A century ago, the four-year-long nightmare called World War I finally came to a halt on Nov 11, 1918.
That date now goes by several names - Armistice Day, Remembrance Day, Veterans Day - and on it, we honour the fallen, which in the case of the supposed "War to End All Wars" amounts to about 20 million soldiers and civilians.
The conflict also took the lives of many promising young writers, some of whom are memorialised in two recent paperbacks: The Penguin Book Of First World War Stories, edited by Barbara Korte and Anne-Marie Einhaus; and The Penguin Book Of First World War Poetry, edited by George Walter.
The prose anthology spotlights, among much else, Arthur Conan Doyle's account of Sherlock Holmes' war service, His Last Bow, and Arthur Machen's The Bowmen, which gave rise to the legend of the Angels of Mons.
Even now, it is said, some people still believe that an English squadron, under intense attack, was miraculously saved by a company of spectral archers. German soldiers were even, supposedly, found dead from arrow wounds.
Walter's complementary and equally superb poetry collection is organised by subject - In Training, In Trenches, Rendezvous With Death - and reprints the work of unfamiliar poets as well as famous ones such as Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg and Edward Thomas. None of these four young Englishmen survived the war.
Those who did, such as Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, were changed men.
In Graves' Good-Bye To All That and Sassoon's autobiographical Complete Memoirs Of George Sherston (comprising Memoirs Of A Fox-Hunting Man, Memoirs Of An Infantry Officer and Sherston's Progress - all three available from Penguin), the horrors of no man's land are vividly and harrowingly relived.
Of course, French and German combatants also brought out accounts of their analogous experiences, notably Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front, Henri Barbusse's anecdotal but grim Under Fire and Ernst Junger's Homeric paean to martial valour, Storm Of Steel.
While the above writers, poets and memoirists are, for the most part, familiar chroniclers of WW I, this is not true of W.F. Morris (1892 to 1975).
Yet, in 1929, Morris published an extraordinary novel that merits rediscovery. Not that Bretherton: Khaki Or Field Grey?, or as it was titled in its American edition, G.B.: A Story Of The Great War, is completely unknown. British thriller writer Eric Ambler listed it among his top five spy thrillers.
In fact, Bretherton: Khaki Or Field Grey? covers nearly every aspect of the 1914 to 1918 conflict: the gallows humour of the English Tommies, night manoeuvres in France, romance-filled interludes away from the front, the Battle of the Somme, a suspenseful escape from a prison camp.
More surprisingly, several key chapters sympathetically portray German soldiers as patriotic and admirable.
From every viewpoint, Bretherton: Khaki Or Field Grey? is unexpected, complex and thrilling, starting with its opening chapter. Slang-filled repartee alternates with scenes of tenderness, desperation and shock throughout the novel.
It is a haunting mystery-thriller of considerable narrative complexity and a lost masterpiece of WWI literature. Read it and weep.
WASHINGTON POST
•The Penguin Book Of First World War Stories and The Penguin Book Of First World War Poetry are both available from Amazon at US$15.07 (S$20.80) each.
