ABSTRACT
As an oral history event documenting the negotiated experiences of bereavement, grief and mourning, the First World War has all but disappeared. A few of the very young men who saw active service during the war survived, all centenarians, to see the ninetieth anniversary of the war’s outbreak. Richard van Emden records the esteem, even awe, in which these veterans are often held (Van Emden 2003: 3). The stories these men tell are fascinating chunks of reminiscence, but, at a distance of over eighty years, they are inevitably complex, multilayered documents that tell us as much about the politics of remembering as the events they explicitly recount. They cannot, by definition, be representative, as their owners are ambassadors of a generation that has mostly slipped away. Soon, it will be possible to listen to such accounts only through the medium of sound archives.
