Armistice Day, an unspecified November in the 1920s. Two ex-servicemen are watching the town celebrations from the window: “Every year came this funeral of part of themselves, unavoidable, saddening in its associations. They turned away from the window. Their island of birth and upbringing, forbade the expression of any feeling, but Skene, the more vocative by profession, silently handed Dormer his pouch” (R. H. Mottram, cited on p. 37). This juxtaposition of public commemorative activities and private memory, of spectacle and silence, lies at the heart of Gabriel Koureas's investigation into masculinities in Britain in the aftermath of the First World War. The author questions the extent to which sites of memory bore any relation to memories of the wartime experiences and reveals how the demand for a heroic, sacrificial war sat uncomfortably with its traumatic and unheroic character.

Sources in which veterans are explicit about their experience of commemorative activities are not abundant, but Koureas seeks a rich basis of comparison, for example, by contrasting the souvenirs collected by veterans from the field with the collection principles of the newly formed Imperial War Museum. Four chapters combine a thematic focus and select “sites of memory”: the cenotaph and aesthetic considerations, the London and North Western Railway Memorial and discipline, the Machine Gun Corps Memorial and trauma and disability, and the Imperial War Museum and individual collection and donation. The author challenges many of the current understandings of war memorials, specifically their inclusivity, and their role in facilitating the resolution of the grief of the bereaved: “the idea of simplicity was a class specific aesthetic, and the grief and trauma of the ex-servicemen was to a very great extent ignored” (186). Koureas's challenge is more effective for being well rooted in the secondary literature surrounding war memory and commemoration, building on, but also taking on, J. M. Winter, for example, for failing to recognize the national (not only transnational) dimensions of mourning and for questioning whether veterans and the bereaved—and the bereaved veteran—could find much solace in unveiling speeches that were above all exercises in industrial relations (73). How were ex-servicemen to relate to order when all had been chaos, to classical beauty denying mutilation, to silence following cacophony? The two-minute silence allowed space for the general to become specific, for a collective act to be simultaneously individual, but crucially, personal experience and mourning were thus confined.

Koureas argues that commemorative activities were intended to foster a harmonious orderly reconstruction and restoration—a renewal of “old habits and traditions” as the Ministry of Reconstruction put it—not to represent a radical breach with the past to permit substantial change, particularly in the context of class. According to the Ministry, the greatest threat to this mission was posed by the worker whose attitudes had been “greatly altered” by the war, and by veterans seeking better conditions of life than those found in British industry before the war. If the war could be mobilized to represent patriotic stoicism, however, these demands could be restrained. The discipline and order represented in both the memorials and the rituals surrounding them thus served to create a spectacle “that attempted to erase and subsume any revolutionary feelings and radical ideas from the collective memory” (4). In consequence, however, while the simplicity of form of war memorials may have satisfied middle- and upper-class aesthetic sensibilities, it sidelined “uncontrolled” emotional expression such as that found in local street shrines. This form taken by public “unofficial” mourning could have provided a valuable counterpoint to the public memorials covered by the author.

The central thesis here is that attempts to shape mourning and memory reflected postwar fears surrounding masculinities. Of particular concern was the masculinity of working-class Britons (constructed in contrast to public school ethos such as self-sacrifice, devotion to duty, stoicism) and of returning servicemen, both vulnerable and disruptive. Civil unrest, labor demands, shell shock, and, more ambiguously, camaraderie challenged the stability of constructions of masculinity. The impulse to restore order (controlled crowds, structured exhibitions) and the noncompliance of the body to such attempts can be found outside the context of class tension, however, and predated postwar Britain. Florence Farnborough, a Red Cross nurse on the Eastern Front, took striking photographs of the debris of war (rifles, bayonets) carefully stacked in the aftermath of battle, and of corpses more resistant to being, or remaining, tidied.

Women appear rarely in the text. On the one hand, their exclusion gives space to individual forms of mourning often ignored elsewhere: the bereaved father, for example, who attempted to donate to the Imperial War Museum a memorial tablet to the memory of his son (179). The discussion of responses to and experiences of disability, on the other hand, would benefit from a greater engagement with the gendered nature of interwar discussion of this subject, not only in terms of the feminization of victims of physical and mental disabilities suggested (and arguably overstated) here, but also in terms of veterans’ reintegration into society through marriage and reproduction. As Janet Watson has shown, driven by postwar concerns surrounding masculinity, there was a shift in the 1920s away from construing male and female contributions to the war effort as equal but different. Instead, the male experience—specifically the trench experience—became the defining experience, against which all others were measured (Janet S. K. Watson, Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain [New York, 2004]). The wartime civilian male is virtually invisible in the historiography, and Koureas includes little to improve his visibility, despite the civilian role in the production of the weapons of industrialized warfare worshipped at the Imperial War Museum, and despite the focus here on the London and North Western Railways (the memorial to the company's 3,719 casualties was, after all, partially raised by their former colleagues).

Nonetheless, the great value of this well-illustrated study is the methodology it devises to capture the elusive: the juxtaposition of collective sites of remembrance with individual memory. As such, it is a valuable addition to the library of any individual interested in commemoration, memory, and masculinity in the wake of war.