Aftermath – when the Boys came home… was the title of a website I owned during the 1990s and early 2000s. There was renewed interest in the 1914-18 war as the centenary of its beginning approached, but much of that interest focused on the battles or dwelled on the horrors of twentieth century warfare. I wanted to look at what happened afterwards. So I wrote articles about remembrance, about the creation of the war cemeteries, about the battlefield pilgrimages and so on.
Those pieces below are the ones I felt were among the best I wrote. There were many more, but the website has long gone now. There was an explosion in studies of the Great War and its consequences in the last twenty years and I felt it my site no longer needed. Nonetheless, I’m pleased I created it, and my proudest memory is of crashing my hosting company’s server after the New York Times recommended the site and I had something around 100,000 visitors in the space of a few hours.
The Unknown Warrior
The Two Minutes Silence
Silent Cities
Battlefield Pilgrimage
Peaceday 19 July 1919
Horatio Bottomley – the ‘soldiers’ friend‘
Not Forgotten Yet
