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Mike Webb, ed. From Downing Street to the Trenches : first-hand
accounts from the Great War, 1914-1916. Oxford: Bodleian Library,
2014. Pp. 304, £ 19.99.

Postcards from The Trenches : images of the First World War.
Introduction by Andrew Roberts. Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2008
(reprinted 2014). Pp. 112, £ 8.99.

Two titles devoted to the Great War and based on materials from the
archives at Oxford’s Bodleian Library offer the contemporary reader
very partial and yet in different ways thought-provoking representa-
tions of the war not as seen in retrospect by historians but in the
records of some of its protagonists.
From Downing Street to the Trenches : first-hand accounts from the
Great War, 1914-1916 is a collection of le ers and diaries of politicians,
soldiers and civilians associated with the University of Oxford. The
materials that compose this book were used for an exhibition at the
Bodleian Library held in 2014 to mark the anniversary of the war; both
exhibition and book were curated by Mike Webb, a senior archivist at
the Bodleian. Rather than “a empt to explain the First World War,”
the book concentrates on the years 1914 to 1916 and documents the
British side of the war (from its outbreak to the end of the Ba le of the
Somme and the fall of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith) exclusively
“from the perspective of a well educated group … people … thrust
into positions of leadership and responsibility” (all quotes herein from
Webb’s introduction). By adopting such a specific focus, the book con-
veys such an “impressionistic and subjective view of the war” as could
not have been otherwise afforded, producing “a kaleidoscopic effect”
that serves to “remind us what it was like to live through the war with-
out any of the prejudices of hindsight.” In a very different regard, the
sources used for the book also provide an interesting record of acqui-
sitions made by the Bodleian Library over the last hundred years. With
accounts ranging “from the Cabinet table at 10 Downing Street to the
trenches on the Western front, and from a village in Essex to the out-
posts of the Empire in Africa,” the reader is able to witness the strain
of leadership in the early war years as experienced by Prime Minister
Herbert Henry Asquith and also gain insights on the events that led

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