Enlistment: Army Policy, Politics and the Press

Abstract

Throughout the Great War, newspaper journalists, politicians and medics made public pronouncements claiming that the conflict was witness to new and revolutionary accomplishments in modern medical science which amounted to a triumph of state control and organization on behalf of the ordinary man. On 12 August 1916, for instance, The Times stated that ‘the public have an utterly inadequate idea of the debt they owe to modern surgery at a time like this. Day by day the surgeons are giving the nation new men for old. They are doing more than would have been credible 20 years ago to rob war of its ultimate horror.’¹ Here, as elsewhere, medicine was depicted as a progressive force for healing, well-being and healthfulness, doctors were compassionate and wise, nurses were ministering angels in white, hospitals were havens of calm and sanity.² As one aspect of military medicine in the Great War the care of shell shock casualties was supposedly another instance of scientific progress, and it too was enlisted for the purposes of Home Front morale. The bodies of men were used in a similar manner: either displayed as evidence that physically injured men could be visibly healed, or else discreetly kept at a distance so as not to offend casual observers.