Quotes from Robin Neillands

In all the odium the British generals have attracted, it should be noticed that it was the British, not the French or the Germans, who created the tank and brought it into action and in so doing changed the face of war.

the British infantry assault on the German positions north of the Somme began at 0730 hrs on 1 July 1916. A force of some 120,000 British soldiers of Fourth and Third Armies assaulted the German line between Maricourt and Gommecourt. Their attack was pressed home with great resolution - and at considerable cost. By the end of that day, 19,240 men had been killed outright and the total casualty figure, including the missing and those taken prisoner-of-war, amounted to 57,470 men.

The battle at Verdun can best be imagined as some monstrous ball game, in which two teams of giants push a boulder to and fro across impossible terrain. For months the Germans had pushed the French south, towards Verdun; now the French were pushing the Germans back to the north, towards their start-line positions of 21 February. The entry fee in this contest for a worthless piece of terrain was a great number of lives.

In all but killing terms, the battle ended in the last days of September and the main reason it ended was mud.

The veterans of the Somme have gone now but while they lived they talked incessantly of the mud of the Somme, mud which permeated everything, clogged rifles, flowed like lava into dugouts and trenches, sucked off boots, drowned wounded men and horses and made movement either impossible or a tremendous physical effort. To fight on the Somme was bad enough; to also fight the mud of the Somme was simply too much.

the aim of the Somme battle was no longer an attempt at a breakthrough to Bapaume but an attempt to write down the strength of the German field army and kill German soldiers - in other words, attrition.

One can only wonder if the generals were serious ... or mad. In all but slaughter, the Battle of the Somme was over by early October, and to continue past that point was madness indeed, but this side of Haig's character, his stubbornness combined with a seemingly incurable optimism, is one that even his supporters find difficult to defend:

The decision on when to break off an attack, like the decision to launch it, is one requiring careful calculation and fine judgement. That said, Haig's judgement in fighting on into the early winter of 1916, when he could have stopped after Flers, is a clear error.

The collapse of morale in the French Army arose not because of the German attack at Verdun but because the French generals, specifically Nivelle, also adopted the doctrine of attrition, and fought with cran and élan, instead of intelligence.

A 'front-line position' was, in fact, a complex, painfully constructed and carefully integrated defensive zone, largely composed of trenches dug in a zigzag pattern. For example, although the Western Front only extended for something over 400 miles, from the coast to the Swiss frontier, the Germans dug some 1,400 miles of trenches to defend it, in the first front line alone.

sometime in October 1916, Haig abandoned the notion of a breakthrough on the Somme and joined his peers in France and Germany in committing his soldiers to a battle of attrition.

The fate of Sir John French, who had failed in the previous September at Loos - but had not lost anything like so many men in the process - cannot have passed unnoticed by General Haig in the autumn of 1916.

In all his battles, Haig never seems to have appreciated that there came a time when he had obtained or achieved all he could hope for and that to press on would either throw away his success to date or result in terrible losses.

strategic considerations alone did not guarantee Britain's entry into the war. There was also the economic argument against entry - could Britain afford a Continental war? - and the British fear that crushing German power, at considerable cost, would simply allow some other power, like Russia, to arise in its place.

No tactical or strategic gain was made on the Somme front that was worth the cost in lives. Even had the British and French achieved their breakthrough on the Somme, the Germans had plenty of room to manoeuvre and, unlike the French at Verdun, no national interest in staying where they were. During the winter of 1916-17 the Germans simply withdrew to the Hindenburg Line, east of the Somme battlefield, and it all had to be done again.

the British Government became determined that when victory came they should be in a position to impose terms, not only on the defeated enemy, but also on their victorious allies.

Total casualties on the Somme, killed, wounded and missing, come to some 1,300,000 men, British, French and German. The British share in this total includes the losses incurred by the Empire and Commonwealth troops, from Australia, Canada, India, South Africa and New Zealand, and amounts to some 400,000 men. The French lost 200,000 men on the Somme, to add to the more serious losses of Verdun. German losses on the Somme came to more than 600,000 men, killed

Many historians still cite Lloyd George's previously quoted comment that the European nations 'stumbled into war' as evidence that no nation was entirely free of guilt for the conflict, but a careful analysis of German plans and ambitions in the pre-war years by the German historian Fritz Fischer confirms the popular opinion that the root causes of the Great War were German militarism and political ambition - and that these roots had been established for some time.

As for Verdun, while the estimates vary, the most widely accepted figure is 377,231 French and 337,000 German - a total of more than 700,000 men.

is now generally accepted that these issues were subordinate to the fact that Germany had been planning a European war for a long time and seized on the Balkan issue in 1914 as the excuse to provoke one.

German casualty returns did not include the less seriously wounded who were treated in their corps area. All British wounded were included in the casualty returns, even if they were treated in a regimental aid post (RAP) or at dressing stations and then returned to duty.

If the French Government had deliberately intended to inflict further torment and loss on their long-suffering soldiers they could hardly have done better than appoint General Nivelle to the post of Commander-in-Chief.

Alexander the Great would have found it difficult to succeed in forcing a breach in the German line in 1914-1915, and the defeats Haig's armies suffered in 1916 and 1917 - those notorious disasters on the Somme and at Passchendaele - should not obscure the fact that it was Haig who commanded the British armies that spearheaded the Allied victory in 1918 and showed the other armies how this war should be fought; even General Foch admitted that.

When King Edward's charm and influence defused six centuries of Anglo-French rivalry and led to the signing of the Entente Cordiale in 1904, the Kaiser saw this as yet another cunning British attempt to unite Europe against Germany.