story about a battle I thought had nothing new to offer.
Since, over the last few entries, I've developed a thread of recommending other books, I'll also tout Stephen O'Shea's Back to the Front: An Accidental Historian Walks the Trenches of World War I. Between 1986 and 1995, O'Shea walked the length of the Western Front. He's good company and his thoughts on war and history are worth pondering—or at least considering.
