Our mental picture of the First World War, particularly its British experience, is suffused with images of male friendship. High literary examples are plentiful enough, the most obvious being the khaki trio of Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Robert Graves, along with their chaste, doomed love objects—David Thomas in Sassoon's case, the pseudonymous “Dick” in Graves’s. Then there are the mass expressions of comradeship: the football friendlies of the brief Christmas 1914 truce; the pals’ battalions of Kitchener's New Army, fattened for slaughter on the Somme; and the rough-and-ready “mateship” of the Australia New Zealand Army Corps Diggers and Kiwis, so grievously tested at Gallipoli. It is one of the enduring ironies of that most ironic of wars that so many combatants testified to the importance of personal friendship in an atmosphere of carnage and hatred. Indeed, the emotional stress of trench warfare seems to have increased the strength of feeling between front-line comrades, intensifying friendships that were too often challenged by, and sought to defy and transcend, death. Some modern theorists of combat motivation argue that only the fraternity of the “primary group” can explain the willingness of men to fight, to kill, and to risk being killed in the Bosch-like landscapes of battlefields such as the Western Front. Whether or not this is true, it certainly appears from the testimonies of these bands of brothers that their wartime friendships had an intensity entirely lacking in civilian life. Postwar writings often regretfully linger on this point, as disappointed ex-servicemen discovered that it was impossible to conjure up more constructive bonds of mutual service and sacrifice in civvy street.

Friendship, then, is an essential theme in the cultural experience of the first half of the twentieth century, but as Sarah Cole points out in her intriguing and useful book, it is a theme little analyzed. Cole's aim is to use the history of male friendship in Britain from roughly the 1890s to the 1930s, with a particular concentration on the course and aftermath of the First World War, as a way of understanding that perennial enigma, the “modern.” Her focus is specifically literary, for she is most interested in the changing use of personal male friendship in modernist writing, but it samples and has implications for the broader cultural history of the period. Cole argues that during those forty-odd years there was a shift “from an idealized, often utopian notion of male friendship to an image of modernity as reflecting the wreckage of that very ideal” (2). She identifies 1914–18 as the watershed of the transformation, for the war brought demands on the conception of male camaraderie that were impossible to satisfy; the Edwardian beau ideal of fraternal intimacy was replaced in postwar literature by the dysfunctional “pseudo-couple,” as Beckett was to later describe it, a needy but endlessly combative pairing, which Cole proposes as “a harrowing image of the bleak interpersonal structures of modernity” (5). The book's argument is developed in four chapters, three of which are loosely arranged around a prominent author (E. M. Forster, Joseph Conrad, and D. H. Lawrence, respectively) whose conception of male friendship Cole suggests was characteristic of a particular cultural moment in time. The chapter on the war itself is more nebulously organized, using a melange of evidence from the canonical war poets as well as Vera Brittain, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot.

Perhaps Cole's most commendable accomplishment is the way that she shows how rarely the discourse of amity is properly explored. She makes, for instance, a valuable distinction between “friendship” and “comradeship” among soldiers in the trenches, the first being a consciously chosen relationship of mutual love and respect, the second a corporate commitment of men thrust into involuntary intimacy—the camaraderie of desperation. Though not clearly demarcated in the literature of the war, Cole makes a plausible case that the two were discrete categories of experience that coexisted in uneasy tension with one another, a strain detectable in many later texts. Loyalty to the group could mean sacrifice of individual constancy; selfless devotion to one's mates ruled out the possibility of peculiar devotion to one. Trench comradeship ultimately damaged friendship, with lasting cultural consequences. Similarly, her discussion of what she calls the malleable “organization of intimacy” (4), the institutional conventions that define and bind the possibilities of friendship from one period to another, is a welcome historicization of an experience too often understood as timeless or unchanging.

The book has its problems. Cole makes clear several times that the cataclysm of 1914–18 lies at the heart of her story, but despite her titular promise the First World War does not arrive until over halfway through. The first two chapters, though they do the necessary work of establishing the antebellum context for later change, appear at times to belong somewhere else. Cole uses an array of sources, from classic modernist texts to obscure travel narratives and unpublished memoirs, some of which were written long after the events in question, but is less than clear as to the proper relationship between these chronologically scattered and very different types of evidence. The book does not always quite seem to know whether its focus is literary or historical; there is a long digression in chapter 4 about the social and cultural conditions of the demobilized ex-serviceman in postwar Britain—a worthwhile topic, and one that Cole writes about astutely, but which rather wanders from the point at issue. A conclusion synthesizing the author's many interesting insights would have been more effective than somewhat abrupt ending that we actually get.

That being said, however, this is a commendable and important work that deserves its place in the literature of the period, and which has the frankly unexpected but much appreciated bonus of being written in skillful and jargon-free English.