Written as someone who was born after the two World Wars and who, like everyone of his and subsequent generations, have been brought up on the myth and memory of war. In the author's examination of the poems, memorials, memoirs, photographs, histories and documentaries of World War I he brings together a network of memory that illuminates our own relation to the past. To it he brings his own experience: his father, who was at the Somme; watching the Blue Max and all our yesterdays on TV, making airfix kits, buying poppies every November. By the end, the reader understand more about war and memory, tenderness, horror, the comfort of landscape, the morality and immorality of order and disorder.