Why World War I Resonates IN France I live near a little village called Sadillac. It's no more than a cluster of houses, an old chateau, a church and a graveyard surrounded by a few farms and vineyards. The village probably hasn't changed much since the French Revolution; its population hovers around 100. By the graveyard is a simple obelisk with the names of the 30 or so young men from Sadillac who died in the First World War, 1914-18. It's almost impossible to imagine the effect on this tiny community of these fatalities over four years. Every year on Nov. 11 at 11 a.m. - the hour and the day of the 1918 armistice - villagers gather to participate in a short memorial service around the obelisk. In 2014 it will be a hundred years since the First World War began, and yet its presence in novels, films and television has never been greater - in "Downton Abbey," on television, in Steven Spielberg's movie "War Horse," in a mini-series of Sebastian Faulks's "Birdsong" and, coming soon, in Tom Stoppard's adaptation of Ford Madox Ford's "Parade's End." The last old soldier or sailor has died and almost all of the witnesses have gone, but the war exerts a tenacious hold on the imagination. For us British, the memories, images and stories of 1914-18 seem to have a persistence and a power that eclipse those of the Second World War. I'm symptomatic of this urge to revisit the conflict: my new novel will be my third with the First World War at its center. When I wrote and directed a movie, "The Trench," about a group of young soldiers in 1916 waiting for the Battle of the Somme to begin, I was obsessed with getting every detail right: every cap-badge worn and cigarette smoked, every meal eaten. It was as if I wanted the absolute verisimilitude to provide an authentic, vicarious experience so the viewer would be in a position to say, "So this is what it was like, this is what they went through, how they lived - and died." I think this is the key behind the enduring obsession with that war. To our modern sensibilities it defies credulity that for more than four years European armies faced one another in a 500-mile line of trenches, stretching from the Belgian coast to the border of Switzerland. The war was also fought in other arenas - in Galicia, Italy, the Bosporus, Mesopotamia, East and West Africa, in naval battles on many oceans - but it is the Western Front and trench warfare that define the war in memory. It was a deadly war of attrition in which millions of soldiers on both sides slogged through the mud of no man's land to meet their deaths in withering blasts of machine-gun fire and artillery. And at the end of four years and with about nine million troops dead, the two opposing forces were essentially where they were when they started. IN France and Germany, the traumas of the Second World War have to a degree erased memories of the First. But in Britain, where almost a million servicemen died, it's still images of the trenches of the Western Front that are shown and that resonate on Remembrance Day. One of the reasons for this is, paradoxically, the resonance of the poetry. The poets of the First World War - Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, Isaac Rosenberg - are taught in almost all British schools. I can remember Wilfred Owen's terrifying poem "Dulce et Decorum Est," about a mustard-gas attack, being read aloud to us in the classroom when I was 10 or 11. One boy actually ran outside, he was so overcome and upset. The war poems shaped your earliest perceptions of the First World War and were swiftly buttressed by the familiar images of the trenches and the histories of the futile, costly battles. Intensifying the powerful art was the visual documentation, because it was the first war to be extensively filmed. And finally, there were family stories. One hundred years is not so very long ago. My great-uncle Alexander Boyd was wounded and decorated at the Battle of the Somme. His brother, my grandfather William Boyd, was wounded a year later at Passchendaele, as the Third Battle of Ypres was known. Family legend and anecdote fueled my interest in the war. But there is another deeper, perhaps more profound reason the war continues to preoccupy us. It was a conflict between 19th-century armies equipped with 20th-century weapons - hence the unprecedented carnage. To put it in an American context: imagine an officer in the United States Army - in his 50s, say - on the Argonne front in 1918. As a young soldier he could conceivably have fought, 30 years earlier, in the last of the wars against the Plains Indians in the late 1880s. Yet now he stands surveying a different world. The tactics were 19th century - advance on the enemy. But the enemy had weapons of mass destruction - the battlefield was dominated by tanks, machine guns, howitzers, aircraft and poisonous gas. Some 117,000 American servicemen died in the 19 months of United States participation in World War I - more than twice as many as in Vietnam, nearly 20 times as many as in Iraq and Afghanistan. No society today would accept such a horrendous casualty count. At the beginning of the Battle of the Somme, on July 1, 1916, the British Army suffered 60,000 dead and wounded - in one day. It was arguably the worst butcher's bill in military history, of army versus army. There is a very real sense in which the modern world - our world - was born between 1914 and 1918. Something changed in human sensibility. Soldiers wouldn't be willing to engage in such slaughter. Toward the end of the First World War, even, tolerance for past norms had begun to end. In 1917, much of the French Army mutinied and refused to attack. They would defend but not attack. The days of cannon fodder were over forever as a result of that war, which is a further reason artists try to re-imagine it constantly. To quote another poem, Philip Larkin's "MCMXIV": "Never such innocence again." After the First World War, nothing in the world would ever be the same. William Boyd is the author of the forthcoming novel "Waiting for Sunrise."