Michael Morpurgo - Only Remembered

Wholl Sing the Anthem? Who Will Tell the Story?
Introduction by Michael Morpurgo

Michael Morpurgo
On les Aura by Barroux (translated from the French by Sarah Ardizzone)

Dame Evelyn Glennie
Percussion instruments used during the First World War

Shami Chakrabarti
Anthem for Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen

Lord Paddy Ashdown
Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen

Frank Field
Strange Meeting by Wilfred Owen

Malorie Blackman
Walter Tull (18881918)

Julian Barnes
The General by Siegfried Sassoon

Ben Barnes
Regeneration by Pat Barker

Emma Chichester Clark
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

Charlie Higson
Charleys War by Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun

Jeremy Irvine
Albert Ball

Ben Elton
Preface to All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

Caroline Wyatt
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

Cathy Newman
Not So Quiet by Helen Zenna Smith

Meg Rosoff
A Man Could Stand Up by Ford Maddox Ford

Helen Skelton
Breakfast by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson

Susan Cooper
In Parenthesis by David Jones

Antony Beevor
Duff Cooper

Richard Curtis
Blackadder Goes Forth by Richard Curtis and Ben Elton

Anthony Horowitz
Bombed Last Night (anon.)

David Almond
Oh, What a Lovely War!

Lissa Evans
Map Reading by Stanley Spencer

Clare Morpurgo
Travoys arriving with wounded at a dressing station at Smol, Macedonia by Stanley Spencer

Ian Beck
The Great Western Railway War Memorial by Charles Sergeant Jagger

Emma Thompson
The Wipers Times

Klaus Flugge
Prayer After the Slaughter by Kurt Tucholsky

Jamila Gavin
Indian soldiers

Bali Rai
Sikh soldiers

Sir Roger Bannister
Queen Alexandras Army Auxiliary Corps

Michelle Magorian
Young soldiers

Mariella Frostrup
Last Post by Carol Ann Duffy

John Boyne
The Death of Harry Patch by Andrew Motion

Howard Goodall
In Flanders Fields by John McCrae

HRH The Duchess of Cornwall
The Christmas Truce by Carol Ann Duffy

Michael Foreman
War Game by Michael Foreman

James Patterson
Lord of the Nutcracker Men by Iain Lawrence

Dame Jacqueline Wilson
A Vicarage Family by Noel Streatfeild

Theresa Breslin
Ghost Soldier by Theresa Breslin

Jilly Cooper
Animals in the First World War

Eoin Colfer
Stay Where You Are and Then Leave by John Boyne

Anne Harvey
Easter Monday (In Memoriam E.T.) by Eleanor Farjeon

Dame Gail Rebuck, Baroness Gould, DBE
In a Field by Seamus Heaney and As the teams head-brass by Edward Thomas

Alan Titchmarsh
Tall Nettles by Edward Thomas

Joanna Lumley
Rudyard Kiplings commemorative scrolls

Jenny Agutter
To a Bulldog by J. C. Squire

Sandi Toksvig
I Didnt Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier by Alfred Bryan and Al Piantadosi

Laura Dockrill
Many Sisters to Many Brothers by Rose Macaulay

Virginia McKenna
A War Film by Teresa Hooley

Kate Mosse
My Boy Jack by Rudyard Kipling

Shirley Hughes
Gassed by John Singer Sargent

Jon Snow
The Soldier by Rupert Brooke

Sir Andrew Motion
Missing by Sir Andrew Motion

Nicholas Hytner
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

Miranda Hart
Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit-Bag

Morris Gleitzman
The Sydney Botanic Gardens memorial

Nick Sharratt
Jelly Babies

Jonathan Stroud
George Davison

Sir Tony Robinson
Grandpa Jack

Sir Quentin Blake
Dicky Herbert

Simon Mayo
No Mans Land by Eric Bogle

Sir Jonathon Porritt
Can You Remember? by Edward Blunden

Raymond Briggs
Aunties by Raymond Briggs

Sarah Brown
Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain

Michael Longley
In Memoriam and Harmonica by Michael Longley

K. M. Peyton
My father-in-law

Sir Terry Pratchett
Johnny and the Dead by Terry Pratchett

Dr Rowan Williams
Swept and Garnished by Rudyard Kipling

Roger McGough
A Childs Nightmare by Robert Graves

Anne Fine
The Book of the Banshee by Anne Fine

Rory Stewart
In Time of The Breaking of Nations by Thomas Hardy

Brian Patten
To a Conscript of 1940 by Sir Herbert Read

Chris Riddell
Drawn from Memory by E. H. Shepard

Flora Fergusson
Gone by Flora Fergusson

Maggie Fergusson
My grandfather

Carol Hughes
For the Duration and The Last of the 1st/5th Lancashire Fusiliers by Ted Hughes

Catherine Johnson
Y Blotyn Du (The Black Spot) by Hedd Wyn

Frank Gardner
The Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams

One hundred years have passed since the outbreak of the First World War.

To mark the centenary, this beautiful anthology collects favourite words and images from some of the UKs leading figures.

Poems, short stories, personal letters, newspaper articles, scripts, photographs and paintings are just some of the elements of this unique and seminal collection each introduced by the person who selected it.

Some years ago I came across the grave of a young British soldier in France, one of thousands, one of hundreds of thousands. I had stopped to look, I think, because there was a wreath of poppies lying there. I read on the gravestone that this was a private killed in 1918, only two weeks before the end of the First World War. He was aged just twenty-one. On the wreath was written: To my Grandpa. I never knew you, and I wish I had. Out of the ten million soldiers who were killed on all sides, many were young, some barely out of school. Most never grew old enough to know and be known by their children or their grandchildren. This book is made for them; for all of them.

In my small village of Iddesleigh, in deepest Devon, there lives the last surviving widow of any of the soldiers who marched off from this country to the First World War. Her soldier was called Wilf Ellis. I knew him when he was an old man. And thereby hangs a tale, the terrible tale of the ten million soldiers, and of the ten million horses, all killed in the First World War.

Dorothy Ellis, now ninety-three, has lived quietly, and spent much of her life looking after the village church, keeping it clean and bright. Wilf now lies in the churchyard, as do other old men I once knew: Captain Budgett and Albert Weeks. But before they died they told me their stories.

When he came back from the war, Wilf Ellis played in dance bands on transatlantic liners before becoming an antique dealer in the village, a knocker. I bought a picture from him once, an old oil painting of a racehorse standing in a stable. The horse was called Topthorn. Topthorn, as you will see, was later to play a part in this tale.

I didnt know Wilf Ellis well, just enough to talk to. Thirty-five years ago now, we met by chance in the pub, the Duke of York. We got talking by the log fire. Id heard hed been to the First World War as a young man, so I asked him about it. It was a conversation which very soon became a monologue. He told me how his uniform had made him itch when he first put it on. He talked of the trenches, the machine guns and the snipers, and the mud, and the whizzbangs and the wire; how he was gassed and hospitalized, how his life was once spared by a German soldier, of the horses who died the same way as the soldiers, of going out on night patrols his courage fuelled by rum of the fear, of the joy of hot food and a communal hot bath, of the relief when it was all over.