This page covers works set during World War I.
For stories based on/during World War II, see Works Set in World War II.
Media set in this time period:
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Anime & Manga
- The shoujo Candy♡Candy is set before and during this time period. It becomes pretty important towards the last part of the series: Candy's fellow nurse Frannie Hamilton decides to enroll as a war nurse to leave her Dark and Troubled Past behind (prompting Candy to investigate her origins) and Candy's close friend Alistair "Stear" Cornwall joins the American Air Forces despite the clan's objections... and later dies when his plane is shot down.
- Mentioned in Chrono Crusade, the main bulk of which is set in The Roaring '20s.
- In Code Geass, a picture of C.C. can be seen running around a WWI battlefield.
- In Fullmetal Alchemist (2003)'s finale Ed finds himself in real-life London in 1916. And yes, zeppelins really were used in bombing raids during that time.
- Several episodes of Hetalia: Axis Powers, specifically detailing Germany's and Italy's first meeting. Austria is described as reduced to a wheelchair-bound cripple after the War.
- Katri, Girl of the Meadows set in Finland during World War One. However, the anime focuses less on the war and more on life in Finland under Russian occupation. Though, a minor character, Carlo Kuusela, is mentioned to have fought in the war against Germany and died.
- The backstory of Porco Rosso.
Art
- Gassed depicts the aftermath of a mustard gas attack during the Second Battle of Arras of 1918.
Audio Plays
- Big Finish Doctor Who: In the first Dark Eyes series (2012), Eighth Doctor companion Molly O'Sullivan is a nursing assistant during the war, with her first story, "The Great War", being set here.
Comic Books
- Charley's War is a classic British comic with socialist overtones that does not flinch from the horrors of battle.
- The most famous comic book example is probably DC's Enemy Ace, about the trials of elite German flying ace Hans Von Hammer, who is profoundly haunted by the constant death around him of which he is a master dealer in the unforgiving sky.
- Fiends of the Eastern Front, which was set during World War II, has a prequel called Fiends of the Western Front, which follows Constanta and his Romanian vampire soldiers during the Western Front of World War I as he encounters an ancient bat-man Ace Pilot fighting on the German side.
- "Golden Eyes" and Her Hero "Bill" is a Propaganda Piece published from 1918 - 1919 by famed illustrator Nell Brinkley. The comic was used to promote the sale of War Bonds and bolster domestic support for the conflict. It follows the adventures and romance of an American woman, "Golden Eyes," who joins her sweetheart Bill at the front lines by enlisting as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross.
- Group of 7: A Most Secret Tale is set somewhere around the tail end of World War I, and stars a group of Canadian soldiers who are tasked with a mission at Vimy Ridge.
- It Was The War In The Trenches: Jacques Tardi's most famous of several graphic novels depicting War Is Hell. His tendencies link the war to Strawman Political and Corrupt Corporate Executive. The usual French point of view about the conflict.
- Midnighter: The Midnighter is forced to assassinate Adolf Hitler in the trenches before he becomes dangerous. He's stopped by the Time Police, and works out a deal to turn the tables on his "employer" while unfortunately sparing Hitler.
- In the Nathan Hales Hazardous Tales graphic novel series, Treaties, Trenches, Mud and Blood, the fourth book in the series, discusses a majority of the events in the war... with talking Funny Animals representing each country. The book would skim over the aerial portion of the war, which would later be the focus of the twelfth book of the series, Above the Trenches.
- Nick Fury's father, Jack Fury, served as a pilot in the war.
- The second arc of Pretty Deadly is set in World War I, and gives a fantastic explanation for it.
- One of the past incarnations of the goddess Promethea was an angelic figure helping the soldiers fighting in the trenches of World War I.
- DC had Steve Savage Balloon Buster, inspired by real-life ace Frank Luke.
Comic Strips
- Snoopy's "World War I Flying Ace" fantasies from the Peanuts cartoons.
Fan Works
- In the Gunslinger Girl fanfic Ghosts
, while hunting terrorists in the Dolomite mountains of Italy, Triela has a vision of a disastrous attack by Italian troops in the same region a hundred years ago.
Film — Animation
- Adama, a 2015 French film telling the story of a young West African boy who sets off across Europe in search of his older brother, who's been conscripted in a French colonial regiment and sent on the Western front.
- Bleuets, a 2019 French short film following a French soldier and a child in a town being bombed by German aviation.
- Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero, a 2018 film centering on the Real Life war hero Sergeant Stubby, a stray Boston Terrier that accompanied the US Army's 102nd Infantry Regiment in Europe.
Films — Live-Action
- 12 Days of Terror which is Based on a True Story of a series of shark attacks along the New Jersey coastline between the 1st and 12th of July 1916, one year before America joined the war. The war is occasionally brought up and one scene sees president Woodrow Wilson who is on holiday in New Jersey giving a speech about keeping America out of the war.
- The plot of Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys features Time Travel and has several short scenes set on the Western front, and the war is also referenced by the Present-Day Past characters in the movie because one of the time travelers apparently got stuck there and was acting suspiciously for that era.
- 1917. As an infantry battalion assembles to wage war deep in enemy territory, two soldiers are assigned to race against time and deliver a message that will stop 1,600 men from walking straight into a deadly trap.
- The 24th is a based on a real-life story about an all African-American US Army unit sent to Houston, Texas during the war to help build an army training camp. Instead, they face extreme racial prejudice from the local townsfolk and Corrupt Cops which eventually lead up to the mutiny and then the riot of 1917
.
- Ace of Aces starts during World War I, with French pilot Georges "Jo" Cavalier (Jean-Paul Belmondo) having an air duel with the German pilot Günther von Beckmann. A young Adolf Hitler watches them from his trench.
- 1970s British drama Aces High, a very down-to-earth and touching portrayal of the lives (and deaths) of a regular squadron of fighter pilots.
- The African Queen is set in German-controlled East Africa during the War.
- All Quiet on the Western Front, the 1930 English-language film adaptation of the Erich Maria Remarque novel about German soldiers in the trenches.
- All Quiet on the Western Front, the 2022 German-language film adaptation of the Erich Maria Remarque novel about German soldiers in the trenches.
- A Bear Named Winnie, chronicling the life of the original Winnipeg/Winnie the black bear, the bear that eventually inspired A. A. Milne to create Winnie the Pooh.
- Beneath Hill 60 tells the story of the 1st Australian Tunnelling Company's effort to mine a tunnel beneath Western European trenches and detonate an explosive charge below a German bunker to aid the advance of British troops.
- The Big Parade. 1925 silent; wonderful story about a callow rich boy who joins the Army, falls in love with a French girl, then sees the hell of combat...
- The Big Red One starts with a black and white segment showing the Sergeant's experiences during the last days of World War I, then flashes forward to the North Africa Campaign of 1943.
- Black and White in Color is a French movie set somewhere in West Africa, on the border between a French colony and a German colony. When the French get news that they're at war with Germany, then they (well, the Africans under their control) go to war. It ends with the English arriving to announce that the Germans' superiors have already surrendered.
- The 1965 film The Blue Max is the story of a German infantryman, Lt. Bruno Stachel, who transfers to the German Air Service towards the end of the war. His ruthless kill-or-be-killed attitude clashes with the squadron's old fashioned notions of chivalry. Most well known for its excellent aerial stunts and flying scenes.
- Capitaine Conan by Bertrand Tavernier, about the French corps in the Balkans.
- There's a little known 2004 independent film about American soldiers on the western front in 1918, called Company K.
- The Day That Shook the World is a 1975 film about the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and Sophie in Sarajevo, which triggered the war.
- Darling Lili, a 1970 musical set in the waning days of the war, starring Julie Andrews as a Glamorous Wartime Singer / Femme Fatale Spy who romances an American Ace Pilot. Has some spectacular aerial dogfight scenes using replica aircraft originally built for the film The Blue Max.
- The Dawn Patrol is a 1930 film about fighter pilots in the RAF.
- De Mayerling A Sarajevo is a 1940 French Biopic by Max Ophuls about the Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
- Death on the Nile (2022) starts with a Distant Prologue in 1914, with Poirot as a soldier in the Belgian army during World War I, and reveals how a wartime injury led him to grow his iconic moustache, as well as touching upon his relationship with Katherine, before jumping forward to the main narrative in 1937.
- Deathwatch (2002) is a British Surreal Horror film, starring Andy Serkis and Jamie Bell, features a squad of Tommies getting lost in a German entrenchment. They are tormented by uncertainty of their whereabouts, mounting distrust of their lone German prisoner and each other, and increasingly supernatural phenomena. They are slowly picked off one by one. And the ending features a What Do You Mean, It's Not Symbolic? Mind Screw.
- Doughboys, the best of a generally uninspiring collection of talking films made by Buster Keaton at MGM, features Buster enlisting by accident, going through boot camp, and then fighting in the trenches in France.
- The Eagle and the Hawk, a depressingly realistic B&W movie in which the hero becomes increasingly and profoundly disillusioned by the number of young pilots dying under his command, finally snapping when the enemy ace he kills turns out to be no more than a fuzzy-cheeked youth. Driven beyond the brink, he kills himself. His best friend takes his body up in a two-seater and, using the rear gun, peppers the wings and the hero's head with bullets to make it appear as though he died in combat and thereby save his reputation.
- The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain. The Hugh Grant character was wounded in the war and sent home, but he still helps the war effort as a cartographer.
- A Farewell to Arms is the 1932 adaptation of the Ernest Hemingway novel, and although much more romantic, it does show the horrors of war.
- Father & Soldier is a 2023 French-Senegalese film about two men who live in the French colony of Senegal being forced to join the military and fight in North-East France.
- Flyboys is a 2006 film about the Lafayette Escadrille, a French fighter squadron composed entirely of American volunteers.
- For Me and My Gal during America's entrance into the war and follows a vaudeville act as war looms over them.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, in which a callow Idle Rich boy goes off to fight in the trenches.
- La France (2007), a somewhat surreal French film in which a woman disguises herself as a teenage soldier to find her husband at the front, ironically joining a squad of deserters en route. And it's (sort of) a musical.
- Frantz takes place just after WWI, it deals with the grief of a German family and a Frenchman about the death of a German soldier during the war.
- The Australian film Gallipoli. Two Australian sprinters face the brutal realities of war when they are sent to fight in the Gallipoli campaign in Turkey during World War I
- Goodbye, Mr. Chips starts when Mr. Chipping ("Chips") is a young teacher in 1870 and goes through his fifty year career. During WWI he reads aloud a "Roll of Honour", the names of those killed in battle which include many of Chip's former students and fellow teachers. One of them is an old friend of Chips, a German who fought on his country's side.
- The 1959 Italian comedy/drama La Grande Guerra (The Great War), the story of an Anti-Hero and a Lovable Coward who become Vitriolic Best Buds and try not to get caught in the slaughter of the trenches.
- The Grand Illusion (1937), was directed by Jean Renoir.
- The Great War (1959) recounts the tragicomic adventures of two Italians drafted into the army and sent to the front lines against the Austrians.
- Hearts of the World (1918) is a propaganda film encouraging the American war effort, made while the war was still raging.
- Hedd Wyn (1992), about a Welsh poet conscripted into the army and forced to fight in Flanders.
- Hell's Angels, a 1930 film about fighter pilots in the RAF.
- I Defended The Young Bosnia (Serbian: Branio sam Mladu Bosnu): 2014 Serbian movie about the Austrian lawyer Rudolf Zistler who did his professional best to defend Gavrilo Princip and other members of the 'Unification [of the entire Balkans under Serbian Rule] or Death' terrorist group. The story pointedly uses the larger social movement which 'Unification or Death' was a part of, the 'Young Bosnia Movement', and is centered around the Kangaroo Court trial set by the Austrians while the war itself is looming in the background.
- Johnny Got His Gun (1971): A horrifying story of a young American soldier, who has his arms, legs and face blown off, leaving him blind, deaf, dumb and immobile, a living torso in a hospital bed, with no way of communicating until he figures out how to tap the Morse code with the back of his head.
- Joyeux Noël ("Merry Christmas") is about French and British soldiers briefly fraternizing with German soldiers on Christmas of 1914.
- Jungle Cruise, inspired by the Disney ride of the same namenote , is set in 1916 and involves a trip down the Amazon to find a mythical flower that the English heroine hopes will help the war effort. A fictionalized version of Germany's Prince Joachim is the Big Bad.
- Kasky, or Tears of April, a 2008 Finnish novel adaptation about a Red POW in the Finnish Civil War of 1918, the White soldier responsible for her, and the corrupt military judge in charge of her trial.
- King of Hearts has a Private trying to defuse a bomb in a town full of former mental patients.
- The King's Man sees the formation of the Kingsman private spy agency with World War I as backdrop.
- Lawrence of Arabia dealt with the Arab Revolt and Middle Eastern theater.
- Legends of the Fall had Brad Pitt, Aidan Quinn and ET's best friend go off to Europe to fight on the Western Front.
- The Lighthorsemen is an Australian film about a stunningly effective (and Truth in Television) mounted charge by Australian horsemen against entrenched Turkish infantry supported by artillery and machine guns, in Palestine.
- The A&E cable network made a movie called and about The Lost Battalion, a US Army unit that during an attack was cut-off behind German lines. Fighting off attack after attack and in spite of mounting casualties and dwindling supplies they rejected every surrender demand that was made. They were rescued and returned back to US lines.
- The Lost Patrol is about a single British cavalry patrol that gets lost in the Mesopotamian desert and endures a harrowing siege while being picked off by unseen Arab enemies.
- The Man Who Knew Infinity follows a self-taught Indian mathematician who travels to trinity collage, Cambridge during the first world war, several members of the college are recruited into the army and the war itself is mentioned several times.
- March on the Drina (Serbian: Mars na Drinu): 1964 movie about the Serbian victory against Austro-Hungarian invasion force in the Battle of Cer (fought in August 1914).
- The Officers Ward in 2001, about the "gueules cassees" ("broken faces" in French: war invalids and horribly disfigured men).
- The musical film Oh! What a Lovely War is a surreal take on the War that features the lyrics from several songs from the period.
- Passchendaele, written, directed, and starring Canadian Paul Gross, based on his grandfather's war diary.
- Paths of Glory with Kirk Douglas. Directed in the late '50s by a then young Stanley Kubrick. An example of Shot at Dawn. And possibly one of the best filmed but least accurate war dramas ever made.
- The Prince of the Pacific: A French officer who was wounded in Verdun goes to French Polynesia to recruit locals for the French colonial armies.
- The Red Baron (known as Von Richthofen and Brown outside the US)
- Rendezvous: Spy drama about an American cryptographer trying to catch a German spy ring which is beaming intelligence about US Navy operations to the U-boat fleet.
- Ryan's Daughter takes place in Ireland during the war. One of the main characters is a crippled British Army officer who's arrived from the Western Front to command a local camp.
- See You Up There: the prologue is set on the frontline in France on 9 November 1918. The rest of the film depicts the life of two veterans between 1918 and 1920.
- The 1941 Gary Cooper film Sergeant York was based on the true story of Sgt Alvin York, a farmhand who became an American hero and earned its highest military honor, the Medal Of Honor, for an incident in 1918 where he single-handedly killed and captured over a hundred German soldiers.
- The Shopworn Angel (1938) stars James Stewart as a newly-enlisted soldier who romances a jaded Broadway actress while waiting to deploy.
- Shoulder Arms (1918) was the product of Charlie Chaplin's rather daring decision to make a comedy out of the horrors of trench warfare while the war was still going on. It proved to be one of his most popular films.
- Sky Bandits: Through a series of circumstances, a pair of Old West gunfighters end up as fighter pilots in World War I.
- Sons O' Guns: A farce comedy about a vaudevillian who joins the army by mistake and goes on various comic adventures on the Western Front.
- The Spy in Black (1939) is about a German U-boat on a mission to sink the British naval fleet in Scotland.
- Theeb is a film about an Arab boy who goes off on a journey with his older brother...and an English officer. The officer is there to help blow up the Hejaz railway as part of the Arab Revolt. (He isn't T.E. Lawrence.)
- They Shall Not Grow Old, a documentary about the war directed by Peter Jackson. It aired on BBC 2 on the 100th anniversary of the Armistice of Compiegne.
- The Thirty Nine Steps (1978), 1978 spy thriller set in the run-up to the War.
- The 39 Steps (2008), 2008 spy thriller set in the run-up to the War.note
- Tolkien is a biopic about the life of English writer J. R. R. Tolkien, and notably covers his wartime, when he enlisted in the British army.
- Trench 11 is a horror film set in late 1918 about an underground German bunker infested with Parasite Zombies.
- Up the Front, which follows cowardly bootboy Lurk joining the war and ending up having the German's master plan tattooed on his rear.
- A Very Long Engagement is about a young Frenchwoman's search for her fiance, who was lost and presumed dead on the no man's land during the Battle of the Somme. We see the war told through some pretty graphic flashbacks of the trench and gruesome No Man's Land fights he and the men he was stationed with had to go through.
- An Australian film, The Water Diviner, set in the aftermath of Gallipoli, that looks at both the Turkish and Australian sides of the battle.
- War Horse (2011), directed by Steven Spielberg.
- Waterloo Bridge is a 1931 film set in 1917 London.
- Westfront 1918, a German film. It bears resemblance to the All Quiet on the Western Front film adaptation, and was released the same year (1930), although it has a bleaker tone.
- What Price Glory: Two Marines romance a French maiden between battle sequences.
- Wilson is a 1944 biopic about Woodrow Wilson, with much of the film focusing on his actions during World War I and his efforts to get the U.S. into the League of Nations. As you might have guessed from the release date, the movie was created largely as propaganda for the then-ongoing sequel.
- Wings, the first movie to win the Oscar for Best Picture, was centered on World War I flyboys.
- Wonder Woman has the eponymous heroine exploring the world of Man during the time period of World War I. It's by far the highest grossing movie
set in WWI, being a superhero fantasy helps.
- Zeppelin: 1971 Michael York film about a German plot to steal the British crown jewels using the eponymous zeppelin and featuring flying sequences using accurate reproductions of actual WWI aircraft.
Literature
- The Alice Network is set partly during World War I (there are two time periods and main characters that the book alternates between). The WWI main character is Eve, a spy for the Alice Network, a network of spies for the British in German-occupied France.
- Always with Honor, the autobiography of Russian General Pyotr Wrangel, includes his experiences in the latter days of the war, leading up to Red October and the events of the Russian Civil War.
- John Buchan's Richard Hannay stories, seminal spy thrillers that include:
- The Thirty-Nine Steps, written in 1915 and set in the run-up to WWI.
- Greenmantle (1916) set during the War itself. Buchan portrays Wilhelm II fairly sympathetically.
- Mr. Standfast (1919) set during the closing weeks of the War.
- Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms is a classic fictional depiction of the war.
- A Killing For The Hawks by Frederick E. Smith. A 1966 novel about a RFC squadron that flew Royal Aircraft Factory S.E.5as.
- A Time Of Death (Serbian: Vreme Smrti) by Dobrica Cosic
is a four-volume novel detailing the Serbian struggle during World War One, as seen from the perspective of one family. Considered among classics of Serbian literature.
- All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) by German writer Erich Maria Remarque, another WWI staple of the western literary canon. The story follows a young German soldier from his idealistic enlistment through the horrors of war as his compatriots die one by one. Ironically, the story was written in German, by a German war veteran, depicting the German side of the war, but it has become the most popular depiction of the war for English speaking audiences.
- The Anderssons by Solveig Olsson-Hultgren takes place in 1917. Sweden is mostly spared from the horrors of the war, but food is very scarce in the cities and the towns, and Rebecka's only uncle has been conscripted into the army.
- August 1914: Russian novel about the disastrous defeat at Tannenberg, which started the chain of dominoes that eventually ended in the destruction of Tsarist Russia.
- The early (and best) Biggles stories are set in the War, though the character debuted in 1932.
- Birdsong (1993) by Sebastian Faulks, widely considered one of the great WWI novels. It describes the horrors of trench warfare, through the eyes of troubled young officer Stephen Wraysford and of his men.
- The Blindness of the Heart (Die Mittagsfrau, 2007)by Julia Franck spans both World Wars; Martha and Helene's father loses his leg and eventually dies from the complications in the war, and it affects their lives in all manner of other ways.
- Bloodline (2006), Kate Cary's unofficial sequel to Dracula, starts off in Northern France during the war. The main characters, John Shaw, Quincey Harker, and Mary Seward, are a lieutenant, captain, and nurse, respectively, for the British.
- The Bloody Red Baron (1995), part of the Anno Dracula series by Kim Newman, takes this war and introduces vampires. Specifically, Dracula leading the German war effort.
- The Book about Milutin
by Danko Popovic is written as a memoir of an aged Serbian veteran of the Great War. The book was banned in the communist Yugoslavia, since it dealt with with sensitive topics, such as the war crimes commited by the Croatian soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian army, and with the poor status the WWI veterans later had under the communist rule.
- A major section of Jan Guillou's The Bridge Builders takes place during WWI, mostly following German soldiers in the East African Campaign, but also showing how civilians in Norway are affected by the war.
- Charlotte Sometimes (1969), second in Penelope Farmer's Aviary Hall series, features a young girl who switches between living in Britain at the end of the war, and in boarding school in 1963. The book does, in fact, mention the flu it is revealed to have killed an unseen but nonetheless crucial character.
- The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica begins in London during WWI, though it mostly takes place in a fantasy world.
- The Combat Baker and Automaton Waitress tells the story of a retired pilot in Wiltia (an alternate Germany) shortly after their victory in "The Great European War", a conflict analogous to World War I, and features frequent Flash Backs to its events.
- Company K is a semi-autobiographic novel by William March, one of the American veterans of the war.
- Crosstime Traffic: The second novel, Curious Notions (2004), is set in the late 21st century of a world where the Central Powers managed to successfully pull off the Schlieffen Plan and eventually won World War I.
- The D Agency Japanese espionage novel series has a World War I veteran, Lieutenant Colonel Yuuki, as its central character. A flashback shows that in 1918, he was serving as a spy in Germany for Imperial Japan but was caught and tortured for information. He used a stolen grenade to blow off his hand and escape, eventually returning to Japan and founding the D Agency much later in 1937.
- The French half of Divisadero (2007), a novel by Michael Ondaatje.
- The Eighth Doctor Adventures novel Casualties of War (2000) is set in England during the closing months of the war.
- A Fable (1954): A Messianic Archetype of a corporal, and his twelve disciples, persuade a French division to refuse to attack the Germans.
- Ken Follett's Fall of Giants (2010), a Door Stopper novel, tells the story of the war (and other important events, like the Russian Revolution) through the eyes of several different individuals: British, Russians, Germans, Americans, some being aristocrats, others being working class people.
- Fall on Your Knees: James Piper is a WWI veteran.
- The Good Soldier Švejk (1923), a classic (and hilarious) satirical novel by Czech writer Jaroslav Hasek.
- In Goodbye, Mr. Chips, the octogenarian title character reminisces about his career as a schoolteacher in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Several of his anecdotes about students he knew end with him recalling that the boy in question didn't make it through the War in one piece. There are also several chapters covering the War itself; Chips is retired by then, but accepts a request to come back and help out his old school when it has staffing issues due to most of the teachers being called up. Among his responsibilities is announcing once a week which former students or staff members have recently fallen in action; he makes a point of including Max Staefel, the school's former German language teacher, even though Staefel fought for the other side.
- Robert Graves' autobiographical novel Goodbye to All That details his experiences as a British army officer on the Western Front.
- The novel Goshawk Squadron (1971) by Derek Robinson deconstructs the popular view of World War One air combat which, rather than dueling "Knights of the Air", actually involved undertrained pilots diving out of the sun and machine-gunning their opponent in the back before he had a chance to defend himself. War Story(1987) and Hornet's Sting (1999) by the same author have a similar setting.
- The Great Game fantasy trilogy by Dave Duncan is set in the 1910s and the War and its aftereffects play into the plot. The protagonist sees action in the trenches and spends some time in a hospital for shellshock victims.
- The Great War trilogy (1998-2000), part of the larger Timeline-191 series of Alternate History by Harry Turtledove, pits the United States of America, Germany and Austria-Hungary against Britain, France, and the Confederate States of America. Among other differences, the October Revolution fails, and Russia is still a monarchy after the war. For that matter, so are Germany, Austria, and Mexico.
- Herbert West–Reanimator (1922) begins several years before the War and ends some years after, with the fifth of its six sections describing West's activities during the War.
- Human Nature, a Doctor Who New Adventures novel, is mostly set in 1914 before war breaks out, but is full of foreshadowing for it, and there are a few scenes showing what became of key characters during the war.
- Infanterie Grieft An (Infantry Attacks) by Erwin Rommel recounts his experiences over the course of the war, from mobilization and the early fighting in France to the Carpathians and the Italian front. These experiences would shape his tactics in the next war.
- Johnny Got His Gun (1938) by Dalton Trumbo: A horrifying story of a young American soldier, who has his arms, legs and face blown off, leaving him blind, deaf, dumb and immobile, a living torso in a hospital bed, with no way of communicating until he figures out how to tap the Morse code with the back of his head.
- Johnny and the Dead, the second book in the Johnny Maxwell Trilogy by Terry Pratchett, features an elderly British soldier who was actually named Tommy Atkins, who on his death joins the rest of the Blackbury Pals' Battalion. The Author's Note at the back says there really were Pals' Battalions, and they really were a horribly innocent way of ensuring all the young men from a given area would be killed at once.
- The first part of the novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932), by the famous French author Celine, takes place during World War One. The main character, who sees the war as a lot of frightening and senseless violence, does his best to avoid risking his life. After being wounded, he manages not to be sent back to the western front until the war is over.
- Leviathan (2009) by Scott Westerfeld is a Young Adult Alternate History adventure novel set in WWI, where the armies of the Entente Powers are aided by their Biopunk creations (like flying sky whales) and where the Central Powers fight with Steampunk Humongous Mecha. And it's awesome.
- Lord Peter Wimsey, Dorothy L. Sayers' fictional detective, was an officer in WWI, and still has occasional shell-shock.
- In The Master Mind of Mars (1928) by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ulysses Paxton starts out fighting in this War.
- Mein Kampf (My Fight), Adolf Hitler's memoir. The book clearly shows that this war and the German defeat shaped this man and his ideas more than anything else.
- The poem My Boy Jack (1915), about the death of Rudyard Kipling's only son in the war.
- My Reminiscences Of East Africa (1920) is General Paul Von Lettow-Vorbek's diary from his service in East Africa at this time.
- The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) was actually written in 1916 and set during the war. Lieutenant Arthur Hastings returns from the War due to an injury, while Hercule Poirot is a war refugee.
- No Man's Land: Tales from the Weird Wars Created by members of AlternateHistory.com.
- Odinochka: Armenian Tales from the Gulag (2016) has its main character reflect on his childhood where he participated in the defense of Van in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 as the Armenian genocide was underway, eventually being sent to get aid from the invading Russian army.
- La Oveja de Nathán, which is a unique case of a Filipino soldier fighting on the American side. (To be fair, his country was a U.S. colonial possession at the time.) Based in part on the Real Life case of Tomas Claudio who really did fight and die in this war.
- Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), a collection of three short stories by Katherine Anne Potter, is apparently the only major work on the Spanish flu epidemic.
- The middle two novels of Parade's End are set during the war.
- Phoenix and Ashes (2004), a Cinderella retelling, centers on the stepdaughter of a war profiteer and a Shell-Shocked pilot sent home to recover.
- The Razor's Edge (1944) by William Somerset Maugham features Larry Darrell, a World War I pilot who is wounded and traumatized in the War. He spends the rest of the novel searching for ways to adjust to the post-war life.
- In the Alternate History Reds!: A Revolutionary Timeline the USA becomes an Entente belligerent in World War I from the onset, however the course of the war doesn't become much different than OTL. The biggest change is the important pacifist backlash led by the Socialist Labor Party, much more popular than OTL and setting the stage for the socialists becoming a bigger player in American politics, especially as the government reacts to opposition to the war with repression.
- British author Pat Barker has written three award-winning novels that form her World War I trilogy, The Regeneration Trilogy (1991-1995): Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road. The novels are chock full of history and real-life characters, including the poets Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Robert Graves. The first novel was turned into a movie, released in 1997 and known as Regeneration in the UK and Behind the Lines in the US.
- The L.M. Montgomery book Rilla of Ingleside (1921) chronicles the eponymous character's experiences throughout the entire war, in quite a bit of detail that could only come from first-hand experience. Given that level of detail, it's supremely odd she made no mention at all of the 1918 influenza pandemic, not even in passing. It devastated Canada as thoroughly as it did the rest of the world, having a profound effect on many of the events she relates, yet the word 'flu' or 'influenza' is never once mentioned.
- The Saga of Tanya the Evil takes place in an alternate universe reminiscent of our world except with magic and the opening stages of the war happening much later than in real life, 1924.
- The short story Schwarzchild Radius (1987) by Connie Willis features an extended metaphor of WWI as a black hole.
- The Secret Adversary has a prologue on the sinking Lusitania (1915).
- Sherlock Holmes: The story His Last Bow, written in 1917 but taking place in England during the run up to the war, with Holmes attempting to deal with a German spy network in England. Also, a series of novels and short stories by Robert Ryan involve Dr. Watson returning to his prior job as an army doctor, this time on the Western Front. The Big Bad of His Last Bow also makes an appearance in one novel, seeking revenge when Watson becomes a prisoner of war.
- Shout At The Devil by Wilbur Smith is a 1968 novel (and movie) about a private war between English poachers and a German colonial official in East Africa.
- In "The Silver Key" by H. P. Lovecraft, his dreamer-hero Randolph Carter saw action with the French Foreign Legion and suffered near-fatal injuries in the Battle of the Somme, near Belloy-en-Santerre. He apparently still had PTSD from this in "The Statement of Randolph Carter" where his friend Warren describes him as a nervous wreck.
- Ernst Junger's autobiographical memoir Storm of Steel.
- The novel Strange Meeting (1971) by Susan Hill, title taken from a Wilfred Owen poem, is about the friendship between two British officers on the front line.
- The Swarm on the Somme series. A World War I equivalent of The War Against the Chtorr. And quite awesome. Created by members of AlternateHistory.com.
- Lord Dunsany wrote Tales of War
based on his experiences in the trenches, focusing on the desolation of the Western Front mixed with a stiff measure of anti-Kaiser propagandizing.
- In Tarzan the Terrible, Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan went up against the Germans in Africa.
- To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf revolves around the Ramsay family and their friends just before and after the war.
- Unnatural Issue (2011), based on the story Donkeyskin, has the main character sent to France to escape her necromancer father shortly before World War One starts.
- War Horse, by Michael Morpurgo.
Live-Action TV
- The BBC's 37 Days is a depiction of the July crisis resulting from the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand.
- ANZAC Girls is a Based on a True Story miniseries detailing the wartime lives of five members of the Australian Army Nursing Service, first in Egypt and then in France.
- ANZACs
- Birdsong, an adaptation of the book by Sebastian Faulks.
- Blackadder Goes Forth: A rare comedy set here, although it was far darker than earlier series. Well-known for an extremely touching and sad finale.
- On Boardwalk Empire, both Jimmy Darmody and Richard Harrow fought in the war, and are both not coping well, which leads to their involvement in organized crime. Harrow in particular suffered horrific injuries.
- Carnivàle has a large portion of its immediate Back Story set in the trenches, and it's heavily implied that the machinations of the two Avatara were major factors in causing this and other conflicts.
- The Cherry Queen: The protagonist's husband is mobilized in the German army during World War I and gets injured on the front.
- Chickens: The show details the exploits of three men who are deemed social outcasts for not fighting in the First World War.
- Doctor Who:
- In The War Games, the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe land in the middle of no-man's land during World War I and they were captured but escaped. Later, they noticed some of the soldiers were replaced by Aliens to keep recreating wars like the WWI, in which was called "The War Games."
- In Silver Nemesis, the Doctor and Ace confromts Nemesis, a silver Living Statue created by Rassilon that passed in a comet of the same name every 25 years to the Earth causing destruction. And the first time it passed was in 1913, the eve of the WWI.
- While most of "The Family of Blood" is set a year before, the episode features two of the students from the episode's school fighting and surviving in the trenches of the war.
- In Twice Upon a Time, the Doctor meets a British soldier who was abducted from the trenches by a mysterious force. His abduction and return are shown, and the episode ends with him taking part in the 1914 Christmas truce.
- Dogfights: Two episodes feature the First World War. The first, "The Greatest Air Battles" pilot episode, features Eddie Rickenbacker's dogfights over the Western Front in 1918. The second, "The First Dogfighters", covers the titular dogfights of the First World War in more detail, featuring several Ace Pilots from the French, German, British, and American sides.
- The episode "To the Last Man" of Torchwood has a World War I veteran snatched away by Torchwood in order to fix two timelines colliding with one another. At the end of the episode after returning to the war, he gets shot for cowardice and shell-shock in the war.
- Series 2 of Downton Abbey is set during the war and immediately after. The ways people responded to the war are explored in detail.
- An episode of Fantasy Island featured Don Adams (in complete Maxwell Smart mode) as a bumbling schoolteacher who wants to visit WWI and ends up fighting the Red Baron.
- Gallipoli (2015)
- The first season of Genius, covering the life of Albert Einstein, shows how he was the only member of Germany's scientific elite to refuse to assist in the war effort, as well as Fritz Haber's creation of chemical warfare to Einstein's disgust.
- Hitler: The Rise of Evil: The first episode depicts Hitler's participation in the western front of WWI, although it adds the bit where he stomps a dog to death.
- The last three episodes of Legends of Tomorrow's second season is set during the war. They went there to retrieve the the Blood of Christ to complete the Spear of Destiny. When the Legion of Doom beats them to it, the titular team travels back to their first arrival to negate the villains' victory.
- M*A*S*H is set in the Korean War, but Colonel Potter fought in World War One after lying about his age at 16 in order to get in the Army. Note that if this is the case, Potter could be no older than 52 at the end of the Korean War; a far cry from actor Harry Morgan's 68 years.
- Our World War is a dramatization of key moments in the war experienced by British forces.
- Peaky Blinders kicks off around six months after WWI has ended, in 1919. All three eldest Shelby brothers, as well as most of the young men of Birmingham, served in France (Tommy, specifically, was a tunneler) and are regarded as war heroes. The show deconstructs this idealization of soldiers, and various characters have shell-shock, PTSD, and the "Flanders Blues", self-medicating with alcohol, opium, and cocaine.
- The Tales from the Crypt episode "Yellow" is about a lieutenant in the U.S. army during World War I who does everything he can to avoid fighting and would rather hide in the trenches, which brings him into conflict with his General father, who is also his commanding officer.
- Season four of Upstairs Downstairs. If Blackadder's Lt. George is the comedy version of what happens when an Upper-Class Twit turns Tommie, James Bellamy is the drama version. It is not easy for him.
- The BBC's series Wings was about the lives of pilots and observers in the Royal Flying corps. Beginning in 1915, it focuses on the development of air combat tactics, the poor performance of British fighters in comparison to their German counterparts, and the changes in social norms that the war brought about.
- Many episodes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles are set during World War I. An adolescent Henry "Indiana" Jones Jr. runs away from his home in the USA, volunteering for the Belgian Army under a false identity, and he later joins a French intelligence agency. His adventures as an Allied soldier-spy take him across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East from 1916 to 1918. Afterwards, he attends the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 before leaving Europe for good.
Music
- "And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda" by Eric Bogle is about a young Australian soldier who is maimed at the Battle of Gallipoli. In another song by Bogle, "No Man's Land" (also called "The Green Fields of France" and what the Dropkick Murphys made famous) the narrator is reflecting on the grave of a young man who died in France during World War I.
- This video
to "A Small Victory" by Faith No More.
- "Paschendale", a song about the horrors of the Third Battle of Ypres by Iron Maiden.
- "Death Or Glory", a song about World War One fighter pilots.
- The song "One" by Metallica
- "1916" by Motörhead is a ballad from the perspective of a soldier fighting in it.
- The War by Running Wild is based on World War One.
- Swedish Horrible History Metal band Sabaton has several songs that deal with the horrors of the Great War, some of the best known being "The Price Of A Mile" and "Cliffs of Gallipoli". In 2019 they released an entire Concept Album focused on the experiences of the war, aptly named The Great War, and followed it with a second one in 2022 titled The War to End All Wars.
- ''Butcher's Tale (Western Front, 1914)" by The Zombies gives gruesome detail to the trench warfare, commenting on both shell shock and the strange dichotomy between "God and Country." "And the preacher in his pulpit / Sermons 'Go and fight, do what is right!' / But he don't have to hear these guns / And I bet he sleeps at night."
- "Snoopy vs. The Red Baron", here
, and the sequel "Snoopy's Christmas"
- "The Soldier's Sweetheart", here
, by Jimmie Rodgers.
- Christmas In The Trenches, a song by John McCutcheon, based on the true stories of truces between different groups of opposing entrenched forces on the Western Front on Christmas Day 1914, with the soldiers singing carols, exchanging gifts, and playing soccer in No Man's Land. (Though later years would see similar truces, due to high command on both sides being upset when they heard it, they were not nearly so widespread as before.)
- Hanzel und Gretyl, an Industrial Metal band, has done World War I-themed German songs such as "KaiserReich".
- "1917
" by Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt is about a Hooker with a Heart of Gold trying to comfort soldiers about to head back into the war.
- Let England Shake, PJ Harvey's 2011 album, deals with WWI in an impressive way.
- "Remember" by Renaissance, a song about finding a (deceased?) old woman's letters from her soldier boyfriend/husband. It's implied, of course, that he never came home.
- "Common Ground" by IQ, a neo-Progressive Rock band.
- "The Rose of No-Man's Land", here
, about the Red Cross nurses who served on the front lines. This song dates from the war itself.
- "Children's Crusade" by Sting is set during World War I and compares it to the titular medieval conflict, nothing how by the standards of the album's time, the soldiers who fought in the former were ridiculously young.
Podcast
- Dan Carlin's Hardcore History series covered the conflict in it's Blueprint for Armageddon series.
- The 10th season of Mike Duncan's Revolutions covering the Russian Revolution covered the conflict from the Russian perspective, as the war and the revolution were inextricably intertwined.
- Twilight Histories has featured World War I as a point-of-divergence on a couple occasions:
- ”The Kaiser’s Assassin” takes place in a world where The Central Powers won the First World War by the end of 1915. Britain stayed out of the war, and Germany is the undisputed master of Europe.
- “The Big Turk” takes place in a world where the war dragged on to 1922. This allowed Mustafa Kemal Ataturk to spread his reforms to the entire former Ottoman Empire, not just Turkey. By the time of the episode the Turkish Republic is well on its way to becoming a major world power.
- “Lord of Heligoland” takes place in an alternate World War I where Germany has been conducting experiments and rituals to contact the Norse gods.
Print Media
- Many characters, including Doc Savage, The Shadow, Secret Agent X, The Spider and many more from Pulp Magazines, had WWI as part of their Back Story. Aviation pulps, such as G-8 and His Battle Aces, tended to be set in this time period.
Tabletop Games
- Diplomacy is a board game made in 1954 about pre-WWI diplomacy.
- Tabletop game Wings of War/Wings of Glory (not to be confused with the computer games of the same name) is a miniatures game involving WWI aircraft.
- Dulce and Decorum Est is a supplement and adventure for Trail of Cthulhu set in the Great War.
- The roleplaying game Never Going Home
by Wet Ink Games focuses on a World War I that is becoming increasingly tainted (in more ways than one) by an Eldritch Abomination.
- Wraith: The Great War is set shortly after the war and focuses on the effects it had in the Underworld. It also includes airships that crashed as relic vehicles!
Theatre
- The originator of many of the tropes seen in World War One fiction is the stage play Journey's End, written a few years after the war by a British officer. It's actually a lot funnier than most of its imitators. (In place of usual tropes about First World War officers it shows one who's been promoted from the "other ranks", which happened in Real Life a great deal more often than it's shown in fiction.)
- Queensland tourist attraction Australian Outback Adventure (a dinner-and-a-show kind of deal), originally just a mish-mash of different stereotypes and Australian bush lore, has started recently performing a show called "Heroes of the Light Horse", based on the aforementioned battle in Palestine.
- The musical play Oh, What A Lovely War is a surreal take on the War that features the lyrics from several songs from the period.
Video Games
- 1916 - Der Unbekannte Krieg is an indie horror game where you are a German soldier being chased through the trenches of the Western Front by...velociraptors. Much scarier than it sounds.
- 1917 - The Alien Invasion DX is set in the First World War... until an Alien Invasion strikes.
- Air Conflicts while the series is mostly set in the second war, Secret Wars has flashback missions to the Great War.
- Amnesia series
- While not specifically set during the war itself, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs uses the specter of the war for all the horror it can; Mandus's visions of the horrors of the 20th century, particularly his sons being doomed to die in the trenches of the Western Front, drove him to build his accursed Machine and infuse it with a fragment of his own soul to render down all of humanity into "product" by butchering them like pigs on a city-sized industrial scale.
- Amnesia: The Bunker takes place on the Western front in 1916. The player, Henri Clément is a French soldier who woke up in an abandoned French bunker with no recollection, but is hunted by 'The Beast' which slaughtered the previous occupants and continues the hunt.
- Assassin's Creed Syndicate has a short side campaign set in London during 1916. You play as Lydia, granddaughter of main character Jacob, and assist Winston Churchill in rooting out German spies operating within the city.
- Battlefield 1, the first entry in the Battlefield franchise to take place in World War I.
- Brass Hats (named after a nickname for officers) is a turn based strategy game in the vein of Nintendo Wars in a surprisingly trenchless version of WWI fought between the "Allied Forces" and the "Central Army". Sadly, it appears to have been discontinued. However, the demo is still downloadable for free, along with a few fan-created maps.
- Britannic: Patroness of the Mediterranean centers around the conversion and sinking of the hospital ship Britannic.
- The N64 game Body Harvest opens with its first act in 1916 as the bugs invade Greece and secretly commence harvesting operations while the world is busy killing itself in the war.
- The 8-bit computer game Blue Max was an Isometric Projection in a WWI setting.
- Canvas Knights
was originally a IL-2 Sturmovik Game Mod.
- Castlevania: Bloodlines is set in 1917. Elizabeth
BathoryBartley uses the souls of war casualties as part of her plan to revive Dracula. - Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land is an indie tactical RPG mixing World War One with the Cthulhu Mythos.
- Company of Heroes has a total conversion Game Mod for World War I The Great War 1918
, keeping the same cover and territory-point mechanics from the base game but changing it otherwise to reflect the Great War (such as having trenches, poison gas, officer mechanics for both sides to make heavy use of, and adding melee combat). It currently includes British Expeditionary Force and the German Empire as 'Allied' and 'Axis' factions respectively, and is working to add the French Army as another 'Allied' faction.
- In the Command & Conquer: Tiberium series, Kane's Black Hand is suggested to be the very same organization that assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
- As testament to either the failings of the game engines or the sheer scale of how many mistakes and complex factors lead to the war, it is nearly impossible to recreate the circumstances of this war in any version of Civilization but it has been attempted on numerous public forums. Whether or not one agrees with this assessment, the important part is that one has to actively try to bring the situation about.
- Clive Barker's Undying is set immediately after the war. The protagonist, Patrick Galloway, is a veteran from one of the Irish regiments on the western front.
- The Darkness has a few levels set in an "Otherworld" where World War I never ended.
- Rowan Software's Dawn Patrol was a DOS WWI flight simulator, roughly contemporary to Red Baron but not as well-known.
- Empire Earth's German campaign covers both the first and second World Wars, the first focusing more on the Red Baron. It also has a WWI era, notable for introducing airplanes and submarines.
- Eternal Darkness has a chapter that takes place in a church-turned-hospital in 1916 France. The premise of the chapter is that the Ancients and Pious Augustus instigated the war so the amount of people who died in the war would inevitably speed up the unleashing of the respective ancient (and keep the artifact guardian in check, apparently consuming far more than can be provided).
- The Great War
mod for Napoleon: Total War, which basically is about the European theather of World War One with the Turn-Based Strategy/Real-Time Strategy hybrid system of the Total War series, including some Alternate History features. While most of the factions are historical World War One belligerants (United Kingdom, Germany, France, Russia, Belgium, Italy, Serbia, etc.)note , some of the playable factions are historically neutral countries (Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, etc.). At campaign start, an option allows to choose whether the AI will try to stay true to the historical alliances or will go in full Alternate History mode. Also, winning the campaign requires that the country did far better in the war than it historically did (victory conditions for France or UK include controlling territories in the German heartland).
- History Line: 1914-1918, a Turn-Based Strategy game, is one of the few dedicated World War I games.
- The Iron Grip series, true to its Schizo Tech Punk Punk feel, borrows a lot of inspiration from this era as well. The games can be seen as a Low Fantasy retelling of some aspects of the war, coating the industrial war-torn grimness of the frontlines with a Darker and Edgier Steampunk and Diesel Punk aesthetic.
- Iron Harvest takes place during and shortly after an Alternate History version of World War One were mechs and powered armor were developed instead of tanks.
- Iron Storm is a dystopian Alternate History FPS in which history diverged from ours during the late stages of WWI and the beginning of the Russian Civil War. It's the 1960s, the Great War has been dragging on for half a century, Earth is a Crapsack World and war has become an accepted way of everyday life. Oh, and the game's Big Bad is none other than a Captain Ersatz of the infamous baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg.
- The events of The Last Express (an Adventure Game) take place on the threshold of the war, are heavily undertoned by and, arguably and implicitly, cause it.
- Marauders takes place in an alternate present shaped by a WWI that never ended. Earth was irreparably damaged by the war which forced the last three empires to evacuate into a Diesel Punk outer space setting - only to continue the war with spaceship battles and plenty of boarding action.
- NecroVisioN is a horror FPS set in 1917 on the most war-torn parts of the Western front. The game starts off fairly normal, but the protagonist soon discovers a Masquerade Dark World hidden (literally) under the surface of the war...
- Several of the most realistic air combat simulations on the market are set in WWI, such as Over Flanders Fields, where the player joins the squadron and side of their choice and continues to fly until their character is killed. And the sim points out that the objective is not to "win" but to survive the seventeen hours that was the average flight time of a new pilot.
- The most famous WWI flight sim games are probably Sierra's older Red Baron series.
- Red Dead Redemption has a Playable Epilogue that takes place in 1914, just after the outbreak of the conflict in Europe. It doesn't really come into play much, but Jack can read a newspaper that also briefly covers the start of the war, with the journalist not even trying to pretend to understand what's going on, but noting that America has wisely decided to stay out of it and is even promoting peace by selling weapons to both sides.
- Rise of Nations, a pan-historical RTS game, has a historical era based on WWI, complete with typical military units of the period.
- Shadow Hearts: Covenant: The game is set in 1915, and its events are kickstarted when German troops invade Undefeatable Little Village of Domremy, which just happens to be protected by our hero, Yuri. While most of the game's events happen far away from actual fighting, the impact of war is felt in several wartime difficulties, such as the inability to easily cross the English Channel. Some of the villains also plan to take advantage of Russia's weakened state as a result of its participation in the war.
- The original Shadow Hearts is set in 1913 and early 1914, and, while the Great War is yet to begin, it's alluded to several times. One of the villains is also revealed as a Well-Intentioned Extremist, who foresaw the war, and wanted to prevent it. The Stinger of the game likewise confirms that "The Great War I" has began.
- Snoopy Vs the Red Baron takes place here, although the technology is... not quite the same.
- Super Trench Attack (previously Medal Wars) is a Third Person RPG that has you playing a comedy version of it as a soldier of the Green Army fighting against seemingly endless and hilarious waves of the Black Army, and various other surprises.
- Toy Soldiers: Is a Tower Defense game, The first game in the series taking place in the various trenches of WWI. Players would play in the main campaign of the British forces covering many real battles and spanning in four grueling chapters from 1914 to 1918 and would later play two more different forces to cover more perspectives (German forces being playable in Campaign+ and French forces in a DLC exclusive campaign "The Kaiser's Battle").
- Trenches (2021): The game is set in the trenches in 1917.
- Valiant Hearts is set on the Western Front from 1914 to late 1917 (ending roughly when the USA enters the war). Notable for being a cartoony sidescrolling puzzle-adventure game and yet probably treating the war with more seriousness and respect than basically any video game for any war ever has.
- Vampyr (2018) is set in a London ravaged by the The Spanish Flu during the last weeks of the Great War. The war is often mentioned in the cast's backstory and many characters served in it one way or another (in the first district alone, you encounter a man who suffered from severed burns in France, two Shell Shocked Veterans from the trench warfare, and a widower who lost his wife during a German bombing on London); the player character, Dr Jonathan Reid, is an army medic who just went back to London from the front when he was turned into a vampire, and his sister Mary is a war widow.
- Verdun is a squad-based online multiplayer FPS that allows the player to fight as German, French, and British infantry, German and French light infantry, and Canadian and German trench-assault-troops. True-to-life, the game hinges on artillery support, machine-gun suppression, concealment, rapid movement between cover, and some small element of sniping. And with a single shot from any weapon (bar the pistols) being instantly lethal, it is extraordinarily unforgiving. A standalone expansion Tannenberg, focusing on the eastern front, launched in 2017.
- Isonzo is a follow-up to both Verdun and Tannenberg, focusing on the Italian Front.
- Victoria: An Empire Under The Sun features World War One technology in its later stages and the possibility to spark the war, create an alternate version of it... or avert it altogether.
- While Hearts of Iron usually has its earliest start date in 1936, more than one of the games got a 1914 mod, and Darkest Hour version of Hearts of Iron II have an official 1914 start date.
- Wing Nuts is a Rail Shooter in which the player character is an American Ace Pilot fighting in the Lafayette Squadron.
- Wings allows playing as either an Entente or German fighter pilot.
- Wings 2: Aces High is a sequel on the SNES.
- Origin's Wings of Glory, using the same engine as their earlier Strike Commander, is set in a British aerodrome in France during WWI with an American volunteer pilot as the Player Character.
- WWI Medic is a freeware game where you control an Entente medic trying to tend to the wounded, and survive long enough to turn the tide of one more battle....
Web Animation
- Emperor Tigerstar has created a map animation showing the front lines of World War I every single day.
- Two episodes of Bedtime Stories (YouTube Channel) had episodes set during the conflict.
- "There is Something in the Water" features the SMU-28 and it's encounter with a mosasaurus, an ancient sea reptile thought to have gone extinct during the Cretaceous period.
- "The Ghost of UB-65" covers the SM UB-65, and the titular ghost of a Kaiserliche Marine officer haunting it.
- Wartime Stories:
- One episode focuses on wolf attacks taking place in the midst of the war, with one such notable incident taking place on the Eastern Front, with the Germans and Russians forced into an Enemy Mine situation to survive. The reasons for these attacks is due to the wolves in question feeding on human corpses sprawled throughout No-Man's Land and the surrounding areas, and becoming emboldened enough to attack wounded men later on. This isn't helped by the fact that the forests that these wolves had lived in had many of their prey animals driven away or killed, with many of these wolves already suffering from starvation.
Web Comics
- The Word Weary features a Dungeons & Dragons campaign that takes place during the Russian Revolution of 1917. The premise of the game comes from Germany's efforts to take Russia out of the war by financing Vladimir Lenin's activities during his time in exile in Zurich and his entrance back into Russia. The main characters play mercenaries hired by Germany charged with keeping Lenin safe.
Web Original
- Covert Front has WWI taking place in 1904, with the protagonist conducting investigations in the midst of the conflict.
- From the SCP Foundation:
- SCP-186
is a WWI battleground that saw the use of anomalous weaponry; the aftereffects have left it anomalous up to the present day.
- SCP-1914
is a WWI soldier transformed into a Cyborg as part of a Super-Soldier experiment.
- The trenches of the Western Front were where SCP-106
became the monster that the Foundation knows it as
.
- SCP-186
Web Videos
- The Great War: An original weekly YouTube documentary series recounting the events of World War One, starting in August 2014, exactly 100 years to the week of the war's beginning and continuing in Real Time through 2018. In 2019 the series reworked itself into lengthier, monthly episodes covering the post-war world with a new host.
Western Animation
- Dastardly & Muttley in Their Flying Machines.
- The final episode of The Flintstones centered around a flashback telling an adventure that Fred's grandfather had in "Stone World War One."
- One of the final classic-era Looney Tunes shorts, 1964's "Dumb Patrol," features Bugs as a flying ace fighting German pilot Yosemite Sam.