All The Kaiser's Men by Ian Passingham (Sutton, £25).

A SOLDIER wrote in autumn 1917: "You do not know what Flanders means. Flanders means blood and scraps of human bodies. Flanders means heroic courage and faithfulness even unto death."

Passchendaele - The Third Battle of Ypres - has become a byword for the horrors of the First World War.

And you might think that the unknown author of those words was a British soldier. After all, our view of 1914-18 has, understandably, been mainly from the Allied perspective.

But you would be wrong. For the identity of this lost warrior is German...

Here is a unique work. It not only breaks new ground, but also rigidly stays put across the no-man's land of the last 86 years and takes up position in the German frontline trenches and bunkers.

Never once does it cross the wire. British, French, Canadians and Americans are all the same. They - we, if you like - are the enemy.

Whether as attackers or the attacked, Tommy Atkins and his comrades-in-arms are either aggressors or prey.

This book also explodes any number of myths. The Somme is not just dismissed with the usual "graveyard of the British Army" stereotype.

Far from it.

Haig's policy of constant attacks and artillery harassment is proved to have ultimately paid off in the end. The German Army was broken on the Somme - by Haig and his generals - and would never be the same again.

Likewise Third Ypres. Thousands of British died, but so did countless Germans. Passchendaele was hell for attackers and attacked in equal measure.

Happily, All the Kaiser's Men does not fall into the trap of revisionism, the snare that has so often caught the willing as well as the unwary historian.

And that is what makes this volume such a valuable aid in our understanding of the conflict.

It is unblemished by prejudice, assumption or clich. It is a fine work. John Phillpott