Civilians, Soldiers and Perceptions of the Afterlife in Britain during the First World War

Abstract

For most educated Britons the First World War is synonymous with death on a massive scale. Although reliable estimates remained elusive for many years (this deceptively straightforward process being complicated by issues such as determining the nationality of the fallen and when to stop counting deaths as war-related), the figures are sobering enough: according to research published in the 1980s, as many as 772,000 Britons died in military service during the First World War. Despite the problems of the statistician, the fact of mass mortality was acutely and painfully obvious to contemporaries, so much so that, in an important essay published in 1981, David Cannadine characterized inter-war Britain as a society that was ‘obsessed with death’. Since 1918, the identification of death with the experience of the First World War has lodged itself deep in the national psyche, spawning the myth of ‘the lost generation’ and dominating the perceptions of posterity. As Dan Todman recently observed: The terrible cost of the war underpins many of our other received beliefs about it: the incompetence of the generals whose actions resulted in so many lost lives; the purposelessness of any war with such a butcher's bill; and the miraculous veneration of any veteran who managed to survive the carnage.

Brotherly loss

“…Collings was not alone in taking consolation in the thought that his brother inhabited an intermediate state, an orthodoxy that gained currency among the church-going population during the war years. 80 Constrained by the language of sacrifice, Francis singled out Sid's death on the cusp of manhood for its personal significance. War narratives are populated by factual accounts of brothers' deaths.…”