Drawing on a collection of one hundred interviews recorded with First World War veterans, many of them never broadcast before, this film reconstructs how the war's opening months turned patriotic enthusiasm into slaughter. Veterans and their loved ones describe the wave of euphoria that swept Britain in August 1914, when two million men volunteered and the fighting seemed like a glorious adventure, whipped along by recruitment posters and newspaper propaganda promising a short, righteous campaign. Their own voices, recorded late in life, describe what actually met them at the front: the trenches, the artillery, the gap between the promise and the experience. The film uses these firsthand accounts alongside archival footage to ask how much the propaganda machine of the era shaped young men's decisions to enlist, and how that machine's version of the war held up against what soldiers actually lived through. With the men who gave these testimonies now all dead, the interviews stand as one of the last direct records of the war as they remembered it.