This is the companion to John Giles' earlier volumes covering the Somme and the Ypres–Passchendaele sector. With The Western Front Then and Now the coverage is extended to include all the other main British battle areas of the Western Front between 1914 and 1918.
Starting with the spark that ignited the war, the outline of events brings the operations of the British Army in France and Flanders full circle: from the BEF at Mons in August 1914 and the retreat beyond the Marne to the victorious advances of the forces of the British Empire and their re-entering the town in November 1918.
It is impossible not to marvel at the triumph of nature over the obliteration of the landscape. As for the men who experienced the horrors of war in the shell-torn,trench-riven wasteland of the Western Front, they were, as John Giles writes of them,a breed apart.
