nine years to sort. Edmonds had found the papers in heaps in the floor and apparently summarily sacked the Chief Clerk for refusing to climb a ladder to retrieve a bundle. Edmonds complained that Atkinson, his predecessor, had let historians plunder the packets of documents and not return items and claimed that it took until June 1923 to catalogue the records. The first draft of a volume was prepared by a "narrator", who sorted, read and analysed the documents. The result was revised by the "historian" who added comments and a conclusion. The draft was then sent to participants down to battalion commanders, other senior military officers, politicians and government departments. The draft for 1916 Part I (including the First Day on the Somme) was sent to who had sent 1,470 replies by 1931. Comments on the first chapter created a pile high and Edmonds complained that his staff was insufficient, considering that he had briefed them that all names, initials, ranks and numbers had to be checked and then cross-checked with the French and German accounts; lack of staff slowed production. In 1922, Edmonds had calculated that it would take twenty years to write ten volumes, a feat that the French had achieved in three years. It took (excluding 1939–1945) to produce Front volumes and on other theatres. Content Edmonds had great influence on the literary and academic integrity of the work. In the first volume, published in 1922, Edmonds wrote in the preface, that "no deviation from the truth nor misrepresentation will be found in the official histories on which my name appeared". Edmonds' claim has been challenged ever since, leading to a common assumption that the work is vapid at best and at worst fraudulent, a partial, misleading and exculpatory account of the military establishment. In 1934, Liddell Hart questioned the integrity of the writers, calling 1918 Part I "patriotic" and "parochial". Norman Brook, one of the official historians, claimed in 1945, that Edmonds could not be trusted to revise 1916 Part I, because he had succumbed to the temptation to interpolate his views. In 1976, John Keegan (15 May 1934 – 2 August 2012) wrote In 1985, David French wrote that Edmonds "...has a private purpose to conceal the truth about the high command in France from the lay public...." and that Edmonds had become concerned to rebut claims by politicians that Haig wasted lives on