Excellent single volume WW1 for beginners. Following is an excerpt from Chapter 8 "First Blood" :="The individual armies, too, would be half-blind as they went into action. And they would be far more vulnerable than their size would suggest. A mass of infantry on the move is like nothing else in the world, but it may usefully be thought of as an immensely long and cumbersome caterpillar with the head of a nearsighted tiger. (The monstrousness of the image is not inappropriate.) It is structured to make its head as lethal as possible, ready at all times to come to grips with whatever enemy comes into its path. A big part of an army commander's job is to make certain that it is in fact the head that meets the enemy, so that the tiger's teeth - men armed with guns and blades and whatever other implements of destruction are available to them - can either attack the enemy or fend off the enemy's attack as circumstances require.
An advancing army's worst vulnerability lies in the long caterpillar body behind the head. (Long is an inadequate word in the context of 1914: a single corps of two divisions included thirty thousand or more men at full strength and stretched over fifteen miles of road when on the march.) Great battles can be won when a tiger's head eludes or even accidentally misses the head of its enemy and makes contact with its body instead. When this happens the enemy is "taken in the flank," and if an attacking head has sufficient weight it can quickly tear the enemy's body apart, finally reducing even the head to an isolated, enfeebled remnant. Much the same can happen when an army on the move is taken in the rear, or surrounded and cut off from its lines of supply. Hence the importance that Moltke and Joffre attached to arranging their armies in an unbroken line, so that each could protect the flanks of its neighbours. Hence too the dangers inherent in the fact that both generals would begin the war with one end of their lines unprotected."
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From Chapter 12 "Flanders Fields"
"Just one day after the fall of Belgrade, however, in a moment of Balkan high drama, the mustachioed King Peter of Serbia, rifle in hand, announced to his soldiers that he was releasing them from their pledge to fight for him and the homeland but that he for one was going to the front, alone if necessary. This gesture rallied every doubting patriot to the cause. A counterattack organized by Serbian General Radomir Putnik - the same old soldier who had been caught vacationing in Austrian territory when the war began but was allowed to return home in an act of almost medieval courtesy by Emperor Franz Joseph - sent two hundred thousand Serb troops down on the overextended Austrians. The Austrians, who had gone days without food and were freezing in summer uniforms, fled back across the border."
From Chapter 16 "Gallipoli"
"Kemal, ordering his men to make yet another charge in which no one seemed likely to survive, uttered the words that would forever form the core of his legend. "I don't order you to attack," he said. "I order you to die. In the time which passes until we die, other troops and commanders can take our place."
Background "Genocide"
"The Young Turks found here all the justification they needed for actions that in peacetime probably would have been unimaginable. They began in comparatively innocuous fashion, disarming their Armenian soldiers and assigning them to labor battalions. Then they porceeded to work, and starve, those battalions to death. Next, having eliminated the part of the population most capable of defending itself, they sent an army onto the plateau that had long been home to most of Turkey's Armenians. In town after town and city after city, all males over the age of twelve were gathered up and shot or hacked to death en masse. Women were raped and mutilated, and those who were not killed were sold into slavery. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were marched off to the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia. Many died of exposure, starvation, or exhaustion along the way, and others were murdered by their Kurdish escorts. The pogrom spread across all of Turkey. In Constantinople thousands of convicted criminals were organized into death squads whose only assignment was to kill ever Armenian they could find, giving first priority to those intellectuals, professionals, and religious and political leaders who might have the potential to serve as leaders. The families of Turkish officials took the choicest booty; the death squads and rabble took the rest.
It is estimated that more than half a million Armenians were killed in 1915, and that was far from the end of it ..."
... Background "Genocide"
"No one would ever be punished. In the years after the war the United States found it more advantageous to come to terms with the Muslims of the Middle East with their oil riches than to redress the wrongs done to an Armenian nation described by the American high commissioner in Istanbul as "a race like the Jews; they have little or no national spirit and have poor moral character."
Successive Turkish governments continued into the twenty first century not only to deny that an Armenian genocide ever occurred but to prosecute any Turk who dared to write of it."
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