THE history of the first World War continues to fascinate and appal, not least because it shows what true heroism was: not the ability to stand upright in a hail of bullets (foolhardy), or plunge a bayonet into the guts of someone who is trying to do the same to you (barbaric), but to endure the mud and the lice, the rats and the decomposing corpses for months on end, under sporadic bombardment and with occasional forays into extreme danger. The triumph, in fact, of ordinary humanity over incalculable adversity.

One such was Freddy Ross, a second lieutenant in the Dublin Fusiliers, who spent a large part of his later life in the caseroom of The Irish Times correcting proofs. He saved the life of my uncle, Cyril Conerney, who had been cut off from the main body of troops fighting their way painfully through southern Belgium in the last weeks of the war.

Neither of them looked like a warrior, though in fact Cyril Conerney yearned for the chance to join up again when the second World War started. The trenches had fitted him for nothing but a humdrum job selling advertising: they also destroyed his chest so he lasted for only a few months in uniform in 1940.

None of the muck and grime emerges from the official history of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, Col Wylly Neill's "Blue-caps", which was published for private circulation in 1923 - an arid account of battles and troop movements, numbers of the killed and wounded (with the names of the officers but rarely of the men), with now and then a mention of the mud that holds up an advance.

The remarkable thing about Cyril Falls's classic history of the 36th (Ulster) Division, which played such a part in shaping the loyalist epic in the North is how it obeys the formalities of regimental history writing, while at the same time using powerfully condensed word pictures to convey the paradoxical horror of it all.

"As one watched the big shells bursting, sending up huge columns of earth, day after day," he writes of the preparatory bombardment before the Battle of the Somme, "it appeared as though no life could continue in that tortured and blasted area."

While the troops were waiting for the onslaught on the morning of July 1st, 1916, "in a curious complete lull that fell before dawn, men heard with astonishment a nightingale burst into song The leading men could even see the German machineguns firing at them, so that it is easy to see what sort of target they offered to those guns."

And then after the slaughter: "Well might commanding officers feel appalled at the magnitude of the task before them in building up anew, without the best of their officers and NCOs. The men were very silent in these first few days after the battle..."

Falls is not averse to blood-and-glory heroics, but there is a grim honesty in how he describes the static nature of contemporary warfare, utterly transformed by well-supplied heavy artillery, the spying balloons and gadfly aircraft.

It is interesting to compare his account of the final stages of the war, as the Dublins and elements of the 36th Division fought shoulder to shoulder from Ypres eastwards towards the German frontier, with that given by Col Wylly.

Falls, unlike Wylly, gives full play to the utter confusion behind the British lines: "Batteries in an advance go forward only. The limbers which feed them, the lorries which feed the limbers from the train, must go forward and backward. Therein lay the real trouble. The roads were choked

"Little more ground was to be won by the Allies until they had mastered the difficulties behind them, pushed forward adequate artillery and ammunition for a new full-dress attack to provide the initial momentum for a great new advance..."

First published in 1922 this book well deserves republication, and not only for the light it casts on the loyalist self-image.