Behind Their Lines

Stefan Sauer/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images “Amputation was a daily occurrence in Europe from 1914-18, as modern warfare tore men apart in u...

For a long time, people have hand-copied poems that they love. The scribing of a poem slows our reading of it; writing out a poem makes us p...

Just four days before her twenty-fourth birthday*, Kathleen Montgomery Coates lost her only brother. Twenty-one-year-old Second Lieutenant B...

Charing Cross Station Detraining Wounded Lobley J Hodgson,  ©IWM ART2758 In early May of 1916, Helen Mackay recorded in her wartime journal,...

  An Ode to a Cootie, sketch by Pvt. Walter R. Sabel National WWI museum The French called them totos ; the British called them coddlers ; t...

How bad were lice infestations in the First World War? One soldier’s shirt “was found to contain 10,428 lice, and more than 10,000 eggs were...

Many of the posts on this blog have begun as secondhand bookshop finds: worn, slim volumes that bear witness to a war that changed the world...