4 ideas
The book deliberately sets aside causes, strategy, diplomacy and outcomes, and reconstructs only what particular people felt, saw and endured from day to day. This changes the war from a chain of decisions made at the top into a mosaic of private worlds. Most of those worlds were confined, repetitive and bewildering, and none of the participants could see the whole.
For most participants, the dominant texture of the First World War was boredom, discomfort, rumour, hunger, illness and waiting, broken only occasionally by violence. Combat was the exception. Because diaries and letters record this ordinary substance, they contradict the battle-centred narratives that later memory built around the war.
Participants repeatedly found war exhilarating, aesthetically striking, comradely and meaningful even while it destroyed them and those around them. Allure and horror were not stages in which disillusion replaced enthusiasm. They existed side by side, which helps explain why people kept participating in something they experienced as terrible.
Elfriede Kuhr was a twelve-year-old girl in Schneidemühl, a German town near the eastern front. In 1914 she watched troop trains leave to cheering crowds and played war games with other children. Her diary then records the growing lists of the dead, hunger, and the wounded passing through, and follows her slow shift from patriotic excitement to revulsion, showing how total war reshaped a civilian child's inner life far from the fighting.