I have always had a fascination with military history, and have written somewhat on it. I have, also, explored many of the WWI and WWII battlefields of Western Europe.

There is nothing glorious or heroic about war close up. It is God awful and ugly stuff. Yet its politics, tactics, strategy and logistics, from afar, remain ever fascinating for some of us.

The Great War (WWI) is part of what I have coined the Industrial War Period — 1861–1945. It is the modern war period up to the advent of atomic weapons that made total war a suicide mission for all contending parties.

This Industrial War Period was a time when which ever military alliance at war had the greatest industrial capacity would inevitably come out victorious — from the North’s great manufacturing advantage in the American Civil War to America being the “arsenal of democracy” in World War Two.

The special thing about WWI is the huge social/cultural changes it brought about. Nothing illustrates this better than that Great British soap opera, Downton Abbey, which covers the period from the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, through WWI (1914–1918) and into the roaring 1920s.