While the article makes some good and accurate points, it seems determined to reconstruct the western front into
'it was more or less like all other wars".
As if the reactions of the public and culture to the massive amounts of wounded (both physically and mentally) and dead was all wrong. That the first hand accounts written were mistaken. Note that going to multiple websites reveals that British/Irish deaths were around 750,000, not 700,000.
The article ignores WHY troops took to the trenches, and WHY they needed helmets and gas masks. And what kind of condition many wounded "survivors" endured for the rest of their lives (I wish I could remember the old photo book I stumbled on in an antique shop decades ago, but there are plenty of gruesome photos around).
As for "changing tactics", the article ignores the UK's and indeed, all the western allies lagging behind the Germans in infiltration and squad tactics. At the Somme, 125,000 British died in 19th century style wave assaults on dug in machine guns. For little gain.
Yet the article lauds the British command. Is the author kidding?
I've read plenty of books about warfare, and warfare in WWI in particular. I've also served. This relatively new trend, 100 years after the war ended, and the maimed are all dead, as are those who remember the dead and maimed, and who willfully ignore the cultural reaction to WWI, may have their stats right, but they miss the forest for the trees.
And lets face it. The war got going for reasons only slightly more understandable than the War of Jenkins Ear.
Did the intense pacifism of the interwar years arise from nothing?
rebases some old soldiers.
