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If you ask most people in Britain today for their views on the first world war, they tell you that it was a futile holocaust in which our nation’s brave and disillusioned young men were herded into a hell of mud and machine-gun fire by incompetent products of the English public schools. Executions for cowardice were a daily occurrence.

Fairly or unfairly, they will cite such various sources as Ben Elton’s Blackadder Goes Forth, Alan Clark’s The Donkeys, Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong, the poems of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen and sundry articles by Max Hastings and others.

This is the modern myth. Only a few question it: war buffs obsessed with a local regiment, with weapons and medals perhaps, and a well established though relatively small group of historical scholars of which Dan Todman, the author of this book, is one.

The theme of The Great War: Myth and Mystery is the development of today’s myth and why it is completely dominant, despite, in recent years, a wealth of first-rate historical research. The fact is that the generals were not all incompetent; that it is often forgotten how the British army achieved an overwhelming victory in the summer and autumn of 1918; that British executions for cowardice and desertions were fairly rare and death sentences frequently set aside; that German military dominance of the Channel ports posed a threat to Britain’s imperial lifelines — of vital interest to us at that time; that most of the five million British soldiers who took part survived; and that British losses were absolutely less than those of the French, German and Russian, and, relative to population, than those of the Italians.

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The modern myth rests of course on an element of truth; no account of the first world war presents a pretty picture; but the myth is a distortion, preferred because it is simple, democratic and unqualifiedly anti-war.