7.29 a.m., 1st July 1916. North of the River Somme the young men of two armies wait to go 'over the top'.

For Britain it was the costliest day in its Army's history - 58,000 dead, wounded and missing. For France, it was a relative stroll as they took every objective within a few hours.

In two volumes, The Long Road to the Somme seeks to explore, understand and, possibly, explain such dramatically different outcomes.

It looks at previous wars - the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1, the Second Boer War, the Russo-Japanese War 1904-5, and the First Balkan War 1912-3 - to see what lessons were learnt and what was ignored.

It looks at politics and society, at education and training, at strategies and tactics, at how the public were conditioned to accept war as inevitable - and at the prescient men who, unlike the military commanders, accurately forecast the way in which The Great War would be fought.

Volume I - Episodes - covers the period from 1870 to December 1915.

Volume II - Planning the Big Push - explores the development of the Somme plan, the impact of Verdun, and the great differences in tactics employed by the two Armies on 1st July.