Before the war ended mankind was at the mercy of its own machines of destruction. It had perfected the techniques of mass slaughter without mastering them, indeed without even thinking about them coherently, and it could do no more than stretch itself on a rack of its own construction. Dreadful as it was, Verdun was not really unique. There was also the Somme.

In a way, this battle at least rested on a brighter base. Sir Douglas Haig, who commanded the British army in France, believed that he could make an outright breakthrough, piercing the German line, rolling up the broken defenses, and going on with a powerful stroke that would win the war then and there. But Marshal Joseph Joffre, the French commander whose troops took a share in this offensive and who exercised a good deal of influence over Haig, saw it from the beginning as an exercise in simple attrition—a notion just about on Falkenhayn’s level—and in the end that is what it became. It may even have destroyed more men than were destroyed at Verdun, but possibly the density of corpses per square yard was somewhat lower.

In any case, the Somme offensive marked the first full-dress appearance of Kitchener’s “new army”—the great army of volunteers which Lord Kitchener raised and which contained the very flower of Britain’s young manhood. To find out what happened to this magnificent army read The Big Push by Brian Gardner, who tells a story which in its own way is as appalling as Mr. Home’s.

It began on the morning of July 1, 1916, when fourteen British divisions attacked along an eighteen-mile front. There had been a tremendous artillery bombardment, lasting the better part of a week, and in the rear there were massed cavalry divisions ready to charge through the anticipated breakthrough and go romping through the German rear areas. The infantrymen had high morale; they had been told, and devoutly believed, that this was the attack that would end the war, and although they were so overloaded with rations and incidental equipment (approximately sixty-six pounds per man) that they could not move faster than a sluggish walk, they went bravely forward in long, unbroken lines, confident that the bombardment had broken the German defenses.

The Big Push, by Brian Gardner. William Morrow and Co. 177 pp. $5.00.

Disillusionment came immediately. At the end of that day no gains worth mentioning had been made. Sixty thousand British soldiers had been shot down, a third of them dead or doomed to die of their wounds; all in all, it was, as Mr. Gardner says, “the most costly day the British Army has ever known.”

To suppose that this fearful disaster cost the British commander his job and led to an immediate cancellation of the offensive is to give way to a delusion. For one thing, army headquarters never at any time really