"The basic and stark fact, nevertheless, was that the conditions of warfare between 1914 and 1918 predisposed towards slaughter and that only an entirely different technology, one not available until a generation later, could have averted such an outcome. The first day of the battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, was to be an awful demonstration of that truth."
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Chapter 8, “The Year of Battles” (p. 316)
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John Keegan
Sir John Desmond Patrick Keegan OBE FRSL (15 May 1934 – 2 August 2012) was an English military historian and journalist.
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