People’s History of the First World War

Everything you associate with the Great War is on this exceptional site, from Christmas football matches in no man's land to Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Oli. Kit Bag. For instance, in the "Vintage Media' section you can hear original recordings of dozens of songs from the period: there are three different versions of It's a Long Way to Tipperary, plus lyrics, including the soldiers' version -'That's the wrong way to tickle Mary". Among the posters, you'll find not just the famous Lord Kitchener "Your Country Needs You" image, but dozens of others, which are fascinating for all sorts of reasons: the crude moral blackmail of "Daddy what did you do in the war?" the amusing naivety of "The kitchen is the key to victory - eat less bread", and the historical irony of "Irishmen, avenge the Lusitania - join an Irish regiment today".

Lost Poets of the Great War

The work of the war poets became central to our view of the war, and that process started in November 1917 with the publication of The Muse in Arms, "a collection for the most part written in the field of action by seamen, soldiers, and flying men". Its text is reproduced in full on FirstWorldWar.com. Inevitably, the work that remains most powerful is that of the handful of truly expert poets commemorated in this simple site from an American academic. Probably the star of them all was Wilfred Owen, whose "Dulce et Decorum Est" still burns like acid. Owen enlisted in September 1915 "in order to help these boys - directly, by leading them as well as an officer can; indirectly, by watching their sufferings that I may speak of them as well as a pleader can". He was killed on Nov 4, 1918, just seven days before the Armistice.

BBC Remembrance

Poetry is also prominent in the BBC's site marking the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month -  the annual commemoration of the moment in 1918 when the Armistice, signed six hours earlier in a railway carriage in a French forest, came into effect. The symbol of the poppy can be traced back to "In Flanders Fields", written in 1915 outside a field hospital at Ypres by a Canadian army surgeon named John McCrae: "In Flanders fields the poppies blow/ between the crosses, row on row..." McCrae tore the poem from his notebook, but a fellow officer found the page in the mud and sent a copy to the press. Noteworthy, too, on this site is a rare first-hand account from a veteran;- Private Arthur Barraclough, who died in 2004 at the age of 106. He recalls an early tank attack: "But with it being wet, we hadn't got very far before the front of the tank sunk. They all got stuck..."

National Army Museum

The 90th anniversary of the tank, which first saw action near the villages of Flers and Courcelette on the Somme on Sept 15, 1916, is celebrated in an online exhibition by this lesser-known museum in Chelsea. The idea for a tank was mooted in 1914, when the Western Front had already become bogged down in an entrenched stalemate, but was ignored by the War Office until the "land ship" concept was taken up at the Admiralty by the First Sea Lord, Winston Churchill. Trials of rival designs took place in 1915, and in June 1916 the first Mk I models were delivered to crews for training at a top-secret base near Bury St Edmunds. The story goes that the mechanics were told to tell the locals that they were working on water cisterns for the Russian army; hence the name.

BBC History

The tank also stars here, in an interactive animation that shows the inside of a Mk I model of 1916 and explains its. mechanical features and what conditions were like for the crew. Elsewhere, the site specialises in the cleat accessible presentation of an overview of the war, including a good, simple account of the Battle of the Somme using animated maps. There's an excellent section entitled "The Human Experience", which has a number of first-hand accounts from servicemen and civilians, and a "Virtual Tours" section that shows how trench systems were made.

Channel 4: Lost Generation

This ambitious community project aims to "turn the long lists of names of the fallen back into real people" by asking relatives to contribute biographical information and photographs to go with inscriptions from war memorials. For example, a brass plaque in Forest Parish Church, Guernsey, commemorates Surgeon Major George Hayes: the project has been able to add that he was noted for driving an ambulance onto the battlefield with full headlights, despite the danger, in the hope of locating every last wounded man. The project is in its infancy and needs your help. There are also tips on how to trace the wartime history of your family.

UK National Inventory of War Memorials

Another ambitious project in its early stages is this Imperial War Museum initiative, which records the details of 53,000 war memorials in the UK and Channel Islands using formation gathered largely by volunteers. The plan is to list about .1,000 memorials, with at least one age for each; it already lets you search by name for those commemorated on all the First World War memorials so far recorded.

David Cohen Fine Art

The Great War was unusual in that the British government not only commissioned official war artists to create a record of the hostilities, but also employed some of the best and most avant- garde artists of the day, including John Singer Sargent, Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer. Their work is mostly held in official collections such as that of the Imperial War Museum (collections.iwm.org.uk), but this specialist gallery in London has works of the period, frequently documentary, by lesser or unknown artists. Particularly intriguing are the examples of trench art, such as elaborately engraved brass shell cases -a kind of battlefield scrimshaw.