The Great War had a profound impact on Britain. Not only did families risk their sons in active combat; every member of society was required to make a contribution to the war effort. National initiatives like rationing affected all, and civilians were now regarded as a legitimate military target. Reminders of this turbulent time survive today, in rituals such as Summer Time and Remembrance, nationwide war memorials, and the powerful myth of a lost generation slaughtered in a futile war. Here Ian Beckett examines the mobilization of the British people for the war effort and reassesses its impact on state and society. As evidence, he presents 40 key documents, including the King's rallying cry to the nation to 'eat less wheat', reports on social phenomena from anti-German riots to the drinking habits of women and juveniles, and Kitchener's initiatives to raise his New Armies.

Account of the major events of the First World War.

Endorsed by Edexcel, this book covers the topic of Britian at home in World War I. It provides background information on the topic.

“A tour de force of scholarship, analysis and narration.… Lloyd is well on the way to writing a definitive history of the First World War.” —Lawrence James, Times The Telegraph • Best Books of the Year The Times of London • Best Books of the Year A panoramic history of the savage combat on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918 that came to define modern warfare. The Western Front evokes images of mud-spattered men in waterlogged trenches, shielded from artillery blasts and machine-gun fire by a few feet of dirt. This iconic setting was the most critical arena of the Great War, a 400-mile combat zone stretching from Belgium to Switzerland where more than three million Allied and German soldiers struggled during four years of almost continuous combat. It has persisted in our collective memory as a tragic waste of human life and a symbol of the horrors of industrialized warfare. In this epic narrative history, the first volume in a groundbreaking trilogy on the Great War, acclaimed military historian Nick Lloyd captures the horrific fighting on the Western Front beginning with the surprise German invasion of Belgium in August 1914 and taking us to the Armistice of November 1918. Drawing on French, British, German, and American sources, Lloyd weaves a kaleidoscopic chronicle of the Marne, Passchendaele, the Meuse-Argonne, and other critical battles, which reverberated across Europe and the wider war. From the trenches where men as young as 17 suffered and died, to the headquarters behind the lines where Generals Haig, Joffre, Hindenburg, and Pershing developed their plans for battle, Lloyd gives us a view of the war both intimate and strategic, putting us amid the mud and smoke while at the same time depicting the larger stakes of every encounter. He shows us a dejected Kaiser Wilhelm II—soon to be eclipsed in power by his own generals—lamenting the botched Schlieffen Plan; French soldiers piling atop one another in the trenches of Verdun; British infantryman wandering through the frozen wilderness in the days after the Battle of the Somme; and General Erich Ludendorff pursuing a ruthless policy of total war, leading an eleventh-hour attack on Reims even as his men succumbed to the Spanish Flu. As Lloyd reveals, far from a site of attrition and stalemate, the Western Front was a simmering, dynamic “cauldron of war” defined by extraordinary scientific and tactical innovation. It was on the Western Front that the modern technologies—machine guns, mortars, grenades, and howitzers—were refined and developed into effective killing machines. It was on the Western Front that chemical warfare, in the form of poison gas, was first unleashed. And it was on the Western Front that tanks and aircraft were introduced, causing a dramatic shift away from nineteenth-century bayonet tactics toward modern combined arms, reinforced by heavy artillery, that forever changed the face of war. Brimming with vivid detail and insight, The Western Front is a work in the tradition of Barbara Tuchman and John Keegan, Rick Atkinson and Antony Beevor: an authoritative portrait of modern warfare and its far-reaching human and historical consequences.

A “fascinating” look at hardship, heroism, and civilian life in England during the Great War (World War One Illustrated). The truth about the sacrifice and suffering among British civilians during World War I is rarely discussed. In this book, people who were there speak about experiences and events that have remained buried for decades. Their testimony shows the same candor and courage we have become accustomed to hearing from military veterans of this war. Those interviewed include a survivor of a Zeppelin raid in 1915; a Welsh munitions worker recruited as a girl; and a woman rescued from a bombed school after five days. There are also accounts of rural famine, bereavement, and the effects on families back home—and even the story of a woman who planned to kill her family to save them further suffering.

When women agitated to join the medical profession in Britain during the 1860s, the practice of surgery proved both a help (women were neat, patient and used to needlework) and a hindrance (surgery was brutal, bloody and distinctly unfeminine). In this major new study, Claire Brock examines the cultural, social and self-representation of the woman surgeon from the second half of the nineteenth century until the end of the Great War. Drawing on a rich archive of British hospital records, she investigates precisely what surgery women performed and how these procedures affected their personal and professional reputation, as well as the reactions of their patients to these new phenomena. Essential reading for those interested in the history of medicine, British Women Surgeons and their Patients, 1860-1918 provides wide-ranging new perspectives on patient narratives and women's participation in surgery between 1860 and 1918. This title is also available as Open Access.

Facing Armageddon is the first scholarly work on the 1914-18 War to explore, on a world-wide basis, the real nature of the participants experience. Sixty-four scholars from all over the globe deliver the fruits of recent research in what civilians and servicemen passed through, in the air, on the sea and on land.