The Battlefields of the First World War: the Unseen Panoramas of the Western Front

This spectacular visual chronicle brings together 200 previously unseen panoramic images of World War I, covering the Western Front from end to end and from all years of the war. Taken at huge personal risk by the Royal Engineers for secret intelligence purposes, they reveal what no other photographs can. Each panorama offers a view of up to 160 degrees, so sharply focused that the individual figures of a waiting sniper or a louse-tortured infantryman can be made out. Introduced by historian Richard Holmes, and published in association with London's Imperial War museum, this collection reveals the landscape of World War I as it really was: rural landscapes and villages appear alongside the ruinous muddy wastes that epitomise war-torn France in the modern imagination.

Peter Barton is secretary of the All Party War Graves and Battlefield Heritage Group. He produced the critically acclaimed documentary film The Undergound War, and is co-author, with Peter Doyle, of Beneath Flanders Fields.

Peter Doyle is a scientist and military historian specializing in the role of terrain in warfare. In addition to numerous scientific books and papers, he has written: Tommy's War 1914-1918 (Crowood 2008), The Home Front: 1939-45 (Crowood, 2007, with Paul Evans); Beneath Flanders Fields: The Underground War 1914-18 (Spellmount, 2004, with Peter Barton and Johan Vandewalle) and Grasping Gallipoli (Spellmount, 2005, with Peter Chasseaud). He is co-secretary of the All Party Parliamentary War Graves and Battlefield Heritage Group, and is an elected member of the British Commission for Military History. He lives in London.