In a year jammed-full of WW1 commemoration the ‘Letter to an Unknown Soldier’ project invites everyone to step back from the public ceremonies and take a few private moments to think.  

If you could say what you want to say about that war, with all we’ve learned since 1914, with all your own experience of life and death to hand, what would you say?

If you were able to send a personal message to one of the men who served and was killed during World War One, what would you write?

Professor Jane Chapman, a comparative media historian, specializing in gender, newspapers and comics/cartoon archive culture, penned a moving letter to the unknown soldier, contributing to a permanent archive in the British Library http://www.1418now.org.uk/letter/professor-jane-chapman/.

Professor Chapman wrote the letter alongside a soldier cartoon produced during the Great War for a trench newspaper and draws upon her wealth of knowledge and expertise in this area to inform the reader about forms of communication at that time.