TGWAMM is a real classic. I’ve read some other Fussell (Wartime and The Boys’ Crusade) but TGWAMM is the best by far.
I also enjoyed Modris Ekstein’s Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. You should also read Robert Massie’s Castles of Steel, about the Great War at sea. It’s a sequel to Dreadnought, which traces the Anglo-German naval rivalry just before the war.
It’s funny how perceptions of movies differ. I saw Grand Illusion as showing the end of the class system (as exemplified by the German camp commander and the French staff officer) and the rise of the common man (as exemplified by our hero).
For WWI, The Big Parade is a pretty good one, and does deal with some of the class issues in Le Grand Illusion.
Not really about the war, but set in the war is King of Hearts
There’s also Oh! What a Lovely War, which is a scathing antiwar satire. It does cover the broad outline of the war fairly accurately, but it is hardly realistic.
The BBC are currently screening a series The Edwardians in Colour based on the photography collections of the Musée Albert Kahn in Paris. Kahn was a rich financier who had created a project to document world cultures using autochromes, a form of colour photography invented by the Lumière brothers. The images are immediate and vivid and, after an introductory programme about Kahn and how the project came about, the series has been using them to illuminate the social history of the early 20th century.
Anyway, the episode screened tonight covered WWI, during which Kahn and the French government used his team of photographers to document the French army at war. Since autochromes were too cumbersome to capture battlescenes, they concentrated on capturing the daily life of soldiers. Amazingly intimate colour images of their humdrum routines between battles and the treatment of the wounded.
Fleshed out with a good selection of unfamiliar monochrome photos and film, together with experts like Richard Holmes explaining the context of the images, it’s an excellent concise account of France’s war.
The whole series can’t be recommended highly enough for anyone with any interest in the period. Extraordinarily good.
Note that the title for the first half of the full nine-part series is a tie-in with the wider season of programmes that BBC4 is currently running on the Edwardian era. The second half, on the Twenties, will presumably have a different name and it really wouldn’t surprise me if any US screening or DVD of the series goes under an entirely different title.