‘No event has ever destroyed so much’, wrote Sigmund Freud a year after the outbreak of the First World War, ‘that has confused so many of the clearest intelligences, or so thoroughly debased what is highest.’ This war, he observed,

It is the bonds that war so effectively severs – bonds that are our most intimate and fundamental – that are the subject of this book. I attempt to explore how mothers, fathers, widows and soldiers dealt with the grief that resulted from the deaths during and immediately after the two world wars. My starting-point is a psychological and emotional one. I examine the process of mourning and the expression of grief, drawing on the understanding that bereavement is ‘the objective situation of loss’, grief is the psychological and emotional response to loss, and mourning is ‘expressive of grief’. Within this context, my study is concerned not only with the psychological strategies that these groups adopted to cope with death, but also examines the cultural and social context of these experiences and thus considers the ways in which grief and loss, like notions of sacrifice, have a history.