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This book is a masterpiece of non-fiction literature and a history of war. Swedish writer and historian Peter Engel focuses on the obscured little people - through the wartime experiences of 23 ordinary people from different classes, countries, and camps, it reproduces those "World War I" stories that are closer to the historical truth. What does war feel like? In that fanatical era, almost everyone looked forward to war. Many people died in unknown places, and many people shared the bitter consequences. They had hope, anger, sympathy, and sorrow, and finally became numbers in a pile of old papers - who were they? They are not the people who control the war, but ordinary people who know best what war feels like. They were excited or depressed soldiers, explorers with fantasies about war games, intellectual women who devoted themselves to medical work in occupied areas, housewives and children in the rear, and civil servants who coldly observed military and political figures; they fought in the trenches of the Western Front, the Balkans, East Africa, Qingdao and other places; some of them became heroes, some died or were injured, and some fell into madness. "Death is so silent..." Their voices have never entered the public hearing. They only eagerly wrote diaries or letters when death knocked on the door. Peter Englund retrieved their obscured and forgotten voices and restored every day of the First World War. This time, the "real" war experience will come roaring like an avalanche.

This is a shocking documentary work of war. The Second World War gradually devolved into a struggle between barbarism and civilization, and November 1942 witnessed the crux of this struggle. This was perhaps the most important month of the entire 20th century, when everything was still up in the air and the balance of victory was swinging back and forth. At the beginning of the month, Axis victory still seemed possible; by the end, everyone had an inkling that their defeat was only a matter of time. As in his previous writings, in this book, Peter Englund does not intend to provide us with another top-down military history, but to record a true history of human war experience. From the American and British landing campaign in North Africa to the Soviet encirclement of the German army in Stalingrad, from the front lines of the battlefield to the occupied areas in the rear, 39 ordinary people with different identities, classes, and camps were all involved in this war without exception. Among them are American pilots on Guadalcanal, Italian truck drivers in the North African desert, guerrillas in the forests of Belarus, a 12-year-old Jewish girl who fled Shanghai, a Chinese sailor who drifted alone for 133 days after a shipwreck, a German female college student who resisted the Nazi regime, and pro-German activists. The British rebels from fascism... Peter Engelen compiled their diaries, letters, manuscripts and memoirs from a massive amount of documentary records, recording their war experiences and mental changes - shock and anger, desire and madness, as well as the distortion and tearing of human nature in a cruel environment.