This book illustrates the relationship between British military policy and the development of British war aims during the opening years of the First World War. Basing his work on a wide range of unpublished documentary sources, David French reassesses for the benefit of students and scholars alike what was meant by 'a war of attrition'.

In 1914 the British government wished to stand aloof from the land war and to confine themselves to acting as the banker and supplier of the Entente alliance. They hoped that France and Russia would pay the blood tax of the continental land war whilst British traders waxed rich. Lord Kitchener was far more than an arresting face on a poster. He raised his New Armies in the expectation that by the time they were ready France and Russia would have exhausted Germany and Austria-Hungary and the British would be able to intervene decisively to end the war and to impose their peace terms on allies and enemies alike. But the allies' inability to stop the Central Powers from conquering much of Central and South Eastern Europe in 1915 meant that in 1916 British manpower was sucked remorselessly into the war on the Western front. The Battle of the Somme was a parody of Kitchener's concept of attrition.