Central to the popular understanding of the British experience in the First World War is the idea that the civilian identities of the young men who served in the British Army on the Western Front were all but obliterated by their exposure to, on the one hand, the anachronistically alien society and culture of the British Army and, on the other, the hellishly alien world of the trenches. Thus the dislocation and disillusion that supposedly characterized the survivors among the Great War's “Lost Generation,” and their commonly assumed difficulties reassimilating into civilian life once they left the military. In Citizen Soldiers, Helen B. McCartney focuses on the First World War experience of the 1/6th and 1/10th Battalions of the King's Liverpool Regiment to make a compelling case that British soldiers’ prewar civilian identities, far from being effaced by their time in the army and in the trenches, were fundamentally inseparable from their identities and experiences as soldiers and may actually have helped to substantially mitigate the potentially alienating effects of war and military life. Furthermore, McCartney argues, there seems to be little evidence that the majority of the soldiers in her study who survived the war returned home as the bitter, dysfunctional veterans of popular imagination. Most that were physically able seem to have reintegrated relatively easily into the civilian world, which remained central to their sense of who they truly were.

McCartney explains that she chose these two particular battalions—popularly known as the Liverpool Rifles and the Liverpool Scottish—largely because their social composition, even among the rank and file, was predominantly middle class, and thus they produced an abundance of personal sources. Using letters, diaries, memoirs, and official documents related to the battalions, she is able to present an admirably detailed and comprehensive social history of the two units. Significantly, the Liverpool Rifles and the Liverpool Scottish were Territorial battalions, which prior to the First World War comprised the reserve forces of Britain's regular army. As such, their character, in terms of traditions, culture, and social composition, was often distinct from that of the two other types of infantry battalion, those of the professional regular army and those, known as Service or New Army battalions, that were created after 1914 to handle the wartime flood of volunteers to the colors. However, as McCartney points out, there were more Territorial battalions in the British Army during the First World War than any other type of battalion, a fact that makes their relative neglect by historians an oversight that she contributes extensively and commendably toward correcting.

The book is divided into three sections, the first of which establishes that the social identities of these men as civilians and as soldiers were often inextricably intertwined, particularly in terms of class, ethnicity, and regional identification. In fact, the members of the Liverpool battalions struggled mightily to retain and continued to emphasize the predominantly middle-class, predominantly Scottish, and predominantly Liverpudlian identity of their units, even as attrition markedly diluted these unit characteristics over the course of the war. It is in this section that the virtues of a local, microlevel study such as McCartney's are most evident. The precision of its focus allows an unusually detailed exploration of the relationship between these soldiers’ sense of identity and their war experience for the duration of their service, from enlistment to active service to demobilization. Consequently, we gain a more complicated understanding of the British soldier in the First World War, one that lifts him from the undifferentiated mass to which he is too often relegated in more general studies of the topic.

The second section explores how the soldiers’ perception of themselves as civilians with a continuing stake in civilian society shaped their attitudes toward and relationship with the British Army as an institution. McCartney provides a considerable amount of evidence, ranging from personal correspondence to official punishment statistics, to demonstrate that while the Liverpool Rifles and Liverpool Scottish showed themselves to be disciplined and courageous soldiers on the battlefield, at no time did they conform to the stereotype of the brave but submissive British “Tommy,” cowed and coerced by harsh discipline and rigid hierarchy into ideal cannon fodder. On the contrary, obedience within these battalions was not as much enforced by the threat of punishment as it was obtained by positive motivation and facilitated by the relatively relaxed relations between officers and men (who, in the early years of the war, often came from the same social background).

The third section of the book focuses on the war fought by the Liverpool battalions on the Western Front and on how their experience of combat and mass casualties affected their ideals and attitudes. The Liverpool Rifles and the Liverpool Scottish participated in some of the British Army's bloodiest campaigns on the Western Front, including the Somme in 1916 and the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917, and both battalions suffered the appalling losses typical of the fighting in that theater. Many of the soldiers’ letters and diary entries provided by McCartney vividly describe the lethality and often-miserable conditions of trench warfare, and some occasionally show evidence of sagging morale, especially immediately after a particularly futile engagement. However, these same personal sources show little evidence that the experience of modern war fundamentally alienated the men who endured it from the civilian world so pivotal to their identity. In fact, McCartney argues, it was this world that the men of the Liverpool battalions believed they were fighting to protect, and this belief sustained not only a willingness to fight but a desire for victory that remained generally consistent throughout the conflict.

In the short epilogue that concludes Citizen Soldiers, McCartney touches on the Liverpool veterans’ return to civilian life after the war and on personal, local, and civic efforts to commemorate the battalions’ dead. Naturally, the level of analysis and amount of supporting evidence here does not approach that of the preceding sections, but the conclusion offered is that the majority of veterans, if they were physically able to do so, reassimilated into civilian society reasonably smoothly, in many cases returning to the jobs and rejoining the clubs and social organizations that had hallmarked their middle-class status before the war. However, whether these men bore psychological scars as a result of their war experience and what, if any, impact this might have had on their postwar attitudes toward their service and toward the conflict in general remain largely unexplored. Of course, not only are there relatively few memoirs and other sources that might comprehensively illuminate this question solely in terms of these particular battalions, but, to a certain extent, this line of inquiry lies outside the purview of McCartney's project, given that she is primarily concerned with how the relationship between identity and experience shaped soldiers’ attitudes during the war itself. To adequately examine how this relationship affected the construction of memory, individual and collective, long after the fighting ended would require a separate study of how interpretations and understandings of the conflict's meaning changed as veterans and their community reflected on their war experience in the context of the post-1918 world. That said, McCartney's valuable and impressive work is bound to inspire further scholarship that will continue to transform our understanding of the First World War's impact on British society and culture.