First to the battle line in the First World War
As the nineteenth century turned to the twentieth Britain could boast a well trained regular European army and one which was-regiment for regiment-considerably better than most. It was finely tuned and fundamentally suited to the kind of warfare the British Empire had fought since Waterloo. In a war of attrition in the industrial age all that could be hoped of it was that it would buy the nation time with its blood, so that other resources of men and material could be brought into the fight. The British Expeditionary Force which landed in Europe in 1914 consisted of six infantry divisions and five cavalry brigades. The 7th Division arrived in October 1914. Most students of the period know of the outstanding performance of the British regulars in the first engagements of the war. Casualties mounted through the Battle of Mons and the subsequent retreat, at Le Cateau, the Maine, the Aisne, at La Bassee and at Ypres. By the end of 1914 the 'old' British Army as it had quickly come to be known had been all but annihilated. The time of fluidity had passed and the war became a grinding stalemate of trenches, mud and wire. From the British perspective, the men who fought the remaining three years of war were Kitchener's New Army supported by troops from the far flung empire. Great feats of heroism and extraordinary acts of fortitude had been performed by the first seven divisions and the achievements of the 'Contemptible Little Army' as it battled to stem the rapid advance of the German tide had become a legend of the Great War. This book tells their story.
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On May 29, 1917, Mrs. E. M. Craise, citizen of Denver, Colorado, penned a letter to President Woodrow Wilson, which concluded, "We have surrendered to your absolute control our hearts dearest treasures - our sons. If their precious bodies that have cost us so dear should be torn to shreds by German shot and shells we will try to live on in the hope of meeting them again in the blessed Country of happy reunions. But, Mr. President, if the hell-holes that infest their training camps should trip up their unwary feet and they be returned to us besotted degenerate wrecks of their former selves cursed with that hell-born craving for alcohol, we can have no such hope". Anxious about the United States's pending entry into the Great War, fearful that their sons would be polluted by the scourges of prostitution, venereal disease, illicit sex, and drink that ran rampant in the training camps, and concerned that this war, like others before it, would encourage moral vice and corruption, countless Americans sent such missives to their government officials. In response to this deluge, President Wilson created the Commission on Training Camp Activities to ensure the purity of the camp environment. Training camps would henceforth mold not only soldiers, but model citizens who, after the war, would return to their communities, spreading white urban middle-class values throughout the country. Fortified by temperance, abstinence, self-control, and a healthy athleticism, marginal Americans were to be transformed into truly masculine crusaders. What began as a federal program designed to eliminate venereal disease soon mushroomed into a powerful social force intent on replacing America's many cultures witha single homogeneous one. Though committed to the positive methods of education and recreation, the reformers did not hesitate to employ repression when necessary. Those not conforming to this vision often faced exclusion from the reformers' idealized society, or sometimes even imprisonment. "Unrestrained" cultural expressiveness was stifled. Social engineering ruled the day. Combining social, cultural, and military history and illustrating the deep divisions among reformers themselves, Nancy Bristow, with the aid of dozens of evocative photographs, here brings to life a pivotal era in the history of the U.S., revealing the complex relationship between the nation's competing cultures, progressive reform efforts, and the Great War.

Intimate and richly detailed, The Beauty of Living begins with Cummings's Cambridge, Massachusetts upbringing and his relationship with his socially progressive but domestically domineering father. It follows Cummings through his undergraduate experience at Harvard, where he fell into a circle of aspiring writers including John Dos Passos, who became a lifelong friend. Steeped in classical paganism and literary decadence, Cummings and his friends rode the explosion of Cubism, Futurism, Imagism and other "modern" movements in the arts. As the United States prepared to enter the First World War, Cummings volunteered as an ambulance driver, was shipped out to Paris and met his first love, Marie Louise Lallemand, who was working in Paris as a prostitute. Soon after reaching the front, however, he was unjustly imprisoned in a brutal French detention centre at La Ferte-Mace. Through this confrontation with arbitrary and sadistic authority, he found the courage to listen to his own voice. Probing an underexamined yet formative time in the poet's life, this deeply researched account illuminates his ideas about love, justice, humanity and brutality. J. Alison Rosenblitt weaves together letters, journal entries and sketches with astute analyses of poems that span Cummings' career, revealing the origins of one of the twentieth century's most famous poets.

To the British soldiers of the Great War who heard about it, "shell shock" was uncanny, amusing, and sad. To those who experienced it, the condition was shameful, unjustly stigmatized, and life-changing. The first full-length study of the British "shell shocked" soldiers of the Great War combines social and medical history to investigate the experience of psychological casualties on the Western Front, in hospitals, and through their postwar lives. It also investigates the condition's origin and consequences within British culture.

Food is critical to military performance, but it is also central to social interaction and fundamental to our sense of identity. The soldiers of the Great War did not shed their eating preferences with their civilian clothes, and the army rations, heavily reliant on bully beef and hardtack biscuit, were frequently found wanting. Nutritional science of the day had only a limited understanding of the role of vitamins and minerals, and the men were often presented with a diet that, shortages and logistics permitting, was high in calories but low in flavour and variety. Just as now, soldiers on active service were linked with home through the lovingly packed food parcels they received; a taste of home in the trenches. This book uses the personal accounts of the men themselves to explore a subject that was central not only to their physical health, but also to their emotional survival. -- .

In the English-speaking world the Great War maintains a tenacious grip on the public imagination, and also continues to draw historians to an event which has been interpreted variously as a symbol of modernity, the midwife to the twentieth century and an agent of social change. Although much 'common knowledge' about the war and its aftermath has included myth, simplification and generalisation, this has often been accepted uncritically by popular and academic writers alike. While Britain may have suffered a surfeit of war books, many telling much the same story, there is far less written about the impact of the Great War in other combatant nations. Its history was long suppressed in both fascist Italy and the communist Soviet Union: only recently have historians of Russia begun to examine a conflict which killed, maimed and displaced so many millions. Even in France and Germany the experience of 1914-18 has often been overshadowed by the Second World War. The war's social history is now ripe for reassessment and revision. The essays in this volume incorporate a European perspective, engage with the historiography of the war, and consider how the primary textural, oral and pictorial evidence has been used - or abused. Subjects include the politics of shellshock, the impact of war on women, the plight of refugees, food distribution in Berlin and portrait photography, all of which illuminate key debates in war history.

An extraordinary tale, much-neglected by historians, of courage, bravery and eventual tragedy which took place during the First World War in the Middle East. It is the story of a small group of people, of whom Sarah and Aaron Aaronsohn were the core, who were devoted to the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, and who were convinced that it was in imminent danger of extinction from the Turks.They resolved to help the British in Egypt by collecting military intelligence. Unfortunately, as Peter Calvocoressi points out, their understanding of the British position was quite wrong...[their] miscalculations created the tragedy which this book recounts...'

World War One was the landmark event of the first quarter of the 20th century. In "The Great War, 1914-1918, " Roy Douglas tells the history of the period through an international collection of over 100 cartoons, many of them previously unknown. This pioneering pan-European approach offers new perspectives of key themes, events and figures, forcing a new reinterpretation of the familiar. Both "establishment" and "subversive" cartoons demonstrate the real concerns of all participants from the governments of the combative powers, to the soldier to those at home.
This unique collection will inform in a fresh way the continued historical debates surrounding the Great War and the implications which reach to the present day.

On November 30, 1916, an apparently ordinary freighter left harbor in Kiel, Germany, and would not touch land again for another fifteen months. It was the beginning of an astounding 64,000-mile voyage that was to take the ship around the world, leaving a trail of destruction and devastation in her wake. For this was no ordinary freighter--this was the "Wolf, "a disguised German warship.
In this gripping account of an audacious and lethal World War I expedition, Richard Guilliatt and Peter Hohnen depict the "Wolf "'s assignment: to terrorize distant ports of the British Empire by laying minefields and sinking freighters, thus hastening Germany's goal of starving her enemy into submission. Yet to maintain secrecy, she could never pull into port or use her radio, and to comply with the rules of sea warfare, her captain fastidiously tried to avoid killing civilians aboard the merchant ships he attacked, taking their crews and passengers prisoner before sinking the vessels.
The "Wolf "thus became a huge floating prison, with more than 400 captives, including a number of women and children, from twenty-five different nations. Sexual affairs were kindled between the German crew and some female prisoners. A six-year-old American girl, captured while sailing across the Pacific with her parents, was adopted as a mascot by the Germans.
Forced to survive on food and fuel plundered from other ships, facing death from scurvy, and hunted by the combined navies of five Allied nations, the Germans and their prisoners came to share a common bond. The will to survive transcended enmities of race, class, and nationality.
It was to be one of the most daring clandestine naval missions of modern times. Under the command of Captain Karl Nerger, who conducted his deadly business with an admirable sense of chivalry, the "Wolf "traversed three of the world's major oceans and destroyed more than thirty Allied vessels.
We learn of the world through which the "Wolf "moved, with all its social divisions and xenophobia, its bravery and stoicism, its combination of old-world social mores and rapid technological change. The story of this epic voyage is a vivid real-life narrative and simultaneously a richly detailed picture of a world being profoundly transformed by war.

This book addresses the many avenues that are still left unexplored when it comes to our understanding of the First World War in the Low Countries. With the ongoing the centenary of the Great War, many events have been organized in the United Kingdom to commemorate its military events, its socio-political consequences, and its cultural legacy. Of these events, very few have paid attention to the fates of Belgium or the Netherlands, even though it was the invasion of Belgium in August 1914 that was the catalyst for Great Britain declaring war. The occupation of Belgium had long-term consequences for its people, but much of the military and social history of the Western Front concentrates on northern France, and the Netherlands is largely forgotten as a nation affected by the First World War. By opening the field beyond the military and beyond the front, this collection explores the interdisciplinary and international nature of the Great War.

In the autumn of 1917, the British government established three batallions of infantry for the reception of non-nationalized Russian Jews. Known colloquially as the Jewish Legion, the batallions served in Egypt and Palestine, before their eventual disbandment in the late spring of 1921. By drawing on the testimonies of over 600 veterans, this unique unit is analyzed from within its political and social context, providing fresh insights into Anglo-Jewish relations during the early twentieth century.

The Great War is a collection of seven original essays and three critical comments by senior scholars dealing with the greatest conflict in modern history to its time - the 1914-18 World War. The Great War is edited by the distinguished historian of the First World War, R.J.Q.Adams.

Steeped in conspiracy, scandal and socialism - the disappearance of radical icon Victor Grayson is a puzzle that's never been solved. A firebrand and Labour politician who rose to prominence in the early twentieth century, Grayson was idolised by hundreds of thousands of Britons but despised by the establishment. After a tumultuous life, he walked out of his London apartment in September 1920 and was never seen again. After a century, new documents have come to light. Fragments of an unpublished autobiography, letters to his lovers (both men and women), leading political and literary figures including H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw, and testimonies from members of the Labour elite such as Clement Attlee have revealed the real Victor Grayson. New research has uncovered the true events leading up to his disappearance and suggests that he was actually blackmailed by his former Party. In a time when homosexuality was illegal, and socialism an international threat to capitalism, Grayson was a clear target for those wanting to stamp out dissent. This extraordinary biography reinstates to history a man who laid the foundations for a whole generation of militant socialists in Britain.

The Zionist Masquerade is a new history of the birth of the Anglo-Zionist alliance during the Great War - a critical chapter in the history of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict. James Renton argues that the Balfour Declaration was the result of a wider phenomenon of British propaganda policies during World War I that were driven by mistaken conceptions of ethnicity, ethnic power and nationalism. From this vantage point, Renton contends that while a number of Zionist activists played a crucial role in the making of the Balfour Declaration, the end result was not the great Zionist victory that has been widely assumed. Although the Declaration came to be the basis for the British Mandate for Palestine, which made a Jewish State possible thirty years later, this was far from being the original intention of the British Government. The primary purpose of Britain's wartime support for Zionism was to secure Jewish backing for the war effort. The unintended consequences of this policy, however, were to be explosive and far-reaching.

This book assesses Lloyd George's attempt to shape the history of 1914-18 through his War Memoirs. His account of the British conduct of the war focused on the generals' incompetence, their obsession with the Western Front, and their refusal to consider alternatives to the costly trench warfare in France and Belgium. Yet as War Minister and Prime Minister Lloyd George presided over the bloody offensives of 1916-17, and had earlier taken a leading role in mobilising industrial resources to provide the weapons which made them possible. Rewriting the First World War examines how Lloyd George addressed this paradox.

"How the War Was Won" describes the major role played by the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front in defeating the German army. In particular, the book explains the methods used in fighting the last year of the war, and raises questions as to whether mechanical warfare could have been more widely used.
Using a wide range of unpublished material from archives in both Britain and Canada, Travers explores the two themes of command and technology as the style of warfare changed from late 1917 through 1918. He describes in detail the British army's defense against the German 1918 spring offensives, analyzes command problems during these offensives, and offers an overriding explanation for the March 1918 retreat. He also fully investigates the role of the tank from Cambrai to the end of the war, and concludes that, properly used, the tank could have made a greater contribution to victory.
"How the War Was Won" explodes many myths and advances new and controversial arguments. It will be essential reading for military historians and strategists, and for those interested in the origins of mechanical warfare.

War Girls reveals the fascinating story of the British women who volunteered for service in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry during the Great. Examining their experiences on the Western Front with the Belgian, British and French Armies, this book shows how the FANY worked as nurses and ambulance driver-mechanics, inspiring stories of female heroism and solidarity. The FANY created skilled gendered performances against the cultural myths of the time, and in concert with their emerging legend. Coming from privileged backgrounds, they drew upon and subverted traditional arrangements, crafting new and unconventional identities for themselves. The author shares the stories of the FANY - a fascinating, quirky and audacious group of women - and illustrates the ways the Great War subverted existing gender arrangements. It will make fascinating reading for those working in the field of gender and war, as well as those who wish to find out more about this remarkable group of women. -- .

Originally published in 1994, This Working-Day World is lively collection of essays presenting a social, political and cultural view of British women's lives in the period 1914-45. The volume describes women's activities in many different areas, ranging from the weekly wash to the rescue of child refugees. Each essay, from an international list of contributors, is based on new research which will complement existing studies in a range of disciplines by adding information on, among other topics, women's teacher training colleges, and women in the BBC, in medical laboratories and in Art schools. The book does not, however, idealise women: the militarism and racism of the period infected women too, and this is revealed in the account of women in the British Union of Fascists, and the analysis of the Pankhursts' merging of patriotism and gender issues. Through studies and personal accounts, This Working-Day World reveals past issues that are still pertinent to debates in today's society. As we read the chapter on the recently discovered Diary of Doreen Bates which outlines possibly the first female civil servant campaign for rights as a single mother, we hear echoes of issues being discussed today. Indeed, as we approach the end of the century it is a good moment to look back and re-evaluate areas and degrees of progress - or the reverse - in society, and in British women's lives in particular. With its unusual photographs, this accessible and informative collection provides a rich resource for students in twentieth century social and cultural history, and women's studies courses, and an enlightening volume for general readers.

During the first twelve months of World War I President Woodrow Wilson had a sincere desire to maintain American neutrality. The president, however, soon found this position unsustainable. As Wilson sought to mediate an end to the European conflict he realized that the war presented an irresistible opportunity to strengthen the US economy though expanded trade with the Allies. As this carefully argued study shows, the contradiction between Wilson's idealistic and pragmatic aims ultimately drove him to abandon neutrality in late 1915 - helping to pave the way for America's entrance into the war.