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This thesis concerns the mobilisation of children who lived within a clearly defined area of Scotland known as the 42nd Regimental Area during the Great War. It asserts that while these children lived through a time of enormous national and local upheaval, the majority of this numerically significant but often overlooked section of the population in terms of Great War studies were far from being helpless witnesses to the conflict on the Home Front or even passive bystanders, but were instead overwhelmingly reasonably well informed supporters of and valued net contributors to the British war effort. This thesis takes the form of a concentrated regional study, drawing heavily both on local sources and the holdings of the four Local Authority archives involved as it traces the evolution of children’s involvement in support work from their initial self-mobilisation to the eventual effective adult capture and direction of their work in the national interest. It takes the shape of a descriptive account of the local children’s war support activities which runs in parallel with analysis of the form of their physical and mental mobilisation and deployment, the limitations placed on that process, the sources of their motivation and an estimate of the extent of their financial contribution to the British war effort. This thesis attempts to strike and maintain an ongoing balance between the need to deal directly with the lived experience of local children while relating that same experience to the broader issues which dominate the historiography of the Great War on the Home Front. The final product is intended to expand current understanding of the shape of children’s mobilisation during the Great War through a study of the processes involved as well as the extent and effectiveness of that movement in one Scottish Regimental Area.

British corps command having been neglected in the literature, this thesis sets out to assess what British corps did, and how they did it, on the Western Front during the Great War. It attempts to avoid anecdotal sources as much as possible, drawing its evidence instead as much as possible from contemporary official documents. It is a central argument here that Field Service Regulations, Part 1 (1909), was found by commanders in the BEF to be applicable throughout the war, because it was designed to be as flexible as possible, its broad principles being supplemented by training and manuals. Corps began the war in a minor role, as an extra level of command to help the C-in-C control the divisions of the BEF. With the growth in numbers and importance of artillery in 1915, divisions could not cope with the quantity of artillery allotted them, and by early 1916, the corps BGRA became the corps artillery commander (GOCRA). In addition to its crucial role in artillery control, corps was important as the highest level of operational command, discussing attack plans with Armies and divisions and being responsible for putting Army schemes into practice. Though corps tended to be prescriptive towards divisions in 1916, and Armies towards corps, a more hands-off style of command was generally practised in 1917, within the framework of FSR and the pamphlet SS13S (and others - to be used with FSR). However, the vital role of artillery still led corps to control divisions more closely than in 1915. In 1918, once the BEF had recovered from the setbacks of March and April (caused mainly by low levels of manpower facing overwhelming German infantry and artillery forces), the BEF as much as possible devolved command - even of heavy artillery - to divisions. In the Hundred Days, acting flexibly, corps only assumed a co-ordinating role when set-piece attacks were required.

Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) has long been the dominant cultural study of Great War Literature. Because Canadian literary critics, such as Evelyn Cobley and Dagmar Novak, rely on Fussell’s text as a model when they write about Great War texts, they either eliminate a variety of interesting texts, or severely distort and misread a narrow range of texts to make them fit Fussell’s ironic, anti-war ideology. This study aims to recuperate and reevaluate a number of Canadian Great War texts by examining a wider ideological range of texts than Fussell or his followers allow. In Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World War (1997), cultural historian Jonathan Vance offers a viable antithesis to Fussell in his method and conclusions. This present study, focused on eight Canadian combatant narratives written between 1917-1939, develops and expands Vance’s argument from the vantage point of literary criticism. The first chapter examines four canonical European anti-war texts, delineating their characteristic features and ideological positions. Chapter 2 shows how the extreme ends of the spectrum of literary responses to the war in Canadian combatant writing distort the truth and are equally unsatisfying. Chapter 3 examines three Canadian narratives located in the middle ground between jingoistic romances and cynical anti-war texts, focusing on their social inclusivity and balance—features which allow for a more multifaceted representation of the Great War. Chapters 4 and 5 offer close readings of two of the best Canadian combatant narratives, Will Bird’s memoir And We Go On, and Philip Child’s novel God’s Sparrows, showing not only how both texts confirm and illustrate the characteristics of more inclusive, balanced war texts, but also how they evoke and affirm the fact of historical and social continuity.

Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) has long been the dominant cultural study of Great War Literature. Because Canadian literary critics, such as Evelyn Cobley and Dagmar Novak, rely on Fussell’s text as a model when they write about Great War texts, they either eliminate a variety of interesting texts, or severely distort and misread a narrow range of texts to make them fit Fussell’s ironic, anti-war ideology. This study aims to recuperate and reevaluate a number of Canadian Great War texts by examining a wider ideological range of texts than Fussell or his followers allow. In Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World War (1997), cultural historian Jonathan Vance offers a viable antithesis to Fussell in his method and conclusions. This present study, focused on eight Canadian combatant narratives written between 1917-1939, develops and expands Vance’s argument from the vantage point of literary criticism. The first chapter examines four canonical European anti-war texts, delineating their characteristic features and ideological positions. Chapter 2 shows how the extreme ends of the spectrum of literary responses to the war in Canadian combatant writing distort the truth and are equally unsatisfying. Chapter 3 examines three Canadian narratives located in the middle ground between jingoistic romances and cynical anti-war texts, focusing on their social inclusivity and balance—features which allow for a more multifaceted representation of the Great War. Chapters 4 and 5 offer close readings of two of the best Canadian combatant narratives, Will Bird’s memoir And We Go On, and Philip Child’s novel God’s Sparrows, showing not only how both texts confirm and illustrate the characteristics of more inclusive, balanced war texts, but also how they evoke and affirm the fact of historical and social continuity.

Abstract Not Provided. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

Christopher Isherwood’s 1938 autobiographical novel Lions and Shadows is often read in light of its subtitle as the story of “an education in the ‘twenties.” Yet Isherwood’s early work is more than a simple interwar bildungsroman. Lions and Shadows is a narratively complicated account of a privileged, queer youth in interwar England and an exposition of the effects of the Great War on an entire generation. The autobiographical novel provides veiled descriptions of the queer cultures of Cambridge and London in the 1920s, and records the early artistic development of several members of what has come to be called “The Auden Generation,” including Edward Upward, W.H. Auden, and Stephen Spender. In this project, I explore how and why Christopher Isherwood obscures his sexuality in Lions and Shadows, looking in particular at his friendships with Edward Upward and W.H. Auden and at the fictional work that the former friendship produced, The Mortmere Stories. Chapter 1 provides background information on homosexuality in England during Isherwood’s lifetime, focusing on how class and privilege affect the experience and expression of homosexuality. Chapter 2 analyzes the obsession with the Great War that pervades Lions and Shadows, concentrating on how the Great War affected ideas of masculinity and male sexuality. Finally, Chapter 3 explores the relationship between Isherwood’s social and sexual discomfort and the production and content of The Mortmere Stories, which tend to poke fun at sexual foibles and the proclivities of the upper classes. / text

The subject of this thesis is the conscription debate in Great Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, defined in a social-cultural context. The basic assumption is that a process of cultural conditioning works to determine human actions; actions therefore can be understood by examining cultural conditioning. That examination in this thesis is limited to a study of social and intellectual influences relating to conscription as they acted upon various groups in the English community prior to the Great War. The thesis also discusses the 1915-1916 crisis over actual adoption of conscription, in light of these influences.

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