The Imperial War Museums’ Voices of the First World War podcast was originally written and produced between June 2011 and August 2015 to mark the centenary of the war. It drew on IWM’s oral history archive to tell the story of the years 1914–1918 through the voices of those who lived through them.
In her deeply moving and powerful memoir, Testament of Youth, the writer Vera Brittain observed that forever there would be two types of people — those who had lived through the First World War in the front line (she had been a nurse working in hospitals in London, Malta and on the Western Front) and those who had not. For what might be called ‘the generation of 1914 –18’, the war was an experience that would never leave them. One elderly man I met in the 1980s explained how it still kept him awake at night once or twice every month, trying to figure out what it had all been about.
Your organisation does not have access to this article.
Sign up today to give your students the edge they need to achieve their best grades with subject expertise
Subscribe
