It was a query that endlessly haunted Sebastian Faulks throughout the writing in an astonishing six-month burst of creativity of Birdsong, his groundbreaking and bestselling novel of the First World War: “How far can you go?” As a brand new father with one other youngster on the best way, he grew more and more offended pondering the staggering demise toll throughout analysis journeys to the Imperial War Museum to learn the accounts of odd troopers, many untouched for 50 years or extra.

“When you have your first baby, most parents think it’s the most miraculous child who’s ever drawn breath and we were no exception,” he explains at this time.

“William was 18 months old at the time and the thought that he might have been killed by a machine gun or a bit of shrapnel, and that this was the case for 20 million parents throughout Europe, made me very sad and very angry.

“The thought of those ten million sons having been lost helped drive me. What struck me most was, ‘Why did they go on so long? How many million dead would have sufficed? Would they have gone to 20 million? How far can you go?’ That was the question that came to me time and again during my research.”

We’re speaking at this time as a result of Faulks’ ensuing multi-million-selling novel, tailored for the BBC as a two-part drama a decade in the past starring a younger Eddie Redmayne as his hero Stephen Wraysford, has been reissued to mark its thirtieth anniversary.

Featuring the primary day of the Battle of the Somme – by which 20,000 British troops alone had been killed – it explores how far the troopers might be pushed within the face of unimaginable horror, and its writer’s anger on the butcher’s invoice stays undimmed.

“Nineteen-year-olds who’d never had a proper night out in their hometowns were taken from their factories and fields, shoved into uniform and asked to proceed at walking pace into solid lines of machine-gun bullets,” he writes in a brand new introduction. “And for many, it was where life ended, face down in the mud on a hill above a small river.”

With at this time’s preponderance of documentaries, battlefield strolling excursions and high-profile movies – the remake of All Quiet On The Western Front gained 4 Oscars – it’s onerous to think about how the battle might have light from reminiscence within the latter twentieth century.

But at the very least partially, it was because of Birdsong, together with Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy, Blackadder Goes Forth, and the works of historians together with Lyn Macdonald, Richard van Emden and Max Arthur, that the battle was propelled again into the nationwide consciousness.

In 2016, when the Battle of the Somme was remembered, Faulks stood with dignitaries, together with David Cameron, Prince Charles, Princes William and Harry, and navy leaders as they bowed their heads in recognition each of the bravery and the loss.

“I felt that finally these men had been properly acknowledged and thanked, but it was too late,” says the previous journalist somewhat gloomily. “But better late than never I suppose.” By then, there was nobody left alive who had really skilled the battle.

Harry Patch, the “last fighting Tommy”, who noticed about three months’ motion within the battle’s penultimate 12 months earlier than being invalided dwelling wounded, died aged 111 in 2009, having loved an outpouring of affection – together with a posthumous Radiohead tune in his honour – in his remaining years.

“The Harry Patch thing was ridiculous, it was completely over the top and, to me, it was the sign of a bad conscience on the part of the public that they hadn’t paid sufficient attention to these men while they were alive,” continues Faulks, now a father-of-three who lives in west London along with his spouse Veronica and their pet, Quincy.

“Harry was there for a very short time and he hated every moment and thought it was not worth the life of a single person. No disrespect to him, I’m sure he was a lovely chap and it’s a perfectly respectable point of view, but all the panoply of whatever it was they did was ridiculous.”

Growing up within the sixties and seventies, says Faulks, whose grandfather fought within the First World War and father within the Second, was an altogether totally different story.

Aged 11 or 12 at prep college, the writer, now 70, recollects being requested to learn out the names of previous boys who had died throughout the two world wars of the twentieth century. “It wasn’t a very big school, there were only about 80 kids, and I was just amazed. I ended up with a sore throat,” he continues. “When it came to the First World War, the teachers seemed unwilling to go there. Either unwilling or unable to describe it.”

This was a part of a silence, as he sees it at this time; an virtually deliberate forgetting of the sacrifices of those that died and people again dwelling who misplaced their family members to the carnage of the Western Front.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, with the specter of a nuclear Third World War an actual and terrifying prospect, the Great War had slipped down the nationwide dialog.

A slew of memoirs, books and movies concerning the Second World War – The Dambusters, The Bridge On The River Kwai, Reach For The Sky and such like – had monopolised the general public’s creativeness. “My calculation in talking to people my age was that they didn’t know much about it,” says Faulks.

“They’d been bombarded with the Second World War in which our parents had been involved, and also, don’t forget the Holocaust which was massively memorialised and one was thinking about that a lot.

“The First World War had sort of slipped out of people’s consciousness. It doesn’t mean it wasn’t still studied but awareness of it was quite low. I took that gamble that this would break fresh on a lot of people, the intensity and scale of this experience. My interest was, ‘What did it feel like to be 19, 21, 23? What did you eat? How did you sleep? What happens if you’re taken short? What happens if you’ve got the flu? How do you correspond with home?’

“Unlike previous wars, this one was fought by the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, your father, your son, your brother, your mate from school and the factory or the office. It was the first sizable war to be fought with big artillery and machine guns. It posed the question, are we prepared to use weapons of mass destruction in order to pursue rather unclear territorial aims? And the answer was a resounding yes.”

Having first visited the Western Front alongside veterans in 1988 for the seventieth anniversary of the Armistice, by May 1992 and the writer of two well-received novels, Faulks took redundancy from Fleet Street, giving himself a 12 months to write down Birdsong. His “scattergun research” concerned visiting France to stroll the battlefields, classic trench maps in hand, and frequent journeys to the pre-digitised collections of the Imperial War Museum in south London.

“They’d bring up these big buff-coloured files, some of which hadn’t been looked at since they’d been lodged there by the families of the guys who had died.”

Knowing he needed his protagonist to have hung out in France earlier than hostilities, he visited Amiens, the closest large city to the battlefields. Uninspired and feeling, “Maybe this is all a bit beyond me, maybe I shouldn’t do this, it’s too presumptuous”, he took a visit in a punt to town’s water gardens – primarily small, cultivated allotments on islands amongst a community of canals. There, inspiration struck.

“I noticed the sides of the canals were held up by wooden planks like the trenches; if you’d been in there a long time, you’d reinforce with revetting, as they called it. Then I saw a rat crawling across the top.

“Suddenly I had the idea that the main character and the woman he was going to fall in love with were, on a hot afternoon, in this boat and her leg would be resting against his, and there would be a foreshadowing of what was coming with the wooden planks and the rats.”

It was a Eureka second.

Back in London and clattering away on his Olympia Portable typewriter, he tried to do three or 4 pages a day. “I still felt very presumptuous but the sight of the pile of white pages growing slowly made you think, ‘Well at least it has some physical existence now’.

“Part of the difficulty when you start any novel, but particularly something like this, is imposter syndrome. You say to yourself, ‘Whoever is going to believe this?’”

His subsequent novel opens in 1910 when a younger Englishman, Stephen Wraysford, visits Amiens on the behest of his employer to forge hyperlinks with the French metropolis’s textiles trade. There he meets Isabelle Azaire, the spouse of his host, and the pair take pleasure in a passionate, sexually charged affair earlier than she falls pregnant.

The second half begins in France in 1916 the place Jack Firebrace, a former London Underground tunneler employed by the Royal Engineers, lies deep underground listening intently for enemy exercise. By now, Stephen is a junior officer within the British Army and the lads’s fates are entwined.

Faulks launched Firebrace and the lesser-known topic of navy tunnelling – each side dug underneath their No Man’s Land to plant explosives, a vastly dangerous enterprise – as a plotline to keep away from folks considering, “Yeah, yeah, yeah… we know all this”.

Later, we meet Stephen’s granddaughter, Elizabeth Benson, as she struggles to grasp extra about him. It’s no marvel this huge, sweeping e-book, that so vividly captures the sights, sounds, smells and sheer hell of the trenches, nonetheless commonly tops lists of the nation’s favorite novels.

Despite a string of bestsellers to his title, together with Charlotte Gray, dropped at the massive display screen starring Cate Blanchett as an undercover wartime agent, and profitable additions to the James Bond and, maybe extra daringly, P.G. Wodehouse, franchises, Faulks stays amazed at his audacity in tackling the First World War as a topic.

“The big battle is the first day of the Somme. And the love affair is not just a wistful yearning, it’s an absolute sex festival, and everything in between is very extreme, it’s very primary, it’s very loud,” he explains.

“Like heavy rock meets Wagner. I wouldn’t do that now, I just think I would find it too presumptuous. In a way, it’s not really very me. Early on, my direction to myself was ‘If in doubt, double’.”

The intercourse scenes he mentions have lengthy drawn the admiration of readers and critics, no imply feat in itself. There was a cause for the eroticism.

“The book is about how far can you go, with the human body being dismembered by iron and shrapnel and bullets and bits of people being eviscerated and burned and flayed.

“I wanted to see how far the human body could be taken in love as well as in war. That’s why it’s such a physical love affair. It’s supposed to be the exact corollary of the dismemberment that is going to happen later on. This is what you can do to and with a body… for pleasure or destruction.”

While Faulks admits battle is a “repulsive subject”, he believes it’s very important we keep in mind conflicts so as to not doom ourselves to repeating their errors.

He singles out ex-PM Tony Blair’s poor grasp of historical past in not realising the catastrophic mistake invading Iraq would entail.

But he suggests he’s achieved with the previous as a topic in his personal fiction. His forthcoming e-book, The Seventh Son, due this autumn, begins in 2030.

“There are no flying saucers or little green men. It’s about something that happens in a fertility clinic, a mistake or an accident
happens and a child who is born is not quite what they are expecting.”

So no extra First World War novels, then? “No,” he smiles. “I’ve discovered the future now.”

• Birdsong: The thirtieth Anniversary Edition by Sebastian Faulks (Hutchinson, £20) is out now. Visit expressbookshop.com or name 020 3176 3832. Free UK P&P on orders over £25.