School-leavers unfortunately will come away thinking the First World War consisted simply of 'going over the top' on the Western Front to slaughter in no-man's-land, when the conflict extended so much further, to the collapse of four empires and numerous civil wars.

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

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.

The First World War was a horror of gas, industrialised slaughter, fear, and appalling human suffering.

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.