Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain

Janet Watson's study of war and memory uses published and unpublished British wartime and retrospective writings concerning World War I. Watson examines differing attitudes to this war among men and women, across different social classes, and in different periods. She concludes that participants often saw their experience - lived and remembered- as either work or service. In fact, far from having a united front, many active participants were 'fighting different wars', and this process only continued in the decades following peace.