John Connor

Home and Away. The Enlistment of Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, and South African Men in Dominion Expeditionary Forces in the United Kingdom during the Great War

On the outbreak of war, men from the Dominions were scattered across the British Empire. As each Dominion began recruiting their expeditionary forces at home, the issue arose whether these expatriates, especially those resident in the United Kingdom, should join the British Army or be able to enlist in their Dominions force. Canada and New Zealand allowed recruiting for the CEF and NZEF in the UK. Many Anglophone White South Africans joined a “colonial” battalion of the Royal Fusiliers. The Australian Government refused to allow Australians in the UK to join the AIF, despite the repeated requests of the Australian expatriate community. This paper examines the questions of British and sub-Imperial Dominion identities as well as the practical policy considerations raised by this issue. It argues that there is some evidence of nascent Dominion nationalism—the Canadian High Commission in London issued what became known as “a Certificate of Canadian Citizenship” to expatriates— but that Dominion Governments generally based their decisions on this issue based on cost and domestic political considerations.

‘Boredom is the enemy’: the intellectual and imaginative lives of Australian soldiers in the Great War and beyond

boundaries. However, war widows could lose benefits and privileges on remarriage or for ‘immoral’ conduct. Dishonourable discharge terminated a widow’s right to compensation, ‘tethering a wife inextricably to the conduct of the man she married’ (p. 81). In any case, as Kuhlman shows, their status as recipients of state benefits cemented widows in their gendered role of economic dependency while often failing to provide sufficient means for a sustainable family life. Kuhlman also explores the relationship of widowhood with concerns about declining populations in France and Germany. She argues that this preoccupation with the low birth rate, often blamed on women’s ‘selfishness’, shifted attention away from other major causes: staggering wartime casualty figures, deaths among prisoners of war and displaced persons, and epidemic diseases to which war-weakened populations succumbed. She also shows how the reproductive capacity of the soldier became an extension of his military duty and led to intense government involvement in the previously private sphere of sexual and reproductive behaviour. Many war widows developed a sense of identity that transcended the nation state, placing their own experiences in the context of an international community of suffering regardless of ‘defeat’ or ‘victory’. In a chapter on the transnationalization of war widowhood, Kuhlman shows how an individual’s war experience could clash with the one that governments sought to commemorate. She draws parallels between past and present, stating that even in today’s context where women increasingly take on combat roles and 90% of war casualties are civilians, ‘the nation state continues to prescribe how survivors interpret warriors’ deaths’ (p. 158). Kuhlman’s detailed and wide-ranging study, aimed primarily at an academic audience, makes an important contribution to our understanding of the experience of women widowed by the First World War. Sparingly illustrated with evocative images, it is written in an accessible style that will prove both appealing and readable to students of history and cultural studies at all levels, as well as researchers from any discipline in the field of First World War Studies. As Kuhlman states, ‘telling the story from the widows’ perspective upsets conventional wartime temporality’ (p. 25) and the periodization that deems a war to be over with the cessation of violence. Clearly, the widows’ war continued long after the guns had fallen silent.

The War Munitions Supply Company of Western Australia and the Popular Movement to Manufacture Artillery Ammunition in the British Empire in the First World War

Among the nations that comprised the British Empire, the First World War has generally either been forgotten, as in India, as irrelevant to the achievement of political independence, or remembered, as in Canada, as the catalyst for developing a separate national identity. This article argues that both these historical interpretations ignore the extent to which the First World War was a shared British Empire experience. The article examines the establishment of the War Munitions Supply Company of Western Australia as an example of the popular movement to make artillery ammunition that swept many parts of the British Empire in 1915. The munitions movement provided an outlet for the patriotic surge that occurred in April–May 1915 in reaction to the German use of poison gas and the sinking of the Lusitania. It was also an attempt to overcome wartime economic disruption by creating a new local industry. The practicalities of cost and shipping meant that by 1917 artillery ammunition production was continued only in Britain, Ireland, and Canada, but in 1915 the Western Australian company was part of an Empire-wide movement to make munitions and support the war.