Five Best: Books on World War I

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By Frederic Manning (1930) 1. All wars end in a war of words, as those who have survived on both sides tell their story. World War I is no exception.

Books are still being written about it, more than a century after its end. However, one doesn’t have to read the six volumes and 3,261 pages of Winston Churchill’s history of World War I to find out what it was like to fight in it. Frederic Manning survived life in the trenches and the First Battle of the Somme—no mean feat—and went on to write a brilliant, unsparing novel that initially had to be published anonymously because of its profane, bracing dialogue.

Manning captures the everyday language of the soldiers, for whom the enemy is not the Germans, but their own senior officers and the politicians at home. Ernest Hemingway called Manning’s book “the finest and noblest novel to come out of World War I." To learn about that war, this is the place to start. By Ernst Jünger (1920) 2.

What World War I was like on the other side is portrayed in Ernst Jünger’s searing memoir, “Storm of Steel." The author—who died in 1998 at the age of 102—describes with stinging accuracy his four years of fighting on the Western Front as a young infantry officer in the German army. During his service, he was wounded seven times and awarded Germany’s highest decoration for bravery, the coveted Pour le Mérite medal (also known as the “Blue Max"). If you want to understand hand-to-hand fighting in World War I, it’s all here: the mud, the blood, the wounded and the dead, the literally breathtaking sensation of being shelled by heavy artillery as the explosions empty the lungs.

Jünger has an amazing memory and a keen eye for detail, and spares the reader nothing. By Robert Graves (1929) 3. Robert