Narrates the warfare of 1914-18, focusing on the strategic failures of each side in the initial going and then in accommodating trench warfare and incipient mechanization. Technically excellent, Keegan’s major extension is to dramatize the senseless waste of millions of enlisted men. Though touching on diplomatic events and social currents, Keegan offers no significant insight in the broader realm of political history. The author fails his self-appointed task of describing why the world’s most advanced region succumbed to self destruction.