Soldiers and Victims: Conceptions of Military Service and Victimhood, 1914–45

Abstract

This chapter explores the competing ways in which the soldier was reimagined in interwar commemorative culture. It charts the shift in representations of the soldier in the interwar years—the military hero, the frightened youth, the conscientious objector, the victim of shell-shock and war-injury/death—and contributes to a deeper understanding of war and the politics of victimhood. Like earlier memorials that honoured the war dead, such as the repatriation of soldier’s bodies (which originated in World War I [WWI]), the establishment of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (1917) and the siting of a Tomb of the Unknown Warrior (1920), the Cenotaph highlighted the equalizing nature of death, bereavement, and sacrifice. It also became a national focus for a re-evaluation of military service. The chapter contends that during this period, and because of this commemorative focus, the soldier came to assume the mantle of victimhood for the first time; and that, although there was then another rapid reconception of the soldier as ‘everyman’ hero rather than victim of warfare in the immediate build up to WWII (notions of victimhood and national service being incompatible), the trope of soldier-victim was well-enough established for it to be re-evoked in the early twenty-first century.