They Did Not Grow Old by Tim Lynch Spellmount, £12.99

Somebody has calculated that the First World War produced more than a million-and-a-half poems. If true, that’s not surprising given that for nearly five years millions of men were under arms and all of them had a story to tell.

Tim Lynch’s book is not about poetry, although the title derives from the best-known verse of Laurence Binyon’s poem, For The Fallen – “They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old...”

But at the heart of this comprehensive, iconoclastic social and historical illustrated chronicle are the stories of half-a-dozen Yorkshire teenagers in the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry who were sent to the Western Front in the latter part of the war.

One of them was Harold Wiseman, from Keighley, the author’s great uncle. Curiosity about who he was and why he and his friends fought prompted Tim Lynch to research the social background of the volunteers and conscripts, the causes of the war and a great deal else.

Lynch, born and raised in Keighley himself, explores all the various aspects of Army life that the young recruits would have experienced, from basic training to ‘chatting up’ in the trenches – removing lice from Army-issue clothing.

This book is not a general reader. It contains a vast amount of information, even down to the shape and colour of the mobilisation envelope – long and green – that Harold Wiseman’s older brother Jimmy received on August 5, 1914.

At the front of the book are graphic descriptions of the filth and squalor of the poorer parts of industrial towns like Keighley. A cynic might say this was ideal preparation for conditions on the Western Front.

“It was, as reformers were later to argue, a situation in which the infantryman on the Western Front in 1914-18 stood a greater chance of survival than a baby born in the West Riding of Yorkshire.”

Unlike today’s beefy specimens in Afghanistan, the young recruits of 1914 were often malnourished and under-sized with an average height of 5ft 2in and a weight of 8st.

After the slaughter of the first two years of war, medical examinations became cursory, says Lynch. Standards began to drop, leading one military medical officer to observe: “...an astonishing number of men whose narrow or misshapen chests, and other deformities or defects, unfitted them to stay the more exacting requirements of service in the field.”

The Kitchener armies that followed the British Expeditionary Force had few if any dentists. Trained cooks were a scarcity as well. Feeding thousands of young men three times a day could be a nightmarish experience especially for those brought up in more genteel circumstances.

But for those brought up in poverty the clothes they were issued and the food they were served were a marked improvement on what they were used to in civvy street. With all its short-comings, Army life gave some a semblance of discipline and purpose.

Among the book’s numerous illustrations are battlefield photographs showing the dead and the wounded from both sides. The book concludes with an appendix listing the names of 136 soldiers, some of whom survived the war and others, like his great uncle Harold Wiseman, who were killed in action but whose bodies were never recovered.