Twice in the 20th century, the world was engulfed by warfare whose battles and effects on society have been much-chronicled. This is the less familiar story of how struggles between the great European powers reached into the quietest corners of the British countryside. Beneath Battle of Britain vapour trails looping over summer cornfields, diarists discuss the effect of planes on hawks and waterfowl. A lone ringed bird limps in from vanished Czechoslovakia. Women and children fetch the harvest as their menfolk fight in Flanders. The nation is encouraged to eat 'Woolton Pie' while Italian prisoners of war sing opera in Herefordshire orchards and Women's Institutes make jam for England. But what is most striking about these selected diaries whose subjects range from Stone Age hillforts to the bitterness of the Iraq war is how they reveal the dramatic change brought by warfare on life in the countryside. They show how, for all its soft beauty, Britain's rural landscape has been shaped in part, for more than 2000 years, by man at war with man.