Eye-deep in Hell: The Western Front 1914-1918 by John Ellis
For four years the French, British and German armies fought in mud and squalor. "Eye-deep in Hell" is concerned with the millions of men who lived and died in the desolate strip that was the western front, the wilderness - of trenches, dugouts, shattered villages and forests of lifeless tree stumps - that was a physical and spiritual desert. The book shows how even in previously inconceivable conditions men were able to formulate routines, rules and codes of conduct that could create some kind of order in the midst of chaos itself.