Now It Can Be Told

A French mother points out the German advance on a map from a troop-train packed with soldiers—then breaks down, while her eight-year-old son begs her to be brave. Philip Gibbs was there, and the question “Had a good time?” would follow him home.

In the first months of the First World War, Gibbs set out from London as a correspondent, without official papers and against military efforts to keep reporters from the front. Across Belgium and northern France, he saw retreating soldiers, ruined towns and civilians driven onto the roads, while people at home still imagined war as heroic pageantry. He writes with the urgency of a witness who knows that neat dispatches cannot convey the sight, stench and anguish of battle—and who cannot forget those who endured it. Can a man who has seen such suffering find words that make others understand?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.