Bringing together Sigmund Freud, Osip Mandelstam, Lloyd George, Bertrand Russell, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, Vera Brittain - voices famous and unknown - Peter Vansittart takes us through the course of the Great War, juxtaposing letters from the trenches with music-hall songs, and the words of poets and politicians. Linking the public and the personal, the history with the myth, his rich and unorthodox anthology forms a moving image of everything that went into the War, and culminated in its 'scalding waste of spirit'.