"Roland Leighton, Edward Brittain, Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow, the four subjects of this book are, for their social class and generation, not untypical examples of the consequences of the world turned upside down. In the summer of 1914 they were all on the threshold of Oxbridge careers, and looking forward, with greater or lesser enthusiasm, to working lives in one of the professions with the youthful hope that they might break the mould and end up doing something out of the ordinary. Instead, caught up in the patriotic fervours of war fever, all thoughts of university were put to one side by three of them as they applied themselves to getting army commisions so as not to miss out on a war popularly expected to be over by Christmas ... Two of them reached the Front in 1915 ... and the other two in 1916. As junior infantry officers in the conditions of trench warfare, as it had evolved in the early months of the war, their chances of survival were not high"--Introduction.