Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front 1914-1918 by Richard Holmes

The secret life of the poor, bloody infantry

How did the British fighting man of the First World War manage to put up with it all? Richard Holmes suggests that we often misunderstand the soldiers of the trenches because we "try to judge them by poems they never read, or cast them in dramas they would never have bothered to watch." The old orthodoxy of lions led by donkeys is now long gone, but receives an efficient reburial here. Whatever you have heard before is always worth hearing again from this author who, like all the best historians, never removes our fascination as he dispels the myths. The new material is also first-rate, with enough breadth and detail to sway anyone who feels there is nothing more they need to know about the First World War.

Words are born innocent. "Tommy Atkins" was the example given in an 1815 War Office publication showing how to fill in the Soldiers' Pocket Book. Though harmless when first used, the name inevitably took on the distrust long accorded to its object. Holmes' book shows how, during the Great War, the men of the British Army reclaimed and brought honour to their moniker. The general staff by that time sought - with some success - to raise the social status of the British soldier, but he showed in deeds that there was no need to also change his nickname. Though he still liked to drink and carouse, he was more civilised than the forebears described in the author's earlier volume, Redcoats. Tommy had become loveable in his way - long-suffering, but usually cheerful and able to cope with anything thrown at him. He did not mutiny on a large scale like his French allies, and by 1917 Ludendorff himself was convinced that the only way to win was to defeat the British in particular.

Along with the prospect of death, Tommy faced odours that required his platoon to smoke cigarettes constantly to numb the air, food of such uncertain origin that "some men were reluctant to eat it in the dark" and was asked by unknowing countrymen while on leave whether he was allowed to visit the cinema at night when in the trenches. Holmes gives good evidence that the infantryman survived by camaraderie and humour. The account is loudly coloured, with men surviving a shell impact that destroys the latrine they are sitting on, pack horses eating ration stores and men clearing gas from trenches with fans only to find comrades on the other side of a traverse frantically wafting it back again.

The Second World War restored some of the popular relish for combat that the First had wiped away in the Western democracies. The memory of glory in a heroic purpose saw military operations codenamed "Rolling Thunder" in Vietnam and "Urgent Fury" in Grenada. It is not just cloth ears and PR concerns that gave us the insipid "Operation: Restore Hope" and "Operation: Enduring Freedom". The lessons of the Great War inspired appeasement. Those of the Second urged timely confrontation. It is unfortunate that even a work as rich and thoughtful as this cannot help suggest a solution.