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 , , , , the library of the , 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. , by Colonel Leonard P. Ayres, United States. War Dept. General Staff, 1919

  2. , by Punch, London, 1919

  3. , by Robert Baden Powell, 1915

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

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

  6. , by Harriot Stanton Blatch

  7. , by John Buchan (adapted to the screen by Hitchcock in 1935), 1915

  8. (1914-1917), told by its members, 1917

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

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

  11. , by Joseph Conrad, 1921

  12. , by Richard Harding Davis, 1917

  13. , by Roland Dorgeles, 1921

  14. , by Georges Duhamel (translated from the French)

  15. , by Philip Gibbs

  16. , by Clair W. Hayesh

  17. , by Vicente Blasco Ibanez, 1918

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

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

  20. , by Rudyard Kipling, 1923

  21. , by Fritz Kreisler, 1915 (translated from the German/Austrian)

  22. , by Victor LeFebure (with a preface by Marshall Foch and an introduction by Field-Marshall Sir Henry Wilson), 1923

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

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

  25. , by E. Phillips Oppenheim

  26. , by John Dos Passos, 1920

  27. , by John Dos Passos, 1921

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

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

  30. , by Punch, London, 1919

  31. , 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. , by Admiral Reinhard Scheer (translated from the German), 1920

  34. , 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. , by General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, 1925 (excerpts only)

  36. , by André Tardieu (translated from the French), 1921

  37. , by H.M. Tomlinson, 1918

  38. , by H.M. Tomlinson, 1922

  39. , by H.G. Wells, 1921 (1914)

  40. , by H. G. Wells, 1917

  41. , by Edith Wharton, 1915

  42. , 1918

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

     

    bal   On the War in the Air

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

  45. , by Eddie Rickenbacker, 1919

  46. , by James Norman Hall

  47. , by Captain William B. Perry

  48. , by H. G. Wells, 1906

  49. , by J.M. Bacon

  50. , by William J. Claxton

  51. , by Horatio Barber, 1917

  52. , by J.S. Zerbe, 1915

  53. , by Charles Amory Beach

  54. , by George Whale

  55. , by Frederick A. Talbot

  56. , by Major C. Gordon Burge, with a foreword by Air-Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, 1918

     

    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. , by John Reed, 1922

  59. , 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. , by Bertrand Russell, 1918

  62. (with an article on war, business and insurance)

     

    bal   TomeRaider Files (You need a -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

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

  71. , edited by George Clarke Herbert (151 poems by 106 authors), 1917

  72. , by John McCrae, with an essay in Character by Sir Andrew Macphail, 1919 (also available , and in pdf-format)

  73. , by Rupert Brooke, 1916

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

  75. , (poems) by Robert Graves

  76. , (46 poems) by Robert Graves, 1918

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

  78. , by Siegfried Sassoon, 1918

  79. , by Siegfried Sassoon, 1918

  80. , by Siegfried Sassoon, 1920

  81. , by William Butler Yeats

  82. , 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'