‘In our collective memory’, writes Cabanes, ‘the catastrophes of Verdun and the Somme in 1916 have eclipsed the unprecedented violence of the war’s first month.’ His history of the first weeks of war is told from the perspective of the ordinary men and women, soldiers and civilians of France and evokes the traumas of mobilization, German conquest and occupation, the death toll of battles – 27,000 in one day at Charleroi – an army in retreat, and old ways of life gone for ever.