The Last Great War

Abstract

What was it that the British people believed they were fighting for in 1914–18? This compelling history of the British home front during the First World War offers an entirely new account of how British society understood and endured the war. Drawing on official archives, memoirs, diaries and letters, Adrian Gregory sheds new light on the public reaction to the war, examining the role of propaganda and rumour in fostering patriotism and hatred of the enemy. He shows the importance of the ethic of volunteerism and the rhetoric of sacrifice in debates over where the burdens of war should fall as well as the influence of religious ideas on wartime culture. As the war drew to a climax and tensions about the distribution of sacrifices threatened to tear society apart, he shows how victory and the processes of commemoration helped create a fiction of a society united in grief.

‘The spirit of 1914’: A redefinition and a defence

“…Gregory, for one, seeks to capture 'the public mood up to the outbreak of war'; Pennell talks about the 'overarching mood of the crowds'; the 'prevailing mood', the 'mood of national emergency'; and Verhey discusses 'the events and moods of the local population'; how 'the dominant moods seem not to have been enthusiasm but sadness and fear'; and how 'a grim determination characterized the mood of most of the population'. 62 The frequency by which such references pop up indicates that revisionist historians too need the notion of a mood. Yet mood, we will argue, is much the same thing a 'spirit' and if revisionists agree that the summer of 1914 can be characterized by a certain mood they should also agree that it can be characterized by a certain spirit.…”

“Buried Alive”: Experience, Memory, and the Interwar Publishing of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force in Postwar Britain, 1915-1939

“…The Western Front, likewise, was often presented as a crusade to rescue European civilization from German kultur. 124 In another instance of the importance of metaphor, its constructive and coercive power, as well as its cultural influence, Nicoletta F. Gullace has viewed the "rape of Belgium" as the "central metaphor of the war." 125 To compete with the liberation of Belgium and to fit into Britain's "moral" war, EEF soldiers promoted the Egypt and Palestine campaign as a cause equal in nobility to the Western Front.…”

Anglicanism and Interventionism: Bishop Brent, The United States, and the British Empire in the First World War

“…117 118 which has been very widely billed and decried by historians (and sundry other commentators) as having urged the faithful to 'kill Germans', a lacuna that suggests that what was actually said at the time was considered either unremarkable or unexceptionable. 119 In stark contrast, there is no doubt as to the significance and content of the sermon preached by Bishop Brent at St. Paul's as part of the American service of dedication, and the numerous reports on his homily in the contemporary secular and religious press help us to grasp the broader context and potential impact of sermons of this era.…”