A Study of the Variety of Responses to Death in the British Army on the Western Front, 1914-1918

Abstract

This thesis explores the variety of responses that the infantryman of the British Army experienced on the Western Front, 1914-1918. Through the concept of the Combat Grief Cycle this work offers an opportunity to understand and construct a form of shared experience in relation to violent death in war for those who served on the frontline. There has been a great deal of research into the civilian outpouring of grief and mourning both during and after the war, with little attention paid to those who were immersed in the horrors of death at the front. This thesis addresses this gap in the historiography. It is a common misconception that fighting men became hardened and indifferent to the losses they bore witness to. Although this thesis accepts that men were able to harden their emotions towards death, it considers how this was never general and could not endure the duration of their service. One traumatic loss or witnessing mass death could breach a man's defences and cause repressed grief to consume an individual or community of soldiers. The concepts of bereavement, grief and mourning all feature heavily in this thesis but are only part of the story concerning soldiers' interactions with the dead and dying. This work has deployed and analysed numerous sources in order to determine the many different ways individuals reacted to their losses. Furthermore, it considers how losses bound soldiers together, separate from the civilian sphere, into communities in mourning as men collectively grieved for what had been lost. It also explores the relative nature of the cohort war experiences, positing that the Battle of the Somme was not the only event that shattered illusions of sacrifice for soldiers but instead, represented one in a series of watershed moments. This thesis demonstrates that soldiers at the front created their own emotional code for sharing grief which ran counter to society's expectations of soldiers as stoic masculine figures. As an extension to this, soldiers created a coded language which allowed them to convey how deeply they had been affected by the loss of friends and comrades. Therefore, this work examines how soldiers used writing as a way to mediate their grief, create enduring memorials to the dead and share their experiences of grief with the Home Front. It also explores how burial and frontline commemorations offered an opportunity for soldiers to come to terms with the violence of death in war. However, when these avenues of expression were not available it led to impaired mourning, which if left unmediated could lead to a lifetime of repressed and painful grief. Ultimately, this thesis has determined that bereavements suffered as a result of violent death in war had long term consequences for survivors and was one of the factors which led to disillusionment amongst soldiers and veterans.