Andrew Marr traces how the First World War reshaped British society, on the front line and at home, where families were bereaved, bombed, and bankrupted by a conflict nobody had budgeted for. He walks the north-east coast where German gun-boats shelled English towns within sight of the shore, an attack that shattered the assumption Britain's waters were untouchable. He follows the strange disappearance of the country's First Sea Lord amid rumors and suspicion at the war's outset, and describes the first aerial bombings of British civilians, a shock that turned the home front into a target for the first time. A sex scandal that erupted during the war years nearly brings down the Establishment, and Marr uses it to show how wartime pressure cracked open institutions that had seemed unshakeable. Rather than a battlefield chronicle, this is an account of a society forced to remake its politics, class relations, and sense of safety under four years of strain.