You will have heard that a subaltern lasted six weeks. He did not. The number has no statistical support: when historians took the officers who went into Flers-Courcelette on 15 September 1916 and checked how long they had actually been at the front, only about one in twenty had been there six weeks or less, and nearly two in five had been on the Western Front for over a year. What is true is worse in a duller way. Estimates put subaltern mortality somewhere between sixty-five and eighty-one per cent — at the lowest end, double the rate of the men they led. They did not die quickly. They died disproportionately.

Look at the difference between these two. The officer kneels in a tailored tunic and riding breeches with a revolver in his fist; the private crouches in a plain tunic behind an SMLE with the bayonet already fixed. From a hundred yards a German rifleman could tell them apart instantly, which is a good part of the arithmetic above. This is the second before the whistle. In a diorama, set them at the fire step of a trench section with the officer with his walking stick further along the line — and across the wire, the MG08 team is what they are about to run at.

W. Britain model 23073. 1/30 scale (approximately 60mm), matte-painted metal. Two-piece set — kneeling officer and crouching infantryman on separate sculpted groundwork bases. Boxed.