Well, Greg and Keith, some war poets were at the front, some made it up afterwards (I wasn't really meaning them), some worked their arses off in munitions factories, and so on. People like those, and people who kept diaries or who described their experiences after the war (like my grandad), or who recorded their experiences in letters, are primary sources. As a non-historian, I look at those and try to glean any truth contained therein. If I read a scholarly tome on the war, I have to acknowledge that the author is distilling a somewhat imperfect assemblage of information from disparate sources and is putting his own slant on things. By saying that I am not in any way trying to demean his scholarship. Similarly, though, I find it rather amusing that people like Keith can immediately get so defensive about the potential value of the contribution of those on the front line who chose to express their experiences in poetry. We learned quite a lot about life in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from Shakespeare, also a poet, and we tend not to get quite so defensive when his name is raised. Perhaps the difference is that the war poets, with their understated protest, make the right-wing by-jingo brigade feel somewhat buttock-shufflingly uncomfortable.