Cheerful Sacrifice

Book excerpt: This WWI history examines the significant yet overlooked British offensive that achieved major advances on the Western Front. Fought between April 9th and May 16th of 1917, the Battle of Arras was the most lethal and costly British offensive battle of the First World War. Lasting a brutal thirty-nine days, its average casualty rate was far higher than at either the Somme or Passchendaele. It also represented the longest advance against Germany up to that point since the beginning of trench warfare. In Cheerful Sacrifice, military historian Jonathan Nicholls gives the Battle of Arras its proper place in the annals of military history, enhancing his text with a wealth of eye-witness accounts. One is left in no doubt that the survivor who described it as 'the most savage infantry battle of the war', did not exaggerate.