2 - Why men fought: combat motivation in the trenches

Summary

Enlistment

Given the strain of fighting, why did most soldiers agree to do so? Traditional historiography held that the First World War had been welcomed by the belligerent populations. Contemporary publications in Germany claimed that huge, ‘war-enthused’ crowds had roared approval at the outbreak of hostilities and that more than 1 million volunteers had flooded into barracks. Echoing this propaganda, historians have until recently also reported that ‘enormous jubilation greeted the announcement [of mobilisation]’. The research undertaken by Jeffrey Verhey, Wolfgang Kruse and Benjamin Ziemann in the 1990s effectively exposed these myths. Verhey found from an extensive analysis of newspaper accounts that ‘the majority of Germans in July and August did not feel “war enthusiasm”’. Kruse uncovered the forgotten fact that 750,000 people took part in peace demonstrations directly before the war and argued that, when the conflict began, the industrial working classes reacted ‘with a serious, frequently also despairing mood’. Ziemann has shown convincingly that people in the Bavarian countryside similarly responded to news of mobilisation with depression and pessimism. On the other side, the British seem to have been little more enthused by the onset of hostilities: Adrian Gregory contends that belligerence and jingoism were not dominant and the public were ‘quite clear-headed about the perils of war’.