Introduction

In 1930, the editor of Everyman Magazine requested entries for a new anthology of Great War accounts. The result was a revolutionary book unlike any other of the period; for as Malcolm Brown notes in his introduction "I believe it might fairly be described as a rediscovered classic".

It was the very first collection to reveal the many dimensions of the war through the eyes of the ordinary soldier and offers heart-stopping renditions of the very first gas attack; aerial dogfights above the trenches; the moment of going over the top.

Told chronologically, from the first scrambles of 1914, the drudgery of the war of attrition once the trenches had been dug, to the final joy of Armistice.