Class and Disillusionment in World War I

Abstract

I Diverse and often contradictory claims have been made about the nature of the social knowledge acquired by combatants in the First World War. Right-wing veterans' groups in Germany, Italy, and France asserted that in the war combatants had undergone an experience of true community; they had lived in a state of equality and classlessness, and this gave them a moral position superior to civilians. Theodore Bartram, an ex-officer who in 1919 attempted to organize a party of returning German frontsoldiers led by their former officers, insisted that the deepest experience is the front experience . . . and the front experience is first of all Gemeinschaft experience.' But others who participated in the war, particularly socialist combatants, felt that the soldier had seen his expectations of a class-unifying enterprise die in a war which expressed, even amplified, the class hatreds endemic to bourgeois society. The character of the war experience and the nature of the social knowledge it imprinted upon the identity of the frontsoldier became a central issue of the ideological battles of the 1920s and 1930s. This, more than anything else, makes it difficult to determine the actual content of the social experience men underwent from 1914 to 1918. Neutral observers, while they may disagree about the nature of the socialization process which men underwent in this war, agree that the war changed social attitudes, particularly those of upperclass combatants. These changes carried over, John Keegan maintains, into postwar Britain. the trenches young temporary gentlemen from West Country and South Coast watering places lived for the first time in their lives with Durham miners, Yorkshire furnacemen, and Clydeside shipyard workers. This encounter, though sometimes painful, worked deeply upon their sympathies for the lower orders. In this process of discovery many of the amateur officers were to conceive an affection for the disadvantaged which would eventually fuel that transformation of middle-class attitudes to the poor which has been the most important social trend in Twen-