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Making sense of the Great War: crisis, Englishness, and morale on the Western Front

Mayhew, Alex (2024) Making sense of the Great War: crisis, Englishness, and morale on the Western Front. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. ISBN 9781009168755

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Abstract

The First World War was an unprecedented crisis, with communities and societies enduring the unimaginable hardships of a prolonged conflict on an industrial scale. In Belgium and France, the terrible capacity of modern weaponry destroyed the natural world and exposed previously held truths about military morale and tactics as falsehoods. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers suffered some of the worst conditions that combatants have ever faced. How did they survive? What did it mean to them? How did they perceive these events? Whilst the trenches of the Western Front have come to symbolise the futility and hopelessness of the Great War, Alex Mayhew shows that English infantrymen rarely interpreted their experiences in this way. They sought to survive, navigated the crises that confronted them, and crafted meaningful narratives about their service. Making Sense of the Great War reveals the mechanisms that allowed them to do so.

Item Type: Book
Official URL: https://www.cambridge.org/gb/universitypress/subje...
Additional Information: © 2024 The Author
Divisions: International History
Subjects: D History General and Old World > D History (General) > D501 World War I
D History General and Old World > DA Great Britain
Date Deposited: 13 Feb 2024 12:21
Last Modified: 13 Feb 2024 12:21
URI: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/122007

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