It was called the Great War by those who lived through it, and rightly so. There had never been anything like it before. Though the Second World War was bloodier and considerably more destructive over much greater areas of the globe, it never approached at any point the concentrated horror of the trench warfare on the Western front. Through the fields of southern Belgium and northern France ran a zone of armies little more than a few tens of miles broad all the way from the English Channel to the border with Switzerland. The actual combat zone was even narrower and in some parts of the front line the soldies could hear their opponents conversations at those times when the guns were silent. Into such a small area were concentrated ammunition dumps, hospitals, light railways, delousing centres and all the paraphenalia of war needed to keep armies of millions of men at each others throats for over four years.        The First World War, was not just the Western front, however. British and Empire troops served in all corners of the earth, often fighting actions very different from the gargantuan struggle in the west. In the Far East Australian troops seized Germany’s Pacific island possessions and a battalion of Welshmen helped the Japanese at the siege of Tsingtao, Germany’s only colony on the Asian mainland. In southern African, Britain’s old enemies the Boer commandos, now riding under the Union Jack, swept into German South-West Africa and then later sailed off to do battle in France. In Mesopotamia British Indian units toiled up the Tigris in an ill-fated attempt to take Baghdad. An equally ill-fated expedition to open the Dardanelles to allied shipping led to the Gallipolli landings and a squalid slogging match in which the ANZACs gained a reputation as some of the best troops in any army. In Palestine in 1917, General Allenby, with a judicious use of cavalry formations, routed the Turks and entered Jerusalem; the first Christian conqueror to do so since the First Crusade. Later, in a race with the flamboyant Lawrence and his arab irregulars, Allenby marched into Damascus and the end of the Ottoman empire was assured. In Italy, men battled in the high Tyrol and the plains of the Po and the Balkans saw first the defeat,by the Germans and their Bulgarian allies, of Serbia, then Rumania and finally the fall of Bulgaria itself to a Franco-British-Greek army pushing up from Salonika. And of course there was the eastern front. On a fluid front thousands of miles long an epic struggle was fought out between the terrifying efficiency of the German army and the ill-clad, ill-led and ill- supplied Russian peasant armies. Russian casualties were appalling and after three winters at the front the Russian troops voted with their feet to go home and create the revolution that would change the course of the 20th century.        For all the glory and the suffering in whatever part of the world, it is, however, the images of the trenches on the western front that are always conjured up by the mention of the First World War and the war there reached an intensity never experienced either before or since.

       It was a type of war the British had little experience of: massed conscript armies, artillery barrages of untold millions of shells that seemed as if they would wake the very dead, and logistical problems that gave a whole new meaning to the art of supply. In the beginning, before the war had sunk into the abyss of trench warfare, the British did very well. Tempered by the experience of a thousand brushfire wars against Afridis in Afghanistan, Zulus and Ashantenes in Africa, Metis in Canada, Burmese hillmen, Chinese Boxers, Sudanese Mahdists and Afrikaaner Boers, the British troops that went to France were professionals, with the regimental spirit and traditions that included a quarter millenium of battle honours to buttress their small numbers. At the grimy little coal town of Mons the British Expeditionary Force met its first European enemy since the Crimean Warover half a century before. The Germans were stopped by repeated volleys of ‘five rounds rapid’ (five aimed rounds quickly fired sometimes by a whole battalion). Such a firestorm of bullets led German Intelligence to grossly overestimate the numbers of machine-guns with which British units were equipped.

       It couldn’t last of course. The original B.E.F. consisted of little more than 75,000 men and casualties, the influx of volunteers into Kitchener’s ‘new armies’ and after 1916 conscription, diluted the professionalism of the ‘old sweats’ and the British army became little different from its continental counterparts. As the trenches grew deeper and stronger, the artillery bigger and more plentiful and the gases more poisonous, the khaki-clad British armies went toe-to-toe with the Germans in an abbatoir of unparalled ferocity. 60,000 men British soldiers fell on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, more than 400,000 over the course of the whole battle. another 400,000 fell at Passchendale, the Third Battle of Ypres.
       In 1914, as Britain prepared to despatch troops to counter the German invasion of Belgium, the British Foreign Secretary said,

He was a prescient man. It is more the pity that his prescience had not come earlier and helped him to prevent such a calamity from occurring.