A Yankee in the Trenches

Letters from railway clerks who enlisted in 1915, written from the trenches of the Western Front. Each letter comes with its original scan and a full transcript.

The National Archives

An American who joined the British Army in 1915 describes life in the trenches, raids, gas attacks, and machine-gun fire. Ends with a dictionary of trench slang.

Arthur Guy Empey

A war correspondent writes the truth that censorship kept out of his reports: the waste, the fear, and the courage he saw on the Western Front from 1914 to 1918.

Philip Gibbs

Letters a young French painter wrote to his mother from the trenches until he went missing in 1915. A quiet, moving record of one soldier's thoughts at the front.

Eugène Lemercier

The diary of a British army nurse who served on hospital trains and in field hospitals in France from 1914 to 1915, caring for the wounded from Mons to Ypres.

Anonymous