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Between January 1916 and March 1919 2,504,183 men were conscripted into the British army-representing as such over half the wartime enlistments. Yet to date, the conscripts and their contribution to the Great War have not been acknowledged or studied. This is mainly due to the image of the war in England, which is focused upon the heroic plight of the volunteer soldiers on the Western Front. Historiography, literary studies and popular culture all evoke this image, which is based largely upon the volumes of poems and memoirs written by young volunteer officers, of middle and upper class background, such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. But the British wartime army was not a society of poets and authors who knew how to distil experience into words; nor, as mentioned, were all the soldiers volunteers. This dissertation therefore attempts to explore the cultural identity of this unknown population through a collection of diaries, letters and unpublished accounts of some conscripts; and to do so with the aid of a novel methodological approach. In Part I the concept of this research is explained, as a qualitative examination of all the chosen writings, with emphasis upon eliciting the attitudes of the writers to the factual events they recount. Each text-e.g. letter or diary-was read literally, and also in light of the entire collection, thus allowing for the emergence of personal and collective narratives concurrently. In Part lithe results of this method of research were used to create an extended account of the human experiences of these conscript soldiers-from enlistment through to daily life on the Western Front. The narrative is constructed out of their words, and written from their perspective, as a subjective account of their wartime existence. The result of this synthesis of attitude and experience is an explanation of these conscripts' cultural identity, as a conclusion to Part II.

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Master of Arts / Department of History / Sue Zschoche / As the world enters the centennial of World War I, interest in this war is reviving. Books, television shows, and movies are bringing the war into popular culture. Now that all the participants of the war have passed away a change is occurring in in American memory. The transition from living to non-living memory is clearly visible in museums, one of the main ways history is communicated to the public. Four museums are studied in this paper. Two exhibits built in the 1990s are in the 1st Infantry Division Museum at Fort Riley, Kansas, and the Chemical Corps Museum in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. The other two exhibits are newer and are the National World War I Museum in Kansas City, Missouri and the Cantigny 1st Infantry Division Museum in Wheaton, Illinois. Findings reveal that exhibits become more inclusive over time to civilian bodies, wounded bodies, and the specific image of “Americans killing Germans bodies.” However, even though there is change some things are turning into myths. The icon of the American soldier as a healthy and strong man willing to sacrifice his life for the country is still a major theme throughout all the exhibits. Finally, there are several myths that America has adopted from its allies. The icons of the bandages over the eyes from the chemical attacks and the horrors of the trenches are borrowed, to a certain extent, from America’s allies. The Americans were only in the war for a limited time and borrowed cultural memories to supplement their own. The examination of the four museums is important because this transition will happen again and soon. Museums must be conscious of the changes occurring during this transition in order to confront the challenges.

At the outbreak of war, the imperial powers in East Africa were unprepared for a major campaign. Although the colonies possessed little strategic value in themselves, the dynamics of imperial rivalry quickly generated armed conflict. The East African campaign evolved haphazardly from neutralising German wireless communications and naval facilities to a wildly over-ambitious plan to conquer the whole of the colony with scant forces. The British wanted to keep any potential spoils for themselves, but were also strongly influenced by the expansionist policies of South Africa, largely propounded by Louis Botha and Jan Smuts. By September 1916, the British forces, commanded by Smuts, had occupied the bulk of German East Africa with all the railways, towns and ports in their possession. However, he had failed to bring the German Schutztruppe to battle and it remained a powerful and well-motivated force. Furthermore, his reliance to manoeuvre and reluctance to fight battles led his troops ever-deeper into enemy territory and dependent on inadequate lines of communication. Smuts continued his advance until January 1917 when he left for the Imperial War Conference. His forces were in terrible condition and unfit for further offensive operations. He was succeeded by the British General Hoskins for a bare three months, but, who nevertheless instigated badly needed reforms and reorganisation. In May 1917, the South African, General, van Deventer assumed command, an appointment that he would hold until the end of war. Van Deventer continued to build on Hoskin’s work while instigating an aggressive policy of fighting hard battles whenever possible, while concurrently trying to destroy German food supplies. These methods were continued throughout the remainder of 1917 and until November 1918 when the war ended with the Schutztruppe being pursued from Portuguese East Africa into Northern Rhodesia.

Our memory and understanding of women's experiences at the Front during the First World War are overwhelmingly influenced by the autobiographical account of Vera Brittain. Testament of Youth was published in 1933 as part of a wave of antiwar literature produced by men and women. Brittain's chronicle of the war achieved renewed popularity in the 1970s and early 1980s when it was dramatised by the BBC and acclaimed by feminist academics who recognised its value in contesting the predominantly male literary war canon. Brittain wrote about the effects of losing the young men in her life, her fiance and her brother, and the inability she felt as a young woman, to achieve anything constructive during the war. When her fiance enlisted in the army she decided to enrol as an auxiliary nurse with the Red Cross Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD), believing this would give her at least some idea of what it was like to experience war. The loss of the men she loved shaped her war experiences, as did the labour and anguish of volunteer nursing and the eclipse of her youth in a war that she considered neither just nor worthwhile. Her experience of being a young woman from a provincial middle-class background, without medical training, going off to war to nurse as a way of comprehending the experiences of the men closest to her came to personify the experience of women who went to the Front.

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This thesis examines the relationships and interactions between British and French soldiers on the Western Front of the First World War. To date the historical approaches to inter-allied relations has been predominantly focused on those interactions taking place at governmental or command levels. Whilst previous studies have touched on the relations between common soldiers, this has often been within specific case studies. I have drawn particularly on the contemporary diaries, letters and written records of British soldiers within the Imperial War Museum and also the postal censorship records of the French army at the Archives de l'armee de terre in order to trace the nature and evolution of these relations across the war. My study covers the time-period of 1914-1918 and focuses on periods of sustained contact in 1914, 1916 and 1918. This focus shows that the arrival of Kitchener's New Armies in 1915-16 was a crucial development in forming strong relations between British and French soldiers. British military command took little interest and made no substantial plans for ensuring friendly relations between soldiers of the two armies and, as a result, these early interactions were largely self-directed by the soldiers. They were also driven by the apparent insecurities of the British volunteer soldiers who viewed themselves as being less accomplished than their French fellows, who were largely well-disposed to welcoming and teaching the new British arrivals in order to achieve swift victory. I argue that, although serendipitous in nature, this uneven starting point allowed relations between British and French armies to evolve positively whilst allowing both sides to maintain a sense of their own national identity without having to overly sacrifice their own ideals. However, the French desire for a decisive victory and a professional response in the trenches led to a rupture in Tommy-Poilu relations following the British failures in 1918. This changed the dynamic between the two nations in the build up to, and aftermath of, the armistice and provided a prelude to the difficult inter-war relationships at governmental levels.

The intensely divided but vocal minority that denounced Great Britain's declaration of war in 1914 and decried Britain's continuance in the war illustrated both the strengths and weaknesses of their nation's politics and the impotence of dissent against a majority united in arms.

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