Last year I wrote a literary biography of HG Wells, a task that, of course, entailed reading all his novels. I already knew his science fiction and some of his other novels, but I’d never read his first world war masterpiece Mr Britling Sees It Through, which was published in 1916. To this day I don’t know anyone who has. Yet in its day this was one of Wells’s most successful books (it was the bestselling novel in the world in 1917) and attracted hyperbolic praise. Maxim Gorky called it “the finest, most courageous, truthful and humane book written in Europe in the course of this accursed war”. Strange to think a book so fêted and successful could drop so comprehensively off the radar.

What makes it stranger is that the novel is exactly as good as Wells’s contemporaries thought: a wonderfully detailed, evocative and moving portrait of England at war. Britling himself is a Wellsian self-portrait: a successful writer, living comfortably in his Essex home of Matching’s Easy; married to his second wife, raising a son, Hugh, and two stepchildren, and conducting a discreet affair with an attractive neighbour. Part one, Matching’s Easy at Ease, compiles a leisurely but compelling portrait of the long Edwardian summer of 1914. The second part, Matching’s Easy at War, describes the impact of the war on the home front. Hugh lies about his age and signs up, and his letters to his father are full of vivid detail about life in the trenches. When he is killed – a freak shot catches him through a “loop” in the trench’s defences – the novel pivots to a heartbreaking account of his father’s grief. As the novel ends, Britling is reaching a fragile but hopeful epiphany, his atheism dissolving into a belief in God. This ending could easily have struck a merely sentimental, or an awkwardly pious, note, but in fact it does neither. It is testament to Wells’s skill as a writer how moving the conclusion is.

This is a novel that portrays war not as an arena for action and heroism, but as a passivity, a state in which there is nothing to be done and everything to be endured. Of course that’s how war is for those left at home, but what’s remarkable is the way the novel’s portrait of the western front, via Hugh’s lengthy letters to his father, describes the fighting in these terms, too. Wells’s soldiers are not agents; their war is one of stalemate and inaction. That reflects the nature of trench warfare itself, of course; and while this became a commonplace of how the first world war was described, Wells’s novel was one of the first to capture this. It also includes the first portrait in fiction of what we now call PTSD, or “shell shock”. When his friend Captain Carmine returns home on leave, Britling is startled to find the soldier broken, “white and jaded, as if he had not slept for many nights”.

Britling himself is a masterpiece of characterisation: wholly believable, often silly and pompous but rounded and real. Wells really doesn’t spare any of his own foibles in his self-portraiture. But though he is comical at the beginning, he ends the novel with real dignity: Britling, this little Briton, “sees it through” in the sense that he endures and survives the trauma of war. (Look!, as DH Lawrence’s end-of-war poetry collection famously exclaimed, We Have Come Through!). But more importantly, Britling sees through “it”, the muddle and pain of mundane existence, to something transcendent. There seems to me something wise and important to be learned from such a tale, and most especially today, as we all languish in the enforced passivity and misery of our present moment.