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  • Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain
  • Lisa M. Budreau
Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain. By Janet S. K. Watson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-521-83153-9. Illustrations. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. Pp. xiv, 333. $70.00.

Another book on Britain and Great War memory? No, not quite. This revisionist work represents the latest in the Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare series under the editorial leadership of memory historian Jay Winter. In her somewhat provocative study, Janet Watson uses an exhaustive supply of published and unpublished texts (diaries, letters, poetry, public and private narratives) to challenge numerous claims concerning the war experience. Most significantly, she suggests that the disillusionment connected with the First World War was a postwar phenomenon, one gradually produced through the publication and popularity of memoirs and novels after the Armistice. "The war itself was overwhelmingly popular, and the nation came together to a remarkable degree [End Page 584] despite critical differences that reflected the nature of divisions in English society," she suggests (p. 2).

This controversial stance is supported by an innovative two-part approach in which the author considers her evidence of wartime accounts as a lived experience separately in the first section, then examines retrospective accounts and postwar writings in the second half. Though primarily a study of gender and class dynamics, the analysis is comparative in several key ways. Watson looks at both women and men side by side, with special attention paid to families where both brothers and sisters were active in the war effort. Then, she examines two groups who brought different attitudes to wartime efforts: those who viewed participation as work and those who saw it as service.

People brought a wide variety of attitudes to their efforts during wartime as the meaning of patriotism was constantly redefined. For example, professional soldiers and trained nurses, while patriotic, saw their efforts as work with a view toward career advancement. Munitions workers, by contrast, saw an opportunity for better wages and working conditions. For some, theirs was a job that had to be done while others believed king, honor, and glory were their supreme duty. Perceptions of class position played a crucial role in the way different types of war work were viewed, according to Watson. These views, in turn, were grounded in convictions about the preservation of social order in Britain's wartime class society. Interestingly, Watson concludes that people who had seen their wartime participation in terms of service were most likely to remember it as a story of disillusionment.

Some aspects of Watson's argument are bound to provoke. She states, for example, "Without diminishing the terrors of trench bombardment or the total horrifics of mass advance into direct machine gun fire (though this was not fortunately, a frequent occurrence), we must acknowledge and give credence to other portrayals of the war experience which are not uniformly negative" (p. 50). Granted, most conventional histories begin with idealistic volunteers and end with shattered veterans and names on memorials. But, what about perspectives during the war? The author asks us to consider where the shift occurred from valuable contribution of soldiers during the war years toward the attitude of useless sacrifice?

Without minimizing the considerable effort that has gone into this study, perhaps the book's greatest contribution to First World War scholarship is its ability to bring such questions of memory to the forefront of traditional military history enquiry. All credit to a work that is freshly researched and can genuinely be said to contribute so significantly to the field. Similarly, I applaud the Journal for its range and diversity by eliciting this new and distinctive historiographical genre for review.

Lisa M. Budreau
St. Antony’s College, Oxford University
Oxford, United Kingdom
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