Hors de combat The 1910s and 1920s at home

Abstract

It is often said that the First World War put an end to a way of life, but it did not, like the Second World War, engulf the home country, peppering the cities with bombs at night, filling their streets with air-raid wardens, fire-fighters, and ambulances, littering them next morning with debris, shrapnel, hose-pipes, holes in the road, charred handbags, and human remains. The munitions factories up and down the land hummed day and night, special constables trod the streets, open-topped charabancs and horse-drawn drays carried the new soldiers from the villages, troop trains transported them to the Channel in their thousands and brought them back wounded, still in their thousands. But the civilian did not find his train held up outside a city because an air raid was in progress; nor did stray enemy planes dive out of the blue to pump gunfire into a passenger coach. The civilians had to cope with shortages and rationing by day, but they had not spent their nights in air-raid shelters or in stations on the London Underground. The massive disturbances to daily life in the United Kingdom effected by the evacuation of children from cities, the training of the Home Guard, and the Air Raid Precautions were not experienced in the First World War.