What Richard Holmes really said, according to the Guardian.
"Holmes is good on war and rearmament, as he should be, though some of his opinions are unexpected: he calls the Gallipoli campaign (more than 20,000 British dead) 'a relatively minor episode' and he thinks that Passchendaele (more than 500,000 casualties on both sides) was a 'grimly successful exercise of attrition by the Allies'. "