How about any of the following?RuthieG wrote:I keep finding fascinating books, and they all turn out not to be PD for me . I shall make a post in the thread with these suggestions, in case anyone is interested.
Ruth
Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That
Siegfried Sasson's Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man
Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War
There's also Rudyard's Kipling's The Irish Guards in the Great War. Blunden, who served with the Royal Sussex Regiment and who writes very vividly criticised Kipling's account as too spare and unemotional. Kipling who was asked to write that regimental history -- his son had died with the Irish Guards -- seems to have felt that anyone who, like himself, hadn't served shouldn't treat the material as an exercise in literary expression and hence should tell the story baldly and let the action speak for itself.
But maybe Kipling's Epitaphs of the War would be a better choice if he's to be represented. He wrote some very fine short stories, too, one of the most interesting being The Gardener -- there's a twist at the end whereby you realise who someone really is and the whole of the story up to that point reads in a different way:
http://www.aftermathww1.com/gardener.asp
There's always Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front -- though that might be a problem inasmuch as the translations may be recent. And I suppose the same might go for Ernst Junger's Storm of Steel, unfortunately. That would have added interest since Junger, unusually among many of the Great War writers, appears to have taken relish in the fighting, understanding it in a kind of Nietzschean way (not that Nietzsche would perhaps have relished real fighting himself!)