The death of glory - Robin Neillands

The year 1915 marked a new and more dangerous phase of World War I with the introduction of gas and the failure of US peace intervention. Neillands' history focuses, above all, on the battlefields of the Western front, where these developments led to nail-biting action and tragic bloodbaths. On the battlefields, the allies were frighteningly unprepared. They simply tried to fight a new kind of war in an old-fashioned way. And this lack of fresh thinking resulted in disatruous allied massacres. 1915 was a the pivotal point between the encounter battles of yesteryear and modern battles of attrition heralded by Verdun and the Somme.

But Neillands' dramatic focus on the field of action is also complemented by his ranging examination of the wider canvas of diplomatic and political struggles. Neillands uses his great expertise, garnered during research on his previous three WW1 books, to set 1915 in the context of the war of a whole.

Ypres, Gallipoli, the torpedoing of the Lusitania... 1915 was a turbulent time, strangely neglected by military history. 1915 is a fascinating, long-overdue account of one of the most terrible years in the history of warfare.