in this great war [WWI] ... they had, all of them, on all sides, lost their freedom. The freedom to think hopefully of the future.

Because, we assume, these days, you just get in a car, you turn the key, and woosh, you're up the road. Or even now, dare I say, you don't turn a key; you get in a car and you're up the road. And yet with this particular car, it was a five-step process to start it. So how do I let the reader know that?

Yes, it does make the load rather heavy if you carry tools for every eventuality.

in this great war [WWI] ... they had, all of them, on all sides, lost their freedom. The freedom to think hopefully of the future.

only when we have a respect for time will we have learned something of the art of living.

It's really important in any historical fiction, I think, to anchor the story in its time. And you do that by weaving in those details, by, believe it or not, by the plumbing.

As Churchill said about the Great War, and he said this in about 1924, that it was the first war in which man realized that he could obliterate himself completely. If you consider the way the whole world was impacted, 18 million people worldwide died, and that is taking into account military and civilian deaths: 18 million people. And it was the whole world, if you will. You know, many of those trenches were dug by Chinese. There are photographs of Chinese looking like they just came from China, with their hats and so on, digging the trenches, right from the beginning.