While this is a very well made and presented book - mine is in vary hardback covers, perfect bound on decent quality paper - and on an overlooked subject, there are some flaws that let it down. The first is, as ever, the appeal to word-based intuiters: yes, there are maps, but just not enough of them; way too much information is packed onto an approx A5 map. What is needed is for more maps, with less stuff on them, interspersed at the exact point in the text of the manoeuvres being written about, eg ‘ghost’ box showing origin of unit, dotted line showing path of unit, heavier outline box showing current position of unit. I do not doubt the amount of work Batten has done in researching who was doing what to whom, but not everyone learns best from page after page of text, with the occasional map and photo. The photos are worth mentioning for their rarity value: makes a change from ‘that’ photo of tommy in mud taken at Passchendaele. As word-based intuiting isn’t my favoured learning method, I’m afraid I dozed off rather during parts of the book, and especially Chapter 4 that does go on a bit, so I put it down, picking it up after a month or two, and zoomed enthusiastically through the last third of the book. Now that I have finished the book, I would have preferred more analysis and concluding rather than just a straight description of events: it’s amazing how many authors do this, and how many editors / publishers don’t pick up on this; a straight re-telling of facts doesn’t mean the reader will automatically come to the same conclusions as th author - they may not come to any conclusions at all ! Some of the interesting stuff I picked up on is :- p169, all major combatants suffered shell shortages at some point, p149, the RFC proposes electronic warfare, p153, the first use of the Hornsby caterpillar tractor. There are one or two quibbles, eg :- p188-189 contradict each other and other pages over the emphasis on the cavalry and the supposed rigidity of doctrine, yet Haig liked tanks, accepted aircraft as valuable, see p136, and was amenable to horse-carried troops as ‘shock troops’, see p140, and on p169, the French are obsessed with old-style cavalry charges, the British are arguing over how best to change, p185, what is a ‘carriage truck’, railway rolling stock is either a carriage *or* a truck / wagon, not both, there’s lots of easily accessible books all over the place, and lots of railway enthusiasts scattered across the country, this one is avoidable, p194, October 1914 seems early for things to have ground to a halt, other books (this is a book review, not an essay) give dates in 1915. I’m giving this four stars because :- i) it is so well made, ii) Batten has done a great deal of work, iii) there are proper footnotes and references to facts, and some assertions, again not all works do this, iv) it is on an overlooked subject that needs to be noted: there are far too many ‘Blackadder’ views that BEF Generals were useless and didn’t know what they were doing, v) other valid points need to be noted, eg p208, the army has to deal with interfering, ignorant, incompetent politicians and their unrealistic budgets, as well as an up itself Royal Navy that has the politicians by the privates: what use is a battleship 30 miles inland ? Eg, p196, just when *do* reservists have the time to practice route marches, get their foot soles hard enough? I would like to tie this in with a useful point from Corrigan’s “Loos 1915: the Unwanted Battle”, where Corrigan makes the observation that the British have always had a small standing army: yet 21st century British people expect a hastily cobbled together, underfunded, undertrained, under-experienced, under-equipped citizen army to break through a bigger, better trained, better equipped army with minimal losses and maximal gains ... er ... But this book, or subject, won’t ever make it onto a BBC or ITV documentary because it has the audacity to challenge the ‘donkey’ myth, which as we all know is a sacred cow that must not be touched.