Janet Watson has written a compelling and deeply researched book that deftly addresses the problem of memory formation during and after World War I. Watson's book deals centrally with the “disillusionment thesis” that has become part of the accepted narrative of World War I. According to this thesis, idealistic young men went to war singing and kicking footballs and returned home broken and disillusioned by the trench experience. In a spate of war books published in the late twenties and early thirties, former soldiers broke years of silence to tell the story of war's horror. According to Watson, this perception of the war and its effect on combatants was entrenched by 1930 and dominated subsequent scholarship. The disillusionment thesis was further reinforced by the publication of Paul Fussell's classic study, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford, 1975), which argued that the experience of trench warfare itself was instrumental to ushering in a modern artistic consciousness. According to Fussell, young soldier-writers like Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon repudiated heroic images of war, developing instead a literary consciousness that stressed irony, realism, and disillusionment.

Watson's book carefully deconstructs the disillusionment thesis at nearly every point. Unlike a number of recent works, most notably Jay Winter's Sites of Memory Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, 1995), Watson does not challenge the disillusionment thesis itself or make a counterargument about the persistence of “traditional” images of war. Instead, Watson compares narratives written during the war with those appearing later to trace the gradual emergence of a critical reremembering of the war itself. According to Watson, “There was no identifiable turning point—at the Somme, at the Armistice, or elsewhere—when traditional ways of imagining the war and one's role in it were no longer comprehensible. For many of the British men and women who were active participants in the First World War, the languages of honor, patriotism, and self-sacrifice for a greater good never lost their currency. … Though some famous authors eloquently articulated a powerful story of disillusionment, this became the dominant historical view of the war because it was embraced by those who came after not because it entirely changed the perceptions of many people who had fought and worked in the war itself” (307–8).

Watson substantiates this generational view of memory formation by analyzing a rich array of archival and published sources. The first part of the book mines sources written during the Great War to investigate the language and images used by a diverse array of Britons to describe their personal experiences. The depth of Watson's research is quite breathtaking. Engaging deeply with a host of sources, many of them archival, Watson offers a thorough and convincing picture of the hopes, rivalries, tensions, and anxieties felt by men and women involved in various aspects of war work. Comparing the experiences of men and women, combatants and noncombatants, volunteer and professional nurses, and middle-class and working-class participants, Watson comes to the conclusion that Britons were “fighting different wars” (61) and that their memories and experiences were shaped more by the motives with which they participated than by any universal sense of horror at the war itself. For example, those who enlisted out of a sense of duty and a wish to perform a “service” for their country were more likely to become disillusioned than those who enlisted or signed on to war work because they needed a job. Aspects of disillusionment were clearly evident in some contemporary war poetry, but, as Watson shows, famous cynics like Graves retained their admiration for the neoclassical verse of Rupert Brooke well into the conflict. Indeed, the ubiquity of disillusionment emerged long after the Armistice. While in the early 1920s the disillusionment thesis already seemed stale to some critics, it did not excite enough public interest to become part of a sustained reworking of the memory of the war. It was only with the flood of war books beginning in 1927 that more idealistic voices were drowned out and the disillusioned trench soldier emerged as the “authentic” voice of the Great War.

Watson's thesis is complex, nuanced, and satisfying. The book's virtues have much to do with the quality and depth of the research and with Watson's gift for methodological reasoning. Rather than evoking theoretical authorities or leaning on inherited assumptions, Watson delves into a comparison of wartime and postwar writing to investigate her claims empirically. A fascinating chapter on publishing in the postwar years, for example, looks at the evolution of war-book publishing in the interwar period and analyzes reviews for assumptions about emerging attitudes to the Great War. Another on Graves, Sassoon, Irene Rathbone, and Vera Brittain compares their postwar writings to the letters, diaries, and literary accounts that they produced during the war itself. The detail and specificity of her comparison of wartime and postwar accounts allows her to trace the reshaping of memory with extraordinary clarity and conviction. The book reminds us of the value of archival research and of the need for scholarship that is more original than deferential and that reexamines familiar sources in new ways. This is a fresh look at the subject of memory and war and should be read by anyone interested in Britain during and after the First World War.