In this episode of his Willy Willy Harry Stee Book Club, Charlie Higson looks at a new book which uses eye-witness accounts to paint a stark picture of the start of World War 1.

As war broke out in the summer of 1914, not a nation on Earth understood the magnitude of what they were about to face. To win it, whole populations must be mobilised, and neutrality was impossible to practice.

Our understanding of this complex conflict has been coloured by a blinkered approach to popular history. It has ignored the fact that Denmark actively participated in laying minefields as soon as war began; that the first British shots were fired in West Africa, by a black man; and the first Australian casualties occurred not at Gallipoli, but in the Pacific.

Charlie's guests are books authors Alex Churchill & Nicolai Eberholst, who have scoured the globe in search of an enormous quantity of fresh material, bringing us history not as told by 'great men', but as a people's view of the war which tells a touching and surprising tale of events that many us may have thought we already knew.

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