The recently released 1917 film by Sam Mendes offers a microscopic view of a significant year of the First World War on the Western Front. Mendes's odyssey immerses viewers in the claustrophobic atmosphere of the late war to highlight the most commonplace sensations for fighting soldiers. If materiality evokes war memory then getting a sense of the trench coats and khaki uniforms, rivers and cherry blossoms, shocking sights and deafening sounds bespeak the human experience of war. Richard Van Emden's book 1918 too is concerned with tracing a hellish and chaotic phase of the First World War—the last year—through images and testimonies from soldiers on the front. Published on the centenary of the end of the First World War, this book is timely: rather than tracing a military history of the campaign, it foregrounds human experience.

A surge in social history since the 1960s has found military history refocus on the mundane and the popular, which has also seen research emerge on the significance of gender and sexuality, race and class to understanding war experience. In postwar Britain, these perspectives were in effect buried in favor of a reconstruction narrative. Van Emden's war on the western front is more chaotic and diverse than conventional histories are usually prepared to admit. The book also demonstrates that the conflict was profoundly shaped by links between the home front and the trenches. It is worth noting that he follows fewer characters than might be expected in order to build up a sense of the transformative effect the war had on those involved. These “real life” accounts are in abundance in 1918, not to indulge readers in entertaining diversions from larger strategic campaigns, but to offer real insights into a people's war, and thus, to tap into the collective experience of the conflict for British soldiers.

This concern with everyday things rather than sensational events is significant. Abstract forms of knowledge about the war, such as strategy, are critical to understanding the conflict, but all too often they drown out the human experience and, by extension, the human cost. It has also, dangerously, left this war open to misinterpretation and misuse by propagandists. The year 1918 was a decisive one in the war. The initial excitement had long since given way to abject horror with the battles of the Somme and Verdun, by which time both sides were caught in the trench system. In 1915, gas was introduced as a weapon of war, and new volunteers were no longer sufficient to replace the dead. Van Emden offers us a sense of the despair felt by soldiers three years later, as Lance Corporal Archibald Davis's diary from 9 April 1918 conveys. Having had an average of four hours sleep a night up to this point, he and his company were tired and weary when their building was hit at four in the morning: “The shelling was terrific, the building we were in being four times hit over our heads. At least one of the shells was a 15-inch. Alas, gas was out all the time” (132). They did not stop to get dressed but fled to the cellar for protection. These kinds of accounts bring the reader close to the reality of life and the vulnerability of citizens in uniform enduring the onslaught of modern industrial warfare.

This book offers a glimpse of what soldiers must have felt like in those final days. According to historian Denis Winter, the experience of the First World War infantryman was one of “small details and large emotions” (Death's Men: Soldiers of the Great War [2014], 51), which Van Emden vividly evokes. Van Emden uses various firsthand accounts gleaned from published and unpublished memoirs, private papers from the Imperial War Museums, the Liddle Archive, the National Archives in Kew, and various smaller collections, largely held in the United Kingdom. The photographs are distinctly unofficial, taken by soldiers on their own illegally held cameras, which they were banned from using back in 1915 due to official fears about information getting into enemy hands. Like the witness accounts, these disarming images depict Tommies washing, waiting, shaving, at play, drinking, and working. Through word and image, the book offers a captivating account of the conflict at a time when both sides were war weary. It looks to the minutiae of war to understand the soldier of 1918 and uncovers seldom seen material, useful primary sources for researchers who want to get closer to the visual and material sensations of this conflict. While this primary material is clearly fascinating and to some extent speaks for itself, further commentary and analysis from Van Emden might have helped the reader to contextualize images and grasp their significance to military and cultural history.

This volume not only offers insights into this conflict but also engages with the reality of how wars end, how combatants feel, their relief and joy, their depression, and even their sense of time lost. In the end, it was the drain of economic warfare that caused the German field commanders to declare the war lost and to seek a truce in November 1918. As twenty-year-old Sapper John Gowland of the Royal Engineers said of demobilization, “behind me are four years of death, misery, and stark horror . . . My body is whole but I have lost something that can never be regained” (355). In common with recent exhibitions and films, this book feeds the current appetite for immersive experiences of past wars. Through firsthand images and soldiers’ accounts, it also conveys the claustrophobic atmosphere of the late war; as such it is an absorbing and accessible volume that offers insights into what being there really meant.