Will Haig end up as a cuddly toy?

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.