The big question for the producers of the BBC coverage of the First World War centenary, which is due to get under way next week, has been:

how do we say something new, how can we find the stories that most of us have not heard before?

Here's one. It's about a 23-year-old nurse from Dumfries called Grace Hume. In the first months of the war, a rumour began circulating that the German army had arrived at the military hospital in Belgium where Grace was working. The story went that the marauding soldiers had cut off one of Grace's breasts, beheaded the patients and burned the place to the ground.

The truth was entirely different. In fact, none of the details of the story - which appears in the excellent first episode of Britain's Great War, which starts on Monday - was true. Grace was actually living quietly in her house in Huddersfield and the story was made up by Grace's sister and spread via the hysteria and fear the British were feeling about the Germans.

Some of this hysteria was perfectly understandable - the Germans were guilty of real savagery in Belgium and did kill many women and children - but in telling the story, Jeremy Paxman, the presenter of Britain's Great War, is making an important point about how the war impacted on civilians - emotionally and physically.

In the process, he is also dismantling - and about time too - a few of the myths around the First World War, the first being that the Second World War directly involved civilians at home but that the First World War didn't and was fought pretty much only by the soldiers on the Western Front.

In fact, from the start of the First World War, civilians were killed - some in the first air raids, some when German ships fired on the coast. In Britain's Great War, Paxman relates the frightening details of how places such as Scarborough and Hartlepool were shelled from the sea.

The other myth Paxman tackles is the most persistent one: that the First World War was the war we didn't need to fight while the Second World War was the great crusade against evil.

Paxman challenges this by going right back to August 4, 1914, and the minutes before the 11 o'clock deadline for war. Britain had been working tirelessly to prevent a conflict, he says, and none more so than the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, and his Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey. Both of them knew that Britain had not fought a war in Europe for a century and were appalled at the prospect of conflict so close to home.

In the hours before war broke out, says Paxman, an anxious Grey went to London Zoo to stand in the aviary, watch his beloved birds and calm his nerves. He was sick with worry about the failure of diplomacy. "It's often claimed that the British were naively enthusiastic about war," says Paxman. "They weren't."

And then the deadline for the Germans to back down passed and in the programme Paxman asks his killer question about the British decision to fight. "What else were they supposed to do?" he asks. "To sit back and watch as Germany amassed an empire that ran from somewhere deep in Russia to the shores of the English channel?"