This book surveys and examines the history of Britain's soldiers from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. It focuses on the lifecycle of a soldier, including enlistment and experience, and on identity, representations and place in society. It covers the diverse military forces of the British crown - the regular army, home defence forces, part-time soldiers, auxiliaries, officers, non-commissioned officers and rank and file - across times of conflictand peace and their wider relationsh...

This is a major new history of the British army during the Great War written by three leading military historians. Ian Beckett, Timothy Bowman and Mark Connelly survey operations on the Western Front and throughout the rest of the world as well as the army's social history, pre-war and wartime planning and strategy, the maintenance of discipline and morale and the lasting legacy of the First World War on the army's development. They assess the strengths and weaknesses of the army between 1...

The British army was almost unique among the European armies of the Great War in that it did not suffer from a serious breakdown of discipline or collapse of morale. It did, however, inevitably suffer from disciplinary problems. While attention has hitherto focused on the 312 notorious ‘shot at dawn’ cases, many thousands of British soldiers were tried by court martial during the Great War.This book provides the first comprehensive study of discipline and morale in the British Army...