Author(s): Mark Adkin

Military/War

The fourth book in Mark Adkin's bestselling Companion series, published in good time for the hundredth anniversary of the start of the First World War in 2014, this is the definitive work on the battles of the Western Front. In 350,000 words of text, over a hundred original maps and diagrams, and hundreds of stunning and often rarely-seen photographs, Adkin anatomises every aspect of the four years of fighting, from the railway supply lines to the trench formations, the shell trajectories to the ambulance corps, from the organisational hierarchies and command systems of every army to the plethora of memorials, cemeteries and ossuaries that today commemorate this titanic conflict. As with his previous companions, a major feature is the author's own photographs of the present-day landscapes, today unrecognisable as the blasted wastelands of trench warfare. Every single aspect of these four years of warfare is described and depicted: no student of the First World War can be without this endlessly browsable and utterly authoritative work of reference.