A platoon of inexperienced British soldiers crosses to France, in excited and nervous anticipation of what is to come; they find themselves at Ypres where the battle-weary Allied troops are dug in, and slaughter surrounds them. With their young, upri...

Set deep in the mountains of southern France, this charming short novel tells the story of a man from the Cevennes Mountains called Roux, who refuses to join the army at the outbreak of war in 1914. Instead, he flees and hides in the hills, only retu...

I never saw the man again, alive or dead. One will say that I saw him only for a moment, that it was misty at the time, and that even I did not recognise the features, covered as they were with grime and stubble. Yet I am sure that the taller of the...

A profound and very human account of the early years of the war, told from the perspective of a father rather than combatants, but no less revealing. Mr Britling lives in the quintessentially English town of Matching's Easy in Essex. He is a great...

"Already loose sand had drifted over the stamped-down square which momentarily had distinguished the subaltern's grave: no there was no sign, no mark, no indication whatsoever. There had been, here, eleven men. Now ten rode away". In the Mesopotamian...

"The million British dead have left no books behind. What they felt as they died hour by hour in the mud, or were choked horribly with gas, or relinquished their reluctant lives on stretchers, no witness tells. But here is a book that almost tells it...

Towards the end of the war as the Germans are in their final retreat in November 1918, a British raiding party stumbles across a strange and eerie scene in a ruined chateau, under fire. Following the strains of a familiar tune, and understandably per...

Under Fire, first published in French as Le Feu, was one of the first novels about WWI, appearing in December 1916, before the outcome of the war was clear. Set in early 1916, it follows a squad of French volunteer soldiers through the eyes of an unn...

Charles Pagan and Dick Baron, who served together in WWI, embark on a walking holiday in the Vosges Mountains in France, in 1930. En route they meet Cecil and his sister Clare who is recovering from the loss of her fiance during the war. Pagan and Ba...

"The Whistlers' Room" is the surprisingly gentle, sensitive story of a section in a German hospital where three soldiers try to recover from battle injuries. They are known as the Whistlers, as all were shot in the throat and their breathing results...