The chapter examines the crisis of the First World War, battlefield action, the war’s impact on patterns of domestic conflict, and the reasons for Germany’s defeat.

Chapter two examines the conflicting nationalist politics mobilising Irish volunteers in wartime Britain. It profiles the political languages and cultures of Irish volunteers in British centres, from the 150,000 recruits in the British armed forces to the eighty-seven rebels in the armed forces of the Irish Republic; interrogates the correspondence, and separation, of Irish nationalist identities between home/front; and charts the rise, and estranged demise, of Irish Party support in wartime Britain. The Irish Party, this chapter submits, successfully maintained its ‘two face’ political position in Britain, in anticipation of a short war and a bitterly contested general election on the Home Rule issue, a political strategy termed ‘home front nationalism’. Redmond’s rejection of a British Cabinet position in May 1915, and the I.P.P.’s rejection of conscription in January 1916, however, fatally undermined the Irish Party’s policy. The participation of British-based Irish Volunteers in the 1916 Rising was a rebellion against the wartime politics of ‘home front nationalism’ and British citizenship. An examination of the ‘British connection’ to the Rising, from the Edinburgh-born James Connolly to the London-based Michael Collins, supports the thesis that military strategy was not the primary focus of the 1916 leaders.

Chapter 5 deals with the years 1942 and 1943, as the Germans reached the peak of their military success and then began to decline. Chaplains were part of the brutal regimes of occupation that characterized Nazi German domination of territories and people. The chapter uses the concept of "genocidal culture" to analyze how Christianity, embodied in the chaplains and symbolized by the cross, helped the Germans construct a story of justification that erased their victims and presented themselves as suffering heroes. Examples from France, Greece, North Africa, and the Soviet Union are presented, and personal accounts from Jewish survivors reverse the gaze, to provide a look at the Germans and their religious practices from outside the group. Amidst the extreme yet everyday brutality of German occupation, the Wehrmacht chaplains turned inward to focus on providing comfort to the men they served and interpreting the war and their role as the ultimate sacrifice. They faced disinterest and at times hostility from soldiers and officers but insisted they were effective “handmaids of the troop leadership.” Chaplains who died or were killed became important figures in a redemptive story of the war.

One of the primary functions of war-time print culture was to bring the home to the front and the front to the home, thereby connecting soldiers with the loved ones they had left behind and bolstering the war effort in both places. On the pages of newspapers that circulated in army camps and in northern cities and towns, the campfire and the fireside were paired emblems of the Union cause. As a hallmark of antebellum conceptions of family and home, the fireside served as inspiration for mobilization and military endeavor. In turn, the campfire—a utilitarian necessity of army life—provided a substitute fireside for the soldiers gathered around it, connecting them to distant homes and uniting them in a shared cause. As flexible symbols, the campfire and the fireside blurred racial and gendered boundaries, equating the work of women at home with the efforts of soldiers at the front and providing a place of communion for Black and white soldiers.

Fears surrounding Dear John letters have often encoded larger concerns – in civilian society and military communities – about new communications technologies that purport to bridge the gap between “over here” and “over there”: the home front and the war zone. From reel-to-reel tape recordings in Vietnam to cellular telephony, email, and social media in Iraq and Afghanistan, the double-edged character of technological innovation has fueled anxiety about the sustainability of love in wartime, and the lethality of Dear Johns in particular. Many observers of wartime’s emotional landscape have equated speed of delivery with a more devastating coup de grâce. As the digital age has brought service personnel and civilians into more continuous contact, “home” has come to appear (in the eyes of some military commentators) less a point of sentimental anchorage than a dangerous source of toxicity. But this chapter cautions against uncritical endorsement of a “ballistic” theory of communication that equates physical velocity with psychological impact. Servicemen in past wars found slow-moving mail – or protracted silence – just as hard to process as texts zapped in real-time across continents.

The war restructured the justice system. Hitler, haunted by the “stab-in-the-back” of 1918, assigned the courts and the Gestapo new roles to safeguard morale. The courts would issue severe sentences to deter dissent, while the political police would ensure that only true opponents faced prosecution. Draconian punishments checked defeatism, while descriptions of the convict preserved support by communicating who was targeted and why. The Gestapo enabled these sentences by resolving lesser offences. Heydrich issued new Principles of Internal State Security during the War authorizing warnings to “correct the mindset and strengthen the will” of supporters who strayed in “momentary weakness.” The new policy also permitted extrajudicial executions to “brutally liquidate” any serious threat to morale. Practically, very little changed about who and what kinds of behavior were a threat. The new policy continued targeting political opponents, criminals, and public offences. Previously, officers had intervened on a case by case basis. Now, station leaders bore personal responsibility for deciding whether to press charges. Selective enforcement passed from the state prosecutor to the Gestapo.

This chapter surveys novels and short stories that illustrate Americans’ complex response to the First World War from 1914 through the 1930s. Registering conflicting views, ultimately this fiction presents a war that resists easy categorization. Fiction by military veterans, medical professionals, and home-front eyewitnesses is represented – including canonical authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, and Katherine Anne Porter; lesser-known writers such as Thomas Boyd, Victor Daly, and Mary Borden whose work has recently been republished; and authors of now out-of-print fiction such as James Stevens, Mary Lee, and Elliot White Springs who deserve greater recognition. A summary of recent literary criticism denotes trends in critical approaches and demonstrates that scholars are re-examining canonical novels and taking an increasing interest in short stories meant for both literary and popular audiences.

The period of American neutrality during the first three years of World War I (1914-1917) was marked by widespread disagreement. Widespread propaganda advocated neutrality as well as intervention on either side. Propaganda advocating different positions nevertheless tended to use some of the same—often gendered and sexualized—imagery to solicit and channel American emotions. Once the US declared war, the creation of a state-sanctioned propaganda agency, The Committee on Public Information (CPI), produced a flow of information that was both intense and univocal in its support for the war. Meanwhile, legislative acts legalized censorship, enabling the Post Office, government at all levels, and even non-state actors to police speech, jail and attack pacifists, and limit dissenting publications. The widespread use of media to secure public consent for and participation in the war effort is an element of modern, total war. The media landscape was permanently changed. Propaganda moved through social channels and frequently targeted and depended upon women to both relay and follow its messages; after the war, largely as a result, women gained the vote. Other legacies were more negative. Some modernist writers and artists would denounce martial (ab)uses of language and to adopt new strategies (including irony) to undermine notions of linguistic and political certainties.

This chapter concentrates on the early months of the war, and delving into autobiographical testimonies looks more closely at the suffering and fate of enemy aliens. The chapter then describes the implementation of the policies adopted in the early months and deals with expulsion, forced repatriation and deportation. It then addresses the internment of civilians, which was one of the major novelties that the belligerent countries introduced in the European war. The chapter follows the spread of concentration camps throughout Europe and the British and French Empires, the internment gender and generational dimensions, and the beginning of the humanitarian activities that the mass internment of enemy aliens triggered. The third part of the chapter deals with another crucial novelty that concerned the property rights of the enemy aliens. States at war sequestered and confiscated their assets as part and parcel of the economic war they waged. The internment and sequestration of enemy property led to enormous growth in the apparatuses of the state. And this meant that state involvement in the lives of civilians increased disproportionately.

In 1914 the home front in all countries greeted the war with an outpouring of patriotic support, but only Germany saw significant support for war before it was declared. Everywhere the advocates of peace were quickly overwhelmed, in particular the Marxist Socialist movement, which struggled to balance the coordination of international pacifism with hopes for political revolution, as reflected in a conference at Zimmerwald in neutral Switzerland in 1915. By then, the early rush to volunteer in Britain and the Dominions, where no military service requirements existed, had begun to dissipate. The home fronts were forced to respond when the anticipated short war dragged on into a second year. When heavy casualties created an ongoing need for fresh manpower, and the exhaustion of the initial stockpiles of munitions placed unprecedented demands on industry, women assumed an increasingly important role either as workers or as noncombatant volunteers, including under the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations. The war revolutionized labor relations as well as gender relations. As the war entered a third year, censorship and propaganda assumed a growing role in sustaining the home fronts, especially for the Central Powers once the Allied naval blockade began to affect food supplies.

The introduction outlines the major themes of the book and its scope and rationale. It explains briefly the Irish context upon the outbreak of war in 1914. It sets the scene for the topic of Irish women and the Great War, outlining the involvement of Irish women in the British war effort and the significant impact of the war on women’s lived experience. It contextualises the wartime experience through a brief examination of women’s role in early twentieth-century Irish society, focusing on the social and economic context and women’s political participation in the nationalist, unionist and suffrage movement. The chapter includes a survey of the international and Irish historiography, focusing on concepts such as everyday life and gender emancipation. The analysis of the Irish historiography charts the slow emergence of First World War scholarship in Ireland and the recent transformation in attitudes towards the war in Ireland. The chapter further outlines the methodological approach of the book, with its emphasis on empirical archival research and the use of samples alongside ego documents. It concludes by outlining the structure of the book, situating each chapter within the existing historiography.

Chapter 3 investigates the Nigerian home front. Nigeria, with its huge reserves of men, food, and raw materials, was critical to the Allied war effort. Nigerians from all walks of life, diverse regions, and various ethnicities were involved in the struggle to win the war. They were deployed as soldiers and workers, on a large scale, to theaters of war in Europe and the Middle East. The optimism expressed by colonial officials regarding support from the dominion and colonies, and the confidence that they would join the empire in the war with Germany, were not in vain. The notion that all people, including colonial subjects, were united by a common cause and a moral war fought against a common enemy drew Nigerians of all classes into a global fight against tyranny. Yet Britain embarked on a systematic extraction of human and material resources on an unprecedented scale. The drive to produce and the regulations put in place to control the local economy and meet wartime requirements created economic crises that were often ignored by the authorities. This chapter details the significant role played by Nigerians at home and the impact of the war in transforming their lives and societies in very fundamental ways to reveal its truly local and global impact.

Chapter 4 examines the idea of the ‘forgotten army’. Whether in the Middle East or Macedonia, soldiers during the war were absolutely certain that their part in the conflict – their suffering, as explored in Chapter 1, and their contribution to the wider war effort, such as the liberation of Palestine or Mesopotamia, as shown in Chapter 3 – had gone unnoticed by the home front. In some ways worse was their fear that those at home had badly misrepresented the war outside the Western Front, recognising the only ‘real’ war as the one being fought in France and Flanders while those in the Middle East and Macedonia were on a ‘picnic’. Again, the Western Front was foremost in the minds of soldiers away from it. This fear became more serious in the war’s final two months, as soldiers in the British Salonika Force (BSF), alongside their French, Greek, and Serbian allies, forced the surrender of Bulgaria, while the Egyptian Expeditionary Force’s (EEF) northwards drive to Aleppo knocked out the Ottomans. In both cases, soldiers in Macedonia and the Middle East argued that it was their campaign that had set in motion the downfall of the Central Powers and, ultimately, the armistice with Germany and an end to the war.