Artist’s impression of the Christmas truce of 1914.
The Illustrated London News of January 9 1915
Two centuries on, this beautiful prayer for peace still brings people together around the world.
Cover of the menu for the AIF Christmas Dinner, Hotel Cecil, London, in 1916. Illustration by Fred Leist.
Museums Victoria collection, donated by Jean Bourke
For Australians serving overseas in WWI, Christmas was particularly difficult. Menus reveal how soldiers tried to maintain the traditions of home.
The Salvation Army is among the top few U.S. charities.
CityOfFortWorth
Around this time of the year, the Salvation Army’s red kettles become visible as part of holiday giving. How this British evangelical organization came to the US is interesting history.
Crowds assemble at Melbourne’s shrine of remembrance on Anzac Day, April 25, 2018,
Joe Castro/AAP
Australia is spending cast amounts of money commemorating the war dead, but it’s time we took better care of ex-servicepeople who are still living.
Viacheslav Nikolaenko via Shutterstock
How books can help veterans overcome physical and mental trauma.
From August 2014, the BBC’s four-year project followed the lives of ordinary people facing the stress of war on the home front.
BBC
Over four years, this BBC Radio 4 drama chronicled the daily lives of ordinary people dealing with the hardships of World War I.
Wellcome Collection
Sphagnum moss made ideal field dressings for wounded soldiers.
There but not there: a “ghost Tommy” sculpture at the Giant’s Causeway, Northern Ireland.
www.therebutnotthere.org.uk
The deep divide between Catholics and Protestants makes the coming together to honour the dead on both sides fraught with problems.
Sending my love.
Agnes Kantaruk/Shutterstock
Stacks of treasured love letters can tell the intimate stories of war.
Women were key to morale on the home front.
Imperial War Museum (IWM)
Battling shortages and rising food and fuel prices, housewives played a vital part in Britain’s first experience of ‘total war’.
Thousands of university staff died in the conflict.
Shutterstock
Estimates suggest that Oxford lost 19% of those who served, Cambridge 18%, and Manchester and Glasgow 17%.
A scholar takes a pilgrimage of the Western Front to try to comprehend the loss of lives of the First World War. Here British soldiers in a battlefield trench, c. 1915-1918.
Shutterstock
From the Swiss border to the English channel, a scholar describes his pilgrimage of the Western Front as a tribute to fallen soldiers and to learn more about the devastating loss of life.
An anti-conscription rally in Melbourne, 1916.
Heritage Council of Victoria
It’s time the Australians who voiced vociferous opposition to war in general and conscription in particular were commemorated as an important part of our history.
A crowd at Martin Place, Sydney, celebrates the news of the signing of the Armistice on November 11 1918.
Australian War Memorial
This year marks 100 years since the fighting stopped in the first world war. The commemoration of the armistice, Remembrance Day, remains potent but is also changing with the times.
Will Dyson sketching close to the German lines on the Western Front, 29 May 1918.
AWM E02439
Australian authorities sent artists to the WW1 battlefields to interpret and commemorate war. But unlike similar schemes in Britain and Canada, ours neglected the war experience at home and the perspective of women artists.
A member of Veterans for Peace marches during the annual Veterans Day parade in New York, Nov. 11, 2017.
AP/Andres Kudacki
Veterans of past wars have long been at the forefront of peace advocacy in the United States.
World War I soldiers in a trench. Trenches led to monotony, malnutrition and shellshock.
Everett Historical/Shutterstock.com
For many health professionals, daily practice increasingly resembles trench warfare, which took a grave toll on WWI’s soldiers.
A display of acrobatics by German internees at the prisoner of war camp at Newbury Racecourse in Berkshire in October 1914.
Imperial War Museum/Wikimedia
During First World War, the rhetoric of chivalry counteracted the inhumanity of the conflict in sometimes surprising ways.
Commonwealth war cemetery at Ypres, Belgium.
chrisdorney via Shutterstock
100 years after the end of World War I, some of its brutal lessons.
Female workers at HM munitions factory in Queensferry, north Wales, c.1915.
Flintshire Record Office/People's Collection Wales
Wartime employment gains were merely on loan for women in Wales.