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As the last bugles sounded to mark a century's distance between us and the war to end all wars, a modern campaign of a different kind – planned with no little military precision – was

brought to an end. For the past four years, the BBC has presented radio listeners with two outstanding drama serials timed to unfold in parallel with the events of the first world war. Home

Front told the interwoven stories of families in England, while Tommies followed soldiers, both British and colonial, on fronts stretching from Europe's trenches to the deserts of the

Middle East. Home Front's writers were charged with bringing to life the extraordinary social change wrought by the conflict. And they succeeded – over more than 600 13-minute episodes,

across 15 series, the show tackled issues that ranged from volunteering and industry to nursing and faith. As the families' stories progressed, real events – a factory explosion, the

first aerial bombing raid, the Russian revolution – framed the action. The saga began in Folkestone – from whose harbour millions of British and Empire soldiers sailed to their fates. We

followed a host of townsfolk of all classes adjusting to war's new realities: the town councillor; the railway signalman; mothers sending their sons to fight; domestic staff; Belgian

refugees; entertainers; policewomen clamping down on prostitution; and, at Home Front's heart, an ordinary Kent girl in love with a gentle German man. The action progressed to Tyneside

munitions factories forced to employ women to fill shells, who started a women's football team; the factory owner's son flirted with radical politics; a toy shop employed maimed

servicemen to paint tin soldiers. Meanwhile, a third strand, in rural Devon, covered farms worked by German PoWs, villagers resentfully guarding conscientious objectors in the local jail,

and the birth of the WI. Home Front's final episode threw the drama forward to 1919, and the eve of the first Remembrance Day, a clever way to take stock of the surviving characters as

they adjusted again to peace – albeit an uneasy one, with damaged men demanding their prewar jobs back, and futures clouded by bitter experience. Tommies was a different beast altogether.

Conceived by showrunner Jonathan Ruffle as a vehicle to tell some of the hidden stories of the war, its 45-minute dramas were pegged to real events on the dates they occurred. A small group

of fictional characters fleshed out the extraordinary true stories Ruffle and his team found in detailed research of war diaries and archives. "Apart from a decision to broadcast an

episode of Tommies on all the last five November 11ths," explains Ruffle, "we asked Radio 4 to deliberately place each episode to capture a historically crucial moment out of the

mainstream understanding of the first world war, which we felt might be missed by other media. For example, we deliberately featured the night _before _the first day of the Battle of the

Somme as the last episode of one series, and then opened our next series on the last day of the same battle, 141 days later." Tommies' central characters were not your average war

heroes either: Sgt Mickey Bliss (played by Lee Ross) was a signalman who ran away from heartbreak to soldier in India, then found new purpose as an intelligence officer; his ex-lover,

Celestine de Tullio, was a doctor whose passion to cure battlefield diseases drove her to ever riskier situations; her husband Robert, the financier whose murky deals to keep the war effort

going dragged him into the world of spies; and Ahmadullah Khan, the Indian soldier in France without a coat, who later ended up in a Turkish PoW camp. Though these characters were fictional,

they were amalgams of many real combatants, and everything they did actually happened. Non-British voices were a crucial part of the story, Ruffle says. "Historical documents show the

involvement of many nations in the conflict. It wasn't a question of consciously taking steps to include anyone – they were all there anyway. Maoris, Chinese, Gurkhas, Canadians,

Australians, Malawians, Nigerians, New Zealanders, Egyptians, Italians, white and red Russians, black and white US soldiers, not to mention the Hong Kong & Singapore Mountain Battery and

the Zionist Mule Corps, as well as the British Indian Army." Throughout the dramatised action, a commentator, played by Indira Varma, drily injected facts – "Bostridge's

pessimism proves correct; he'll die in August 1916", and the like. Nor was the attention to detail confined to the words. In a clip shared on social media, BBC engineers recorded

French soldiers blowing up a first world war shell, freshly ploughed up by a farmer, so that Tommies' sound effects would be authentic. At the end of the four-year run, there was still

scope for surprise. The 11 November 1918 episode did not, as one might expect, follow soldiers waiting out the last hours before the Armistice, but took listeners to the frozen north of

Russia, and the abortive Allied campaign to oust the Bolsheviks. The final instalment, on the 12th, was a cliffhanger involving a massive German explosive booby trap threatening what was

left of the Belgian city of Mons. And so the faithfully recorded Maxim guns and Lee-Enfields fell silent. Ruffle hopes Tommies will show future writers another way to approach drama about

historical events: "I can confidently say that if you look closer at history, there are far better stories than you can make up." There have been many touching artistic responses

to mark the centenary of the Great War: the National Theatre Wales's re-creation of the trenches, Ryoji Ikeda's pillar of light, the Tower of London poppies, Jeremy Deller's

Somme soldiers on trains that reached across the intervening years. Like those artists, the writers, producers and actors of Home Front and Tommies have produced a magnificent, lasting

memorial to lost voices of the first world war that they can be proud of. _ Every episode of Home Front is available on BBC Sounds. Tommies: The Complete BBC Radio Collection is available at

Amazon and Audible.com_