Conscripts: Lost Legions of the Great War by Ilana R. Bet-El (Sutton, £19.99)

THE chronology of the First World War in terms of the British Armies that opposed the Germans on the Western Front can be divided into three distinct phases.

First, we have the Regulars arriving in France in August 1914, and all but destroyed at the ramparts of Ypres, by the end of that year.

They were followed by Kitchener's volunteers, badly bloodied at Loos, and utterly decimated during the disastrous Somme offensive of 1916.

Finally, came the conscripts. Some were willing troops, others reluctant soldiers.

But it is their memory that will go down in the annals of 1914-18, for they made up the citizen armies that would ultimately wear down the Germans and bring about eventual victory for the Allies.

This is the human story, one that deals with the emotions of those thousands of young men, rather than merely yet another roll call of those French and Flemish place names that are so indelibly burned into the British psyche.

Starting with the Conscription Bill of January 1916, the author neatly breaks up her narrative into manageable sections.

The mechanics of enlistment are explained, as are the personal experiences of some of the men who were obliged to report to barracks or employment exchange.

After attestation, the new recruit would undergo various processes before he took The King's Shilling and became a soldier. Training followed and then came the fateful journey to France... and an unknown destiny.

After the Somme offensive became bogged down in the mud of the Ancre and attrition returned once more to front lines, the soldiers often found that the business of survival concentrated the mind far more than the designs of the enemy.

Consequently, trench life is graphically described and all that it entailed - the misery of living and sleeping in wet clothes, the rats, bad food and ever-present dangers.

Fear was the constant companion, as was the permanent exhaustion of a way of life in which sleep was all but impossible.

Today, it is difficult to imagine how anyone could survive such conditions and still, as most did, retain a sanity of sorts. But many did, amazingly, come through the horror to make old bones.

And this is their story, finely crafted with care and no small degree of affection.

John Phillpott