Though relatively old at this point, this still feels like an incisive examination of the first real tank battle, besides being a consideration of the reality that while effective planning was happening by this stage of the war in both the German and British militaries, the reality is that on the fly improvisation seldom worked in 1917, such was the state of battlefield communications. Perhaps most damning from the British perspective is the failure to imagine what a German counter-response might look like, and to act accordingly sooner. Besides that, Turner writes with great compassion about the human cost; his time as a combat officer in Iraq filling him with awe at the ghastly numbers of combat in the "Great War." ( )