A time machine · 1914 – 1918
The Great War, in the words and maps of the people who lived it.
Drag a timeline and watch the front line move. Read a soldier’s letter home. Trace a single word across four years. Everything here is built from the real letters, diaries, and maps of the war.
Read the war in its own hand
Letters & Diaries
Tens of thousands of soldiers' letters and diary entries, searchable and readable — filter by nation, date, person and type, and open any one to read it in full.
Read the letters
Watch the line move
The Front, Day by Day
A scrubbable map of the Western Front, 1914–1918. Drag the timeline and watch the order of battle shift day by day, with the battles, leaders and headlines of each date.
Open the map
The whole archive at a glance
Insights
The war read by machine and drawn as one dashboard — momentum, the words that set people apart, a map of what they wrote about, and a single writer's spirits across four years.
Explore the insights
A parlour game from the record
The Moustache Duel
Two faces from 1914–1918, and you pick the finer moustache. An Elo ranking crowns the Great War's greatest upper lip — a light touch drawn from the photographic record.
Enter the duel