Blood and Thunder: The Boys of Eton College and the First World War

A photograph of three friends on the football field, taken in 1912. Less than five years later all three would be killed and buried beneath the fields of Belgium. This story is typical of many schoolboys across Britain who signed up for or were conscripted to fight in World War I. In this groundbreaking new book, historian Alexandra Churchill tells the story of World War I through the extraordinary band of brothers from Britain’s most famous public school, Eton, following them as they stepped out of the classroom, into the army and onto the battlefields before they had left their teenage years behind. Beginning on the banks of the Thames as they worked and played in privilege, the ghastly realities of war are retold in these moving pages.