Conditions The Soldiers example essay topic

Explain The Changing Attitudes Of British Soldiers And Civilians Towards The War When war broke out in 1914 soldiers were ready and eager to fight a war they believed would be over by Christmas. They volunteered to beat the Germans, to fight for King and country, to protect their land and families and they believed it was their duty. There was also huge public pressure to join up and objectors were given white feathers and publicly ridiculed. Friends egged each other on and rushed to join up together these were known as pals battalions. Civilians were caught up by the war fever. Years of anti-German feeling led to atmosphere of finally being able to teach the Germans a lesson.

Patriotic fever swept the country except for those who did not want to fight - mostly for religious reasons. Huge efforts were made to raise money for the war effort and newspapers and radios were read and listened to by a population hungry for the details of the fighting. Gradually the soldiers realised that the fighting was not only not going to be over by Christmas but could go on for years. New and more efficient methods tanks, planes and gas added to the sheer misery of the soldiers. Battles such as the Somme and Passchendaele saw soldiers killed in numbers never seen before.

Plagued by cold, rats, fleas, lice with a shortage of food and homesick the soldiers began to question what they were doing especially since the Generals and Officers, with a few exceptions stayed well behind the actual fighting lines. The condition in the trenches was appalling cold and wet with no comforts. Food was rationed and inadequate so the soldiers were usually hungry. Leave was rare and it could be difficult for the average soldier to get home given the transport problems. Many of the soldiers were young, frighten e and very homesick.

For thousands of men in the army it was the first time that they had been away from home and the noble cause they were fighting for became harder to actually believe in. Any letters home were heavily censored and they couldnt talk about they felt or what was really happening. News from home could take weeks to arrive and men would worry about their families if they lived in an area that was under threat and male relatives who were also away fighting. Whilst they were away many became fathers and didnt know when, if ever, they would see their children. Having joined up with friends many witnessed friends slaughtered on the battlefields and became depressed and demoralized.

Soldiers waiting to go over the top were probably terrified, reluctant to go and wanting to go home. Morale became lower and lower as more and more men saw the fighting as a futile exercise where neither side seemed to make any advance. The fact that so much of the war was a stalemate led to boredom with nothing to relieve the monotony. The constant bombardment from the enemy meant that sleep was short and interrupted so as well as every thing else the soldiers would have been constantly tired some almost to the point of exhaustion. Generals, distant from their men by miles, and often class, appeared to have no real sympathy or understanding for the average soldier. Field Officers understood more since they actually saw the conditions the soldiers were fighting under but they were powerless to act.

Part of the problem was that many Generals had no real conception of how fighting tactics had changed since the Crimean War over a decade before. At the end of the war the overriding feeling was of relief to be going home at last, to be alive and able to go. It was probably very difficult to feel enthusiastic and happy about the victory except it meant being able to see home again. On the home front women took over many mens jobs and settled down to keep the home fires burning for their men to come home to when the war to end all wars was over. They presumed, as the soldiers had, it wouldnt be long. Germans were portrayed as evil monsters and the propaganda machine worked all the time to try and keep morale high and justify the war.

The home front kept factories going, helped with rationing and tried to keep peoples spirits up. By claiming the bombing of Scarborough 1916 was killing innocent victims the Government could give a reason for the necessity of winning the war. However many civilians had to suffer air raids, the carrying of gas masks and uncertainty as to the whereabouts and well being of their family and friends. Due to heavy censorship civilian attitude to war took longer to change than the men fighting on the front. Civilian life changed dramatically during the war. Strikes in factories were banned so that there could be no threat to the production of arms or other wartime necessities and pubs were closed at lunchtime so that workers could not get drunk and build faulty guns etc.

All talk of war was banned in public places in case enemy spies overheard some important military talk. They were subjected to endless speeches promoting the war and began to suffer war fatigue. Every where they looked there were reminders of the fighting from radio broadcasts to posters warning of the dangers of careless talk and propaganda to try to get men to enlist. Almost everything was rationed food, clothes and other things that people had taken for granted before the outbreak of war. The constant worry about husbands, boyfriends, brothers, fathers etc took their toll and reading the casualty list of newspapers every day to see whom you knew that had died would have added to the constant stress that they were living under.

The horror of the trenches was played down but after 1916 the ever-increasing list of casualties, which the Government could not hide, increased awareness in people that many hundreds of thousands were dying and slowly morale began to falter. Many people just wanted life to return to normal and began to long for the war to be over and for their loved ones to come home. The long separation from loved ones was extremely hard to bear once the belief that it would be a short war became a distant memory. For most married women it meant that they were struggling to bring up their children alone, with fathers some of them barely knew, work in the factories and live with the constant fear of an air raid and their men not returning. Civilians celebrated the end of the war with parties and victory celebrations. Many had no idea what the soldiers had been through and could not understand the weary acceptance of the soldiers.

The relief that it was all finally over and life could begin to return to normal was overwhelming and they all believed that it would never happen again. They thought that the war to end all wars would be a lesson no one could forget.