Reddit reviews The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War

Four recent books (one of which I haven't looked at personally) have addressed this matter in varying capacities, and while none of the three I've seen is perfect all four each have considerable merits.

Adam Hochschild's To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 (2011) is an admirable attempt to integrate the story of objectors, resisters, pacifists and the like into the already well-established tableau of the war's history. It is a less than objective work, to put it mildly -- the tone is often one of outrage rather than dispassionate provision of facts. Still, the war seems to bring this out in people in a way that others do not, so this is scarcely a surprising feature. Still a good start, though; broadly focused on Great Britain and British colonies.

Louisa Thomas' Conscience: Two Soldiers, Two Pacifists, One Family (2011) examines the tensions involved in non-combatant decisions on the American home front, with particular focus upon her great grandfather, Norman Thomas, who refused to fight at a time when two of his brothers had chosen otherwise. More of a meditation than an outright history book, but still quite interesting.

Peter Englund's fascinating narrative history, The Beauty and the Sorrow (2011), contains about twenty interwoven accounts of the war from a variety of perspectives, many of them on the home front. It's more determinedly international than the other two books I've mentioned, but may be less completely useful to you in that it jumps around considerably to provide a wider view.

For a specifically Australian view (albeit in a work I've not yet read, and probably won't be reading), check out Philip Payton's Regional Australia and the Great War (2012), which focuses on soldiers from a specific part of Australia and how both they and their home front contemporaries fared. If any book is likely to have at least something in it that will specifically help you, it's probably this one!

Try the following:

http://www.amazon.com/Beauty-Sorrow-Intimate-History-First/dp/030759386X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1322721086&sr=8-1