A team of academics, archivists and volunteers set about tracing WWI veterans and interviewing them at length in order to record the experiences of ordinary individuals in war.

Authors have occasionally been granted access to the vaults, but digesting the thousands of hours of footage is a monumental task.

Author Max Arthur puts the interviews into chronological and campaign order, and provides some context about the events that surround the memories.

The book includes testimonies from Harry Patch, Philip Neame, Horace Birks, Edmund Blunden, Douglas Wimberley, Mabel Lethbridge, Reginald Leonard Haine, Edward Spears, Godfrey Buxton, Henry Williamson, Tom Adlam, Cecil Arthur Lewis, Montagu Cleeve, Charles Carrington, Keith Officer and Norman Demuth.

Now, forty years on, the Imperial War Museum has at last given author Max Arthur and his team of researchers unlimited access to the complete WWI tapes.