In the opening line of his poem “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” Randall Jarrell grasps the fundamental negation of the individual in war: “From my mother's sleep I fell into the State.” This negation, this mobilization and categorization of human raw material as the instrument of national policy, is the modern catastrophe underlying the question that Tammy Proctor attempts to answer in this book: what does it mean to be a civilian in wartime? In a concise and useful synthesis of the burgeoning social and cultural history of war that has emerged over approximately the last fifteen years, Proctor shows that the mobilization for total war in the twentieth century transformed the conventional demarcations between soldier and civilian. Her focus is how the combatant states during World War I created whole new categories of human beings that were conscripted, trained, transported, coerced, exploited, expropriated, and neutralized to keep their war machines running. In other words, all “citizens” became “soldiers” (and potential casualties) in the pursuit of victory.

Acknowledging that such a claim is hardly novel in light of the massive scholarship on this subject, Proctor clearly states that her book is intended primarily for undergraduate audiences. Nevertheless, even specialists will find much of value in the book's overview of the militarization of all facets of social, economic, political, intellectual, and even spiritual life imposed by nations at war in the industrial age. In depicting the varieties of the civilian experience of war between 1914 and 1918, Proctor draws on the work of most of the leading historians currently working on the impact of wartime mobilization on civil society: John Horne (France), Nicoletta Gullace (Britain), Christopher Capozzola (the United States), Peter Gatrell (Russia), Roger Chickering (Germany), and Maureen Healy (Austria-Hungary). While the book includes some archival material, consisting mainly of memoirs, letters, and diaries, from Britain, France, Belgium, the U.S., and Australia, the bulk of Proctor's evidence is cited from published and secondary sources, the material dealing with Germany, Italy, the Balkans, and eastern Europe exclusively so. This reliance on secondary sources, however, does not detract from the crucial paradox that Proctor draws out of her synthesis: as the professionalization of military organization accelerated in the half century prior to 1914, civilian identity was granted a protected status; yet, as the war ground on, the mobilization of the “home front” allowed (or forced) the combatant states to abrogate or modify that status according to the exigencies of their war aims and efforts.

The organization of the book enables Proctor to examine in turn the new categorical nomenclature necessitated by total war: the conscript, the war worker, the patriotic xenophobe, the occupied, the wounded, the war expert, the displaced person or refugee, and the revolutionary. Chapter one, “Citizens in Uniform,” examines how the modern phenomenon of the levée en masse created the divided soul of the “citizen soldier” or the conscript, whose utility depended not only on the breakdown and remaking of the civilian body but, ultimately, on a radical (and frequently contested) renegotiation of the social contract. Chapter two, “Civilians and the Labor of War,” points out that the pursuit of victory in the industrial age turned the factory and the granary into weapons of war. This militarization of the economy and the logistical discipline it imposed justified a transformation of the worker's status that could, on the one hand, bring women into the industrial workforce and, on the other, legitimate the forced labor of civilians and prisoners of war. Along these same lines, the discipline of mobilization, as discussed in chapter three, “Constructing Home Fronts,” required the comprehensive integration of the idea of “sacrifice” within the established privileges and obligations of citizenship. War loan subscriptions, rationing, patriotic displays, vigilance against spies: all of these were the “positive” dynamics of state-sponsored wartime solidarity. Yet, Proctor believes, such coercive mechanisms inevitably stressed commitments to fairness and equity, resulting in the rise of the black market, food and draft riots, and conflict between rural and urban populations, all of which required further state intervention to suppress these threats to productivity. In extremis, as Proctor shows in chapter eight, perceptions of inequity could drive an escalation of civil and class conflict that propelled the “revolutionary” out of the violence of the front to attack the state itself, as happened in Russia and Germany between 1917 and 1919.

War in the age of nationalism is fundamentally about the control and exploitation of territory. Establishing this control creates vast numbers of people who are cut off from their homelands: occupied populations, prisoners of war, civilian internees, insurgents, and ethnic minorities identified as “subversive.” Proctor discusses the treatment of these groups in chapter four, “Caught Between the Lines,” and chapter seven, “Civilians Behind the Wire.” Generally, Proctor observes, these threats to the productive control of the territorial base of the war effort were primarily neutralized through methodical processes of concentration and deportation, though violent methods of control and coercion, such as rape, terroristic massacre, and genocidal mass murder, were also used. The precondition in all of these cases, however, was the categorization of civilian populations according to the military's utilitarian calculus of security and logistical efficiency.

Proctor notes that the militarization of civilian populations in wartime was not necessarily or exclusively coercive in nature. Chapters five and six describe the mobilization of “expertise” considered essential to military effectiveness, respectively that of medicine and the collective knowledge contained in the spheres of the sciences, the humanities, and industrial capitalism. In other words, a mutually beneficial cooperation between public agencies and the private sector was temporarily mobilized to repair broken bodies and spirits, design new weapons, win hearts and minds, and care for uprooted populations impoverished by the insatiable demands of the war machine.

While Proctor could perhaps have devoted more space to the context of the pre-1914 militarization of the western world, her book, as a survey and a synthesis, achieves her stated aim and would work well in undergraduate and even graduate seminars.