If you ever had super-secret papers, microfilm, a great old bottle of Scotch, or anything else you didn’t want me to find, you could hollow out this book and put those items in it and they would be safe forever.
What?! That sounds like, quite possibly, the greatest thing ever written anwyehre about anything by anybody.
Here in Kansas City a recently opened museum is dedicated to this conflict:
Housed at the Liberty Memorial, a monument to soldiers from that war.
Check it out!
Well, I made it sound quite a bit sillier than it is, but if vampires aren’t your thing, Kim Newman’s probably not your favorite author.
I hope you don’t mind if I steal this quote, though. It’s hysterical. 
Just remembered: Tori Amos has a song called “Not the Red Baron” (lyrics) that references the Red Baron, Jean Harlowe (I’ve seen the line “with a hallowed heart” transcribed as “with a harlowed heart” in some places), fighter planes, and Charlie Brown.
Here’s probably the most famous WWI poem, at least in Britain:
Wilfred Owen
Dulce Et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.
GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.–
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Mods: this is public domain now given that Owen died in 1918
Oh, how I’d love to own that “great mind” business, but the kudos should go to Manda JO who first brought it up in this thread. I just read it and gushed. Thanks though, AuntiePam. 
As long as we’re on the subject of poems, here’s the famous Canadian poem of World War I:
In Flanders Fields
by John McCrae
1915, public domain
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
An Anthology of Alternate Canadas– “Is the Canada we know the only concievable Canada? Do we live in the best possible country in the best possible world?”
I so need to get this book.
“What if… a Canadian air ace hadn’t shot the Bloody Red Baron down?”
My guess is that he would have been shot down by Australian ground troops instead. As a result, Australia would rule Canada today, instead of the other way round.
Yanno - there’s something wonderful about a place where we can assume that most of the people reading this thread, at least, know exactly what you’re talking about. 
I’d like to second the reccomendation for The Great Influenza, a very engrossing book.
Lazarus Long enlisted and went to Europe at the end of Time Enough for Love.
Be my guest, and thanks. Sometimes I think the only person who thinks I’m funny is me.
IIRC, the title character in Doctor Zhivago, Yuri, meets Lara when they are both working in the medical facilities on the WWI front lines. Yuri as a doctor, (of course!) and Lara as a nurse.
But speaking of Canada, that reminds me of another book that I think is great for describing WWI in a social context, which is Rilla of Ingleside by L.M. Montgomery, author of Anne of Green Gables. Rilla is Anne’s daughter and Rilla’s story is told from 1914 to 1918. The book was published in 1921. A sample passage, from a letter Rilla’s brother Walter writes to her:
Keeping the theme of Canada:
The Bandy Papers series, starting with Three Cheers for Me, by Donald Lamont Jack, are worth the read. They’re quite entertaining.
Also, the CBC had one of those high-budget mini-series about the Halifax Explosion the summer before last.
Frankly, it was a much bigger deal for Europe and the Commonwealth than for the US, so we get less in the States than elsewhere.
A very good German war movie: Westfront 1918.
From Hollywood: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Hell’s Angels (directed by Howard Hughes), Three Comrades (co-written by F. Scott Fitzgerald), Paths of Glory (directed by Stanley Kubrick), Johnny Got His Gun.
Yes, opposite Gary Oldman, who taught him the importance of copiously spitting when truly acting one’s heart out. 
A slight tangent: Smithsonian magazine had an article a few years ago about a unit of French Army sappers whose assignment is to remove and defuse left-over and buried ordinance from WWI, year in and year out. A farmer or two dies every year when plowing over unexploded WWI shells.
All I can think of is a few episodes of The Young Indiana Jones. Does that count?
Oh, and there was an episode of Dinosaurs where the 2-leggers and the 4-leggers go into trench warfare over who was better. They kept throwing sticks at each other and everyone kept losing eyes. You know, that’s actually clever the more I think about it.
How the smeg did we get two pages into this thread without someone mentioning Biggles???
Don’t tell me I’m the only person on these boards who grew up reading Biggles books… :eek:
I certainly did as well. 
Shout at the Devil has Lee Marvin & Roger Moore take on a German Cruiser.