HIS expression is one of weary resignation, his eyes fixed in a distant stare.

The stubble on his face speaks of days in a muddy trench and you can only guess at the unspeakable horrors he has just witnessed.

The face adorning the cover of this book encapsulates the deadening emotion of war. It is one of hundreds of striking images portraying the fear, futility, humour and pathos of the First World War unearthed from the archives of the Imperial War Museum and agencies such as Getty Images, as well as the author's own collection.

The photographs, many not seen before, chart the transformations in Edwardian Britain and continental Europe following the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. Most of all they humanise the grim statistics we often read about. Such is the immediacy of these people that only the uniforms of the time separate them from the reader.

One of the most evocative photographs of the Titanic disaster is of a young newspaper seller holding the bills. He was Ned Parfett who went to war and won The Military Cross, only to be killed two weeks before the armistice. Most other of the cheering faces pictured at the recruitment offices would also not return, swallowed up by the fields of Ypres, The Somme, Paschendaele, Cambrai...

many of the places featured in these dramatic pictures. The book captures the young men enjoying carefree days with their families before war to grim deaths in muddy shell craters.

Published as Remembrance Day is marked again, this is a fitting tribute to those who fought for the freedoms we still enjoy.