World War One

Woman's Hour goes behind the scenes at new Radio 4 drama Home Front, as it begins its four-year run. Actor Harriet Walter talks about her cameo role as Emmeline Pankhurst, and we hear from the writers about the opportunity to dramatise the domestic lives of people whose stories aren’t told in military history books. Plus Emma Barnett is joined by Home Front editor Jessica Dromgoole and academic Dr Angela K Smith to discuss the war's impact on the lives of women far away from the trenches.

What drove men to volunteer to fight during World War One? What drove them to the edge of sanity when they got there?

John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps first appeared in Blackwoods Magazine in August and September 1915 and depicts Europe on the edge of war in May and June 1914. It quickly became popular reading in the trenches and on the home front, and 100 years and three film adaptations later, its popularity is enduring. Matthew Sweet talks to biographer Andrew Lownie and scholars Dr Michael Redley and Dr Kate Macdonald about the connections between Buchan's own war experience and The 39 Steps, and to Professors Elleke Boehmer and Terence Ranger about how ideas about empire and adventure play out in the novel.

Medical innovation from a wartime surgeon, a soldier's satirical spin on World War One, and how a chocolate bar inspired a unique correspondence between a child from Cornwall and a soldier at the Front.

Completed in 1916, Le Feu was the first explicit account of conditions at the front. French soldier Henri Barbusse's novel proved a revelation to a French public sold a sentimental line by the press of the time. Yet Le Feu, with its deep insights into the emotions of men at war, was not seen as damaging to home-front morale. Here was a new kind of writing in which rural dialects and working-class accents conveyed heroism, and could be literary, even transcendent. Dr Heather Jones reflects on Barbusse's novel.