What do you think?
Rate this book
Conscripts
Drawing on diaries, letters, and personal accounts from British conscripts who served on the Western Front in the latter half of the Great War, this is the first book to explore the contribution they made to the war effort. By the end of the war more than 2.5 million men had been conscripted, but their memory has not lived on; they are the lost legions of World War I. Here, at last, their story is told: the story of ordinary men, from manual workers to clerks and solicitors, who became soldiers, fought and—for those who survived—went home. In this groundbreaking work, Ilana Bet-El explains their absence from the imagery of the war. She reconstructs the daily life of soldiers on the Western Front as we are told, in the conscripts’ own words, of the grim reality of dirt and lice and hunger, the mysteries of army pay and military discipline, and the joys of leave and cigarettes. It is a compelling journey back in time, which restores these men to the public image of the Great War by rediscovering the "forgotten memory" of Britain’s conscript army.
264 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
10 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
May 9, 2022
3.75/5. Worth a read if the WWI British army interests you.
More academic than I expected but also better than I thought it would be. Covers the experiences of British conscripts in WWI from being conscripted through to ending up at the front. But the first chapter is more politically focused and covers the transition from a volunteer based recruitment system to a conscription based one. The focus for the bulk of the book is more on the day to day experience than fighting so if you are looking for combat then skip this book. There is quite a big psychological style in the book mainly about what the various stages of signing up, training, ending up at the front did to the conscripts. The big theme throughout the book is whether the conscripts ended up mentally identifying themselves as soldiers or stuck in a more 'civilian in uniform' mindset (the author argues that they were "alienated civilians" that were too far from their civilian lives because of things like censorship but never very attached to the military life in their views on tradition and discipline). There is some comparison between the experiences of volunteer soldiers and conscripts but this is not the main focus.
The epilogue was also quite good as it focused on historical memory. The argument is that British conscripts made up half the British army in WWI but are neglected in public memory up until the time of writing (1999) because (1) they did not fit in with the public view of the heroic self-sacrificial volunteer at the time. And (2) since the conscripts tended not to identify themselves as real professional soldiers they tended not to write memoirs or talk about their experiences as much so on the literary level the war is presented through the views of volunteer middle or upper class officers.
More academic than I expected but also better than I thought it would be. Covers the experiences of British conscripts in WWI from being conscripted through to ending up at the front. But the first chapter is more politically focused and covers the transition from a volunteer based recruitment system to a conscription based one. The focus for the bulk of the book is more on the day to day experience than fighting so if you are looking for combat then skip this book. There is quite a big psychological style in the book mainly about what the various stages of signing up, training, ending up at the front did to the conscripts. The big theme throughout the book is whether the conscripts ended up mentally identifying themselves as soldiers or stuck in a more 'civilian in uniform' mindset (the author argues that they were "alienated civilians" that were too far from their civilian lives because of things like censorship but never very attached to the military life in their views on tradition and discipline). There is some comparison between the experiences of volunteer soldiers and conscripts but this is not the main focus.
The epilogue was also quite good as it focused on historical memory. The argument is that British conscripts made up half the British army in WWI but are neglected in public memory up until the time of writing (1999) because (1) they did not fit in with the public view of the heroic self-sacrificial volunteer at the time. And (2) since the conscripts tended not to identify themselves as real professional soldiers they tended not to write memoirs or talk about their experiences as much so on the literary level the war is presented through the views of volunteer middle or upper class officers.
Displaying 1 of 1 review