Picture This: World War I Posters and Visual Culture

10. Humanitarians and He-Men: Recruitment Posters and the Masculine Ideal

MEG ALBRINCK Humanitarians and He-Men: Recruitment Posters and the Masculine Ideal m ith a standing army eighteen times smaller than that of the Germans, Britain’s most immediate task at the outbreak of the First World War was to build up its military. The nonpartisan Parliamentary Recruiting Committee (prc) was quickly formed and given the job of calling eligible men to serve. For the first two years of the war, the prc used a variety of initiatives to expand the armed forces, including door-to-door canvassing and recruiting rallies. However, our best records of the prc’s efforts lie in the print materials they produced. Working with advertisers and other artists, the prc developed a series of recruiting posters and pamphlets that asked, called, and later demanded military service from British men. These materials blanketed the nation, covering walls, windows , hoardings, tramcars, taxis, and kiosks in urban and rural areas alike. Although few photographs remain to confirm the prevalence of these images, stories and articles from the period refer to their ubiquity. In one story these posters haunt a clerk as he makes his way through town: “Your King and Country Need You . . . 100,000 Men Wanted . . . God Save the King!” The City clerk and his wife stared up at the big poster together. . . . He tried to avoid a daily reading of this . . . HUMANITARIANS AND HE-MEN 313 message. He went round by the longer way to the station in the mornings. Then there was one posted up in that road, too. Gradually one began to meet them everywhere. Then came other messages —some pictured—all with that same direct stirring appeal— more men.1 The pervasiveness of these images was well established by the summer of 1915: “In every street, on every hoarding, at every railway station, all the art and artifice of the poster-designer and publicity-agent have been enlisted in the national cause. Everywhere striking placards, plain or coloured . . . emphasise and illustrate the urgent necessity of the call to arms.”2 One writer reports that the posters cover “the length and breadth of the land,” while another claims that “there are acres of them.”3 Using these publications, the British government orchestrated a range of voices to call its citizens to service. Even though the figure of the soldier was visually and verbally drawn and redrawn , the idealized outlines of the soldier himself remained constant throughout the recruiting campaigns. He was usually plucky, genial, and determined, happy to be serving his country and reveling in the camaraderie of his regiment. If he was in a tight spot, he exhibited courage; if he faced a serious challenge , he did so with resolve. In all nations in the First World War, press and propaganda praised the soldier for resisting invading armies, protecting women and children, defending the ideals of his homeland, and standing by his comrades in the face of danger. Together, these texts argued that military service exemplified not only one’s patriotism but one’s masculinity as well. This is clarified by a further look at the clerk’s story. When he sees the first poster, he assumes “an air of manly authority ” as he assures his wife that Kitchener will resolve the con- flict in short order and that his service will not be necessary.4 314 MEG ALBRINCK However, his defiance of the poster’s call makes him feel guilty, and in his efforts to avoid the appeal, he seeks more circuitous routes to the train station. By the second page of the story, he begins to succumb to the poster’s pressure and, in a strange turn, asks “for his wife’s tape-measure.”5 Finding that he does not meet the physical criteria for enlistment, he then “hunt[s] up his old dumbbells” in order to shape his body into the form required by the War Office.6 Once he achieves a more robust physique, he volunteers and is accepted for service. This story, for all its predictability, clearly demonstrates the links between patriotism and masculinity in the discourse surrounding the soldier. The clerk cannot maintain his air of “manly authority ” once the wartime definition of masculinity begins to circulate in his community. He is restored only when he brings his body and his behavior into compliance with the authoritative definitions of manliness communicated through the recruiting posters. Lacking a...