Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain (Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare, Series Number 16)

by Janet S.K. Watson

Janet Watson's study of war and memory uses published and unpublished British wartime and retrospective writings concerning World War I. Watson examines differing attitudes to this war among men and women, across different social classes, and in different periods. She concludes that participants often saw their experience - lived and remembered- as either work or service. In fact, far from having a united front, many active participants were 'fighting different wars', and this process only continued in the decades following peace.

Genres: History, World War I

Paperback

First published February 19, 2004

Reviews

[Michael Koch · Rating 2 out of 5]

Written in 2004, Watson describes her view of how differing sectors of Britain, mostly England, populations view how the war progressed and was considered. The different sectors are primarily segmented by sex, male and female. Males are described as military, industrial in support of the war, and others including protected, for example farmers and bankers. Females were described in many more sectors, those wearing khaki, those who considered they served the country in war, nurses, industrial in support of the war, others at work, and others, for example mothers.

Every sector was sub-divided. Military men were regular army, early volunteers were seen as doing their service to the country, conscripts were working, doing their job. The point of Watson’s book is that populations in each sector and sub-sector saw themselves in “fighting different wars.” Also, their view of each other changed over time. During the war and shortly after, every soldier was contributing heroically but by mid 1920s their contribution was a waste wrapped in disillusion and by the end of the 1930s attitudes were even more ambiguous. I cannot describe all this to readers. Watson cites major literary, and numerous letters to make her cases.

All the layers are further complicated by Class which I have little experience with. Her view of women is especially complicated by Class. She makes a lot of discussion about which females can legitimately work at which functions and what they can wear. A lot of society attitudes towards women’s roles are revised during the war although some seem to become more permanent. There is also a lot of discussion regarding what roles are seen as professions, especially regarding females in the medical fields. She seems to trivialize that question for engineers, lawyers, teachers, pilots, artillery and navigators, apparently because these are either too few in the military or females.

Watson’s conclusions are that all these population categories lived different lives before the war, some of them changed during the war to become heroes during the war, and some tried to return after the war. She seems to conclude that the broader population memory of the war became nothing except the trenches. She makes no attempt to make any of these different attitudes positive or negative despite the huge cost in resources and male deaths. While I do not condone Germany between the wars, it did set firm objectives and used scarce resources and adept propaganda to move towards those objectives.

There is a lot of research in this book and a fairly complete segregation of society’s sectors relevant to the Great War. Those sectors are well described by their literature and activity during and after the war. However, in my opinion it is a little late in describing how these different attitudes and sectors could have been better utilized during, and more importantly after the war. Two Stars

[Nicola12345]

Read for uni but I’m counting it🤷🏼‍♀️

[Steelwhisper · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too revisionist for comfort. It all depends on which accounts you select for what you want to say. This selection is very one-sided and defends warfare way beyond what people truly said or were allowed to say.

[AskHistorians]

Examining the lived experiences of men and women, together, in WW1. Her chapter on nursing, how nurses were perceived, and how nurses figure into the historical myths of the war, is particularly excellent.