Britain's Call to Arms During the Great War

Britain's Call to Arms During the Great War

The Great War brought many challenges to all nations, as this was truly a world war by most definitions. These challenges were faced on the battle front as well as at home. They ranged from diplomatic, to social, to basic commodity shortage. These problems where felt the hardest in Europe where the majority of the fighting took place. Both civilians and soldiers produced many pieces of art and literature that has become symbolic of these hardships. One of the ways many populations responded to these challenges was by providing a unified front. This was especially true for Britain, being a member of the Entente and an active belligerent from early in the war; it was forced to take drastic steps in all aspects to present a formidable front against the Central Powers. Britain chose to focus the vast majority of its available manpower towards the battle lines, at first this idea was reinforced by public support and later by conscription. This paper will focus on how recruitment and moral bolstering from the home front was a key element to the war effort in Britain, as well as some of its sociological side effects. To anchor this argument I used Paul Ruben's song "Your King and Country Want You" written at the outbreak of the war in 1914, often used as a recruiting song.

At the out start of the war there was popular support for it, and many young men who held a romanticised idea of war along with the notion that the war was going to be relatively short lived. This resulted in a very successful recruiting campaign leading to over 225,000 recruits signing up by September 5th, 1914 (Beckett, 291). By 1915 the number had swollen to over 1 million enlisted recruits (Dewey, 200). This was fortunate for the British military as is had opted to approach the war by dominating on manpower, drawing upon all regions of its empire, while the Germans had approached the war mechanically, although by the end of the war this would change (Strachan, 87). One of the continuous driving forces that helped spur this constant recruitment was the attitude adopted by the civilian population. Beckett describes the phenomenon as "recruitment by insult" (9), where men were forced into service both by pride and by goading from there public. Those who did not volunteer were seen as cowards or not fully British by not fulfilling their public responsibility and their "duty to the king" as the song I chose would suggest. Derogatory names such as "shirkers" were used to humiliate the men that did not enlist; some women would even hand out white feathers to fit men who weren't enlisted to signify their cowardice (Moskos, 77). Although this pattern would not persist after the devastating Battle of the Somme. Even with a society driven towards bolstering recruitment numbers, enlistment tapered off by the end of 1916.

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