War is an act of massive violence that takes place in a specific space during a specific amount of time. While there is an abundance of literature on war and time that explains how warfare is shaped and constructed by factors such as technology, politics, and socioeconomic relations, the influence of space is often overlooked. This is highly regrettable, according to Christoph Nübel, whose book focuses on German soldiers who fought on the twenty-kilometer-wide Western front during World War I. The landscape was altered unrecognizably as a result of constant shelling and gas poisoning, but the land itself also determined the way the war was fought and how the soldiers coped. How, Nübel asks, did they adapt to the unusual circumstances, and what impressions did this landscape make on them? The theater of war became three-dimensional for the first time in history during the Great War, expanding into airspace and beneath the ground. Such sights were not only a completely unfamiliar experience for most soldiers, but also constantly altered over time, which meant that the soldiers' coping mechanisms had to change constantly as well. It became the task of the military—military doctors and psychiatrists, in particular—to make the soldiers' bodies and psyches capable of adapting to the changing circumstances and appearances of the landscape. Not only did the landscape alter, but also man's interpretation of this landscape as well: how it was valued, how it was described, what metaphors were used. Nübel nevertheless acknowledges that the war—the front—always changed faster than man could react.

Nübel divides his book into three parts. In the first section about the Umwelt—the climate, weather, and soil at the front—the author deals with the way in which the soldiers, deprived of the familiar ways of coping with these surroundings, adjusted to and lived in them. The novelty of his conclusion that these new surroundings often disturbed the soldiers more than the actual fighting did is debateable, but his second conclusion—that the trenches and battlefields helped to overcome the complacent years of peace—is unconvincing, for it suggests that the soldiers had indeed welcomed war. In fact, most of them had not.

The second part, which focuses on the Gelände (terrain), concerns itself with military responses to a landscape that witnessed violent destruction. Focusing on the 15th Bavarian infantry regiment, for instance, the author makes it clear that soldiers seldom had clear and up-to-date knowledge of, or interest in, issues such as new tactics and learning processes—despite continuing attempts by their leaders to convince them of the necessity of doing so. This undoubtedly made their attempts to survive more difficult, especially, Nübel argues, in the closing months of the war, when, as a result of decreasing manpower, the number of new recruits increased. The latter were unaware of the particularities of the Western front and often physically and/or psychologically unfit to engage in battle.

Gelände distinguishes itself from Landschaft (landscape): whereas the latter is the physical scene that one actually sees, the former has historical and cultural connotations as well, which give it a far deeper emotional meaning. What did soldiers think of when they saw a destroyed landscape that they had perhaps seen and visited before the war—or a landscape that had once been beautiful and would likely be beautiful again at some point in the future? Such thoughts influenced the way they described the physical landscape they saw. Based on scant sources produced by the few men who discussed such issues, Nübel concludes that the soldiers used the landscape as an escape from their hardships. As others have argued, this modifies the common myth that an unbridgeable gap existed between military front and home front, between soldier and civilian. In the eyes of many, but not all, the front was strange, ugly, and full of often hidden and constantly new terrors. Home, or Heimat, thus remained an ideal of rest, beauty, and peace.

Nübel's conclusions are not especially surprising, but his use of a broad range of academic literature, as well as letters, diaries, drawings, and picture books, could nevertheless have resulted in a highly valuable contribution to the history and understanding of the Great War in particular, and of war more generally, as well as of the way soldiers endeavoured to survive. Unfortunately, Nübel's story is weighted down by too many facts and details; as a result, the book is often chaotic, lacks clear development, is repetitious, and makes irrelevant jumps through time—all of which, in the end, needlessly blur his narrative.