Making Sense of the Great War
Crisis, Englishness, and Morale on the Western Front

This interdisciplinary account explores how English infantrymen in Belgium and France experienced and coped with war between 1914 and 1918.

Alex Mayhew (Author)

9781009168748, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 12 June 2025

390 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.56 kg

'Those who want to know how and why English soldiers endured the Great War ought to read Making Sense of the Great War.' Elizabeth Stice, Orange Blossom Ordinary

The First World War was an unprecedented crisis, with communities and societies enduring the unimaginable hardships of a prolonged conflict on an industrial scale. In Belgium and France, the terrible capacity of modern weaponry destroyed the natural world and exposed previously held truths about military morale and tactics as falsehoods. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers suffered some of the worst conditions that combatants have ever faced. How did they survive? What did it mean to them? How did they perceive these events? Whilst the trenches of the Western Front have come to symbolise the futility and hopelessness of the Great War, Alex Mayhew shows that English infantrymen rarely interpreted their experiences in this way. They sought to survive, navigated the crises that confronted them, and crafted meaningful narratives about their service. Making Sense of the Great War reveals the mechanisms that allowed them to do so.

List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Preface
Introduction
Part I. The Environment
1. Familiarising the Western Front: Attachment to Belgium and France
2. Enduring the Western Front: Winter and Morale
Part II. Social Groups
3. Defining Duty: Obligation and the Cultural Foundations of Morale
4. Imagining Home: Englishness in the Trenches
Part III. Crises and Morale
5. Hoping for Peace: Victory and the Future
6. Experiencing Crisis: Battle and Sensemaking, c. July 1917–June 1918
Conclusion
Appendix
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Military history [HBW]