World War One. The Great Battles

(Hertfordshire: Transatlantic Press, 2012) 9781908849045. 248 x 198 mm; saddle-stitched laminated pictorial wrappers; [pp. 48]; profusely illustrated with contemporary photographs. As new. "Technology played a pivotal role in World War One. Tanks, aircraft, chemical weapons and flame-throwers were all deployed, while high explosives and machine guns brought industrial-scale slaughter to the battlefield. The places where the fiercest fighting and worst blood-letting occurred are seared into the collective consciousness. Verdun, where the German army sought to 'bleed France white'; Ypres, the scene of two major battles before the Allies attempted to break the German line at Passchendaele; Gallipoli, the Allies ill-fated attempt to strike at Ottoman Turkey; Cambrai, which saw the first massed tank attack; and the Somme, where 20,000 Allied soldiers were killed in the first wave. Then there was Mons, Marne and Jutland, the only large-scale naval engagement of the war. These were among the battles - many ending in stalemate - that claimed over nine million lives, a human catastrophe described by British Prime Minister David Lloyd George as 'the cruellest and most terrible war that ever scourged mankind'. World War One: The Great Battles uses contemporaneous reports and photographs from the Daily Mail archives, to capture the defining moments of The Great War." .