The Great War, as it is still often referred to in Great Britain and among former members of the Commonwealth, has remained very much alive in the British consciousness. Fictional and historical accounts of the war continue to be written and widely read. The past several years have seen the publication of comprehensive histories of the First World War by two of England’s pre-eminent military historians—John Keegan and Martin Gilbert (the latter also the official biographer of Sir Winston Churchill). Even more recently The Pity of War, written by the young Oxford don Niall Ferguson and offering a revisionist interpretation of Britain’s involvement, has sparked controversy on both sides of the Atlantic. Regeneration, by Pat Barker, the first volume of her fictional trilogy (The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road) dealing with the physical and psychological damage of men brutalized by the war, won the Booker Prize in 1992, while in  1996 Birdsong, a novel whose main protagonist is a soldier who fought in the tunnels under the Western Front, was widely heralded. A much longer list could easily be compiled. The Great War also precipitated some of the most powerful poetry of the 20th century, and that too remains a center of public attention. More important, however, is the central role that the war played in shaping the events of the rest of the century. While to most Americans—as Ferguson notes—World War I is seemingly "the forgotten war"— historian Eric Hobsbawm observes that "the lives of Europeans since August 1914 have been surrounded, impregnated and haunted by world war." Although Woodrow Wilson and many Americans thought of the conflict as "the war to end war," British Field Marshall Earl Wavell described it more accurately as producing a "Peace to end Peace." And Adolf Hitler came to power by exploiting "a legacy of political rancor and racial hatred so intense," says John Keegan, "that no explanation of the causes of the Second World War can stand without reference to those roots." Various field trips in London, especially to the Imperial War Museum will help us understand some of the social, cultural, political, aesthetic, and historical reverberations of this cataclysmic event.