ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I consider how the personal connection provided by family stories has often informed historians’ writings on World War I and ask what happens when this sense of familial emotional relation to the war is absent. My own family’s war stories do not stretch back more than two generations. In the absence of familial stories, in my adolescence war seemed as romanticised as a novel. When I later began to research the history of war trauma, I tried to achieve perfect objectivity by expelling all emotion from the history I wrote. But is it right to be dispassionate about war? I conclude by considering to what extent the self can or should form part of our histories of war.
