The metaphor of the brotherhood of arms has a powerful association with the British cultural history of the First World War. From recruitment practices through training and service to mourning and the legacy of war, the invocation of symbolic brotherhood is evident in every aspect of what Samuel Hynes has termed “the soldiers’ tale” (The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War [1997], xii–xiii). Yet, as Linda Maynard points out in Brothers in the Great War: Siblings, Masculinity and Emotions, literal fraternal relationships were often as important to men's experiences of the war as were metaphoric ones. Maynard sets out to explore sibling relationships in war as a prism through which to analyze martial and familial emotions. Doing so, she argues, marks a key development in the scholarship of “the primacy of domestic ties for fighting men” (21).

To do this, Maynard has researched a huge range of primary sources through which the stories of sibling relationships were built, including letters, memoirs, oral history, and fiction. The stories she tells range from those of well-known siblings, such as Vera Brittain and Siegfried Sassoon, to those whose stories she brings to historical attention from the archive for the first time. Maynard is a conscientious and passionate researcher. Her love for her subject is evident in the level of detail that she brings to telling the stories of these families. She has consulted more than one hundred archival sources and a range of published primary source material and data drawn from the Family Life and Work Experience database. Her research is deep and broad, including an impressive array of detail about the circumstances, movements, and emotions of the individuals discussed.

While impressive, the amount of research is also one of the weaknesses of this volume. While Maynard knows her material intimately, the sheer amount of detail provided can leave the reader unable to distinguish among the many different family units and sibling relationships. Separating Dodo Baines from Do Dodsworth, for example, is challenging for someone less familiar with these individuals than is Maynard. This problem extends to the overall argument. In trying to locate her analysis in relation to three major historiographies—those of domesticity, gender, and emotions—Maynard never fully succeeds in showing the full significance of her material to any of the three. Indeed, in relation to gender, her case is based on a misreading of current literature. Far from “perpetuating the gendered expectations that ‘real’ men fight wars” (267), the argument put forward by the historians Maynard cites is that “real” men in wartime had to negotiate dominant masculine hegemonies, negotiations that could include resistance and subversion as well as enthusiasm and submission. While Maynard's sources undoubtedly demonstrate this range of responses, she does not show how their status as either experiential sources—that is, those that reflect author subjectivities—or as reflective of sibling relationships in particular, furthers understanding of gender, emotions, or siblinghood in wartime beyond the current state of these fields.

This is not to suggest that the sources are not worth exploring. There are many interesting details and, indeed, moments of analysis throughout. Chapter 5, “Brotherly Loss,” is particularly insightful, demonstrating the particularity of sibling mourning within a variety of family structures. Here Maynard brings together the theories of gender, emotion, and domesticity most clearly and effectively. Too often, however, her line of argument gets lost in the level of detail provided about different topics. For example, while the concerns of Emily Penrose and H. A. L. Fisher about the impact of the war on female education sheds an interesting sidelight on the question of female emancipation by the war (124), it is hard to see what this point adds to our understandings of siblinghood, masculinity, or emotions. Similarly, a digression into the makeup and purpose of military service tribunals (145–46) adds nothing to the overall argument and could have been discussed more concisely and effectively through secondary literature. Thus, while it is possible to track a chronological path through the chapters, from prewar family relationships through enlistment, wartime service, death, and mourning, it requires considerable concentration on the part of the reader to follow the thread of argument. As with the details and distinctions of family histories, Maynard's own sense of structural clarity has not translated easily to the page.

None of this is helped by the number of editing mistakes and oversights and other errors that occur throughout. These include footnotes where quotations and paraphrases are inaccurately attributed, references missing from the bibliography and the misnaming of the historian Nancy Martin as Nicola (110). There is also a glaring contradiction, with David Thomas called Siegfried Sassoon's lover on page 211, a claim then rejected in a later footnote (232n108). Slippages of categorization are also problematic, with the word filial used in place of fraternal, and fictional sources read alongside letters and diaries without consideration of generic differentiation. Most frustrating is the lack of clarity about whether the analytic focus is on relationships between brothers, brothers and sisters, or siblings more generally. This elision of gender distinctions undermines the engagement with the historiography of masculinity in particular. The equation of the proximity of the Clarke and Dodsworth sisters in their wartime munitions work and voluntarism respectively with that of the Collings brothers’ sharing of a dugout at Ypres undermines Maynard's suggestion, following Michael Roper, that comradeship formed a part of complex wartime definitions of masculinity in particular (168–69).

In spite of these problems, Maynard does manage to make the case that a sibling's eye view of the war has the potential to inform our understanding of the social and cultural history of the conflict. She shows that the material available is rich and wide ranging, with many stories to tell us. Maynard herself tells them with great passion. It is unfortunate that the analytic clarity of her book is not equally great.