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growth in the membership of the Western Front Association,
founded in 1980. Arguably, nothing else could have stimulated such
a large number of publications since 1984, including the welcome
reprinting of so many classics, such as previously unobtainable
volumes of the Official History and The War the Infantry Knew in
1987. The useful milking of memoirs and memorial volumes in Hot
Blood and Cold Steel is also to be recommended 8 . Such interest is
almost worth the appearance of books such as British Butchers and
Bunglers of World War One and Haig’s Command, the latter
attracting arguably some of the most entertaining reviews ever
penned 9 . In their different ways, of course, these two books were
equally representative of the tired old ‘lions led by donkeys’ theme
of the 1960s, which merely refought the historiographical battles of
the 1920s and 1930s.
All this may suggest a rather jaundiced view of much of the
output between 1984 and 1994 but, in reality, our knowledge of the
British Army on the Western Front has continued to advance
materially. Indeed, as perusal of the articles in Home Fires and
Foreign Fields will demonstrate, new parameters for scholarship had
been established already. Indeed, in the same year of 1985, A
Nation in Arms attempted a study of the social aspects of the British
presence, which consciously broke away from a concern with
generalship. Its themes included patterns of recruitment and the
subsequent social composition of an institution comprising distinctly
separate contingents of pre-war regulars, Territorials and Kitchener
volunteers. Surprisingly, little more has been done on recruitment
and enlistment patterns in England and Wales to add to those
studies of Birmingham, Bristol, Gwynedd and Leeds available in
1985, but considerable attention has been devoted to Ireland 10 . By
contrast, Scotland appears to have been neglected totally. There is
also a pioneering study of Jewish enlistment. However, there is the
benefit of Jay Winter’s essays on military participation, collected in
one volume, in The Great War and the British People and Keith
Grieves and the late F W Perry have illuminated the slow evolution
of a coherent manpower policy by late 1917. Above all, there is
arguably the greatest single contribution to our knowledge of the
army’s social organisation in Peter Simkins’s Kitchener’s Army,
published in 1988. It represents a formidable study of the political,
8
Keith Simpson (ed.), The War the Infantry Knew, London, 1987; Andy Simpson, Hot Blood and Cold
Steel, London, 1993.
9
John Laffin, British Butchers and Bunglers of World War One, Stroud, 1988; Denis Winter, Haig’s
Command, London, 1991.
10
Ian Beckett and Keith Simpson (eds.), A Nation in Arms: A Social Study of the British Army in the
First World War, Manchester, 1985, p.10; Patrick Callan, British Recruitment in Ireland, 1914-16, dans
la «Revue Internationale d’Histoire Militaire», vol. 63, 1985, p. 41-50; Idem, Recruiting for the British
Army in Ireland during the First World War, dans «Irish Sword», vol.17, 1987-88, p. 42-56; Terry
Denman, Sir Lawrence Parsons and the Raising of the l6th (Irish) Division, dans Ibidem, p. 16-24;
Nick Perry, Nationality in the Irish Infantry Regiments in the First World War, dans «War and
Society», N° 12/1994, p. 65-95.
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