10 books to mark

by Rosemary Goring

To mark the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War, here are ten novels describing the conflict, some of them from first-hand experience.

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

Remarque, a war veteran, follows the experiences of Paul Baumer, who was encouraged to sign up by his schoolteacher. A gruelling indictment of the pointlessness of war, it depicts how little any soldier's death meant among so many.

Regeneration by Pat Barker

The first of Barker's acclaimed trilogy, which explored the effect of war on soldiers, it is set in Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh, where doctors experimented with new ways of helping the shellshocked. Including real characters, notably poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, this work and its sequels (The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road) are profoundly moving and informative, a blend, as one critic said, of the poetic and the practical.

The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West

West's first novel, published before the war ended, also deals with the trauma of officers. It comes to a simplistic conclusion, suggesting that psychoanalysis would help them get over their ordeal and fit to fight again. Clearly, West had never been at the Front.

The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek

Opening with news of the assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo, Hasek's unfinished novel - it was completed after his death - is a satire of war, which takes no prisoners. The soldier Schweik acts throughout like a fool, showing up the hypocrisies and idiocies and futilities of war. Hasek, who fought in the Austro-Hungarian Army, knew of what he wrote.

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway helped as an ambulance driver in Italy for the Red Cross, which is exactly what his American hero Frederic Henry does in this maudlin novel of conflict, love, drink, and death.

Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford

Among the best wartime novels, set between England and the western front. This four-part work features one of the most inscrutable but attractive fictional characters, the buttoned-up gentleman and officer, Christopher Tiejens, a man so unhappily married, he almost does not care if he dies.

Mr Standfast by John Buchan

A Richard Hannay novel, this is a gung-ho adventure, in which Hannay, a brigadier-general, must leave the western front in order to uncover a German agent at work in England. To do so, he must impersonate a pacifist. Not as easy as it sounds.

The Enormous Room by e e cummings

Based on cummings's experience as a prisoner of war in France, where he had been serving as an ambulance driver, the novel is a wry account of an intellectual coping with an absurd situation, in which he and 30 other prisoners share a room.

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

A lushly written evocation of the appalling conditions in which English soldiers fought and died, it is both sentimental and unforgettable, especially in its descriptions of mud and homesickness.

Under Fire by Henri Barbusse

Published in 1916, by which time Barbusse had been invalided out of active service to a desk job in the War Office, this is a brutally realistic and unflinching account of life for French volunteers at the front.