The history of the married couple during the Great War is situated at the intersection of three distinct historiographies: the combatant’s connection to the home front; the history of domestic life in wartime; and the history of affect, emotions and sexuality during and after the war. Scholars who have worked in these fields, even when they have not concentrated exclusively on the experiences of married couples, have contributed significantly to how we understand married couples and their experiences of the war.

Fundamental to our understanding of how soldiers thought about, imagined and remained connected to the home front, and especially to their wives, parents and children at home, is Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau’s Men at War 1914–1918: National Sentiment and Trench Journalism in France during the First World War, trans. Helen McPhail (Oxford: Berg, 1992). Marie-Monique Huss provides an analysis of postcards from the war years to reveal how European society visualised connections between husbands and wives in Histoires de famille, 1914/1918: cartes postales et cultures de guerre (Paris: Noesis, 2000). On letter-writing and its centrality to wartime marriage, see Martha Hanna, ‘A republic of letters: the epistolary tradition in France during World War I’, American Historical Review, 108:5 (2003), pp. 1338–61, and Hanna, Your Death Would Be Mine: Paul and Marie Pireaud in the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). For an analysis of the affective connections between British combatants and their families at homes – husbands and wives as well as sons and parents – see Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (University of Chicago Press, 1996), ch. 3; Helen B. McCartney, The Liverpool Territorials in the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2005), ch. 5; and Michael Roper, The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester University Press, 2009). For Germany, Bernd Ulrich analyses the character of wartime correspondence, including but not limited to that between husbands and wives, in Die Augenzeugen: Deutsche Feldpostbriefe in Kriegs- und Nachkriegszeit 1914–1933 (Essen: Klartext, 1997). Benjamin Ziemann identifies the importance of family connections to German soldiers in War Experiences in Rural Germany, 1914–1923, trans. Alex Skinner (Oxford: Berg, 2007). The collection by Bernd Ulrich and Benjamin Ziemann (eds.), German Soldiers in the Great War: Letters and Eye-Witness Accounts (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2010), offers an excellent sample of documents written by German soldiers and their wives during and after the war. For Canada, see Desmond Morton, When Your Number’s Up: The Canadian Soldier in the First World War (Toronto: Random House of Canada, 1993), ch. 10; and Morton, ‘A Canadian soldier in the Great War: the experiences of Frank Maheux’, Canadian Military History, 1 (1992), pp. 79–89.

War widows have of late received more attention than war wives, but the challenges of life on the home front, especially for married women, emerge as important themes in Susan R. Grayzel’s comparative overview, Women and the First World War (Harlow: Pearson, 2002). National studies include Hanna, Your Death Would Be Mine; Belinda J. Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); and Maureen Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2004). For Austria, see also Reinhard Sieder, ‘Behind the lines: working-class family life in wartime Vienna’, in Richard Wall and Jay Winter (eds.), The Upheaval of War: Family, Work and Welfare in Europe, 1914–1918 (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 107–35. For Canada, see Desmond Morton, Fight or Pay: Soldiers’ Families in the Great War (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004). On war widows, see Peggy Bette, ‘Veuves et veuvages de la Première Guerre mondiale Lyon (1914–1924)’, Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire, 98 (April–June, 2008), pp. 191–202; Stéphanie Petit, ‘Les veuves de la Grande guerre ou le mythe de la veuve éternelle’, Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains, 197 (March 2000), pp. 65–72; Francesca Lagorio, ‘Italian widows of the First World War’, in Frans Coetzee and Marilyn Shevin-Coetzee (eds.), Authority, Identity and the Social History of the Great War (Oxford: Berghahn, 1995), pp. 175–98; Karin Hausen, ‘The German nation’s obligations to the heroes’ widows’, in Margaret Randolph Higonnet et al. (eds.), Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 126−40; and Erika Kuhlman, Of Little Comfort: War Widows, Fallen Soldiers, and the Remaking of the Nation after the Great War (New York University Press, 2012). Jean-Yves LeNaour analyses the impact of bereavement, including that of war widows, on post-war French culture in The Living Unknown Soldier: A Story of Grief and the Great War (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004).

On the sexual conduct of men and women, and how it generated cultural anxiety in wartime and post-war society, see Jean-Yves Le Naour, Misères et tourments de la chair durant la Grande Guerre: les mœurs sexuelles des Français, 1914–1918 (Paris: Aubier, 2002); Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927 (University of Chicago Press, 1994); and Richard Bessel, Germany after the First World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).

The historiography of children’s experiences of the Great War is still largely dependent on a national approach, a state readily explained by the nature of the sources, which tend to be fragmentary and diffuse, making their collection difficult for foreign researchers, and by the necessity of in-depth knowledge of cultural, educational and familial systems.

The subject of children has traditionally been approached through the history of the family, within grand overviews; the same holds true for the historiography of the First World War, but here we restrict ourselves to works that are child-oriented. If we except two foundational works published in 1993, the majority of references indicated here have been published since 2000, an indubitable sign that the exploration of this still new field of study is far from over.

As for the history of youth, it has been approached first and foremost from a social and political point of view, notably through the history of youth movements, such as Gudrun Fiedler’s Jugend im Krieg: Bürgerliche Jugendbewegung, Erster Weltkrieg und sozialer Wandel 1914–1923 (Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1989).

Among published children’s sources, several diaries are worth mentioning: Ernst Buchner [Eduard Mayer], 1914–1918: Wie es damals daheim war: Das Kriegstagebuch eines Knaben (Leipzig: Die neue Zeit, 1930); Yves Congar, Journal de la guerre 1914–1918 (Paris: Cerf, 1997); Piete Kuhr, Da gibt’s ein Wiedersehn: Kriegstagebuch eines Mädchens 1914–1918 (Fribourg: F. H. Kerle Verlag, 1982); Marcelle Lerouge, Journal d’une adolescente dans la guerre 1914–1918, ed. Jean-Yves Le Naour (Paris: Hachette, 2004); Anaïs Nin, Journal d’enfance 1914–1919 (Paris: Stock, 1978); Elizabeth Sczuka, Gefangen in Sibirien: Tagebuch eines ostpreussischen Mädchens 1914–1920 (Osnabrück: Fibre Verlag, 2001).

Letters, memoirs and memories likewise constitute precious sources, though secondary, for the history of childhood in wartime: Françoise Dolto, Enfances (Paris: Seuil, 1986); Eugénia Fraser, The House of the Dvina: A Russian Childhood (London: Corgi, 1984); Jean-Pierre Guéno and Jérôme Pecnard (eds.), Mon papa en guerre: lettres de pères et mots d’enfants 1914–1918 (Paris: Les Arènes, 2003); Christa Hämmerle (ed.), Kindheit im Ersten Weltkrieg (Vienna: Bölhau, 1993); Ivano Urli (ed.), Bambini nella Grande Guerra (Udine: Gaspari, 2003).

Some editions of drawings published contemporaneously are available: Charles Chabot, Nos enfants et la guerre: enquête de la société libre pour l’étude psychologique de l’enfant (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1917); Colestin Kik, Kriegszeichnungen des Knaben und Mädchen (Leipzig: Ambrosius Barth, 1915); Deti i vojna: sbornik statej (Kiev: Kievskoe Frebelevskoe Obshchestvo, 1915); and two recent editions: Didier Guyvarc’h (ed.), Moi Marie Rocher, écolière en guerre: dessins d’enfants, 1914–1919 (Rennes: Éditions Apogée, 1993); and Manon Pignot (ed.), La guerre des crayons: quand les petits Parisiens dessinaient la Grande Guerre (Paris: Éditions Parigramme, 2004).

Overviews exist for the majority of belligerent nations: Andrew Donson, Youth in the Fatherless Land: War Pedagogy, Nationalism and Authority in Germany 1914–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Susan Fisher, Boys and Girls in No Man’s Land: English-Canadian Children and the First World War (University of Toronto Press, 2011); Antonio Gibelli, Il popolo bambino: infanzia e nazione dalla Grande Guerra a Salò (Turin: Einaudi, 2005); Manon Pignot, Allons enfants de la patrie: génération Grande Guerre (Paris: Seuil, 2012). For Russia so far we do not have an overview account that has been translated from Cyrillic; two references, however, allow us to approach the reality of Russian children’s experience: Catriona Kelly, Children’s World: Growing up in Russia, 1890–1991 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), and Dietrich Beyrau and Pavel P. Shcherbinin, ‘Alles für die Front: Russland im Krieg 1914–1922’, in Elise Julien and Arnd Bauerkämper (eds.), Durchhalten! Krieg und Gesellschaft im Vergleich 1914–1918 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), pp. 151–77.

Two articles that were precursors to the construction of a transnational study of the history of childhood should also be consulted: Stefan Goebel, ‘Schools’, and Catherine Rollet, ‘The home and family life’, both in Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert (eds.), Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin, 1914–1919 (Cambridge University Press, 2007), vol. ii, pp. 188–234, 315–53.

Among the studies defining or discussing the notions of ‘war cultures’ and ‘children’s mobilisation’ are Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, La guerre des enfants 1914–1918: essai d’histoire culturelle (Paris: A. Colin, 1993; new edn 2004); Eberhard Demm, ‘Deutschlands Kinder im Ersten Weltkrieg: Zwischen Propaganda und Sozialfürsorge’, Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift, 60:1 (2001), pp. 51–98; Andrea Fava, ‘Riflessioni e spunti di ricerca sulla “mobilitazione dell’infanzia”’, in Maria Cristina Giuntella and Isabella Nardi (eds.), La guerra dei bambini: da Sarajevo a Sarajevo (Pérouse: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1998), pp. 69–78.

Several works concentrate on the specific study of the cultural effects of the Great War on children’s literature, games and toys, or school, such as Aaron J. Cohen, ‘Flowers of evil: mass media, child psychology and the struggle for Russia’s future during the First World War’, in James Marten (ed.), Children and War: A Historical Anthology (New York University Press, 2002), pp. 38–49; Andrew Donson, ‘Models for young nationalists and militarists: youth literature in the First World War’, German Studies Review, 27 (2004), pp. 575–94; Olivier Loubès, L’école et la patrie: histoire d’un désenchantement, 1914–1940 (Paris: Belin, 2001); Sonja Müller, ‘Toys, games and juvenile literature in Germany and Britain during the First World War: a comparison’, in Heather Jones, Jennifer O’Brien and Christoph Schmidt-Supprian (eds.), Untold War: New Perspectives in First World War Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 233–57; Michael Paris, Over the Top: The Great War and Juvenile Literature in Britain (London: Praeger, 2004).

Among the fields most recently studied, the impact of the war on juvenile behaviour is still being explored. To begin with the phenomenon of underage enlistment by young adolescents: Tim Cook, ‘“He was determined to go”: underage soldiers in the Canadian Expeditionary Force’, Social History, 41:81 (2008), pp. 41–74; Manon Pignot, ‘Entrer en guerre, sortir de l’enfance? “Les ado-combattants” de la Grande Guerre’, in Manon Pignot (ed.), L’enfant-soldat. xixe–xxie siècle: une approche critique (Paris: A. Colin, coll. ‘Le fait guerrier’, 2012), pp. 69–89; Richard Van Emden, Boy Soldiers of the Great War: Their Own Stories for the First Time (London: Headline, 2005).

Another approach to studying the impact of the war on youth is the study of juvenile delinquency: see Victor Bailey, Delinquency and Citizenship: Reclaiming the Young Offenders 1914–1948 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); Sarah Bornhorst, Selbstversorger, Jugendkriminalität während des Ersten Weltkriegs im Landgerichtsbezirk (Ulm: UVK, 2010); Dorena Caroli, ‘Les enfants abandonnés devant les tribunaux dans la Russie pré-révolutionnaire 1864–1917’, Cahiers du Monde russe, 38:3 (1997), pp. 367–85; Aurore François, Guerres et délinquance juvénile: un demi-siècle de pratiques judiciaires et institutionnelles envers des mineurs en difficulté (1912–1950) (Bruges: La Charte–die Keure, 2011); David Niget, La naissance du tribunal pour enfants: une comparaison France Québec (1912–1945) (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009).

Selected references on children confronting the violence of war and its repercussions on their generation: Margaret R. Higonnet, ‘Picturing trauma in the Great War’, in Elizabeth Goodenough and Andrea Immel (eds.), Under Fire: Childhood in the Shadow of War (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008), pp. 115–28; Antoine Rivière, ‘“Décisions spéciales”: les enfants nés des viols allemands abandonnés à l’Assistance publique pendant la Grande Guerre (1914–1918)’, in Raphaëlle Branche and Fabrice Virgili (eds.), Viols en temps de guerre (Paris: Payot, 2011), pp. 189–205; Andrea Süchting-Hänger, ‘“Kindermörder”: Die Luftangriffe auf Paris, London und Karlsruhe im Ersten Weltkrieg und ihre vergessenen Opfer’, in Dittmar Dahlmann (ed.), Kinder und Jugendliche in Krieg und Revolution (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2000), pp. 73–92. In the Ottoman Empire, and in particular in Anatolia, children’s experience of violence is inseparably associated with their experience of the genocide. Several accounts have played an important role in our knowledge of the event as it was lived by children, and also in the memorialising of the massacre by the third or fourth generation: Fethiyé Cetin, Anneannem (2004), French edn: Le livre de ma grand-mère (Paris: Éditions de l’Aube, 2006); Ayse Gül Altinay and Fethiyé Cetin (eds.), Torunlar (Istanbul: Metis Yayinlari, 2009), French edn: Les petits-enfants (Arles: Actes Sud, 2011); Thea Halo, Not Even My Name: A True Story (New York: Picador, 2001).

To confront the violence of war is necessarily to confront the question of bereavement in all its forms. Several studies focus on bereavement and its aftermath in the post-war period: Olivier Faron, Les enfants du deuil: orphelins et pupilles de la nation de la Première Guerre mondiale (1914−1941) (Paris: La Découverte, 2001); Bruce C. Scates, ‘Imagining Anzac: children’s memories of the killing fields of the Great War’, in James Marten (ed.), Children and War: A Historical Anthology (New York University Press, 2002), pp. 50–62.

Last, two recent studies that attempt to examine the impact of the war on the adults-to-be of the children’s generation of 1914: Andrew Donson, ‘Why did German youth become fascists? Nationalist males born 1900 to 1908 in war and revolution’, Social History, 31 (2006), pp. 337–58; and Bérénice Zunino, ‘Pacifisme et violence: femmes et enfants dans la pédagogie de la paix d’Ernst Friedrich’, Les cahiers Irice, 8 (2011−12), pp. 111–36.

To write about families at war requires attention to a vast literature, touching on diverse themes in demographic, sociological, political, anthropological and literary history.

On the demographic history of the war, see the collective history of Paris, London and Berlin published in Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert (eds.), Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin, 1914–1919, 2 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1997−2007). For Britain and for comparative statistics, see Jay Winter, The Great War and the British People (London: Macmillan, 1985).

On the upheaval in family life, see Jay Winter and Richard Wall (eds.), The Upheaval of War: Family, Work and Welfare 1914–1918 (Cambridge University Press, 1987); Manon Pignot, Allons enfants de la patrie: génération Grande Guerre (Paris: Seuil, 2012); Benjamin Ziemann, War Experiences in Rural Germany 1914–1923, trans. Alex Skinner (Oxford: Berg, 2007); and Erica A. Kuhlman, Of Little Comfort: War Widows, Fallen Soldiers, and the Remaking of the Nation after the Great War (New York University Press, 2012)

For mourning practices, see Pat Jalland, Death in War and Peace: Loss and Grief in England, 1914–1970 (Oxford University Press, 2009); Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 1995); Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan (eds.), War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2000), chs. 2 and 11; and D. Cannadine, ‘War and death, grief and mourning in modern Britain’, in J. Whaley (ed.), Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death (London: Europa Press, 1981), pp. 187–242.

On the possibility that there was a crisis in patriarchy during the war, see Elizabeth Domansky, ‘Militarization and reproduction in World War I Germany’, in Geoff Eley (ed.), Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870–1930 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), and for the opposite view see Jay Winter, ‘War, family, and fertility in twentieth-century Europe’, in John R. Gillis, Louise A. Tilly and David Levine (eds.), The European Experience of Declining Fertility, 1850–1970 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 291–309.

On state policies to help children whose fathers died in the war, see Olivier Faron, Les enfants du deuil: orphelins et pupilles de la nation de la Première Guerre mondiale (1914–1941) (Paris: La Découverte, 2001), and Antoine Prost and Jay Winter, René Cassin et les droits de l’Homme: le projet d’une generation (Paris: Fayard, 2011), ch. 2.

On the insight of writers on the devastating effects of the war on their family lives, see Doris Lessing, Alfred and Emily (London: Fourth Estate, 2008), and the interview with Pat Barker by Kennedy Fraser, ‘Ghost writer’, New Yorker, 17 March 2008, pp. 41–5. An astonishing and unfinished account of family life lived in the shadow of the Great War is Albert Camus’s Le premier homme (Paris: Gallimard, 1995).

On the politics of the rescue of women and children in the aftermath of the Armenian genocide, see Keith David Watenpaugh, ‘The League of Nations’ rescue of Armenian genocide survivors and the making of modern humanitarianism, 1920–1927’, American Historical Review, 115:5 (2010), pp. 1315–39.

On letter-writing and codes of communication between soldiers and families, see Pignot, Allons enfants de la patrie, and Aribert Reimann, Der grosse Krieg der Sprachen: Untersuchungen zur historischen Semantik in Deutschland und England zur Zeit des Ersten Weltkriegs (Essen: Klartext, 2000).

The question of women’s war work has produced an extensive literature, one that is centred not only on the world of paid labour but on the various forms of unpaid work (nursing, ambulance-driving, charitable work, etc.) that women undertook in wartime. As recent historiography has stressed, those ill-paid or unpaid labours extended, in a time of total war, to the ever more burdensome work of raising – and more particularly feeding – a family.

On waged labour, you can begin with Gail Braybon, Women Workers in the First World War (London: Croom Helm, 1981); and Gail Braybon (ed.), Evidence, History and the Great War: Historians and the Impact of 1914–1918 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2003); Barbara Clements, Daughters of Revolution: A History of Women in the USSR (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1994); Joy Damousi and Marilyn Lake (eds.), Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1995); Ute Daniel, The War From Within: German Working-Class Women in the First World War (Oxford: Berg, 1997); Laura Lee Downs, Manufacturing Inequality: Gender Division in the French and British Metalworking Industries, 1914–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); and Laura Lee Downs, ‘Les marraines élues de la paix sociale? Les surintendantes d’usine et la rationalisation du travail en France, 1917–1935’, Le Mouvement social, 164 (1993), pp. 53–76; Mathilde Dubesset, Françoise Thébaud and Catherine Vincent, ‘The female munition workers of the Seine’, in Patrick Fridenson (ed.), The French Home Front 1914–1918 (Oxford: Berg, 1992); Jane McDermid and Anna Hillyar, Midwives of the Revolution: Female Bolsheviks and Women Workers in 1917 (Athens: University of Ohio Press, 1999); Françoise Thébaud, La femme au temps de la guerre de 14 (Paris: Stock, 1986); and Françoise Thébaud, ‘The Great War and the triumph of sexual division’, in Françoise Thébaud (ed.), A History of Women in the West, vol. v: Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Deborah Thom, Nice Girls and Rude Girls: Women Workers in World War One (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998); Angela Woollacott, On Her Their Lives Depend: Munitions Workers in the Great War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Luigi Tomassini, ‘Industrial mobilization and the labour market in Italy during the First World War’, Social History, 16:1 (1991), pp. 59–87; and Luigi Tomassini, ‘The home front in Italy’, in Hugh Cecil and Peter Liddle (eds.), Facing Armageddon: The First World War Experienced (London: Leo Cooper, 1996);

On various types of work, paid and unpaid, that were conceived as patriotic services, see Margaret Darrow, French Women and the First World War: War Stories from the Homefront (Providence, RI: Berg, 2000); and Margaret Darrow, ‘French volunteer nursing and the myth of war experience in World War I’, American Historical Review, 101:1 (1996), pp. 89–106; Henriette Donner, ‘Under the cross: why VADs performed the filthiest task in the dirtiest war: Red Cross volunteers, 1914–1918’, Journal of Social History, 30:3 (1997), pp. 687–704; Billie Melman (ed.), Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace, 1870–1930 (London: Routledge, 1998); Janet Watson, Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory and the First World War in Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2004); Benjamin Ziemann, War Experiences in Rural Germany, 1914–1923 (Oxford: Berg, 2007).

On the linked issues of domestic labour, consumption and social protest one can usefully consult Belinda Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Laura Lee Downs, ‘Women’s strikes and the politics of popular egalitarianism in France, 1916–1918’, in Lenard Berlanstein (ed.), Rethinking Labor History: Essays in Discourse and Class Analysis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Barbara Engel, ‘Not by bread alone: subsistence rioting in Russia during World War I’, Journal of Modern History, 69:4 (1997), pp. 696–721; Peter Gatrell, Russia’s First World War: A Social and Economic History (London: Longman, 2005); Maureen Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (Cambridge University Press, 2004); Daniel Kaiser, The Workers Revolution in Russia, 1917: The View from Below (Cambridge University Press, 1987); Daniel Kaiser, Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution (Princeton University Press, 1981); Diane Koenker and William Rosenberg, Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917 (Princeton University Press, 1989); Giovanna Procacci, ‘Popular protest and labour conflict in Italy, 1915–1918’, Social History, 14:1 (1989), pp. 31–58; Giovanna Procacci, ‘La protesta delle donne delle campagne in tempo di guerra’, Annali Cervi, 13 (1991), pp. 57–86; Stephen Anthony Smith, ‘Gender and class: women’s strikes in St Petersburg, 1895–1917, and Shanghai, 1895–1927’, Social History, 19:2 (1994), pp. 141–68; Richard Wall and Jay Winter (eds.), The Upheaval of War: Family, Work and Welfare in Europe, 1914–1918 (Cambridge University Press, 1988); Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert (eds.), Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin, 1914–1919, 2 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1997–2007).

On the gendered politics of social welfare and social control, see Gisela Bock, ‘Poverty and mothers’ rights in the emerging welfare states’, in Françoise Thébaud (ed.), A History of Women: Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Elizabeth Domanksy, ‘Militarization and reproduction in World War I Germany’, in Geoff Eley (ed.), Society, Culture and the State in Germany, 1870–1930 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); R. M. Douglas, Feminist Freikorps: The British Voluntary Women Police 1914–1940 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999); Susan Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Susan Grayzel, ‘Liberating women? Examining gender, morality and sexuality in First World War Britain and France’, in Gail Braybon (ed.), Evidence, History and the Great War: Historians and the Impact of 1914–1918 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2003); Philippa Levine, ‘“Walking the streets in a way no decent woman should”: women police in World War I’, Journal of Modern History, 66 (1994), pp. 34–78; Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 1993); Nancy Christie, Engendering the State: Family, Work and Welfare in Canada (University of Toronto, 2000); Young-Sun Hong, ‘World War I and the German welfare state: gender, religion and the paradoxes of modernity’, in Geoff Eley (ed.), Society, Culture and the State in Germany, 1870–1930 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996).

There is an ever growing body of literature that addresses the experiences of women and, to a much lesser extent, men beyond the official battle zones. The following are good starting points, but by no means stopping points, for those wishing to learn more.

For a general overview of civilians as such, see Tammy M. Proctor, Civilians in a World At War (New York University Press, 2011); for family and domestic life, see Catherine Rollet, ‘The home and family life’, in Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert (eds.), Capital Cities At War: Paris, London, Berlin, 1914–1919, vol. ii: A Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 333–5, and Richard Wall and Jay Winter (eds.), The Upheaval of War: Family, Work, and Welfare in Europe, 1914–1918 (Cambridge University Press, 1988).

For an introduction to women’s experiences, see Susan R. Grayzel, Women and the First World War (Harlow: Longman, 2002); and the wonderful collection of primary sources found in Margaret R. Higonnet, (ed.), Lines of Fire: Women Writers of World War I (New York: Plume, 1999). For men and women, see the essays in Gail Braybon (ed.) Evidence, History and the Great War: Historians and the Impact of 1914–1918 (Oxford: Berg, 2003); Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann and John Tosh (eds.), Masculinities in War and Peace: Gendering Modern History (Manchester University Press, 2004); and Margaret R. Higonnet et al. (eds.), Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987).

For specific case studies on a country-by-country basis, see, for Australia, Bruce Scates and Raelene Frances Scates, Women and the Great War (Cambridge University Press, 1997). For Austria-Hungary, Maureen Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Marsha L. Rozenblit, ‘For fatherland and Jewish people: Jewish women in Austria during World War I’, in Frans Coetzee and Marilyn Shevin-Coetzee (eds.), Authority, Identity, and the Social History of the Great War (Providence, RI: Berghahn, 1995). For France, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, L’enfant de l’ennemi: 1914–1918 (Paris: Aubier, 1995); Annette Becker, Oubliés de la Grande Guerre: humanitaire et culture de guerre (Paris: Noesis, 1998); Margaret H. Darrow, French Women and the First World War: War Stories of the Home Front (Oxford: Berg, 2000); Martha Hanna, Your Death Would Be Mine: Paul and Marie Pireaud in the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Ruth Harris, ‘The “child of the barbarian”: rape, race and nationalism in France during the First World War’, Past and Present, 141 (October 1993), pp. 170–206; Helen McPhail, The Long Silence: Civilian Life under the German Occupation of Northern France, 1914–1918 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1999); and Françoise Thébaud, La femme au temps de la guerre de 14 (Paris: Stock, 1986). For Great Britain, see the comparative studies of Laura Lee Downs, Manufacturing Inequality: Gender Division in the French and British Metalworking Industries, 1914–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Susan R. Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); and Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence and the Origins of the Welfare State in Britain and France (Cambridge University Press, 1993); as well as Johanna Alberti, Beyond Suffrage: Feminists in War and Peace, 1914–28 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989); Nicoletta F. Gullace, ‘The Blood of Our Sons’: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship during the Great War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Jessica Meyer, Men of War: Masculinity and the First World War in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Michael Roper, The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester University Press, 2009); and Janet S. K. Watson, Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory and the First World War in Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2004). For Germany, Ute Daniel, The War from Within: German Working-Class Women in the First World War, trans. Margaret Ries (Oxford: Berg, 1997); Belinda Davis, Homes Fires Burning: Food, Politics and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Elizabeth Domansky, ‘Militarization and reproduction in World War I Germany’, and Young-Sun Hong, ‘World War I and the German welfare state: gender, religion, and the paradoxes of modernity’, both in Geoff Eley (ed.), Society, Culture and the State in Germany, 1870–1930 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). For Italy, Allison Scardino Belzer, Women and the Great War: Femininity under Fire in Italy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). For Russia, Barbara Alpern Engel, ‘Not by bread alone: subsistence riots in Russia during World War I’, Journal of Modern History, 69 (1997), pp. 696–721; Peter Gattrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during the First World War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). For other parts of Eastern Europe including Romania and Serbia, see Maria Bucur, ‘Between the mother of the wounded and the Virgin of Jiu: Romanian women and the gender of heroism during the Great War’, Journal of Women’s History, 12:2 (2000), pp. 30–56; Jovana Knezevic, ‘Prostitutes as a threat to national honor in Habsburg-occupied Serbia during the Great War’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 20:2 (2011), pp. 312–35; and essays in Nancy M. Wingfield and Maria Bucur (eds.), Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). For the United States, Lottie Gavin, American Women in World War I: They Also Served (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1997); Kimberly Jensen, Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008); Kathleen Kennedy, Disloyal Mothers and Scurrilous Citizens: Women and Subversion during World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).

For works that treat the political aspects of wartime domestic life, including aid for women and children, the role of women’s organisations, and the struggle for women’s suffrage, see Ann Taylor Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Western Europe, 1890–1970: The Maternal Dilemma (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Birgitta Bader-Zaar, ‘Women’s suffrage and war: World War I and political reform in a comparative perspective’, in Irma Sulkunen, Seija-Leena Nevala-Nurmi and Pirjo Markkola (eds.), Suffrage, Gender and Citizenship: International Perspectives on Parliamentary Reforms (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009); Gisela Bock and Pat Thane (eds.), Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States 1880s−1950s (London: Routledge, 1991); Alison S. Fell and Ingrid Sharp (eds.), The Women’s Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives, 1914–1919 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and Karen Offen, European Feminisms, 1700–1950: A Political History (Stanford University Press, 2000).

For works on gender and anti-militarist action at home during the war, see Frances H. Early, World without War: How US Feminists and Pacifists Resisted World War I (Syracuse University Press, 1997); Jill Liddington, The Long Road to Greenham: Feminism and Anti-Militarism in Britain since 1820 (London: Virago, 1989); David S. Patterson, The Search for Negotiated Peace: Women’s Activism and Citizen Diplomacy in World War I (New York: Routledge, 2008); and Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton University Press, 1997).

Finally, for differing assessments of gendered post-war legacies, see Françoise Thébaud, ‘The Great War and the triumph of sexual division’, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, in Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot (eds.), A History of Women: Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1994), pp. 21–75; Joy Damousi, The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia (Cambridge University Press, 1999); Susan Kingsley Kent, Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain (Princeton University Press, 1993); Erika A. Kuhlman, Of Little Comfort: War Widows, Fallen Soldiers, and the Remaking of the Nation after the Great War (New York University Press, 2012); and Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization without Sexes: The Reconstruction of Gender in Postwar France (University of Chicago Press, 1994).

Studies of women as nurses and auxiliaries were already appearing during the war, sometimes as chapters within the wider topic of women’s work. Jules Combarieu, for example, devoted a chapter to nurses who had won medals of honour in Les jeunes filles françaises et la Guerre (Paris: Colin, 1916). Thekla Bowser’s The Story of British V.A.D. Work in the Great War (London: Imperial War Museum, 2003; 1st edn 1917) included chapters on VAD service during air raids, in French hospitals in the ‘zone of the armies’, and in Serbia and India. German women leaders likewise reported on women’s nursing and auxiliary work: on this subject, see Marie Elisabeth Lüders, ‘Frauenarbeit in der Etappe und im besetzten Gebiet’, Deutscher Tagesanzeiger, 28 August 1918.

Immediately following the war, Eva Shaw McLaren celebrated Elsie Inglis’s work by editing A History of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1919). The Scottish Women’s Hospitals, which sent a large number of women doctors to the front lines during the war, have continued to generate detailed studies: the French part of the story is told in Eileen Crofton, The Women of Royaumont: A Scottish Women’s Hospital on the Western Front (East Linton, East Lothian: Tuckwell Press, 1997); a collage of voices from the Eastern Front was put together by Audrey Fawcett Cahill (ed.), Between the Lines: Letters and Diaries from Elsie Inglis’s Russian Unit (Edinburgh: Pentland, 1999); and Monica Krippner focuses on Serbia in The Quality of Mercy: Women at War, Serbia 1915–18 (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1980). Leah Leneman surveys medical women’s work, with an emphasis on doctors, in ‘Medical women at war, 1914–1918’, Medical History, 38 (1994), pp. 160–77. A broad range of approaches to the history of British nursing in this period is provided in Christine Hallett and Alison Fell (eds.), First World War Nursing: New Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2013).

Lucy Noakes traces the struggle to establish auxiliary services in Britain in Women in the British Army: War and the Gentle Sex, 1907–1948 (London: Routledge, 2006). British auxiliaries and the controversies over their mobilisation are also discussed by Diana Shaw, ‘The forgotten army of women: Queen Mary’s Army Auxiliary Corps’, in Hugh Cecil and Peter Liddle (eds.), Facing Armageddon: The First World War Experienced (London: Leo Cooper, 1996), pp. 365–79; Jenny M. Gould, ‘Women’s military service in First World War Britain’, in Margaret R. Higonnet et al., Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987); and Krisztina Robert, ‘Gender, class and patriotism: women’s paramilitary units in First World War Britain’, International History Review, 19:1 (1997), pp. 52–65.

For Australian medical staff, recent work includes Ruth Rae, Veiled Lives: Threading Australian Nursing History into the Fabric of the First World War (Burward, NSW: College of Nursing, 2009), and Kirsty Harris, More than Bombs and Bandages: Australian Army Nurses at Work in World War I (Newport, NSW: Big Sky, 2010). Irish nursing is addressed in Yvonne McEwen, ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’: British and Irish Nurses in the Great War (Dunfermline: Cualann Press, 2006).

Modern historians of wartime French nursing include Françoise Thébaud, La femme au temps de la guerre de 14 (Paris: Stock, 1986), a general book that set the groundwork for subsequent studies; Margaret H. Darrow included a sophisticated chapter on nursing in French Women and the First World War: War Stories of the Home Front (Oxford: Berg, 2000); Yvonne Knibiehler, who set war nursing into the context of a century of change in Cornettes et blouses blanches: les infirmières dans la société française 1880–1980 (Paris: Hachette, 1984), focused on the war in ‘Les anges blancs: naissance difficile d’une profession féminine’, in Évelyne Morin-Rotureau (ed.), 1914–1918: Combats de femmes − les femmes, pilier de l’effort de guerre (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 2004), pp. 47–63.

A helpful early German sourcebook containing reminiscences and excerpts from the diaries of many nurses is Elfriede von Pflugk-Harttung (ed.), Frontschwestern, ein deutsches Ehrenbuch (Berlin: Bernard & Graefe, 1936). Useful data on the history of German nurses and auxiliaries appears in Ursula von Gersdorff’s Frauen im Kriegsdienst 1914–1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1969). One of the few critical studies of attitudes governing the history of nurses is Regina Schulte, ‘The sick warrior’s sister: nursing during the First World War’, trans. Pamela Selwyn, in Lynn Abrams and Elizabeth Harvey (eds.), Gender Relations in German History: Power, Agency, and Experience in the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (London: UCL Press, 1996). The conflict between uniformed nurses and salaried auxiliaries not in uniform is laid out by Regina Bianca Schönberger, ‘Motherly heroines and adventurous girls’, in Karen Hagemann and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum (eds.), Home/Front: The Military, War, and Gender in Twentieth-Century Germany (New York: Berg, 2002), pp. 87–114.

Several studies have been devoted to Italian women’s medical service, starting with Italy’s entry into the war in 1915: Stefania Bartoloni, Italiane alla guerra: l’assistenza ai feriti 1915–1918 (Venice: Marsilio, 2003), presents military nursing, hospital trains and front-line first aid, together with an overview of diaries and memoirs, many of which recount work at the front. Nurses’ work at the front is also the focus of her earlier collection, Stefania Bartoloni (ed.), Donne al fronte: le infermiere volontarie nella grande guerra (Naples: Jouvence, 1998). The record left by nurses is well laid out by Allison Scardino Belzer, Women and the Great War: Femininity under Fire in Italy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

The American story begins before the country’s entry into the war, as shown in the wide-ranging history by Dorothy and Carl J. Schneider, Into the Breach: American Women Overseas in World War I (New York: Viking 1991). From 1917 onwards, the creation of national service organisations to mobilise army nurses as well as other volunteer groups and auxiliaries is traced by Susan Zeiger, In Uncle Sam’s Service: Women Workers with the American Expeditionary Forces, 1917–1919 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). Chapters on medical organisations and relief organisations also figure in Kimberly Jensen, Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008).

Eastern European women’s contributions are an understudied field, but there are a few focused accounts such as Maria Bucur, ‘Women’s stories as sites of memory: gender and remembering Romania’s world wars’, in Nancy M. Wingfield and Maria Bucur (eds.), Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), pp. 171–92; and Maria Bucur-Deckard, ‘Remembering the Great War through autobiographical narratives’, in Maria Bucur (ed.), Heroes and Victims: Remembering War in Twentieth-Century Romania (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), pp. 73–97.

Serious studies of women soldiers are inevitably focused on the Eastern Front: Richard Stites and Ann Eliot Griese, ‘Russia: revolution and war’, in Nancy Loring Goldman (ed.), Female Soldiers – Combatants or Noncombatants? Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1982); Melissa K. Stockdale, ‘“My death for the motherland is happiness”: women, patriotism, and soldiering in Russia’s Great War, 1914–1917’, American Historical Review, 109:1 (2004), pp. 78–116; and especially useful for the ample documentation, testimony from the period, and attention to the controversial image of the soldier is Laurie S. Stoff, They Fought for the Motherland: Russia’s Women Soldiers in World War I and the Revolution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006).

A bibliography of gender and combat is necessarily narrower than one about gender and war more broadly defined. This selective bibliography is only representative of a much larger literature and does not claim to be comprehensive.

For a useful overview about the relationship between gender and combat, including valuable theoretical summaries, Joshua Goldstein’s War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge University Press, 2001) remains the best single-volume text. An excellent overview of some of the historiographical controversies is provided by Jay Winter and Antoine Prost in Penser la Grande Guerre (Paris: Seuil, 2004), published in English as The Great War in History: Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

The socialisation to violence is addressed in a number of monographs. In the British context, helpful accounts can be found in Heather Streets, Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–1914 (Manchester University Press, 2004); and Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire, and the Imagining of Masculinities (London: Routledge, 1994). Andrew Donson’s Youth in the Fatherless Land: War Pedagogy, Nationalism, and Authority in Germany, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010) offers a particularly insightful account of the specificity of historical processes of socialisation. Donson argues that the war accentuated gender roles, and he also traces the complex ways in which German boys and girls were socialised into violence in ways that differed from elsewhere in Europe.

Two interesting volumes that problematise the home/military front dichotomy are Susan R. Grayzel’s Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), and Karen Hagemann and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum’s edited volume Heimat-Front, (Frankfurt: Campus Publishers, 2002), published in English as Home/Front: The Military, War and Gender in Twentieth Century Germany (Oxford: Berg, 2002).

Most monographs focus on the gendered experience of combat in one nation-state. A particularly rich history exists in the context of the Soviet Union, where women served in combat both as individuals in general units and in all-female combat units. One example is Laurie S. Stoff, They Fought for the Motherland: Russia’s Women Soldiers in World War I and the Revolution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006). In the British context, Lucy Noakes’s Women in the British Army: War and the Gentle Sex, 1908–1948 (London: Routledge, 2006) deals with the tensions between the desire by many women to be accepted within the army and the anxieties of British officers and politicians. Jessica Meyer, Men of War: Masculinity and the First World War in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), provides a nuanced account focusing on British masculinities, as does Janet S. K. Watson, Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2004). For a book that spans the twentieth century, Angela K. Smith’s edited volume, Gender and Warfare in the Twentieth Century: Textual Representations (Manchester University Press, 2004), provides a gendered analysis based on literary texts. Masculinity and femininity in twentieth-century wars are the theme of Joy Damousi and Marilyn Lake’s edited volume Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1995). For a unique account based on the experience of men and women in the north of Ireland, see Jane G. V. McGaughey, Ulster’s Men: Protestant Unionist Masculinities and Militarization in the North of Ireland, 1912–1923 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012). Ethnic and racial tensions are also explored in books such as Mark Whelan’s The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008), in which he argues that African American servicemen forged an image of the ‘New Negro’, which fused martial heroism with patriarchal gentility and authority.

A more comparative approach is taken by Susan R. Grayzel in Women and the First World War (Harlow: Longman, 2002) (she focuses primarily on Europe and its colonies, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, but she also explores the global dimension in the contexts of Japanese, Indian and African societies) and Nancy M. Wingfield and Maria Bucur’s edited volume Gender and War in Twentieth Century Eastern Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). Imperial masculinities at war are the focus of Santanu Das’s edited volume Race, Empire and First World War Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2011), which explores gender and race in the context of China, Vietnam, India, Africa, France, Belgium, Germany, the Ottoman Empire, Jamaica, Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand.

Masculinity and trauma are perceptively analysed by Eric J. Leed in his pioneering No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge University Press, 1979). This is also a theme in Joanna Bourke’s two volumes about American and British experiences of combat: Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain, and the Great War (London: Reaktion Press, 1996) and An Intimate History of Killing: Face to Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare (London: Granta, 1999). The relationship between masculinity and sexual violence is explored by Joanna Bourke in Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present (London: Virago, 1999). Ana Carden-Coyne’s Reconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism and the First World War (Oxford University Press, 2009) provides a carefully crafted argument about masculinity, mutilation and reconstructing masculinities during and immediately after the war, as do Julie Anderson’s War Disability and Rehabilitation in Britain: ‘Soul of a Nation’ (Manchester University Press, 2011) and Deborah Cohen’s The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). In The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester University Press, 2009), Michael Roper makes a strong argument for the role of families in the emotional survival of combatants. In the French context, Leonard V. Smith’s The Embattled Self: French Soldiers’ Testimony of the Great War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007) explores men’s initiation into combat, death and killing, and survival. For a comparative British−German perspective, see Alexander Watson, Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale, and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914–1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

For general comments and the point of view of activists, see Herman Folks, The Human Costs of War (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1920), and Ruth Fry, A Quaker Adventure: The Story of Nine Years’ Relief and Reconstruction (London: Nisbet, 1926). A classic packed with data compiled from numerous sources is Eugene M. Kulischer, Europe on the Move: War and Population Changes, 1917–1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948). For an anthropological work of great insight, see Liisa Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago University Press, 1995). Annette Becker, Oubliés de la Grande Guerre: humanitaire et culture de guerre 1914–1918, populations occupées, déportés civils, prisonniers de guerre (Paris: Noesis, 1998), is a pioneering work including the history of refugees. Philippe Nivet, Les réfugiés français de la Grande Guerre, ‘les Boches du Nord’ (Paris: Economica, 2004), throws much light on the Western Front.

A fine synthesis on the history of Belgian war refugees is available in Michael Amara, Des Belges à l’épreuve de l’exil: les réfugiés de la Première Guerre mondiale, France, Grande-Bretagne, Pays-Bas (Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2008). For the chaos produced by occupation and displacement in Belgium, see Sophie de Schaepdrijver, La Belgique et la Première Guerre mondiale (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2004). An important work on administrative arrangements concerning Belgian refugees is Peter Cahalan, Belgian Refugee Relief in England during the Great War (New York: Garland, 1982). See also Tony Kushner, ‘Local heroes: Belgian refugees in Britain during the First World War’, Immigrants and Minorities, 18 (1999), pp. 1–28. For problems on the Allied side, see Pierre Purseigle, ‘“A wave on to our shores”: the exile and resettlement of refugees from the Western Front, 1914–1918’, Contemporary European History, 16 (2007), pp. 427–44, and for the flight of refugees to the Netherlands, see Evelyn de Roodt, Oorlogsgasten: Vluchtelingen en krijgsgevangenen in Nederland tijdens de Eerste Wereldoorlog (Zaltbommel: Europese Bibliotheek, 2000).

For material on various aspects of the aftermath of the war in Eastern Europe, consult Nick P. Baron and Peter Gatrell (eds.), Homelands: War, Population and Statehood in the Former Russian Empire, 1918–1924 (London: Anthem Books, 2004). There is much of general interest in Mark Levene, ‘The tragedy of the rimlands: nation-state formation and the destruction of imperial peoples, 1912–48’, in Panikos Panayi and Pippa Virdee (eds.), Refugees and the End of Empire: Imperial Collapse and Forced Migration in the Twentieth Century (Houndmills: Macmillan, 2011), pp. 51–78, and in Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity, and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge University Press, 2001), which is an original interpretation of population and cultural politics in the Baltic region.

For scholarship on Italian refugees displaced in Austria and Italy, see Bruna Bianchi (ed.), La violenza contro la popolazione civile nella Grande Guerra, deportati, profughi, internati (Milan: Edizioni Unicopli, 2006), as well as Matteo Ermacora, ‘Assistance and surveillance: war refugees in Italy, 1914–1918’, Contemporary European History, 16 (2007), pp. 445–60.

On Austria, see David Rechter, ‘Galicia in Vienna: Jewish refugees in the First World War’, Austrian History Yearbook, 28 (1997), pp. 113–30, and Marsha L. Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). The latter is an informative monograph on a neglected topic.

The first attempt at a comprehensive history of population displacement in tsarist Russia is Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). See also his essay, Peter Gatrell, ‘World wars and population displacement in Europe in the twentieth century’, Contemporary European History, 16 (2007), pp. 415–26, as well as Joshua A. Sanborn, ‘Unsettling the empire: violent migrations and social disaster in Russia during World War I’, Journal of Modern History, 77 (2005), pp. 290–324. For Russian scholarship, see A. Kirzhnits, ‘Bezhenstvo’, in Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia (Moscow: izdatel’stvo sovetskogo entsiklopediia, 1926), vol. v, cols. 176–8; A. N. Kurtsev, ‘Bezhentsy pervoi mirovoi voiny v Rossii’, Voprosy istorii, 8 (1999), pp. 98–113; and S. G. Nelipovich, ‘V poiskakh “vnutrennego vraga”: deportatsionnaia politika Rossii 1914–1915’, in A. Kruchinin (ed.), Pervaia mirovaia voina i uchastie v nei Rossii 1914–1918 (Moscow: Gotika, 1994), vol. i, pp. 51–64. See also the important studies of tsarist policy and its consequences by Eric Lohr, ‘The Russian army and the Jews: mass deportations, hostages, and violence during World War I’, Russian Review, 60 (2001), pp. 404–19; and Eric Lohr, Nationalising the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). On the zemstvos, see Olga Pichon-Bobrinskoy, ‘Action publique, action humanitaire pendant le premier conflit mondial: les zemstvos et les municipalités’, Cahiers du Monde russe, 46 (2005), pp. 673–98, and the much older Tikhon Polner, Russian Local Government during the War and the Union of Zemstvos (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1930). For a first-person account, see Violetta Thurstan, The People who Run: Being the Tragedy of the Refugees in Russia (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1916). For Jewish life in this turbulent period, see Steven J. Zipperstein, ‘The politics of relief: the transformation of Russian Jewish communal life during the First World War’, Studies in Contemporary Jewry, 4 (1988), pp. 22–40. On the Ukraine, see the first study available on refugees: Lubov M. Zhvanko, Bizhenstvo pershoi svitovoi viini v Ukraini, 1914–1918rr: dokumenti i materiali (Kharkov: KhNAMG, 2010).

On the origins of ethnic cleansing in this period, see T. Hunt Tooley, ‘World War I and the emergence of ethnic cleansing in Europe’, in Steven B. Várdy and T. Hunt Tooley (eds.), Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 2003), pp. 63–97.

On the Armenian genocide, see Leshu Torchin, ‘Ravished Armenia: visual media, humanitarian advocacy and the formation of witnessing publics’, American Anthropologist, 108 (2006), pp. 214–20, and Uğur Ümit Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–50 (Oxford University Press, 2011). This is an outstanding study of population displacement including the fate of Armenians in the final years of the Ottoman Empire. For some useful data, and some controversial interpretations, see Justin McCarthy, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims 1821–1922 (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1995). On the post-genocide rescue of forced converts, see Keith Watenpaugh, ‘The League of Nations’ rescue of Armenian genocide survivors and the making of modern humanitarianism, 1920–1927’, American Historical Review, 115:5 (2010), pp. 1315–39.

On Serbia, see Muriel Paget, With our Serbian Allies (London: Serbian Relief Fund, 1915), and Andrej Mitrović, Serbia’s Great War 1914–1918 (London: Hurst, 2007). For a first-person account, see M. I. Tatham, ‘The great retreat in Serbia in 1915’, in C. B. Purdom (ed.), Everyman at War: Sixty Personal Narratives of the War (London: Dent, 1930), pp. 374–9.

Despite the emergence of the minorities question at the end of the Great War and its significance in the history of interwar Europe, we do not yet have a synthesis of the history of ethnic groups during the conflict, especially one that compares immigrants, dispersed groups and localised populations. This means that we need to piece together the experiences of minorities as a whole by utilising work on individual nation-states, which has emerged in recent decades. A starting point for the treatment of outsiders in both world wars on a global scale is Panikos Panayi (ed.), Minorities in Wartime: National and Racial Groupings in Europe, North America and Australia during the Two World Wars (Oxford: Berg, 1993). For a broader theoretical perspective, see Anthony D. Smith, ‘War and ethnicity: the role of warfare in the formation, self-images and cohesion of ethnic communities’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 4 (1981), pp. 375−97.

Much work has recently emerged on the treatment of German minorities. The pioneer in this area was Frederick C. Luebke, who published two important works: Bonds of Loyalty: German Americans and World War I (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974) and Germans in Brazil: A Comparative History of Cultural Conflict during World War I (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987). For issues of loyalty in the USA more generally during the Great War, see Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (Oxford University Press, 2010). Much work has surfaced on the position of Germans in Britain during the Great War, including J. C. Bird, Control of Enemy Alien Civilians in Great Britain, 1914–1918 (London: Garland, 1986); Panikos Panayi, The Enemy in our Midst: Germans in Britain during the First World War (Oxford: Berg, 1991); Thomas Boghardt, Spies of the Kaiser: German Covert Operations in Great Britain during the First World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Nicoletta F. Gullace, ‘Friends, aliens and enemies: fictive communities and the Lusitania riots of 1915’, Journal of Social History, 39 (2005), pp. 345−67; Stefan Manz, Migranten und Internierte: Deutsche in Glasgow, 1864–1918 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2003); and Panikos Panayi, Prisoners of Britain: German Civilian and Combatant Internees during the First World War (Manchester University Press, 2012). Several scholars have also tackled the position of Germans in the British Empire, notably Gerhard Fischer, Enemy Aliens: Internment and the Home-Front Experience in Australia, 1914–1920 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1989); and Andrew Francis, ‘To Be Truly British We Must be Anti-German’: New Zealand, Enemy Aliens and the Great War Experience (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012). Beyond the English-speaking world we can also point to a series of volumes that have dealt with the position of Germans in Russia, above all Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). In addition, Dittmar Dahlmann and Ralph Tuchtenhagen (eds.), Zwischen Reform und Revolution: Die Deutschen an der Volga (Essen: Klartext, 1994), and Victor Dönninghaus, Die Deutschen in der Moskauer Gesellschaft: Symbiose und Konflikte (1494–1941) (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2002), contain important sections on the First World War. Daniela Luigia Caglioti, Vite parallele: una minoranza protestante nell’Italia dell’Ottocento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2006), covers the Great War experience of the Germans in Italy. As a ‘reverse’ study, Matthew Stibbe, British Civilian Internees in Germany: The Ruhleben Camp, 1914–18 (Manchester University Press, 2008), provides an excellent account of the position of an Allied minority in Germany.

Since the pioneering efforts of Vahakn Dadrian in particular, the Armenian genocide has increasingly moved to the centre of scholarly interest. Dadrian’s The History of the Armenian Genocide (Oxford: Berghahn, 1995) sums up much of his work. Other key volumes include Richard G. Hovannisian (ed.), The Armenian Genocide: History, Policy, Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1992); Taner Akçam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (London: Constable, 2000); Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford University Press, 2005); and Raymond Kevorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011).

Justin McCarthy, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922 (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1996), deals with the consequences of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire for Muslims. Key works on the population exchange between Greece and Turkey following the end of the war include Bruce Clark, Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey (London: Granta, 2007); and Dimitri Pentzopoulos, The Balkan Exchange of Minorities and its Impact on Greece (London: Hurst, 2002). Renee Hirschon (ed.), Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey (Oxford: Berghahn, 2003), sums up much of the most important research on this theme.

There is no one study that covers the European-wide experience of Jews during the Great War, although David Vital, A People Apart: The Jews of Europe 1789–1934 (Oxford University Press, 1999), deals with the key themes. Both German and Austrian Jews have received attention in recent decades. For the former see, for example, Egmont Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik und die Juden im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1969); Derek Penslar, ‘The German-Jewish soldier: from participant to victim’, German History, 29 (2011), pp. 423−44; and Tim Grady, The German-Jewish Soldiers of the First World War in History and Memory (Liverpool University Press, 2011). For Austria, see David Rechter, The Jews of Vienna and the First World War (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2001); and Marsha L. Rozenblit, ‘Sustaining Austrian “national” identity in crisis: the dilemma of Jews in Habsburg Austria, 1914–1919’, in Pieter M. Judson and Marsha L. Rozenblit (eds.), Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe (Oxford: Berghahn, 2005). Works that cover the Jewish experience in Russia include Mark Levene, ‘Frontiers of genocide: Jews in the eastern war zones, 1914–1920 and 1941’, in Panikos Panayi (ed.), Minorities in Wartime: National and Racial Groupings in Europe, North America and Australia during the Two World Wars (Oxford: Berg, 1993); and Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, Jews in the Russian Army, 1827–1917: Drafted into Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Both of these offer excellent insights. The leading work on French Jewry during the Great War is Philippe E. Landau, Les Juifs de France et la Grande Guerre: un patriotisme républicain (Paris, CNRS Éditions, 1999). Colin Holmes, Anti-Semitism in British Society, 1876–1939 (London: Edward Arnold, 1979), contains an important chapter on the First World War.

Major volumes on the collapse of Austria-Hungary and the emergence of nationalism and successor states include Leo Valiani, The End of Austria-Hungary (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1973); Alan Sked, The Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire, 1815–1918 (London: Longman, 1989); and Mark Cornwall (ed.), The Last Years of Austria-Hungary (Exeter University Press, 1990). Benno Gammerl, Untertanen, Staatsbürger und Andere: Der Umgang mit ethnischer Heteronität im Britischen Weltreich und im Habsburgreich 1867–1918 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), offers a comparative analysis of nationality in the Habsburg and British empires.

A starting point for Irish experiences, and the position of a variety of ethnic groups in Britain, is Catriona Pennell, A Kingdom United: Popular Responses to the Outbreak of the First World War in Britain and Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2012). David Fitzpatrick in particular has dealt with Ireland in works that include David Fitzpatrick (ed.), Ireland in the First World War (Dublin: Trinity History Workshop, 1986); ‘The logic of collective sacrifice: Ireland and the British army, 1914–1918’, Historical Journal, 38 (1995), pp. 1017−30; and The Two Irelands, 1912–1939 (Oxford University Press, 1998). See also Karen Stanbridge, ‘Nationalism, international factors and the “Irish question” in the era of the First World War’, Nations and Nationalism, 11 (2005), pp. 21−42; and Richard S. Grayson, Belfast Boys: How Unionists and Nationalists Fought and Died Together in the First World War (London: Continuum, 2009).

Much work has recently emerged on the recruitment of foreign workers and troops during the Great War. As a starting point see the excellent overview provided by Christian Koller, ‘The recruitment of colonial troops in Africa and Asia and their employment in Europe during the First World War’, Immigrants and Minorities, 26 (2008), pp. 111−33. Germany has received much coverage, including Friedrich Zunkel, ‘Die ausländischen Arbeiter in der deutschen Kriegswirtschaftspolitik des I. Weltkrieges’, in Gerhard A. Ritter (ed.), Entstehung und Wandel der modernen Gesellschaft: Festschrift für Hans Rosenberg zum 65. Geburtstag (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1970); and Jochen Oltmer, ‘Zwangsmigration and Zwangsarbeit – Ausländische Arbeitskräfte und bäuerliche Ökonomie im Deutschland des Ersten Weltkrieges’, Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte, 27 (1998), pp. 135−68. There is also an excellent chapter on the Great War in Ulrich Herbert, A History of Foreign Labour in Germany, 1880–1980: Seasonal Workers/Forced Laborers/Guest Workers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990). For France, see two outstanding articles: John Horne, ‘Immigrant workers in France during World War One’, French Historical Studies, 14 (1985), pp. 57−88; and Tyler Stovall, ‘The color line behind the lines: racial violence in France during the Great War’, American Historical Review, 103 (1998), pp. 737−69. The best volume on Britain remains Peter Cahalan, Belgian Refugee Relief in England during the Great War (New York: Garland, 1982), which covers a group that provided an important source of labour.

There is as yet no synthesis of European military occupations during the First World War. Sophie De Schaepdrijver (ed.), ‘Military occupations in First World War Europe’, special issue of the journal First World War Studies, 4:1 (2013), assembles contributions on northern France, Belgium, German-occupied Poland, Serbia, Romania and Ukraine, as well as on forced labour in the West and the East. Reinhold Zilch’s Okkupation und Währung im Ersten Weltkrieg: Die Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Belgien und Russisch-Polen, 1914–1918 (Goldbach: Keip, 1994) is a rare comparative work, offering a close analysis of exploitation through currency manipulation. A framework to interpret Germany’s occupations, specifically in the West, is suggested in Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). ‘Caught between the lines’, ch. 4 of Tammy M. Proctor’s Civilians in a World at War, 1914–1918 (New York University Press, 2010), makes good use of private diaries written by civilians under military occupation. The chapters on Romania and Belgium in Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites (eds.), European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment, and Propaganda, 1914–1918 (Cambridge University Press, 1999), are still useful. Of particular interest is Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius’s synthesis on ‘German-occupied Eastern Europe’, in John Horne (ed.), A Companion to World War I (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 447–63; see also Dennis Showalter, ‘“The East gives nothing back”: the Great War and the German army in Russia’, Journal of the Historical Society, 2:1 (2002), pp. 1–19.

Research on the German occupation of France has enjoyed a revival, with recent work by Annette Becker, Les cicatrices rouges 14–18: France et Belgique occupées (Paris: Fayard, 2010), and Philippe Nivet, La France occupée 1914–1918 (Paris: A. Colin, 2011). See also James Connolly, ‘Encountering Germany: Northern France and the Experience of Occupation during the First World War’ (PhD thesis, King’s College London, 2012), and Larissa Wegner, ‘Deutsche Kriegsbesetzung in Nordfrankreich 1914−1918’ (PhD thesis, Universität Freiburg, in progress): the latter offers a rare view of the German perspective. For Belgium, research has further developed since the publication of Sophie De Schaepdrijver, La Belgique et la Première Guerre mondiale (Amsterdam: Atlas, 1997; Frankfurt: P.I.E.−Peter Lang, 2004); there is an overview in Sophie de Schaepdrijver, ‘Belgium’, in John Horne (ed.), A Companion to World War I (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 386–402. Michael Amara and Hubert Roland have superbly edited the reports by the head of the political department of the Government-General in Belgium, Gouverner en Belgique occupée: Oscar von der Lancken-Wakenitz – Rapports d’activité 1915–1918. Édition critique (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2004). Regarding governance and local authorities, see also Benoît Majerus, Occupations et logiques policières: la police bruxelloise en 1914–1918 et 1940–1945 (Brussels: Académie Royale de Belgique, 2007). Great strides have been made in the scholarship on resistance, specifically secret intelligence, including its cultural impact: Laurence van Ypersele and Emmanuel Debruyne, De la guerre de l’ombre aux ombres de la guerre: l’espionnage en Belgique durant la guerre 1914–1918. Histoire et mémoire (Brussels: Labor, 2004); Emmanuel Debruyne and Jehanne Paternostre, La résistance au quotidien 1914–1918: témoignages inédits (Brussels: Racine, 2009); Emmanuel Debruyne and Laurence van Ypersele, Je serai fusillé demain: les dernières lettres des patriotes belges et français fusillés par l’occupant 1914–1918 (Brussels: Racine, 2011); Jan Van der Fraenen and Pieter-Jan Lachaert, Spioneren voor het vaderland: de memoires van Evarist De Geyter 1914–1918 (Kortrijk: Groeninghe, 2011). The deportations and forced-labour measures of 1916–18 are analysed closely in Jens Thiel, ‘Menschenbassin Belgien’: Anwerbung, Deportation und Zwangsarbeit im Ersten Weltkrieg (Essen: Klartext, 2007). One longer-term interpretation of the war in Belgium is analysed in Sophie De Schaepdrijver, ‘“That theory of races”: Henri Pirenne on the unfinished business of the Great War’, Revue Belge d’Histoire Contemporaine, 41:3−4 (2011), pp. 533–52.

For Ober Ost, the work by Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge University Press, 2000) is indispensable; still fundamental is Aba Strazhas, Deutsche Ostpolitik im Ersten Weltkrieg: Der Fall Ober Ost 1915–1917 (Wiesbaden: Harrrassowitz, 1993). German-occupied Poland has seen a renewal of scholarship since the late 1950s/early 1960s works of Werner Conze and Werner Basler: Jesse Kauffman’s PhD dissertation, ‘Sovereignty and the Search for Order in German-Occupied Poland, 1915–1918’ (Stanford University, 2008), will form the basis of a forthcoming book. Deportation and forced labour in both Ober Ost and the German Government-General of Poland are studied in Christian Westerhoff, Zwangsarbeit im Ersten Weltkrieg: Deutsche Arbeitskräftepolitik im besetzten Polen und Litauen 1914–1918 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2011). The Austro-Hungarian occupation of Poland remains relatively under-examined, but great progress has been made regarding the occupation of Serbia, analysed and interpreted very convincingly by Jonathan Gumz, The Resurrection and Collapse of Empire in Habsburg Serbia, 1914–1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2009). The PhD dissertation by Jovana Knežević, ‘The Austro-Hungarian Occupation of Belgrade during the First World War: Battles at the Home Front’ (Yale University, 2006), makes good use of diaries. Heiko Brendel, who is working on a dissertation regarding Montenegro, has started to publish his first findings: ‘Der geostrategische Rahmen der österreichisch-ungarischen Besatzung Montenegros im Ersten Weltkrieg’, in Jürgen Angelow et al. (eds.), Der Erste Weltkrieg auf dem Balkan: Perspektiven der Forschung (Berlin: Wissenschaft Verlag, 2011), pp. 159–77. The joint occupation of Romania has been studied by Lisa Mayerhofer, Zwischen Freund und Feind: Deutsche Besatzung in Rumänien 1916–1918 (Munich: Martin Meidenbauer, 2010). Work by David Hamlin on this topic is forthcoming. The occupation of Ukraine, late in the war, against the background of disintegrating empire, is the object of a massive edited volume by Wolfram Dornik et al., Die Ukraine zwischen Selbstbestimmung und Fremdherrschaft 1917–1922 (Graz: Leykam, 2011). For the occupation of Vardar-Macedonia by Bulgaria, a little-known theatre, see the excellent comparative study by Björn Opfer, Im Schatten des Krieges: Besatzung oder Anschluss – Befreiung oder Unterdrückung? Eine komparative Untersuchung über die bulgarische Herrschaft in Vardar-Makedonien 1915–1918 und 1941–1944 (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2005). The Austro-Hungarian and German occupation of northern Italy, post-Kaborid/Caporetto, has been studied, with a keen eye for demographics, by Gustavo Corni in a series of articles and chapters, such as ‘Die Bevölkerung von Venetien unter der Österreichischen-Ungarischen Besetzung 1917/1918’, Zeitgeschichte, 17:7–8 (1990), pp. 311–29.

As noted in the chapter, occupations by Entente powers have remained outside its remit largely because of their transitory nature; recent work includes Mark von Hagen, War in a European Borderland: Occupations and Occupation Plans in Galicia and Ukraine, 1914–1918 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007); Peter Holquist, ‘The role of personality in the first (1914–1915) Russian occupation of Galicia and Bukovina’, in Jonathan Dekel-Chen et al. (eds.), Anti-Jewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), pp. 52–73; Christoph Mick’s carefully documented and moving Kriegserfahrungen in einer multiethnischen Stadt: Lemberg 1914–1947 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010); and Petra Svoljšak’s work on Italian occupation in the Isonzo region, ‘The social history of the Soča region in the First World War’, Mitteilungsblatt des Instituts für soziale Bewegungen, 41 (2009), pp. 89–109.

Only in the last dozen years or so has historical scholarship integrated research on civilian internees during the war. This is despite the fact that published sources on this subject have been in print for decades.

Among memoirs and literary sources, the following are important: Shloymé Ansky, The Enemy at his Pleasure: A Journey Through the Jewish Pale of Settlement during World War One (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002) (translated from Yiddish); Annette Becker (ed.), Journaux de combattants et civils de la France du Nord dans la Grande Guerre (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Septentrion, 1998, new edition with two new memoirs, 2014); François Laurent, Des Alsaciens-Lorrains otages en France: 1914–1918: souvenirs d’un Lorrain interné en France et en Suisse pendant la guerre, ed. Camille Maire (Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 1998); Israel Cohen, The Ruhleben Prison Camp: A Record of Nineteen Months’ Internment (London: Methuen, 1919); J. M. Decelle, B. Grailles, P. Marcilloux and F. Schoonheere (eds.), 1914–1918, Le Pas de Calais en guerre, les gammes de l’extrême (Dainville: Éditions du Conseil général du Pas-de-Calais, 1998); Archives du Nord (ed.), Guide des sources de la guerre 1914–1918 dans le Nord (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Septentrion, 2009); Claudine Wallart (ed.), ‘Souvenirs d’un otage du Nord, par le Docteur Carlier’, document preserved in the Archives départementales du Nord, Lille, edited in Revue du Nord, 325 (April−June 1998), pp. 122−201; e. e. cummings, The Enormous Room (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922); Aladar Kuncz, Le monastère noir (Paris: Gallimard, 1937) (first published in Hungarian, 1931); Florence Daniel-Wieser, Otages dans la Grande Guerre: dessins de prisonniers et civils lorrains (Nancy: Éditions de l’Est, 2005); Clémence Leroy, ‘Sous le joug: journal d’occupation, 1914–1918’ (typescript, Historial de la Grande Guerre, 2010); Anthony Splivalo (a Dalmatian imprisoned in Australia), The Home Fires (Fremantle: Arts Centre Press, 1982); Mary Ethel McAuley, Germany in War Time: What an American Girl Saw and Heard (Chicago: Open Court, 1917); France, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Deportation of Women and Girls from Lille (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1916); Arnold Toynbee, Le massacre des Arméniens: le meurtre d’une nation, (1915–1916) (Paris: Payot, 2004; 1st edn 1915); Armin T. Wegner e gli Armeni in Anatolia, immagini e testimonianze (Milan: Guerini, 1996).

The following are some general works which refer to civilian prisoners and camps for civilians during the First World War: Giorgio Agamben, ‘Le camp comme nomos de la modernité’, in Homo sacer: le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue (Paris: Seuil, 1997); Jean-Marc Berlière and Pierre Fournié (eds), Fichés? Photographie et identification, 1850–1960 (Paris: Éditions Perrin, 2011); Donald Bloxham and Robert Gerwarth (eds.), Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2011); Michael Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 1985); David Olugosa and Erichsen Casper, The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism (London: Faber and Faber, 2010); Jan Patočka, Essais hérétiques sur la philosophie de l’histoire (Paris: Verdier, 1981; first published in Czech, 1975); Tony Kushner and Katherine Knox, Refugees in an Age of Genocide: Global, National and Local Perspectives during the Twentieth Century (London: Frank Cass, 1999); Sylvie Thénault, Violence ordinaire dans l’Algérie coloniale: camps, internements, assignations à résidence (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2012).

On German colonialism, see Jürgen Zimmerer and Michael Perraudin (eds.), German Colonialism and National Identity (London: Routledge, 2011); Jürgen Zimmerer, Deutsche Herreschaft über Afrikaners: Staatlicher Machtanspruch und Wirklichkeit im kolonialen Namibia (Hamburg: LIT Verlag, 2001); Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard and Gilles Boëtsch (eds.), Zoos humains: au temps des exhibitions humaines (Paris: La Découverte, 2004).

On camps for civilians during the First World War, see Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 14–18: Retrouver la guerre (Paris: Gallimard, 2000); Annette Becker, ‘Les déplacements de population pendant la Grande Guerre: exodes, refuges, camps, travail forcé’, Témoigner. Entre Histoire et mémoire, Getuigen, Tussen Geschiedenis en Herinnering, Revue pluridisciplinaire de la Fondation Auschwitz, 110 (September 2011), pp. 18−28; Annette Becker, ‘Suppressed memory of atrocity in World War I and its impact on World War II’, in Doris Bergen (ed.), Lessons and Legacies, vol. viii: From Generation to Generation (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008); Annette Becker, ‘Art, material life and disaster: civilian and military prisoners of war’, in Nicholas Saunders (ed.), Materiality of Conflict: Anthropology and the Great War, 1914–2001 (London: Routledge, 2004); Annette Becker, ‘La genèse des camps de concentration, Cuba, Guerre des Boers, Grande Guerre’, in ‘Violences de guerre, violences coloniales, violences extrêmes, avant la Shoah’, special issue of Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah, 189 (July−December 2008); Annette Becker, ‘The emergence of the concentration camps’, in M. Cattaruzza, M. Flores, S. L. Sullan and E. Traverso (eds.), History of the Shoah, vol. i: The Crisis of Europe, the Extermination of the Jews and the Memory of the Twentieth Century (Turin: UTET, 2005), pp. 14−24; Bruna Bianchi (ed.), La violenza contro la populazione civile nella Grande Guerra: deportati, profughi, internati (Milan: Edizioni Unicopli, 2006); Tammy M. Proctor, Civilians in a World at War, 1914–1918 (New York University Press, 2010). Nicholas Saunders, ‘Civilians behind the wire’, ch. 7 in Trench Art, Materialities and Memories of War (Oxford: Berg, 2003) has a very useful synthesis; Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 1977).

On prisoners of war and civilian prisoners, see Odon Abbal, ‘Le Mahgreb et la Grande Guerre: les camps d’internement en Afrique du Nord’, in Les armes et la toge, Mélanges offerts à André Martel (Montpellier: Centre d’Histoire Militaire et d’Études de Défense Nationale, 1997); Heather Jones, Violence against Prisoners of War in the First World War: Britain, France, and Germany 1914–1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

On different regions see the following works. For France and Belgium, Annette Becker, Oubliés de la Grande Guerre: humanitaire et culture de guerre, populations occupées, déportés civils, prisonniers de guerre (Paris: Noesis, 1998); Annette Becker, Les cicatrices rouges 14–18: France et Belgique occupées (Paris: Fayard, 2010); Annette Becker, ‘From war to war: a few myths, 1914–1942’, in Valerie Holman and Debra Kelly (eds.), France at War in the Twentieth Century: Propaganda, Myth, Metaphor (Oxford: Berghahn, 2000); Annette Becker, ‘Prisonniers civils et militaires de la Grande Guerre, images de la guerre totale’, in Philippe Buton (ed.), La guerre imaginée (Paris: Seli Arslan, 2002); Annette Becker, ‘Des vies déconstruites, prisonniers civils et militaires’, in Anne Duménil, Nicolas Beaupré and Christian Ingrao (eds.), 1914–1945: l’ère de la guerre, violence, mobilisation, deuil, 2 vols. (Paris: Éditions Agnès Viénot, 2004), vol. i, pp. 234−54.

Jean-Claude Farcy, Les camps de concentration français de la Première Guerre mondiale (1914–1920) (Paris: Anthropos-Economica, 1995); Emmanuel Filhol, Un camp de concentration français: les Tsiganes alsaciens-lorrains à Crest, 1915–1919 (Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 2004); Marie Llosa, ‘Les camps d’internés civils de l’Aveyron (1914–1919)’, Bretagne 14–18, 3 (May, 2002), pp. 123−56; Hervé Mauran, ‘Les camps d’internement et la surveillance des étrangers en France, 1914–1920’ (thesis, University of Montpellier, 2003); Hervé Mauran, ‘Une minorité dans la tourmente: évacuation, internement et des Alsaciens-Lorrains en France (1914–1919)’, Bretagne 14–18, 3 (May 2002), pp. 111−22; Helen McPhail, The Long Silence: Civilian Life under the German Occupation of Northern France (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001); Philippe Nivet, La France occupée, 1914–1918 (Paris: A. Colin, 2012).

Jean-Louis Pilliat, Alsaciens-Lorrains internés en France: Besançon 1914–1919 (Colmar: Do Bentzinger, 2004). Jens Thiel, ‘Forced labour, deportation and recruitment: the German Reich and Belgian labourers during the First World War’, in Serge Jaumain et al. (eds.), Une guerre totale? La Belgique dans la Première Guerre mondiale: nouvelles tendances de la recherche historique (Brussels: Archives générales du Royaume, 2005).

On Italy, see Gustavo Corni, Il Friuli occidentale nell’anno dell’occupazione austro-germanica 1917–1918 (Pordenone: Edizioni Concordia Sette, 2012); Gustavo Corni, ‘L’occupazione austro-germanica del Veneto 1917–18, sindaci, preti, austracanti e patrioti’, Rivista di storia contemporanea, 3 (1989), pp. 380−409.

On Britain, see Len Barnett, Internment of Enemy Aliens in Great Britain, within the Empire and at Sea during 1914 (London: Len Barnett, 2004); J. C. Bird, Control of Enemy Alien Civilians in Great Britain, 1914–1918 (London: Garland, 1986); David Cesarani and Tony Kushner, (eds.), The Internment of Aliens in Twentieth Century Britain (London: Frank Cass, 1993); Richard Dove (ed.) ‘Totally Un-English’?: Britain’s Internment of ‘Enemy Aliens’ in Two World Wars (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005); Panikos Panayi, Prisoners of Britain: German Civilian and Combatant Internees during the First World War (Manchester University Press, 2012); Matthew Stibbe, British Civilian Internees in Germany: The Ruhleben Camp, 1914–18 (Manchester University Press, 2008); Matthew Stibbe, ‘A community at war: British civilian internees at the Ruhleben Camp in Germany, 1914–1918’, in Jenny Macleod and Pierre Purseigle (eds.), Uncovered Fields, Perspectives in First World War Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2004); Matthew Stibbe, ‘A question of retaliation? The internment of British civilians in Germany in November 1914’, Immigrants and Minorities, 3 (2005), pp. 1–29.

On Germany, see Lewis Foreman, ‘Musicians in Ruhleben camp’, First World War Studies, 2:1 (2011), pp. 27–40; Ulrich Herbert, A History of Foreign Labor in Germany, 1880–1980: Seasonal Workers/Forced Laborers/Guest Workers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990); Mark Levene, ‘Frontiers of genocide: Jews in the eastern war zones, 1914–1920 and 1941’, in Panikos Panayi (ed.), Minorities in Wartime: National and Racial Groupings in Europe, North America and Australia during the Two World Wars (Oxford: Berg, 1993).

On Australia and New Zealand, see Gerhard Fischer, Enemy Aliens: Internment and the Homefront Experience in Australia, 1914–1920 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1989); Michael McKernan, The Australian People and the Great War (West Melbourne: Nelson, 1980); Andrew Francis, ‘“To Be Truly British We Must be Anti-German”: Patriotism, Citizenship and Anti-Alienism in New Zealand during the Great War’ (PhD thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 2009).

On Canada, see V. J. Kaye, Ukrainian Canadians in Canada’s Wars, ed. John B. Gregorovich (Toronto: Ukrainian Canadian Research Foundation and Ethnicity Books, 1983); Bodhan S. Kordan, Enemy Aliens, Prisoners of War: Internment in Canada during the Great War (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002); Frances Swyripa and John Herd Thompson, Loyalties in Canada during the Great War (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, 1983).

On Russia, the Eastern Front and the Balkans, see the following works: Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War One (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Jonathan Gumz, The Resurrection and Collapse of Empire in Habsburg Serbia, 1914–1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2009); Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge University Press, 2007); Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Olga Pichon-Bobrinskoy, ‘Action publique, action humanitaire pendant le premier conflit mondial: les zemstvos et les municipalités’, Cahiers du Monde russe, 46:4 (2005), pp. 673–98; a special issue of Kritika, 10:3 (2009), including Laura Engelstein, ‘“A Belgium of our own”: the sack of Russian Kalisz, August 1914’, pp. 442−73. See also Jovana Knežević, ‘The Austro-Hungarian Occupation of Belgrade during the First World War: Battles at the Home Front’ (PhD thesis, Yale University, 2006); Anita Prazmowska, ‘The experience of occupation: Poland’, in Peter Liddle, Ian Whitehead and John Bourne (eds), The Great World War, 1914–1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), vol. i, 108−32; Nicolas Werth, ‘Réfugiés et déplacés dans l’Empire russe en guerre’, in S. Audoin-Rouzeau and J. J. Becker (eds.), Encyclopédie de la Grande Guerre (Paris: Bayard, 2004), pp. 156−74; Nicolas Werth, ‘Les déportations des “populations suspectes”, dans les espaces russes et soviétiques, 1914–1953’, Communisme, 78−9 (2004), pp. 11–43.

On internment in the case of the Armenian genocide, see Volume I, Chapter 22 of this History, and the following: Christian Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth-Century World (Cambridge University Press, 2010), especially ch. 3, ‘Participating and profiteering: the destruction of the Armenians, 1915–23’, pp. 77−93; Raymond Kevorkian, Le génocide des Arméniens (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2006). This is the most up-to-date summary of research: see especially his ‘La deuxième phase du génocide (automne 1915−décembre 1916)’, and on concentration camps, in particular, pp. 775–852. In addition, see Raymond Kevorkian, ‘Camps de concentration de Syrie et de Mésopotamie (1915–1916): la deuxième phase du génocide’, L’actualité du génocide des Arméniens (Créteil: Edipol, 1999); Annette Becker, ‘L’extermination des Arméniens, entre dénonciation, indifférence et oubli, de 1915 aux années vingt’ in ‘Ailleurs, hier, autrement: connaissance et reconnaissance du génocide des Arméniens’, special issue of Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah, 177−8 (2003), pp. 295–312; Annette Becker and Jay Winter, ‘Le génocide arménien et les réactions de l’opinion internationale’, in John Horne (ed.), Vers la guerre totale: le tournant de 14–15 (Paris: Tallandier, 2010); Annette Becker, ‘Voir, ne pas voir un génocide: l’exemple des Arméniens’, in C. Delporte, L. Gervereau and D. Maréchal (eds.), Quelle est la place des images en histoire? (Paris: Nouveau Monde Éditions, 2008).

There have been many studies which have touched on facets of the history of military medicine. Among them is John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History (New York: Viking, 2004). Although the relationship between the war and the Spanish flu is unclear, no medical history of the war can ignore this pandemic − one of the three deadliest in history. Barry’s book is essential reading on it. See also Chapter 14 of this volume.

On disability and the wounded, see first Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London: Reaktion Books, 1996). The armies of invalids and otherwise disabled men had important implications for the war effort, the history of pensions and the history of gender categories and conflicts. This is essential reading on all these matters. There is much of interest on this subject in Deborah Cohen, The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany 1914–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Hers is a valuable study of the disabled but in a comparative perspective dealing with Britain and Germany. An important study on facial injuries is Sophie Delaporte, Gueules cassées de la Grande Guerre (Paris: Éditions Agnès Viénot, 2004). Her earlier publication, Les médecins dans la Grande Guerre 1914–1918 (Paris: Bayard, 2003), is an equally pioneering work.

Imperial medicine has its historians too. There is Eran Dolev, Allenby’s Military Medicine: Life and Death in World War I Palestine (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007). Although a bit tainted by admiration for Allenby, Dolev offers a well-documented picture of the British medical success in waging one of the most important ‘side shows’ of the war.

For decades German medical historians have focused on the Nazi period. Compared to Britain, German monographs on their side of the story of medicine and the First World War are rare. The following two books present numerous articles on diverse aspects of German and Austrian medicine during the 1914–18 conflict, and provide insights into the peculiarities of medicine in the context of science, social Darwinian ideas and nationalism: Wolfgang U. Eckart and Christoph Gradmann (eds.), Die Medizin und der Erste Weltkrieg (Freiburg: Centaurus, 1996); and Hans Georg Hofer, Cay-Rüdiger Prüll and Wolfgang U. Eckart, War, Trauma and Medicine in Germany 1914–1939 (Freiburg: Centaurus, 2011).

Medical history in wartime includes the way medical practitioners developed ideas about society and war in general. Susanne Michl focuses on the language and discourse of (mostly university) physicians in medical journals, and compares the German with the French medical communities. See Susanne Michl, Im Dienste des ‘Volkskörpers’: Deutsche und französische Ärzte im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007).

Leo van Bergen, Before my Helpless Sight: Suffering, Dying and Military Medicine on the Western Front 1914–1918 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), focuses on the Western Front on both sides of the line. He throws light on British, French, Belgian and German medical care, taking into account physical and psychological conditions and forms of treatment. He does not take as his point of departure the doctor and the nurse, but rather chooses the patient as the central character in the medical war, all too frequently set aside in favour of the ones wearing the white coats and deciding their fate.

On nursing, see Christine E. Hallett, Containing Trauma: Nursing Work in the First World War (Manchester University Press, 2009). Although often partly or totally ignored by medical historians, nursing played an essential role in the medical care of the sick and the wounded, not only because they were the ones translating medical diagnosis into practice, but they were the ones supporting the patients in their hours of need and despair. Hallett’s book, although confined to English-speaking patients and nurses, is essential reading.

The best book we have on the British side of the story of the medical war is Mark Harrison, The Medical War: British Military Medicine in the First World War (Oxford University Press, 2010). Harrison’s work on the ‘medical war’ is outstanding. He does not focus solely on the Western Front (where the medical line, in his view, did not collapse, although it was certainly stretched to the limit at times), but looks at other British fronts as well. There the medical story had more mixed results.

Jeffrey Reznick, Healing the Nation: Soldiers and the Culture of Caregiving in Britain during the Great War (Manchester University Press, 2004), focuses on convalescence − the medical space the wounded occupied between having been declared healthy (fit for service) and being sent home. He shows the stigma attached to the walking wounded, and explores their strategy for reasserting their dignity.

The best collection of case histories of soldiers treated for psychological or neurological disorders during the First World War was by an American physician, E. E. Southard. His unique compendium was published as Shell-shock and Other Neuropsychiatric Problems: Presented in Five Hundred and Eighty-Nine Case Histories from the War Literature, 1914–1918; with a Bibliography by Norman Fenton, and an Introduction by Charles K. Mills (Boston: W. M. Leonard, c. 1919; reprinted 1930). A similarly essential source on the emergence of shell shock as a diagnostic category is C. S. Myers, Shell Shock in France 1914–1918: Based on A War Diary (Cambridge University Press, 1940). For an adversarial point of view, see F. Mott, Neuroses and Shell Shock (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1919).

A special issue of the Journal of Contemporary History, 35:1 (2000), addresses shell shock in comparative perspective. See, in particular, the introduction by Jay Winter, and these two articles: Marc Roubebush, ‘A patient fights back: neurology in the court of public opinion in France during the First World War’, pp. 29–38; and Paul Lerner, ‘Psychiatry and casualties of war in Germany, 1914–18’, pp. 13–28.

On the British side of the story, there is an abundant critical and narrative historical and medical literature from which to choose. The 1922 report on shell shock was recently reprinted. See Report of the War Office Committee of Enquiry into Shell-Shock (The Southborough Report, 1922) (Imperial War Museum, London, 2004). Readers will find insights in all of the following: Fiona Reid, Broken Men – Shell Shock, Treatment and Recovery in Britain, 1914–1930 (London: Continuum, 2009); Ben Shepherd, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the 20th Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Peter Leese, Shell Shock: Traumatic Neurosis and the British Soldiers of the First World War (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Edgar Jones, ‘Shell shock at Magull and the Maudsley: models of psychological medicine in the UK’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 65:3 (2010), pp. 365–8; Tracey Loughran, ‘Shell shock, trauma, and the First World War: the making of a diagnosis and its histories’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 67:1 (2010), pp. 91–106; Celia Kingsbury, The Peculiar Sanity of War: Hysteria in the Literature of World War I (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2002); Ted Bogasz, ‘War neurosis and cultural change in England, 1914–22: the work of the War Office Committee of Enquiry into “shell-shock”’, Journal of Contemporary History, 24:2 (1989), pp. 227–56; Peter Barham, Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), and Michèle Barrett, Casualty Figures: How Five Men Survived the First World War (London: Verso, 2007).

An excellent study of Australian psychological casualties and their treatment may be found in Martin Crotty and Marina Larsson (eds.), Anzac Legacies: Australians and the Aftermath of War (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2010).

On rates of psychological casualties over time, see Edgar Jones and Simon Wessely, ‘Psychiatric battle casualties: an intra- and inter-war comparison’, British Journal of Psychiatry, 178 (2001), pp. 242–7.

On the French side of the story, see Anne Rasmussen, ‘L’électrothérapie en guerre: pratiques et débats en France (1914–1920)’, Annales historiques de l’électricité, 8 (2010), pp. 73–91; and Gregory Mathew Thomas, Treating the Trauma of the Great War: Soldiers, Civilians, and Psychiatry in France, 1914–1940 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009). A recent bande dessinée on shell shock in France is Hubert Bieser, Vies tranchées: les soldats fous de la Grande Guerre (Paris: Delcourt, 2011).

On Austria, see Hans-Georg Hofer, Nervenschwache und Krieg: Modernitatskritik und Krisenbewaltigung in der österreichisten Psychiatrie (1880–1920) (Vienna: Bohlau, 2004); and K. R. Eissler, Freud as an Expert Witness: The Discussion of War Neuroses between Freud and Wagner-Jauregg, trans. Christine Trollope (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1986).

A suggestive use of film to show the shadow of shell shock in cultural life is Anton Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War (Princeton University Press, 2009).

The pandemic we call the Spanish flu is the subject of an entire historiographical field, distinct from that of the Great War. The bibliography on this subject is very extensive, covering on the one hand the range of geographical areas affected by this global pandemic, and bringing together on the other a group of disciplinary approaches – epidemiological, medical, public health, demographic, anthropological – which can intersect with historical approaches, but without relating to them exclusively. Although there can be no question here of presenting a full synthesis of this bibliography, the different orientations are indicated which have been undertaken in the study of the influenza pandemic of 1918, noting in particular those which accord importance to interactions between the flu and societies at war.

In the strict meaning of the phrase, there was no historical study of the flu epidemic during the decades after it. However, statistical tables of the pandemic from health authorities proliferated: suitable, or so it was believed, to give lessons for the future to public health authorities. For historians there are sources of the first importance, in particular: on the United States, War Department, Office of the Surgeon General, Medical Department of the United States Army in the World War, vol. ix: Joseph F. Siler, Communicable and Other Diseases (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1928); on Great Britain, Ministry of Health, Report on the Pandemic of Influenza, 1918–1919, Reports on Public Health and Medical Subjects iv (London: Ministry of Health, 1920); on New Zealand, House of Representatives, Report on the Influenza Epidemic Commission, Appendices to the Journal of the House of Representatives nos. 1−7 (Wellington, 1919); on France, Henri Pottevin, ‘Rapport sur la pandémie grippale de 1918–19 présenté au comité permanent de l’Office international d’hygiène publique’, Bulletin mensuel de l’Office international d’hygiène publique, 13:2 (1920), pp. 125–81; on Germany, Reichswehrministerium, Heeres-Sanitätsinspection, ‘Grippe’, in Sanitätsbericht über das Deutsche Heer im Weltkriege 1914–1918 (Berlin, 1934), vol. iii, pp. 121–3; on Portugal, Jorge Ricardo, ‘La grippe’, Rapport préliminaire à la Commission sanitaire des pays alliés (Lisbon: National Press, 1919).

The emergence of the flu as a historical object is often undertaken in comparison with the flu-type pandemics of the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed such comparisons have stimulated historical research on the unequalled precedent of 1918. For an account of this history, see Howard Phillips, ‘The reappearing shadow of 1918: trends in the historiography of the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic’, Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 21 (2004), pp. 121–34.

Some scholars concentrated on the sum of individual experiences of the epidemic, as in Richard Collier, The Plague of the Spanish Lady: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919 (1974; London: Allison & Busby, new edn 1996), which in 1974 constituted the first publication in a popular style, taking as its subject the pandemic catastrophe ‘seen from below’ and its victims, based on published testimony and interviews.

Recently, a new trend has added to our knowledge of the Spanish flu – environmental history, which puts the focus on the properly biological dimension of the pandemic and re-evaluates the impact of other epidemics on the course of history. A representative example is the work of Alfred W. Crosby, Epidemic and Peace, 1918 (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1976), reissued under the title of America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2003). It seeks to evaluate the effects of the flu on the outcome of the war and the peace of 1918, in analyses which have been submitted for criticism.

More broadly, the interactions between flu and war have led to few specific studies, apart from the following: Jürgen Müller, ‘Die spanische Influenza 1918–19: Einflüsse des Ersten Weltkrieges auf Ausbreitung, Krankheitsverlauf und Perzeption einer Pandemie’, in Wolfgang U. Eckart, and Christoph Gradmann (eds.), Die Medizin und der Erste Weltkrieg (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1996), pp. 321–42; and Marc Hieronimos, Krankheit und Tod 1918: zum Umgang mit der spanischen Grippe in Frankreich, England und dem deutschen Reich (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2006).

A third orientation is demographic and informed estimates in figures of victims of the war of 1918. From the first overall table established by the epidemiologist of the University of Chicago, Edwin O. Jordan, Epidemic Influenza: A Survey (Chicago: American Medical Association, 1927), which was used as the point of reference for nearly fifty years, all the new estimates tend to increase considerably the figures of flu mortality. Particularly noteworthy are David K. Patterson and Gerald F. Pyle, ‘The geography and mortality of the 1918 influenza pandemic’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 1 (1991), pp. 4–21; and Niall P. A. S. Johnson and Jürgen Müller, ‘Updating the accounts: global mortality of the 1918–1920 “Spanish influenza” pandemic’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 76 (2002), pp. 105–15.

As well as the strict statistical approaches, there is scholarship at the intersection of demographic and social history that provides accounts of the effects of the morbidity and mortality caused by the flu, and to question the intersecting impact of the war and the flu in societies, such as, for example, Jay Winter, The Great War and the British People (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985); Alice Reid, ‘The effects of the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic on infant and child health in Derbyshire’, Medical History, 49 (2005), pp. 29–54; S. E. Mamelund, ‘A socially neutral disease? Individual social class, household wealth and mortality from Spanish influenza in two socially contrasting parishes in Kristiania 1918–19’, Social Science and Medicine, 62 (2006), pp. 923–40.

A fourth orientation, which we may date from the 1990s, places the epidemic of 1918 within the orbit of the social history of medicine and the history of the politics of public health. Work in this spirit includes Martha L. Hildreth, ‘The influenza epidemic of 1918–1919 in France: contemporary concepts of aetiology, therapy, and prevention’, Social History of Medicine, 4:2 (1991), pp. 277–94; Sandra Tomkins, ‘The failure of expertise: public health policy in Britain during the 1918–1919 influenza epidemic’, Social History of Medicine, 5:3 (1992), pp. 435–54; Eugenia Tognotti, ‘Scientific triumphalism and learning from facts: bacteriology and the “Spanish flu” epidemic’, Social History of Medicine, 16:1 (2003), pp. 97–110.

Fifthly, a more global approach to the pandemic of 1918 has been possible with the arrival of social history in this field, and the combining of studies on societies at war suffering from the flu, on a larger or smaller scale, and which in particular take the urban space as their locale. See, in particular, Fred R. van Hartesveldt (ed.), The 1918–1919 Pandemic of Influenza: The Urban Impact in the Western World (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992); Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert (eds.), Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin, 1914−1919, vol. i (Cambridge University Press, 1997).

The first syntheses on the flu as a global phenomenon, with a transnational approach and calling on all the disciplines concerned, appeared in the 2000s. Notably, see Howard Phillips and David Killingray (eds.), The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919: New Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2003), the proceedings of the first international interdisciplinary conference on the flu of 1918, held in South Africa in 1998, which constitutes a reference work with a detailed bibliography by nation. Ten years later, a conference held at the Institut Pasteur added to our knowledge, against the backdrop of recurrent threats of a flu-style pandemic. Its proceedings may be found in Tamara Giles-Vernick and Susan Craddock (eds.), Influenza and Public Health: Learning from Past Pandemics (London: Earthscan, 2010). Alongside these studies, Wilfried Witte, Tollkirschen und Quarantäne: Die Geschichte der Spanischen Grippe (Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 2008), provides a brief international synthesis.

Finally, the national level is the one on which the greatest number of studies have appeared, making it possible to take account, in a more or less focused way, of the effects of the flu on societies at war. In particular the following should be mentioned.

On the United States, John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History (New York: Viking, 2004); and Carol R. Byerly, Fever of War: The Influenza Epidemic in the U.S. Army during World War I (New York University Press, 2005).

On Germany, Eckard Michels, ‘“Die spanische Grippe” 1918/19: Verlauf, Folgen und Deutungen in Deutschland im Kontext des Ersten Weltkriegs’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 1 (2010), pp. 1–33; Manfred Vasold, ‘Die Grippe-Pandemie von 1918–19 in der Stadt München’, Oberbayerisches Archiv, 127 (2003), pp. 395–414.

On Britain and the British Empire, Niall Johnson, Britain and the 1918–19 Influenza Pandemic: A Dark Epilogue (London: Routledge, 2006); Robert J. Brown, ‘Fateful Alliance: The 1918 Influenza Pandemic and the First World War in the British Context’ (PhD thesis, Syracuse University, New York, 2006); E. D. Mills, ‘The 1918–1919 influenza pandemic: the Indian experience’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 23 (1986), pp. 1–40; Geoffrey W. Rice, Black November: The 1918 Influenza Pandemic in New Zealand, 2nd edn (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2005); and Howard Phillips, ‘Black October’: The Impact of the Spanish Influenza Epidemic of 1918 on South Africa (Pretoria: Government Printer, 1990).

On France there has been no synthetic work on this subject, but there is a thesis in preparation on the epidemic by Frédéric Vagneron (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris) that will fill this gap. For some elements of the story, see Lion Murard and Patrick Zylberman, L’hygiène dans la République (Paris: Fayard, 1996); and Anne Rasmussen, ‘Dans l’urgence et le secret: conflits et consensus autour de la grippe espagnole, 1918–1919’, Mil neuf cent, Revue d’histoire intellectuelle, 25 (2007), pp. 171–90.

The leading works in the field of mourning practices and the war are Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 1995); Pat Jalland, Death in War and Peace: A History of Loss and Grief in England, 1914–1970 (Oxford University Press, 2010); David Cannadine, ‘War and death, grief and mourning in modern Britain’, in Joachim Whaley (ed.), Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death (London: Europa, 1981); and Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 14–18: Understanding the Great War, trans. Catherine Temerson (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000).

In the context of Germany, patterns of mourning are explored in compelling ways in Alon Confino, Paul Betts and Dirk Schumann (eds.), Between Mass Death and Individual Loss: The Place of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany (New York: Berghahn, 2008); and Tim Grady, The German-Jewish Soldiers of the First World War in History and Memory (Liverpool University Press, 2011).

For memorials and remembrance, leading works are Thomas Laqueur, ‘Memory and naming in the Great War’, in J. R. Gillis (ed.), Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton University Press, 1994); Daniel Sherman, ‘Bodies and names: the emergence of commemorations in interwar France’, American Historical Review, 103:2 (1998), pp. 443–66; Annette Becker, Les monuments aux morts: patrimoine et mémoire de la grande guerre (Paris: Éditions Errance, 1988); and Ken Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape (Melbourne University Press, 2005).

The key scholarship that has especially looked at mothers and widows includes Erika Kuhlman, Of Little Comfort: War Widows, Fallen Soldiers and the Remaking of the Nation after the Great War (New York University Press, 2012); Suzanne Evans, Mothers of Heroes, Mothers of Martyrs: World War I and the Politics of Grief (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2007); Joy Damousi, The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia (Cambridge University Press, 1999); Susan Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). Other key texts include Karin Hausen, ‘The German nation’s obligations of the heroes’ widows of World War I’, in Margaret Randolph Higonnet et al., Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 126–40; and Robert Weldon Whalen, Bitter Wounds: German Victims of the Great War 1914–1939 (New York: Cornell University Press, 1984).

For families in mourning, see the following: Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Cinq deuils de guerre: 1914–1918 (Paris: Noesis, 2001); Jay Winter, ‘Forms of kinship and remembrance after the Great War’, in Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan (eds.), War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 40–60; and two chapters in this volume: Chapter 21, by Bruce Scates and Rebecca Wheatley on ‘War memorials’, and Chapter 3 by Jay Winter on ‘Families’.

For an examination of pilgrimages, an excellent text is David Lloyd, Battlefield Tourism: Pilgrimage and the Commemoration of the Great War in Britain, Australia and Canada 1919–1939 (Oxford: Berg, 1998). The major work on American mothers is Lisa M. Budreau, Bodies of War: World War I and the Politics of Commemoration in America, 1919–1933 (New York University Press, 2009), and, in the Australian context, Bruce Scates, Return to Gallipoli: Walking the Battlefields of the Great War (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

On the Eastern European experience of war and mourning, the work of Maria Burcur has made a major contribution through her scholarship in Heroes and Victims: Remembering War in Twentieth-Century Romania (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009); and ‘Edifices of the past: war memorials and heroes in twentieth century Romania’, in Maria Todorova (ed.), Balkan Identities: Nation and Memory (London: Hurst, 2004). In addition, ‘Between the mother of the wounded and the Virgin of Jiu: Romanian women and the gender of heroism during the Great War’, Journal of Women’s History, 12:2 (2000), pp. 30–56, provides important contextual material on mourning.

On religious observance, Annette Becker’s War and Faith: The Religious Imagination in France, 1914–1930 (Oxford: Berg, 1998) is a seminal text. For exemplary explorations of the role of religion in communities, see Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2008), and for soldiers and religion, see Jonathan H. Ebel, Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War (Princeton University Press, 2010).