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THE FIRST WORLD WAR

SERIES ONE: European War, 1914-1919, The War Reserve Collection (WRA-WRE) from Cambridge University Library

Part 5: The Royal Army Medical Corps, Red Cross and other Ancillary Series

Part 6: The War at Sea and the War in the Air

 

Editorial Introduction to Part 5 by Dr J. M. Winter

These documents highlight the genius of the British war effort:  its capacity to tap the ingenuity, energy, and compassion built into the Victorian and Edwardian voluntary tradition.  Of Protestant origin, but deeply ecumenical, the activity of a myriad of groups and individuals in hospitals, in the Red Cross, in the Society of Friends, in the YMCA, and in every theatre of military operations described the peculiarly British nature of the war effort of 1914-18.

This collection brings to the fore the variety and ingenuity of these people, whose fight was to defend a way of life.  Civil society went to the front, and through these documents, we can catch a glimpse of the greatest secret weapon of the Allies:  the consent of the governed, not manufactured by propaganda or dragooned into being by edict or fines, but emerging from a field of social action spanning civil society from the shadow of family life on one side to the shadow of the state on the other.

We can see here too one of the ironies of the war.  By fighting such a war, in which the state grew exponentially, the civil society mobilized between 1914 and 1918 was defending a way of life about to be eclipsed.  Here too the yawning gap between pre-war and post-war takes on new meaning and new sadness, for this world of associative action began to fade away at precisely the moment of its greatest service.

Jay Winter

Pembroke College, Cambridge

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