Voices of the First World War has been broadcast throughout the commemorative period on Radio 4 as a 50-part series in which Dan Snow brings together the sound archive collections of the Imperial War Museums and the BBC, to tell the story of the war through the recollections of those who were there. The series, which will conclude in the week running up to November 11th 2018, has been tracing the story of the war, year by year, by drawing on interviews in the oral history collection of the IWM and the rushes for the BBC’s ‘Great War’ series of 1964.

All this week on 4 Extra, five hour-long editions will explore the events of each year of the war through the memories of those who actually took part. In this first programme exploring the men’s experience of the beginning of the war in 1914, speakers recall in great detail, as though it were yesterday, their first impressions of France as they arrived, the shock of seeing their first casualty and hearing their first shell, their daily and nightly routines as soldiers, and their psychological state in the face of so much trauma. And we hear recollections of the much-mythologised Christmas Truce of 1914, from the point of view of those who witnessed it. Show less