When residents of the United Kingdom think about the First World War, they instinctively think of the trenches on the Western Front. The names alone — the Somme, Thiepval, Sanctuary Wood, Passchendaele, Ypres — possess an immense cultural heft, and their view of the war, which ended 93 years ago, has long since hardened into orthodoxy. Peter Englund's stated aim in The Beauty and the Sorrow is not to provide a history of the war but to give an idea of what it was like to live through it. To this end he has chosen 20 ostensibly ordinary lives and followed them from August 1914, when the war began, to November 1918, when it finally came to an end. In fact, these lives are anything but ordinary, and the stories are riveting.

Englund's first subject is Laura de Turczynowicz, a Canadian married to a Polish aristocrat, living near Suwalki, a little town in northeast Poland. After a perfect summer, she is woken by a knock at the window at 4 in the morning. War has been declared. She has three children born in Krakow, then in Austria-Hungary. It means they are subjects of the Austro-Hungarian emperor, her husband a subject of the tsar and she, a Canadian, a subject of the British king. "Few people would have thought of such categories before August," Englund writes, "there are many people who can hardly think of anything else now." The next subject, a schoolgirl from Schneidemuhl, now in Poland, but then in Germany, watches an infantry regiment leaving for the Western Front. She is bemused. Surely the war is all about the Russians, who are about to invade from the east?

Englund introduces each new character with perfect timing. It creates a fresh, varied and convincing picture of the war. He mixes quotes from the original sources — diaries and books published by survivors — with his own extrapolations. Some voices drop off along the way, but all are memorable. Englund has chosen his voices with great care, and the resulting picture of the war in the round, with all its sorrows but also its joys, is made all the more vivid by the eloquent translation from the Swedish by Peter Graves.

Compared to the unorthodox approach Englund adopts, Richard van Emden's The Quick and the Dead is a more sober and old-fashioned affair. His aim is similar, but limited to Britain's involvement in the war. It deals first with the country's attitude to the calling up of men, from the excitement of signing up to the chaos of basic training and the mammoth task not just of getting men to the front, but also providing for those left behind. Misspelt letters inquiring after pension provision are very moving. Elsewhere an officer tells a friend that he knows he won't come back: "Of course it's all right, but it's not what one would have chosen." Once at the front there was a high chance that a soldier would be killed, leaving the army with fresh administrative burdens, first in finding his body (if possible), then identifying it, burying it and returning the possessions to the family.

Van Emden knows his material, and he has uncovered from the archive some fascinating correspondence showing how people reacted to the news that their friends, husbands, fathers and sons were dead. Van Emden is also superb on the impact of the deaths: on the financial and social deprivation suffered by families without a breadwinner; the children who were excused school so they might look after younger siblings while their mothers went to work; the parasites who clung to grieving relatives; the psychometrists and fixers who claimed that men reported missing might be in German hospitals, and that they might be found, for a fee; and the tourist trade that sprang up allowing children who had never known their fathers to travel to see his name written on one of the monuments to the missing. Of the two books, Englund's is the more thrilling, a grand narrative of war, full of colour and movement, while Van Emden's is the more shattering for its wealth of tiny heartbreaking truths.

The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World WarBy Peter Englund, Translated by Peter Graves, Profile Books, 522 pages, £25

The Quick and the Dead: Fallen Soldiers and their Families in the Great WarBy Richard van Emden, Bloomsbury, 344 pages, £20