
As war breaks out, the journey of Reg Evans, a cockney lad and one of the first to volunteer to fight, is told told through moving letters to his anxious mother at home. The letters of Alan Lloyd, an upper-crust young man from Birmingham who joined the army in the same month he was married, to his new wife from the battlefields of Ypres reveal the shock of a generation of young men coming to terms with a war more terrible than anyone had foreseen. Dorothy Lawrence was determined to find a part she could play in the war… and who set off on her own to the trenches, undercover as a war correspondent. James Butlin, a young Oxford University student, whose letters indicate initial positivity on joining the conflict disintegrating into despair as the reality of trench warfare takes its toll.
As war breaks out, the journey of Reg Evans, a cockney lad and one of the first to volunteer to fight, is told told through moving letters to his anxious mother at home. The letters of Alan Lloyd, an upper-crust young man from Birmingham who joined the army in the same month he was married, to his new wife from the battlefields of Ypres reveal the shock of a generation of young men coming to terms with a war more terrible than anyone had foreseen. Dorothy Lawrence was determined to find a part she could play in the war… and who set off on her own to the trenches, undercover as a war correspondent. James Butlin, a young Oxford University student, whose letters indicate initial positivity on joining the conflict disintegrating into despair as the reality of trench warfare takes its toll.
The real-life stories of Reg Evans, shot in the face in the trenches, as he undergoes pioneering plastic surgery – and of Alan Lloyd, who has swapped life with his new wife and baby son for the battlefields of Ypres and the Somme. But it also explores war on the Home Front – through the diaries of fashionable celebrity cook and restaurateur Hallie Miles and suffragette Kate Parry Frye, as they see the old Edwardian world crumble around them, opening up ever more opportunities for women, as ever more men – including their own loved ones – and sent to fight and die at the Front.