The Great War

Plot

Publisher description: By the outbreak of the First World War, photography was no longer in its infancy. At first, small pocket cameras enabled informal, personal pictures to be made by men at the front, but the dangers of uncontrolled photography were realised by those in power. The arrival of official photographers were used both to document this unprecedented conflict and to serve the patriotic mood. The scale of the conflict was matched by the extent to which it was photographed. For the first time an attempt has been made to construct a single visual narrative of the war in one all-encompasing book drawn from the Imperial War Museum's nearly half a million photographs. The opening photograph is of the gun that fired the first shot of the war. The final photograph is of an audio recording showing the arrival of silence on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. This book offers a chronology of events and a historical summary, together with detailed captions for every picture. The consequences of this conflict shaped much of the modern world, and the depth of the human loss incurred is almost impossible to measure. Inescapably, the book serves as a memorial.