Statistics numb; individual testimony restores feeling to catastrophe

Hastings's organizing method is to build the book almost entirely from first-person accounts — letters, diaries, postwar interviews — rather than leading with troop movements and casualty figures, because he believes sheer numbers desensitize readers rather than informing them. A statistic like an average daily death toll in the tens of thousands is almost impossible to feel; a single soldier's account of a specific death is not.

He deliberately alternates between the necessary strategic context (why a campaign happened, what its objectives were) and granular personal testimony, using the latter to keep the former from becoming abstract. This produces a reading experience that is far more viscerally uncomfortable than a typical campaign history, by design.

His implicit argument is that historical understanding requires both registers — the scale that only aggregated numbers can convey, and the felt reality that only individual voices can convey — and that most single-volume histories sacrifice the second for the sake of narrative efficiency.

Takeaway: when encountering any large-scale historical statistic, deliberately seek out one individual account to keep the number from becoming merely abstract.