Given this was a real place, and it features real people, do you know how closely it reflects historical events? Let’s move onto your fourth choice, Learning to Fight (2017) by Aimee Fox, which is about military innovation.

For instance, The Good Soldier: The Biography of Douglas Haig by Gary Mead has sought to re-evaluate the Field Marshal. Haig’s post-war reputation has inspired debate for decades. Mead seeks to separate myth from reality regarding Haig in his well-reviewed book. Flo of the Somme by Hilary Robinson with illustration by Martin Impey shows how animals were integral to the war effort. As well as the eponymous doggy hero of the book, Flo also looks at the impact of cats, canaries, bears, goats, rabbits, and even glow-worms, in a youngster-friendly format with captivating illustrations. World War 1 audiobooks The war continues to provide inspiration for writers from all literary spheres. From expressive imaginative poetry to in-depth biographies to children’s novels, new works appear every year. So you’ve got to look at the whole army and see how lessons that were learnt in one place — the Western Front, say —were then applied in Palestine or Mesopotamia or vice versa. What she also did was to say that academics have done a lot of work explaining what was learnt, but no one’s really explained how the learning process operated. How did these lessons get transmitted and how did people learn new stuff? She gets into that.But the questions that the book is asking, about the connection between these literally earth-shaking events and the impact they have on individuals, and how that feeds through into the way that people perceive the world around them and interact with it—whether that’s artistically or just in terms of their everyday life—I think are really, really interesting. One of the points that he makes is that the traditional distinction that most historians make—whereby, broadly, you have international historians talking about the causes of war and then military historians talking about what happens during the war—is a false one. You can’t actually explain the causes of the war without also looking at its conduct and how it is fought out. Nor can you understand the conduct without understanding the causes. And so he tries, if you like, to bridge the divide between peace and war. I suppose literature allows the juxtaposition of the softer side of human emotions with the terrible machine of war.

The book does not focus on heroics, but rather on the conditions in which a generation of young men found themselves when caught up in this horrendous conflict. The poets of the Great War drew heavily on their surroundings, creating chapter and verse to help them understand and explain the sights and sensations of World War One battlefields.The British were a lot more ad hoc. Sometimes that can be a bad thing. Sometimes you need uniformity and systematization, and the British couldn’t always manage that. But the real point—and the same is true for any organisation—is that change is easier to effect if you go with the cultural grain of the organisation rather than cutting across it. The British Army with all this ad hocery looks terribly haphazard, but actually it suits the way the British Army works. For beginners, Sir Michael Howard’s aptly titled The First World War: A Very Short Introduction might be the ideal entry point. Historian and Author John Boff describes Howard’s work as “the best, single, short introduction to the whole First World War. Perhaps the most famous works focussed on World War One for children were penned by renowned author Michael Morpurgo. America’s entry into the war. Superb analyses the arrival of 100,000 fresh troops a month in the summer of 1918 along the Western front. The German high command knew by the end of summer that they had lost the war. They were losing nearly every single battle/skirmish on the Western front and lost all their gains made in the Spring of