World War One did not stay confined to the trenches. Drawing on a collection of a hundred interviews recorded with veterans and their families, many of whom had never spoken on camera before or since, this episode turns to the people who stayed behind. Wives, mothers, and children describe Zeppelin raids over British towns, food shortages that stretched rationing to its limit, and the dread of a telegram arriving at the door announcing a death at the front. Surviving veterans recall the strain of letters home, censored and delayed, and the gap between what they could say and what their families needed to hear. The film moves between these first-person accounts and period footage of home-front life: queues outside shops, air-raid shelters, and the mail rounds that could end a family's ordinary day in an instant. As the interviewees are now all deceased, the recordings stand as one of the last direct records of what the war did to the people who never left home.