William Philpott is Professor of the History of Warfare in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. In a thirty-year career he has published extensively on the First World War, with a focus on strategy, operations and Anglo-French relations. His book, Bloody Victory: The Sacrifice on the Somme and the Making of the Twentieth Century (2009) won the Society for Army Historical Research’s Templer Prize and the World War 1 Historical Association’s Norman B. Tomlinson Jr book prize. Attrition: Fighting the First World War (2014) was a Wall Street Journal book of the year. He is President of the British Commission for Military History.