Clicking on this blue square gives you correct entrance into The Heritage of the Great War - to the FrontpageTHE HERITAGE OF THE GREAT WARClicking on this blue square gives you correct entrance into The Heritage of the Great War - to the Frontpage
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Great Writings of The Great War

Flanders, by Otto Dix, dedicated to Le Feu by Henri Barbusse

Star Flanders, by Otto Dix

Otto Dix, former German soldier, dedicated this painting to Le Feu (Under Fire), the book written by the French soldier Henri Barbusse. In our opinion Under Fire is the best novel that appeared during the war. Click on the picture to read it online.

Drawing: Writing soldier of the Great WarBelow you'll find complete books on the Great War. They are in different formats; most are just plain text, others are html-files or pdf. They come from various sources: the Gutenberg Project, Bartleby, Eldritch Press, BookRags, the library of the University of Kansas, etc.

Of a few books we have at the moment excerpts only. As soon as the full texts are available we will replace them.

If you can't find the book you are looking for, then maybe it is not yet in the public domain. Books are copyright free 70 years after the author's death (in the European Union), or when first published before 1923 (in the USA). Click here if you want to know more about copyrights.

The books in the list below are already in the public domain. Take your pick (some may take time to load):

Click to see the literary section in the Index on the left Prose        

  1. The War with Germany - A Statistical Summary, by Colonel Leonard P. Ayres, United States. War Dept. General Staff, 1919

  2. Mr. Punch's History of the Great War, by Punch, London, 1919

  3. My Adventures as a Spy, by Robert Baden Powell, 1915

  4. Under Fire: The Story of a Squad, by Henri Barbusse, 1917 (translated from the French)

  5. Germany and the Next War, by General Friedrich von Bernhardi (translated from the German Vom heutigen Kriege), 1914 (excerpts only)

  6. Mobilizing Women-power, by Harriot Stanton Blatch

  7. The Thirty-nine Steps, by John Buchan (adapted to the screen by Hitchcock in 1935), 1915

  8. History of the American Field Service in France (1914-1917), told by its members, 1917

  9. One of Ours, by Willa Cather (Pulitzer Prize–winning novel of a midwestern American’s journey to the Western Front), 1922

  10. The Riddle of the Sands, by Erskine Childers (in which he discusses a fictional German plan for invading England), 1903

  11. Notes on Life and Letters, by Joseph Conrad, 1921

  12. The Red Cross Girl, by Richard Harding Davis, 1917

  13. Wooden Crosses, by Roland Dorgeles, 1921

  14. The New Book of Martyrs, by Georges Duhamel (translated from the French)

  15. Now It Can Be Told, by Philip Gibbs

  16. The Boy Allies with Haig in Flanders, by Clair W. Hayesh

  17. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, by Vicente Blasco Ibanez, 1918

  18. The Grand Fleet, by Admiral John Rushworth Jellicoe, 1919 (excerpts only)

  19. The Gardener, by Rudyard Kipling (short story)

  20. The Irish Guards in the Great War, by Rudyard Kipling, 1923

  21. Four weeks in the trenches, by Fritz Kreisler, 1915 (translated from the German/Austrian)

  22. The Riddle of the Rhine: Chemical Strategy in Peace and War, by Victor LeFebure (with a preface by Marshall Foch and an introduction by Field-Marshall Sir Henry Wilson), 1923

  23. On Special Missions, by Charles Lucieto, of the Allied Secret Service, 1927

  24. Into The Jaws of Death, by Private Jack O'Brien (appendix only: a narrative of the the 28th Battalion), 1919

  25. The Zeppelin's Passenger, by E. Phillips Oppenheim

  26. One Man's Initiation: 1917, by John Dos Passos, 1920

  27. Three Soldiers, by John Dos Passos, 1921

  28. Tales of War, by Lord Dunsany (pseudonym of Edward John Plunkett), 1918

  29. Fighting in Flanders, by E. Alexander Powell, with photo's by Donald Johnson, London

  30. Mr. Punch's History of the Great War, by Punch, London, 1919

  31. Army Boys on German Soil - Our Doughboys Quelling the Mobs, by Homer Randall

  32. The Land that Time Forgot, by Edgar Rice Burroughs (novel, first published in 1918's Blue Book Magazine as "The Lost U-Boat")

  33. Germany's High Fleet in the World War, by Admiral Reinhard Scheer (translated from the German), 1920

  34. Shell Shock and its Lessons, by Grafton Elliot Smith, Dean of Faculty of Medicine and Professor of Anatomy, and Tom Hatherly Pear, Lecturer in Experimental Psychology, both from Manchester University Medical School, 1917

  35. Memoirs of Forty-eight Years of Service, by General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, 1925 (excerpts only)

  36. The Truth about the Treaty, by André Tardieu (translated from the French), 1921

  37. Old Junk, by H.M. Tomlinson, 1918

  38. Waiting for Daylight, by H.M. Tomlinson, 1922

  39. The World Set Free, by H.G. Wells, 1921 (1914)

  40. War and the Future: Italy, France and Britain, by H. G. Wells, 1917

  41. Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport, by Edith Wharton, 1915

  42. A War Nurse's Diary - Sketches from a Belgian Field Hospital , 1918

  43. War Against War, by Ernst Friedrich, 1924 (Extract in English)

    44.  

    bal   On the War in the Air

  44. The Red Battle Flyer, by Manfred von Richthoven (translated from the German Der Rote Kampfflieger), 1917

  45. Fighting the Flying Circus, by Eddie Rickenbacker, 1919

  46. High Adventure, by James Norman Hall

  47. Our Pilots in the Air, by Captain William B. Perry

  48. The War in the Air, by H. G. Wells, 1906

  49. The Dominion of the Air, by J.M. Bacon

  50. The Mastery of the Air, by William J. Claxton

  51. The Aeroplane Speaks, by Horatio Barber, 1917

  52. Aeroplanes, by J.S. Zerbe, 1915

  53. Air Service Boys in the Big Battle, by Charles Amory Beach

  54. British Airships, Past, Present and Future, by George Whale

  55. Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War, by Frederick A. Talbot

  56. The Annals of No. 100 Squadron, by Major C. Gordon Burge, with a foreword by Air-Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, 1918

    57.  

    bal   Less related but relevant

  57. Merchants of Death, A Study of the International Armament Industry, by H.C. Engelbrecht and F.C. Hanighen. With a Foreword by Harry Elmer Barnes, 1934

  58. Ten Days that Shook the World, by John Reed, 1922

  59. On War, by Carl von Clausewitz (translated from the German, with an introduction by Colonel F. N. Maude, C.B.)

  60. Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler, 1924 (translated into English by James Murphy, 1939, plain text; also available in pdf-format).

  61. Proposed Roads to Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism and Syndicalism , by Bertrand Russell, 1918

  62. The Scientific Monthly, October - December 1915 (with an article on war, business and insurance)

    63.  

    bal   TomeRaider Files (You need a TomeRaider-program to read these files)

  63. A Short History of the Great War, by A.F. Pollard, 1920

  64. Vom Kriege, by Carl von Clausewitz (original German version)

  65. World War I Conventions and Treaties (18 texts)

  66. The Mastery of the Air, by William J. Claxton

  67. A Short History of Austria-Hungary, by H. Wickham Steed, Walter Alison Phillips and David Hannay, 1914

  68. Die russische Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg (original German version)

  69. Drei Aufsätze - Januar 1919, by Rosa Luxemburg (original German version)

  70. The World Set Free, by H.G. Wells, 1914

    71. Click to see the literary section in the Index on the leftVerse        

  71. A Treasury of War Poetry, edited by George Clarke Herbert (151 poems by 106 authors), 1917

  72. In Flanders Fields And Other Poems, by John McCrae, with an essay in Character by Sir Andrew Macphail, 1919 (also available here, and in pdf-format)

  73. Collected Poems, by Rupert Brooke, 1916

  74. Poems, by Wilfred Owen (with an introduction by Siegfried Sassoon)

  75. Country Sentiment, (poems) by Robert Graves

  76. Fairies and Fusiliers, (46 poems) by Robert Graves, 1918

  77. Poems, by Alan Seeger (with an introduction by William Archer)

  78. The Old Huntsman, and other poems, by Siegfried Sassoon, 1918

  79. Counter-Attack, and other poems, by Siegfried Sassoon, 1918

  80. Picture-Show, by Siegfried Sassoon, 1920

  81. Collected Poems, by William Butler Yeats

  82. Rhymes of a Red Cross Man, by Robert W. Service. 1916

bal   Many of these books are deep-linked from here. If one of the links appears dead, or if you know of the presence of other complete World War I books on the Internet, please let me know.

bal   Click here for the Frontpage of the 'Heritage of the Great War'