Aftershocks of World War I

They are instructive today, historian says

World War I shattered the people and the collective psyche of Great Britain, but the war’s end did not stop the strife or suffering. Between 1918 and 1931, the shell-shocked people and their nation sought to regain a sense of order through repression and sometimes violence.

That is the contention of Susan Kent, chair of the University of Colorado Department of History, who has spent 15 years writing a book on post-war Britain. “Aftershocks: Politics and Trauma in Britain, 1918-1931” has just been published in the United States.

Kent notes that “shell shock” afflicted staggering numbers of Britons, and she argues that these individual cases of trauma were extrapolated to the society, which tried to repair its shattered psyche by asserting “extremes of Britishness,” particularly with extraordinary violence directed at those deemed un-English.

Though it pulled together during the war, Britain took a political hard right afterwards, she notes. During this time, political and social leaders wrote a “political narrative” in which, she says, a host of groups were marginalized.

The Irish were blamed for harming the British war effort by carrying out the Easter Rising of 1916, which necessitated the transfer of troops from Somme to Dublin. Women were blamed for making good money while men died in trenches. Indians were lambasted for taking advantage of the war to make demands for self-government.

In the wake of war, Kent says, society used reactionary measures to reassemble itself. She cites the Alien Restriction Act of 1919, race riots of the same year, the massacre of more than 500 Indians in 1919, reprisals against the Irish until 1921 and the General Strike of 1926.

Further, she cites the debates over the bill to enfranchise women over 30 in 1927 and 1928 and the 1929 Igbo women’s war in Nigeria.

Regarded as a whole, she writes, these events “demonstrate a pattern of thinking and behavior we have not heretofore attributed to Britons.”

Kent adds that unlike earlier instances of violence committed against national or colonial subjects, “a substantial portion of Britons thought and acted in the extreme ways they did in the interwar period in an effort to repair the damage done to the individual and national psyche by deep and abiding personal suffering.”

That suffering was indeed extreme. In one of many eyewitness accounts from the front lines, Kent quotes a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps assigned to a dressing station, who recalled that “troops came pouring up … and as rapidly as they went up they would be brought back—what was left of them—mangled masses of blood, bits of men, limbs missing, groaning bodies with intestines visible, sometimes khaki shapes that screamed like maniacs when the stretchers were lifted out.”

Kent emphasizes the scale of suffering: In four years of war, Britain lost 750,000 men. Six million British men—one-seventh of the nation’s population—served in the armed forces; one in eight died. Further, 1.6 million servicemen—one in four—suffered wounds or illnesses.

This magnitude of suffering is hard to convey to Americans. “It just doesn’t register with us the way it does with them,” she says. The war wasn’t fought on American soil or at as great a cost. Some 112,000 Americans died in World War I, but by the time the United States joined the fighting, conditions were different, Kent notes.

The war, she says, seems to have blurred normal boundaries in British society. “Lines were eradicated and blown apart,” she says. “Male melded into female (as women entered the workforce and performed jobs traditionally done by men). Indians fought in the front lines with British soldiers. That kind of blurring of lines required the re-establishment of boundaries.”

Political extremism promised to re-establish those lines, she adds.

Kent describes her work as an attempt to fuse the literatures of cultural memory on one hand and conventional politics on the other. Though those literatures refer to each other routinely, they have remained “largely aloof from one another.”

Her aim in the book is to connect those literatures “to argue the crucial connection between structures of feeling and political culture in Britain and thereby to explain the widespread appeal of conservative politics to a broad segment of British public opinion.”

Britain’s experience in those dark years is relevant today, she says. “What we see today are all these men and women coming home with traumatic brain injuries, which will have a political effect down the road. And we haven’t a clue what that impact will be.”

She says Americans have had similar political reactions to wars in which conventional expectations of warfare were shattered. “I’ve always argued that Reaganism, which succeeded in part by demonizing various groups in American society, was a consequence of Vietnam.”

Today, “The difference is that we have people coming home (from Iraq and Afghanistan) who never would have survived in any other war. So there will be all the more consequences.” On the other hand, she adds, a relatively small portion of Americans are fighting, so the societal consequences may be less pronounced.