Our generation was born during the turmoil following the First World War. That war marked the dividing line - at least for the Western World - between the comfortable security of the 19th century and the instability and flux of our own time.

The first World War in so many ways shaped the 20th century and really remade our world for the worse.

My father was in the First World War.

'All Quiet on the Western Front' is just sort of there isn't it? Every single trope of the First World War, and anti-war writing in general, is in there.

Culturally, the First World War is the war that stands in for other wars.

This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.