Back to the Front: An Accidental Historian Walks the Trenches of World War I

World War I is beyond the memory of almost everyone alive today. Yet it has left as deep a scar on the imaginative landscape of our century as it has on the land where it was fought. Nowhere is that more evident than on the Western Front-the sinuous, deadly line of trenches that stretched from the coast of Belgium to the border of France and Switzerland, a narrow swath of land in which so many million lives were lost.

For journalist Stephen O'Shea, the legacy of the Great War is personal (bo...