"Now every decent man has a place here!"

Cultural sociologist Ferenc Gereben accidentally came across his grandmother's correspondence from World War I, which had been lying dormant for a hundred years, in a family heirloom. The 120 field journals, letters and postcards that were discovered, as well as the images from a torn photo album, inspired him to write this book. The recipient of all the correspondence was Aranka, a teenage bakfis at the time. The 15 letter writers fighting on different fronts (usually lower-ranking non-commissioned officers, later reserve lieutenants) are relatives and acquaintances of a German bourgeois family that had become Magyarized. The letters written from the trenches are often only concise communications that are connected by archival and historical data, so we also learn what war events the letters were written during or after. The published letter excerpts tell about the leisure activities of everyday life on the battlefield (for example, the letter writers' reading material), their state of mind, their fighting morale, etc. They also report, so in addition to family and military history information, they also carry strong cultural, social and mental history features. In the small world of the documents of a family, or even a single person - like a drop in the ocean - the great drama of the history of the era is reflected there. The letter writers mentioned resemble the characters of a war novel, who fight, fall in love, get injured and sometimes even die, but whose story - sometimes only partially revealed - was shaped not by the writer's imagination, but by history itself.