The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915

This is history as it unfolded, not as it was later remembered. Compiled by The New York Times in January 1915, just months into the Great War, this volume captures World War I through the dispatches and reports of those living it. The opening piece is a dispatch from Field Marshal Sir John French himself, commanding the British Expeditionary Force, recounting the early battles around Mons and the grueling retreat that would become legendary. Here you will find the logistics of moving troops across a countryside descending into war, the thunder of German artillery, the courage of British infantrymen facing impossible odds, and the strategic calculations made in real time by men who could not yet see what this conflict would become. This is not a history of the war. It is the war as contemporary journalists and military leaders saw it: urgent, terrifying, and still unwritten. For readers who want to understand how the First World War was understood in its first brutal months, before the trenches calcified into stalemate and the full scale of the slaughter became clear, this document remains indispensable.