The Young Oxford Book of War Stories

Book excerpt: Out of the hundreds of wars that ravaged the twentieth century, the three wars covered in this book were the longest and blackest. In total they lasted 20 years and killed nearly 100,000,000 people. The writers in this collection of stories and poems are friend and foe - British and German, Russian and American. The first story is from All Quiet on the Western Front by the German Erich Maria Remarque, perhaps the most moving war novel ever written. Other writers - Russian, German, and English - convey in verse the tragedy and waste of the 'Great War'. The six British Children's writers write about World War II - Robert Westall and Robert Swindells on the 'home' war, Michael Morpugo about a 'war horse', Jill Paton Walsh on the war at sea, and Ian Serraillier and Anne Hohn on refugees in occupied Europe. Young girls - Anne Frank and Tatiana Vassieleva - provide war diaries. Since 1945 no one has suffered as much as the people of Vietnam. In her moving story Rachel Anderson shows not only a nation's suffering but how war can brutalise soldiers. Finally, the women's poems on the two world wars show that war is a woman's affair as well as a man's.