Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson a special edition this week to mark 100 years since the end of the First World War.

As ever, this is history told by the people who were there.

We were under incessant bombardin.

Soldiers in the bunkers became hysterical.

As soon as you get over the top, fear has left you and it's terror. The carnage is just

indescribable. We were literally walking over the dead bodies of our cobbas. The

fighting wasn't just in Europe, it was a global war. We'll tell the forgotten story of Africa's soldiers.

When we moved, we carried everything including bullets. We used to carry more stuff than a woman carrying a whole sack of maize.

We dug trenches in front of the enemy and waited for them. We would then shoot and keep following them wherever they went.

Plus the First World War as a catalyst for huge social change.

We have a first-hand account of the signing of the armistice in 1918

and we'll look at the pain that lingered long after the

fighting was over. I don't think that any of us can quite wipe out the saws that

we have in our souls, if I may say so, of the sights that we're joined by the

that's all coming up and to help guide us

we're joined by the historian Anika Mombauer

professor of modern European history at the Open University

who specializes in the First World War and German military history.

And to begin with Professor Mumbauer, why do we remember?

Why is this centenary important when immediately after the war many wanted to forget?

Yes, the First World War is important to us I think for two main reasons.

One is that it continues to haunt us and it continues to speak to us emotionally because of the scale and the nature of the war itself and of the suffering that it inflicted.

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