Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain

The popular idea of the First World War is a story of disillusionment and pointless loss. This vision, however, dates from well after the Armistice. Here, Janet Watson separates out wartime from retrospective accounts and contrasts war as lived experience - for soldiers, women and non-combatants - with war as memory, comparing men’s and women’s responses and tracing the re-creation of the war experience in later writings. Using a wealth of published and unpublished wartime and retrospective texts, Watson contends that participants tended to construct their experience - lived and remembered - as either work or service. In fact, far from having a united front, many active participants were in fact ‘fighting different wars’, and this process only continued in the decades following peace. Fighting Different Wars is an original, richly textured and multi-layered book which will be compelling reading for all those interested in the First World War.