From the First World War, junior officers assigned to units across the British Army compiled daily reports as part of their institution’s process of Operational Record Keeping. These documents, called War Diaries, captured aspects of the Army’s combat experience. Thus, they were integral to the Army’s institutional learning but also comprised foundations on which much of British twentieth-century war history was built. What was recorded, how this was done, and, crucially, what was omitted, have exerted a powerful influence in shaping British cultural attitudes to modern war. Ramsay’s central ambition is to provide a history of this process, revealing how these records were written and read.

While the focus is on a specific type of record, and the study engages deeply, as it should, with military bureaucratic procedures, Ramsay uses War Diaries as a vehicle to spark a series of wider thematic discussions. In many ways, these broader inquiries form the most consequential aspects of the study and those likely to appeal to the widest readership. By applying multidisciplinary methods, Ramsay advances both sweeping and intimate observations about how War Diaries were made. This enables her to observe the interplay between official regulations for reporting and the agency and authorship of individual compilers. While War Diaries were ostensibly meant to depict wartime events in rational and linear terms, where war could be comprehended, parsed into episodes, scrutinized for lessons, and stripped of feeling, Ramsay’s methods reveal this to be overly restrictive. She highlights both deliberate and unintentional “unruly” behavior on the part of reporting officers, as well as cases where the burden of battlefield events caused record-keeping to break down, revealing by omission, the pressures of war. Such findings blur boundaries that historians often apply between individually authored works and official reports, and challenge assumptions forged in the early twentieth century about how war should be understood.

By adopting a timeframe that spans both World Wars, Ramsay constructs a compelling comparative analysis of technological and attitudinal shifts. Ramsay reveals how early-twentieth-century attitudes toward emotion in war became entrenched so deeply through these reporting processes that they still influence twenty-first-century norms and the trajectories of many military histories. Ramsay’s textual analysis reveals that fear was an “outlaw emotion” for officers compiling War Diaries during the First World War. Fear was either omitted entirely or acknowledged through euphemism, despite evidence beyond War Diaries that it was felt prevalently in combat zones. Intriguingly, Ramsay’s study reveals significant attitudinal shifts toward the British Army’s acceptance of emotion between the World Wars. Indeed, during the Second, the Army acknowledged that harnessing, rather than repressing, certain emotions could enhance battlefield performance. However, as Ramsay reveals, in both her engagement with War Diaries’ influence in the construction of histories, and twenty-first-century Operational Record Keeping, the process toward accommodating a fuller emotional spectrum in war writing remains incomplete.

In contrast to relatively sedate change among the Army’s emotional regimes, Ramsay concurs with much revisionist scholarship that the Army was relatively open to organizational innovation and technological change across both World Wars. In this, she concurs with revisionist consensus, but adds a dimension beyond technologies designed to kill or main, toward tools and systems aimed at orchestrating mass armies and capturing data.

The picture that emerges across the first two thirds of the volume indicates a more anarchic reality to conflict that the official rules for reporting sought to permit, in turn, calling into question whether war could, or should, ever be rendered in such reductive terms as the British Army sought. Ramsay understands why the Army felt the need to do so, but then argues that such practices have impinged, negatively, the construction of war history, by failing to record important facets that did not accord with institutional priorities and contemporary values. As noted above, while individual expression reveals these strictures to be imperfect frameworks for operational reporting, bureaucracy did still exert a major influence in setting parameters for how history was made.

The final third addresses how War Diaries have been archived and consumed, delving into scholars’ experience engaging with The National Archives, its antecedents, current physical location at Kew, and parallel online spaces. It forms a thought-provoking reflection on how archives, as mediated spaces rather than neutral repositories, influence how their holdings are read. There is much that readers familiar with British archives, or archival research more generally, would recognize.

Overall, this is a thought-provoking study, likely to appeal to historians of the United Kingdom at war, but also to resonate with readers interested in historiography, research methods, archival practices, and narrative construction. Indeed, the volume is so rich conceptually that, although space precludes, it would be intriguing to see a handful of ideas developed further. First, while there is a section addressing how War Diaries shaped official histories of the First World War, it would be pleasing to see comparably thorough coverage of the same process after the Second World War. Second, the conclusion is packed with insights into twenty-first-century British Operational Record Keeping. This coverage is promising enough that it might have been worked into a stand-alone chapter. Finally, Ramsay hints at an episode where British officers described emotions shown in battle by Nepalese Gurkha soldiers of the colonial Indian Army differently to stylistic norms applied concurrently to British troops. There would be an opportunity to reflect on whether such tropes were common, and, if so, how far they were influenced by colonial othering and martial race theory. This might reveal whether mid-twentieth-century British attitudes toward emotion in war varied according to subjects’ “racial,” colonial, or national status. While this question is beyond the volume’s scope, it indicates a need for similar studies addressing depictions of emotion in Operational Record Keeping in imperial contexts, and, for gender history, for units fielding female personnel in roles that courted danger. Records exist and Ramsay’s approach offers a splendid precedent.