It’s called microhistory, which says, among other things, that in order to understand big events, we first need to understand smaller events, and how these historical events affected not only bigger figures, but also the not so important “everyday guys” (Schofield and Blake in this case). This technique was used, encouraged and further developed by one of the most important and influential schools of historiography; the Annales school.

So no, it’s not just some stupid way of dismissing the impact WWI had on a major scale, it’s a different way of looking at history as not only big events and big names with big impacts, but as a compilation of small event that result in, and are influenced by this big events and names.