Jessica Meyer

Neutral Caregivers or Military Support? The British Red Cross, the Friends’ Ambulance Unit, and the Problems of Voluntary Medical Aid in Wartime

Abstract During the First World War the British Red Cross Society (BRCS) served as the coordinating body for voluntary medical aid giving in Britain. Among the many units which came within its purview was the Friends’ Ambulance Unit (FAU), formed by a group of young men whose desire to serve their nation in wartime conflicted with their pacifist principles. Both the BRCS and the FAU were wracked by ideological conflicts in the years which preceded and throughout the war. These struggles over voluntarist identity highlight the contested meanings of service and conscience in wartime. Through a critical examination of the language of official histories and biographies, this article will argue that the war formed a key moment in the relationship between the British state and voluntary medical aid, with the state’s increasing role in the work of such organizations raising questions about the voluntarist principles to which aid organizations laid claim. The struggles that both organizations and individuals within them faced in reconciling the competing pressures that this new relationship created form a legacy of the war which continues to have important implications for the place of medical voluntarism in wartime today.

The Tuition of Manhood: ‘Sapper’s’ War Stories and the Literature of War

British combatant authors of the First World War have long laid claim to being the truth-tellers of the war and many historians have used the literary legacy of the war as a source of evidence. Much of this analysis has concentrated on a number of well-known sources, including the poetry of Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, and biographies and novels such as Goodbye To All That (1929), All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930). The war, however, produced a huge amount of literary expression, including an array of newspaper articles, popular novels, short stories and poems. The recent academic rediscovery of this wealth of literature has complicated the claims to truth-telling that any individual work of literature may make. The literary evidence of the war increasingly provides almost as many ‘truths’ of war as there were writers.

Nine Centuries of Man: manhood and masculinities in Scottish history

Book review: Nine Centuries of Man: manhood and masculinities in Scottish history, edited by Lynn Abrams and Elizabeth Ewan, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2017, xii + 284 pp., £75.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-47440-389-4

The Long Carry: Landscapes and the Shaping of British Medical Masculinities in the First World War

For First World War stretcher bearers, wartime landscapes had a direct impact on the work they undertook. Trenches, shell holes, mud and sand all presented challenges to their ability to carry wounded men swiftly and safely from where they were injured to aid posts and beyond. At the same time, landmarks could assist bearers in navigating the landscape they worked in, enabling these men to develop particular skills in direction-finding. This chapter uses the diaries and memoirs of British stretcher bearers to examine experiences of carrying in a range of wartime landscapes. In exploring how different landscapes shaped the labour that bearers undertook and the physical and embodied nature of the bearer’s relationship with the landscape, it interrogates the masculine status of these men as non-combatant servicemen to uncover some of the relationship between landscape and masculine service identity in wartime.

The Politics of Wounds: military patients and medical power in the First World War

Given the growing interest in the history of the medical services in Britain during the First World War, evident in such recent cultural productions as the BBC1 drama The Crimson Field (2014) and James Kent’s film version of A Testament of Youth (2014), the relative paucity of cultural histories of medicine of this period is, perhaps, surprising. Medical provision in the war has been the subject of histories of science and medicine, principally the development of medical technologies and practices and studies of specific types of wounds and illness, most recently Mark Harrison’s excellent The Medical War (2010). There have Riots, the sacking of the Bastille and the ‘October days’. In each instance Alpaugh’s narrative argues that what began as non-violent protests only escalated after protestors’ goals were frustrated by the violent intervention of the forces of the state – the police in the case of the Réveillon riots; and the military in the case of the Bastille insurrection and the October days. The fate of Bernard-René de Launay and Jacques de Flesselles, the men whose decapitated heads graced pikes over cheering crowds following the Bastille’s fall, are thus seen as products of localised escalation that were the result of a sequence of unprecedented events. Rather than read the display of their severed heads as a sacrificial offering that may have been the starting point of a broader cyclical culture of retributive violence, in line with the interpretations of Schama or Mayer, for Alpaugh, its historical significance lies with the speed of de-escalation and the absence of a ‘wider massacre’ (p. 63). Chapter three deals with the protest campaigns of June and July 1791, while Chapter four covers the waves of demonstrations that began with the declaration of war in April 1792 and culminated in the September massacres of the same year – a series of events that are also known as the second Republican campaign. In both instances, Alpaugh’s point is to show that the episodes of protestor violence that marked the end of each of these micro-periods of political protest, specifically the Massacre of the Champs de Mars and the August 1792 insurrection, were not the inevitable consequence of an increasingly violent repertoire of protestor actions. Rather, like the aftermath to the Bastille Insurrection, the violence that took place ran against the grain of increasingly sophisticated attempts to influence the political decision making of the elites from below. Chapters five and six continue in the same vein, showing how the behaviour of demonstrators remained peaceful even as the revolution entered its most radical phase. The book’s final chapter deals with another prototype political crowd that emerged during the French Revolution: the anti-protests of conservatives and moderates. It is a well-researched book that deserves to be widely read and debated. I could not help but wonder if by setting out to disprove the idea that revolutionary crowds were inherently violent, Alpaugh occasionally undermines what might be his greater achievement: this book is a fine contribution to historical writing on the political life of the streets in Paris during the French Revolution. Mark Jones University College Dublin & Free University of Berlin mark.jones@ucd.ie

Introduction: Untold Legacies of the First World War in Britain

Abstract The current centenary of the First World War provides an unrivalled opportunity to uncover some of the social legacies of the war. The four articles which make up this special issue each examine a different facet of the war’s impact on British society to explore an as yet untold story. The subjects investigated include logistics, the history of science, the social history of medicine and resistance to war. This article introduces the four which follow, locating them in the wider historiographic debates around the interface between warfare and societies engaged in war.

Before my helpless sight: Suffering, dying and military medicine on the Western Front, 1914–1918

places while jumping around in others. As a result, it is hard for the narrative flow of the book to really develop. Readers unfamiliar with the American road to war will find a reliable introduction to the main themes and events. Doenecke is especially good in describing the role of German saboteurs and secret agents, a theme often ignored by historian who writes on this subject. While not excusing the jingoism and anti-German hysteria of the war years, these acts of German espionage are key to understanding both why Americans felt under threat in 1917 and why they reacted as they did once war began. Diplomatic discussion with Great Britain features prominently, although the absence of similar discussions with France is a curious choice. Nothing Less than War is probably not a good choice for course adoption. Undergraduates may get lost in the maze of detail and it is not sufficiently rooted in historiography, especially more recent historiography, for use in a graduate classroom. There are also many more typos than there should be. This book is unlikely to replace the standard works on the subject, although the topic of American entry into the war is badly in need of more historical research.