You're right, The Great War and Modern Memory is not only an amazing history but it's also a remarkable bit of writing in its own right. It's one of those exceptional books on war and the history of warfare and up there with the likes of John Keegan's The Face of Battle and others that comprise the main text corpus about warfare. It's an essential read for anyone who's interested in the subject.

It's author, Paul Fussell, an educator in English, was a WWII veteran and in that nightmarish push across the border into Germany and so had firsthand experience of what it's like to be in battle. Fussell not only looks at the horrors of The Great War but also at those who participated in it, and of the social milieu that surrounded it.

Fussell not only speaks from experience but also from the heart, he dedicates the book to the memory of a companion who was killed nearby him. It's a very moving piece of writing.

I came to the book just by chance, I saw it on a pile of old books on a table outside a secondhand bookstore around two decades ago. My eye was drawn immediately to the remarkable photo of a tragic figure of a young soldier on its cover. The lost and dejected look on that soldier is forever fixed in my memory.

I doubt if that cover photograph could be bettered, it foretells the book's contents to a tee.

A week ago I referenced this book in a HN discussion of Tolkien: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40573023

Yeah, war is one of the most frequent topics of his books: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Fussell#Works

Which actually surprised me, because I first learned about him through his book on class (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-fussell-on-clas...).