Interlude 1.

A cemetery, a grave and my wife's great uncle—one of the missing from Loos in 1915.

Okay, so Princip arrived in Sarajevo 100 years ago today and Franz and Sophie are looking forward to their holiday—time to say a bit about this blog.

The First World War has fascinated me of almost as long as I can remember. I was born only 33 years after the war ended and grew up amidst village memorials with unbelievably long lists of names and aware of the physically and mentally broken survivors of the Somme and Ypres who sold crafts door-to-door before Christmas. So this blog will have history (hopefully some unusual fragments that you don't know), but it will also have a personal element—thoughts, anecdotes, memories, and perhaps even a poem or two. I'll slip these in during the periods when it's "all quiet on the western front"!

I will also occasionally invite guest bloggers to put up posts on aspects of the war that interest them. Finally, I will shamelessly promote my books dealing with WWI, several of which are coming out over the next four years. Hopefully the package will be varied, different and interesting enough to be a complement to all the mainstream information coming out for the WWI anniversary.

I won't blog every day, so drop by occasionally to see what's happening, or follow me on twitter or facebook, where I will announce posts as I upload them. The rest of my electronic life is on my website. Enjoy my blog and the many anniversaries of the war that created the world we live in.