Abstract
Tammy M. Proctor, Civilians in a World at War, 1914–1918, New York and London, New York University Press, 2010; xiv +363 pp.; £19.99 hbk; ISBN 9780814767153
This book, Tammy Proctor announces immediately, is inspired by growing interest in transnational or global history and by the wars of the last decade in Afghanistan and Iraq. It aims to explain how our understanding of civilians in wartime contexts evolved. For Proctor, the First World War was the crucial moment when twentieth- and twenty-first-century ideas of warfare and civilians’ place within it were developed: the histories and experiences of Hiroshima or My Lai or Abu Graib are far different from what happened in Przemyśl or Ypres, but the logic used in each of these cases is recognizable in the experiences of World War One civilians (275). While later wars increased the intensity of civilian suffering, Proctor argues, its justification was established in the ways in which civilians were employed and exploited, mobilized and manipulated, used and abused in the world’s first total war. Proctor seeks to provide a global history of the First World War which goes beyond what she considers a falsely constructed image of the home front to consider the full range of civilian experience. Her richly illustrated book provides very wide-ranging examples from archival and published sources, which go some way towards achieving her goal, but her ambitious undertaking has, perhaps, produced a book of greater breadth than depth.
From the outset, the author seems intent on rescuing civilians from the enormous condescension of previous historical writing. As she points out more than once, civilians’ war contributions are very rarely the subject of commemoration. Reading her chapters, it is tempting to believe that historians of the war have so far overlooked all but soldiers, their generals and political leaders. Yet the admirable depth of secondary research on which her chapters are based highlights the thriving scholarship surrounding the various civilian activities she explores. Despite the odd curious omission – Helen McPhail’s The Long Silence (2001), on the experience of occupation in northern France, or Janet Watson’s Fighting Different Wars (2004) which deals, among other things, with varying perspectives on war work, for instance – Proctor’s achievement is to bring together much of this existing work in one overarching discussion.
The first chapter, ‘Citizens in Uniform’, sets the tone for much of what follows. The ambiguities and ambivalence in the identities of soldier and civilian are noted. Most men in military uniform were civilians torn from their normal lives who took with them their fears and prejudices, their hopes and ideals (28), and maintained civilian perspectives wherever possible. Proctor returns to this ambiguity, these blurred distinctions between civilian and military roles, throughout the book, which she exemplifies particularly well in the paradox of various workers subjected to military discipline but having civilian status. Also evident in the first chapter are the exclusions that the author herself has imposed, presumably to keep her global history to a manageable size. The dichotomy she traces is always between soldiers and civilians; sailors (even merchant civilian sailors) are conspicuously absent, except for a brief discussion of German sailors interned in the Australian camp at Berrima (210–11). Likewise, in supplying faces and stories to the anonymous civilian mass, the state and governments instead become generic and somewhat shadowy entities, issuing demands and propaganda to which civilians seem condemned to bow. This depiction of most civilians’ apparently fatalistic acceptance of state expectations (notwithstanding discussion of conscientious objectors, Russian opposition to enlistment and anti-conscription sentiment at various points, and the final chapter on civil war and revolution) contrasts with more careful demonstration of the variety of civilian roles and attitudes in other contexts. This, presumably, relates to another recurring question for the author (and one directed as much at 2010 as 1914–18 [268]): do civilians’ wartime efforts make them complicit in the continuation of warfare?
Proctor is determined to emphasize the many roles civilians played close to, or even on, the battle lines, arguing that the image of a home front deliberately constructed a parallel but separate civilian effort that supported the real front (9), withholding recognition of the genuine dangers endured by many civilians. For this reason, despite acknowledging that most civilians lived well behind the lines and experienced the war as a reality ‘in much different ways than … civilians on occupied or front zones’ (77), only one chapter focuses on civilian life away from the enemy. Three others explore the activities of civilian labourers, medical personnel and experts (charity workers, diplomats and others), often working close to the battle lines, while two more discuss civilian life in occupied zones and in internment camps. Unfortunately, this approach includes several repetitions where different categories of civilian overlap, while the chapter on the camps also seems oddly denuded of contemporary accounts, given the rich examples in preceding chapters. It is important to recognize the breadth of possible civilian experiences, and Proctor certainly achieves this. At the same time, however, emphasizing that a minority of civilians faced comparable dangers to soldiers perhaps perpetuates (doubtless unintentionally) a view of civilians’ contributions at home as being less meaningful than those made by civilians or soldiers directly in harm’s way.