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  • Citizen Soldiers: The Liverpool Territorials in the First World War
  • Stephen M. Miller
Citizen Soldiers: The Liverpool Territorials in the First World War. By Helen B. McCartney . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-521-84800-8. Maps. Photographs. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xv, 275. $90.00.

McCartney's Citizen Soldiers, a recent entry in the "Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare" series published by Cambridge University Press, follows two Battalions of the King's Liverpool Regiment, the 1/6th (The Liverpool Rifles) and the 1/10th (The Liverpool Scottish), from enlistment through trench warfare to demobilization. Using letters, diaries, and official sources, McCartney shows how the men of these Liverpool units used their civilian identity to influence their wartime experiences and maintain their morale through the entire conflict.

The British army underwent substantial reorganization following the Liberal Party's victory in 1905. The Haldane reforms attempted to rationalize the administration and improve the efficiency of Britain's many auxiliary units, like the volunteers, yeomanry, and militia. The Territorial Force was created to meet the needs of home defense and to supplement the Regular army as a potential reserve. The outbreak of World War I, however, redefined the purpose of this force. When the Regular army was expanded, the Territorial Force was also expanded and, by the end of 1914 and early 1915, was needed to serve overseas, garrisoning imperial outposts and, more importantly, fighting as line battalions along the Western Front. After about three weeks of training behind the main line of trenches, both the Liverpool Rifles and Liverpool Scottish headed into the Ypres salient.

Although McCartney is concerned with the experiences of individual soldiers in the Liverpool Territorials, she is much more interested in the Territorials as a social and cultural institution: how the units served as a representation of Liverpool itself with its local class, religious, and ethnic divisions, its influential notables, and its historical symbols and dialect prose. McCartney must do this to show that local identity was more significant than the effect of national institutions in determining how the Liverpool Territorials would react in this wartime situation. Generalizations regarding issues which all military units had to deal with in World War I such as alienation from the civilian community, treatment of new recruits and, later, conscripts, and discipline in the trenches, do not work. The experience of the Liverpool Territorials was informed by their unique prewar character.

Military historians will no doubt find Citizen Soldiers a significant contribution to World War I studies. It is very engaged in important historiographical debates, foremost among them whether World War I transformed British civilians into disciplined soldiers who assimilated the values and ideals of the Regular army or if they were able to retain individual qualities enabling them to challenge their officers and question their purpose. McCartney's "revisionist" challenges to the alienation theme are also significant and show that Liverpudlian civilians remained informed, sympathetic, and supportive of their city's soldiers throughout the war, and that Liverpool's soldiers were sustained by these connections. General readers interested in topics such as trench warfare, volunteerism, and life in Britain [End Page 935] during the war, are best advised to look elsewhere, however. McCartney's thorough investigation of the Liverpool Territorials as a social institution comes at the expense of not providing the reader with a better understanding of the men themselves and their experience as citizen-soldiers.

Stephen M. Miller
University of Maine
Orono, Maine
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