As my friend has already explained it to all of you that the effects of the first World

War..... it also affected literary works written in that era.

Prose, particularly in the form of novels and memoirs, is often a vehicle for
sustained reflection on an event long after it has taken place. Many accounts of the First
World War, however, were written during the conflict. Nothing of Importance was penned
shortly after the events it describes, long before the war reached its conclusion. Sometimes
diaries, in their raw, unmediated form found an audience. Arthur Graeme Wests record of
his service as an officer on the Western Front was published posthumously as The Diary of
a Dead Officer in 1918. Despite his voluntary enlistment, the diary records Wests growing
contempt for army life and his conversion to pacifism.
However, most popular works published during the war offered optimistic, patriotic
portrayals. Ian Hay, in his novel The First Hundred Thousand (1915), provided a light-
hearted and humorous account of life at the front. Writers like Escott Lynn in his adventure
novels, and Sapper, in his various short stories, depicted war as a fulfilling and exciting
endeavour.
But if these authors dealt their characters clubs and diamonds, the French author
Henri Barbusse dealt his characters spades and hearts. In his novel Le Feu (Under Fire),
published in French in 1916, translated into English in 1917), Barbusse provided a
vehement denunciation of militarism. Known for his brutal realism, Barbusse captured in
stark, graphic language the appalling horror of mechanical warfare. In this account,
soldiers are not adventurers or warriors; rather they are civilians uprooted, who await
the signal for death or murder.
Another sorce:
The Home Front in London during the First World War was defended mostly by
women. It was women who stepped into the breach when men left government offices,
banks, shops and restaurants, and who laboured in giant factories making the munitions of
war. And it was women who left some of the most memorable Great War writing.
Rose Macaulays Non-Combatants and Others (1916) is a sharp and witty
evocation of middle-class family life in the London suburbs during the war; the womenfolk
in hospitals, canteens and charity organisations lead lives full of interest and fun amid the
horror of news from the front.
Mary Wards Missing (1917) details the agonies felt by mothers and wives in the
no mans land between pain and fear, trying to track down their men reported missing,
often destroyed without trace, in France.
From the first moments of the war many women began diaries to chart the
tumultuous times. Sylvia Pankhursts The Home Front (1932) is an unforgettably close
observation of working-class life in East London under the strains and anxieties of total
war, based largely on her contemporary diary.
Enid Bagnolds self-effacing A Diary Without Dates (1918) recounts in luminous
prose her life as a voluntary aid detachment nurse in Woolwich.
A diary of nursing life is also at the heart of Vera Brittains Testament of Youth
(1933), a timeless saga of love and loss. This book has an endless capacity to shock and
move. It remains one of the greatest autobiographies of the 20th century.