Over the Top: Great Battles Of The First World War - Martin Marix Evans (Author); Book Description: The First World War was the first chapter in the history of modern warfare. The early battles for the French and British during the autumn and winter of 1914 were open, mobile affairs of the kind long familiar to professional soldiers. By early 1915, a new type of war had emerged – trench warfare. Although modern artillery and machine-guns had been employed in the Second Boer War only a decade or so previously, the perfection of their use led to the creation of a static front, the Western Front, stretching from the Belgian coast in the north to the Swiss border in the south. Attempts to circumvent the Western Front, notably at Gallipoli in 1915, became entangled in the same form of warfare. The attempt to break through the trench lines and re-introduce open, mobile warfare fuelled the development of close-action weapons such as the Mills bomb and the light machine-gun, new methods of using artillery, and the production of entirely new weapons such as poison gas, the aircraft and the tank. Over the Top looks at the employment of these weapons in the trench warfare of the Western Front and Gallipoli during 1914–1918 in the major battles that influenced the outcome of the First World War. About the Author: Martin Marix Evans was born in Southport, Lancashire, England in the opening days of the Second World War. He studied at Wesleyan University, Middletown CT and at the University of Cambridge in England. His publications includeThe Battles of the Somme (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1996), Passchendaele and the Battlesd of Ypres (Osprey Military, 1997), The Military Heritage of Britain and Ireland (Andrè Deutsch, 1998) and The Fall of France (Osprey 2000). He is also the author of many battlefield guides, including the D-Day operations, Ypres, and Operation Market Garden. His grandfather came from Buffalo NY, and he lived in New York and Connecticut as a boy. With his wife, Gillian, he has visited most of the battlefields of the First and Second World Wars, where he carried out most of the original research for his books. (NR KAT. 1)