Much has been said and written about the ghastliness of life on the Western Front in the First World war. And yet...

Why are there many photographs of young men smiling and laughing, even in the trenches of the front lines?  How did anyone survive and thrive when facing the extremes of danger?

Those were the questions in my mind many years ago as I started reading factual accounts and novels set in the First World War. I began with the well-known classics - Goodbye to All That, All Quiet on the Western Front, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, but then discovered that there were thousands of other books to explore.

After some time, I came to think that perhaps men and women deal with war as they do all other extreme challenges in life - taking refuge in the safety of routine ,in humour, in friendship, love and hate. And in wartime, all those emotions are greater and brighter, more vivid and more exciting, to the point where many of those who survive find life afterwards dull and disappointing.

I began to feel that we have failed to appreciate some of those emotions and so, after years of collecting books and reading about life in and around the trenches, I decided to try and gather war stories together on a single web site.

In addition, I started to write my own novels - a sequence called the Lost Intensities, which sets out to find stories in the less-explored sides of the war. While writing now takes more of my time I continue to read about life in the First World War and the Western Front, which continues to fuel the imagination.

[ Originally educated in the USA, Oxford and London, I now live and work in Suffolk, UK and my other job is as a hospital based eye surgeon.]