In the Shadow of War

(. o tL ý(-ct 5 /ýkOO IN THE SHADOW OF WAR Continuities and Discontinuities in the construction of the identities masculine of British soldiers, 1914 - 1924 i W" NLARGARET MILLNUN A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirementsof the University of Greenwich for the Degree of Doctor of PHosophy July 2002 ABSTRACT The upheavalsof the cataclysmof the First World War reverberatedthrough every comer of British society, how society was reconstructedafterwards is the subject of enormouscritical debate. This study examineshow masculinitieswere disrupted and. reconstructedduring and after the war. It is a study of British men, previously civilians, who becameservicemen in the First World War. It aims to map the continuitiesand discontinuitiesin the construction of their masculineidentities during war and in its aftermath in the 1920s. Pioneeredby feminist scholarsconcerned with analysingthe historical construction of femininity, the study of gender relations has becomea significant area of historical enquiry. This has resulted in a substantialbody of historical scholarshipon the history of masculinitiesand the increasingvisibility of men as genderedsubjects whose masculinities are lived and imagined. This thesis is informed by, and engageswith, the histories of masculinities. It also draws on recent historical researchon the cultural legacy of the war. The first chapter explores the subjectiveresponses to becominga soldier through an examinationof personalmemoirs; largely unpublishedsources drawn from memoriesand written or recordedby men as narrativesof their wartime experiences.The subject of the secondchapter is shell shock. The outbreak of shell shock among the troops aroused anxietiesabout masculinity. The competing versionsof masculinitieswhich emergedin military and medical discoursesis examined. Returning to individual memoirs,the chapter examineshow men producedtheir own representationsof the shell shockedman contesting other versions. Chapters3 and 4 focus their attention on the relatively neglectedsubject of ex-servicemen'sorganisations and the collectivities of ex-servicemen.During and after the war a movementof ex-servicemenemerged to campaignfor justice and fair treatment, Comradesh.ip underpinnedthe attempt to forge an ex-servicemanidentity and an examinationof veterans' publications, a largely neglectedsource, has revealedthe tensions and conflicts which contestedthis form of masculineidentity. Masculine identities, as citizens and workers, presenteda challengeto the potential for a unified, apofitical movement. Unemploymentwas a challengeto male identities traditionally securedthrough work and masculinecodes of independence. Unlike many studies,this thesis intentionally straddleswar and peace. It beginsin 1914 and endsa decadelater in a society restoredto peacebut still essentiallyin the shadow of war. CONTENTS INTRODUCTTON 2 Chapter One 19 'Incidents that haunt me' Soldiers'Stories Chapter Two 75 'War makes sane men mad' Shell shocked soldiers and competing masculinifies Chapter Three 148 'Soldiers from the war returning' Comradeship and the imagined community ofex-servicemen Chapter Four 203 'We are citizens... we are workers' Broken bodies and the body politic CONCLUSION 272 BIBLIOGRAPHY 282 INTRODUCTION The imagesand iconography of the GreatWar of 1914-18still resonatein the imaginationtoday. Trenchwarfare, gas attacks, barbed wire, poppiesand No Man's Land are sharedcultural referentsof that war. The pity of war remainsentrenched in collectivememory. Prior to, and especiallyduring, the eightiethanniversary of the Armisticein 1998the First World War was subjectedto a new wave of cultural representationswhen a spateof novels,films, televisiondocumentaries and journalism appeared.In the 1990sPat Barker'sRegeneration trilogy and SebastianFaulks's Birdsong (1994) becamebest sellers.In a reviewof the film, YheTrench (1999), the directorialdebut of the novelistWilliam Boyd, the youngmale reviewer wrote 'the I trenchesare scarson the nationalpsyche; the War was the fulcrum of the modernage. Peoplelike me can't imagineit. " Yet we continueto imagineit. As recentlyas May of this year,the BBC produceda documentaryseries, Yhe Trench, in which a group volunteersfrom Hun, men betweeneighteen and thirty-eight years of age,volunteered to recreatethe experiencesof the I Othbattalion of the East YorkshireRegiment. The First World War, now in supposedlyauthentically created trenches, was onceagain the subjectof imaginative recreation.The persistenceof suchpopular imaginings have been mirrored in the renewedand substantialbody of academicwriting aboutthe First World War emerging from acrossa rangeof disciplinesfrom military anddiplomatic history, economic, social andgender history to literary andcultural studies.The war andits impactcontinue to be 1 Andrcw O'Hagan, The Daily Telegraph, September 17,1999 2 the subjectsof intensescrutiny and debate, with previouslyaccepted conventions challengedand revised. The meaningof the war continuesto be a struggleover representationand a conflict over which dominantmemory of the war remainsin the collectiveand national memory. The imageof the soldieris centralto all the popularcultural representations which are testimony to the persistenceof the imaginings of a powerful form of masculinity. War has been one of the most gendered of human activities; soldiering one of the most sexually differentiated. The imaginings of masculinity are central to this study which explores the lived experiencesof servicemenin the First World War and in the period immediately following it. Within the extensivebody of historical research which exists on the First World War, servicemenare ever-presentas objects of study, their experiencesfiltered through official statistics,surveys and reports. In addition,their attitudesto war havelargely been represented and refracted through the literary output of, for example,Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owenand Robert Graves. Yet, their presenceas genderedsubjects, their masculinitieshave been largely left unexplored. This studyaddresses the omissionby makingan examinationof the masculinitiesof servicemenits centralfocus., It exploresthe extentto which the war precipitatedchanges to former codesof masculinity.It aimsto mapthe continuitiesand discontinuities in the constructionof the masculinitiesof British soldiersin the contextof the war but its trajectorymoves into the post war periodof the 1920s.War broughtthe experienceof soldieringto a significant.section of the malepopulation, men who weregenerally 3 2 soldiers 'for the duration only'. The war experiencedid not end with the cessationof hostilities but was framed in private memories as well as in public representations. The meaningsthe men sought to give to those experiencesand the dislocations they felt in their senseof themselvesas men determined the selection of sourcesand how they were used. I have prioritised the writings, mainly unpublishedand some neglected, of the unknown men who volunteered for war service and who, on their return, constituted the body of men known as ex-servicemen. I have also submitted official sourcesand public documents to new interrogations as to what insights they might yield into the structuring and restructuring of masculine identities. In recent years the objective of 'making men visible as genderedsubjectSO and to interrogatethe constructionof masculinityhas produced a significantcontribution to the studyand understanding of sexualdifference and its manifestationswhich hasbeen so muchpart of a feministapproach. For historians,this hasentailed exploring the historicaldiversity of masculinitiesand their formationwithin specifichistorical contexts. The collectionof essaysin Manful Assertionsedited by JohnTosh andMichael Roper (1991) illuminatesthe socialand historical production of, for example,the Respectable WorkingMan, ImperialMan, the post-warPublic SchoolMan andCompany Man. Thesevaried masculinities demonstrate the shift in men'sgender identities in different historicalperiods, particularly at timesof socialchange and upheaval, while at the same time they indicatethat malepower is more contingentthan the term patriarchyallows. 2 Estimatesof the percentagevary: JayWinter estimatesthat it wasalmost fifty per cent; otherslike Bourke suggestit wasnearer twenty two per cent. 3 Mchael Roperand JohnTosh (eds),Manful Assertions.*Masculinities in Britain since 1800, London: Routledge,1991, p. I 4 The use of the term masculinifies emphasisesthe plurality and diversity of men's experiences,attitudes, beliefs and so on andwhich, in turn, are structuredby class, sexualorientation, ethnicity, age and other categoriesmarking difference. Moreover, in their analysis,Tosh and Roper argue that masculinitiesare affirmed not only by the social roles ascribedto men but in their lived experiences,in subjective identities. The historiography of pre-war masculinity provides a framework for interpretiýg the changeswar may have wrought on prevailing ideals of manhood. Much of the work focussed on manlinessas a particular construct of Victorian and Edwardian middle-class 4 manhood, associatedin particular with the public schools. The qualities of physical strength, enduranceand courage were developed in the new cult of athleticism. Games played in the public schools had become codified and rationalised, representing an instrument of discipline for boys learning how to be men with future careersin government, the military and,the administration, both in Britain and in the Empire. While the Iýstoriography

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