The reality is that most of North America knows next to nothing of the 20th century's first genocide - the systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in the First World War.

My father was in the First World War.

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

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

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

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.