Best Stories of the 1914 European War

This is not a history of the Great War. It is the war itself, captured in real time. Compiled in 1914, when the conflict was still being called the European War and no one yet knew it would swallow four years and twenty million lives, this anthology gathers dispatches from correspondents embedded with armies, reflections from soldiers in the field, and voices from civilians swept up in the chaos. Here are Belgian defenders holding impossible lines near Namur, families torn apart at railway stations, refugees streaming toward nowhere, and the strange, dark humor that blooms even in catastrophe. The remarkable thing about these accounts is their temporal innocence: these writers do not yet know about the Somme, about gas, about the mud that will swallow a generation. They write of valor and retreat with the urgency of people living through something unprecedented. For historians and readers drawn to primary sources, this volume offers an invaluable window into the war's first, bewildering months, before the word 'trench' became synonymous with hell.