All these stories Beevor tells again, and tells them very well. But this time he tells them "from the bottom up". Previous accounts - with the exception of John Keegan's superb Six Armies in Normandy - have largely been written from the top down, concentrating on the problems of the High Command on both sides, with particular emphasis on the problems created by Hitler's interventions on the one side and Montgomery's prima donna behaviour on the other. Beevor sketches all this in with a very light hand. But he has used his research in newly available archives, not to produce a revisionist account of the campaign, but to describe what the fighting was like, both for the Allied and the German armies. His account is pointilliste, composed of detailed descriptions of the battle experience of the participants on both sides and at every level of command. This does not make for a racy narrative: sometimes Beevor's determination to make his readers see the campaign through the eyes of those fighting it makes it hard to retain a view of "the big picture". But after all, that is what war is like: an accumulation of terrible experiences, out of which historians have in retrospect to create a quite artificial order. It is his success in doing this that makes Beevor's account a quite outstanding book, well worthy to stand beside its predecessors.

One of the major points that emerges from Beevor's narrative is the difference, not only between but within the armies fighting the campaign. The core of the German armies consisted of the SS divisions, highly motivated, brilliantly led, toughened by years on the Eastern Front and fighting with a determination bred of ideology and despair. But many of the others were elderly reservists, bewildered children or units conscripted wholesale from the Eastern Front who often spoke no German at all. The American infantry was also often of low quality, with none of the regimental cohesion that kept the British going. But their armour was well equipped, well trained and led by officers who showed, when the occasion offered, an initiative powered by a ferocity that was notably lacking in their British allies. As for the British, they were very good at doing what they were ordered to do, but showed little inclination to do anything more. Their generals were mercifully "casualty-averse". They had their own experiences of the First World War and they knew that once their divisions were used up there would be no reinforcements available to replace them.