The Great War

The opening photograph is of the gun that fired the first shot of the war. The final photograph is of an audio recording showing the arrival of silence on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. The advent of popular photography meant that the Great War was the first conflict to be documented in photographs, from the deserts of the Middle East to the mud of Western Front. Now the digital age has made it possible to construct a single photographic narrative that follows the war on multiple fronts, covering the conflict on land, sea and air. Imperial War Museums in London houses one of the greatest photographic archives of conflict in the world, collecting hundreds of thousands of pictures of the First World War from all the combat nations. This unique book is divided into five sections, each prefaced with a detailed chronology of events and a historical summary, together with detailed captions for every picture.