This very welcome further addition to Jay Winter's numerous seminal publications on the First World War and its impact analyses long-term changes in the cultural response to war, focusing particularly on the visual arts, photography, film, literature and memorials. An intriguing final chapter also explores silence, drawing particularly on the legacy of shellshock as a further implicit form of memory. There is little explicit coverage of religious aspects, but nevertheless much food for thought for historians of religion. In particular, in a chapter entitled ‘Memory and the sacred’, Winter explores the decline in Western Europe of the use of the language of martyrdom in relation to death in war, and its replacement in the aftermath of the Holocaust with the language of human rights. By contrast (p. 124), ‘the presence of the terms “martyr” and “martyrdom”’ increases ‘in frequency and significance the further east one goes’, an argument that Winter primarily substantiates by discussion of the Armenian-Turkish case. The argument would, however, have benefitted from some attention to the Irish case, which in view of the persistence of the language of martyrdom in the republican tradition is at odds with Winter's geographical generalisation, although not necessarily with his underlying cultural analysis. The book as a whole can be read as a useful contribution to the literature on secularisation, insofar as it well illustrates the decline of religious reference in war art and literature in favour of more abstract and secular forms of expression. On the other hand, Winter's analysis might be balanced by expanding the agenda to include architecture and music, for example by exploring the use of the ruins of the Dresden Frauenkirche as a war memorial before its eventual restoration in the 1990s, or the composition of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem for the consecration in 1962 of the new Coventry Cathedral next to the ruins of its bombed predecessor. It is no criticism of Winter thus to suggest that there are further dimensions of the ‘war beyond words’ that merit exploration: rather it is the great strength of this book that, grounded as it is in profound reflection and extensive research, it opens up important agendas for historians of both the sacred and the secular.