This powerful anthology contains extracts from 47 authors and 20 countries, covering the fighting in all theatres of the first world war. Some passages have been specially translated. It includes memoirs and essays, as well as fiction that is rooted in first-hand experiences. Context is provided by a useful biographical paragraph on each author. The range of texts is what makes it so remarkable, from Ernst Jünger’s disturbing War Diary (“In war moral considerations should not be allowed to determine any action”), Wyndham Lewis’s memoir Blasting and Bombardiering (“There is nothing so romantic as war”), to Vera Brittain’s memories of working as a nurse in a German prisoner ward (“The world was mad and we were all victims”) and DH Lawrence’s disgust at postwar life: “This England of the peace was like a corpse.” One of the most memorable passages is from Emilio Lussu’s A Soldier on the Southern Front, in which he takes aim at a young Austrian officer smoking a cigarette, but cannot pull the trigger: “Fighting a war is one thing, killing a man is something else.”
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