The Great War Remembered: August 4, 1914. The First World War Begins.

On Tuesday, August 4, the day before Clarice's sixth birthday, Britain declared war on Germany. In London, the British Foreign Secretary Lord Grey remarked: 'The lights are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lighted again in our lifetime.' Over the next four years some 10 million of the brightest and best young men in Europe would be slaughtered. Mrs Onions remembers the day as though it were yesterday:

"My mum said that Father would have to go away and, oh, I cried and cried. Father said, 'I'll come back, don't worry'. He was one of the first to go and he did look so smart in his uniform. I loved him so much. He was a lovely man."

But for her younger brother, Don, the separation of war brought distress and confusion. When his father came on leave, the little lad called him 'that man'.

The British Regular Army, dismissed by the German Kaiser as 'contemptible,' was virtually wiped out in the first few weeks of the war. By Christmas it was time for Sergeant Thomas Ricketts and his comrades in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment to be sent into the trenches of the Western Front. Mrs Onions cherishes his little brass box, once containing cigarettes and chocolate, distributed to all British soldiers at Christmas 1914. By a miracle, her father came through the First World War unscathed. Like many veterans of that war, he rarely talked about it. But what he did describe was harrowing enough. He was a member of the so-called 'trench police'. His job was to ensure that, as the attack was sounded, every soldier left the trenches, even if it meant advancing to certain death in barbed wire swept by machine guns.

"He told me that some of the soldiers would be scared and crying out for their mums. He'd say, 'Come on, lads, don't think about your mothers,' and make sure they went over the top."

The First World War began when the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated while visiting the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo in June 1914. Austria demanded impossible reparations from Serbia. Germany sided with Austria. France and Russia declared support for Serbia. Russia began the slow process of mobilising her vast peasant army. Terrified of fighting on two fronts, Germany's only hope was a quick victory against France. It almost came off. But when Germany crossed the Belgian border, Britain stepped in to defend Belgium. After the first German thrust towards Paris was turned back by the 'Old Contemptibles' of the British Army, the conflict settled into the squalid business of trench warfare punctuated with occasional, enormously bloody battles. On the home front, the war brought hardships. Growing up in Stratford-upon-Avon, Clarice, her mother and brother relished rare treats such as bread smeared with lard and salt. But she recalls not a word of complaint or protest in her neighbourhood.

"It was a different world. It was just accepted that we had to beat the Germans. A lot of men came home with legs missing and a lot of girls a bit older than me never married because their fellows were killed. People were different then. They were brought up differently. I sometimes wonder how people today would have survived back then. In my day if you were told to do something, you did it."

On November 11, 1918, with the British and German armies only a few miles from where they first clashed four years earlier, the Great War ended.

Mrs Onions remembers Armistice Day, 1918: "All the neighbours came out and we had a street party. They were a good lot in our street. No-one had any money or much to eat but we had a few bits and dabs of food and were quite thankful for that. After the war some people talked of going abroad for a new life but there was no money to go anywhere. They told us it was the war to end wars and there would be homes fit for heroes. But we were still as poor as church mice."

Interview from August 2004