In his 1998 Reith Lectures, the military historian John Keegan addressed the issues of War and Our World.

Read now, from the perspective of a world irrevocably altered by the aftermath of 9/11, there is an almost antique flavour about his ideas and the innocent complacency of the western culture in which they were written. Nevertheless, much of what he wrote remains relevant, addressing as he does the timeless truths of conflict, since ancient times.

Reflecting on the millions who have waited at home for news of their loved ones over the centuries, Keegan quotes this newspaper's former deputy editor, George MacDonald Fraser. In Quartered Safe Out Here, his memoir of his time with the Border Regiment in Burma in 1944-45, MacDonald Fraser writes: "Whatever anxieties the soldier may experience in the field can be nothing to the torment of those at home... Those months must have been the longest of [my parents'] lives." As Keegan adds: "soldiers know when and why they have reason to be in fear, which typically is not very often - war service has been called 'long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of acute terror'. Yet those who worry for them do so every waking hour."

Commemorations for the start of the First World War have already begun, and the plight of those at home, acutely anxious for those in the thick of battle, has probably been given more attention than ever before. These past few months have seen a flood of newly published diaries and first-hand accounts of the conflict, from housewives and farm workers as well as soldiers and medics, not to mention fresh histories, novels and reissues of novels that have stood the test of time.

One of the most interesting of these books is also among the most unsettling. Penguin Modern Classics has published the first unbowdlerised translation of German novelist Hans Fallada's Iron Gustav (£9.99), which sends a shiver up the spine from the opening pages. Fallada, who died of drink and drugs in 1947, was a complicated and tortured figure, and Iron Gustav is a deeply compromised work. It is, however, a superb evocation of the Home Front during the Great War, as the central character, the indomitable stable-owner and war veteran Gustav Hackendahl, lives out the painful years of war with two sons in uniform and a business going down the drain.

Published in 1938, Iron Gustav was commissioned by Josef Goebbels with the idea that it would be made into a film script. Fallada's saga of a Berlin family during the war, and the decade after, based on a real-life cab driver in the city, is a superb piece of social history, not to mention fiction of a high order. However, the astonishingly naive Fallada was badly rattled when the novel was returned with the demand to rework it to show the rise of the Nazis. This request came with the remark that "if Fallada was still unsure about his attitude toward the Party, the Party had no doubt about its attitude toward Fallada".

Perhaps oddly for a man who had tried to kill himself on more than one occasion, Fallada caved in. "I do not like grand gestures, being slaughtered before the tyrant's throne, senselessly, to the benefit of no one and to the detriment of my children, that is not my way."

He therefore amended the novel, and when it was published in Germany, some of the most fascinating detail of the original was excised. This edited version was, remarkably, published in England during the war but only now is the full version available.

It is a powerful work, dark, bleak, and cruel. Because of Goebbels's interference it cannot be read without its political message intruding and polluting the plot; but as a record of the indignities and terrors of home life, especially for the women who had to keep going, it is utterly compelling. Long before its end, there is no doubt that its true heroes are not the nascent Nazis, bent on restoring Germany's glory, but the downtrodden, half-starved, stoical mothers and wives, sisters and girlfriends, whose ordeal, far from ending with the armistice, only got worse.