It is perhaps difficult for anyone who did not live through it to understand the impact the First World War exercised upon a whole generation of English men and women. The outbreak of war in August 1914 must have come as a cataclysmic shock. Europe had been at peace since 1871; to many thousands of intelligent people war seemed a remote possibility until, in the aftermath of the Sarajevo assassination, the conflagration spread beyond all hope of arresting its advance and the long Edwardian summer was at an end.