Under the DORA, the government converted land for farm production. The women’s land armies were used to recruit women workers for the farms and other places in short of workers. However in 1917, the nation was running low on food. German U-Boats were sinking one in every four British merchant ships. The price of food doubled and the richer people were buying and hoarding most of the food. The government then introduced voluntary rationing, led by the Royal Family. The government published many propaganda posters encouraging people to be more economical with bread.
However, none of these measures were effective. So the government introduced a big change in 1918: it introduced compulsory rationing of sugar, butter, meat and beer. Every person had a book of coupons which they had to hand over when they bought their ration. There were stiff penalties facing anyone who broke the rationing rules.
On the whole though, rationing was widely welcomed as a fairer system of sharing out the available food. By the end of the war, as a result of rationing, the diet and health of many poorer people had actually improved in comparison with pre-war days.
Censorship and propaganda also affected the lives of ordinary people and hence changed many people’s attitudes. There were three aims of the government’s propaganda and censorship policy: to keep up morale; to encourage people to support the war effort; and to create hatred and suspicion of the enemy.
DORA allowed the government to control mass media. During the first few months of the war, casualties were bad but none of this got through, even to Parliament. Newspapers ere full of British heroism and German atrocities.
But after the Battle of the Somme, the British propaganda machine made a staged short film before the offensive. This glorified the way people were dieing, and many hailed its realism. Millions of recruitment posters were set up.
The impact of enemy action on the civilian population is significant in explaining the changing attitudes. The British government produced lots of anti-German propaganda. Some of it was true but much of it wasn’t. Stories began to circulate e.g. that there was a German factory where human corpses gathered from the battlefield were melted down so that the fat could be made into soap. The government’s campaign of hatred against the Germans was very successful. German people living in Britain were attacked:
“If by chance you should discover one day in a restaurant that you are being served by a German waiter, you will throw the soup in his foul face.”
False stories of German soldiers murdering children in Belgium often appeared in newspapers. Any German aged between 17-45 living in Britain were put in prison. The vast majority of the nation actually hated Germany.
Casualties in the First World War were appallingly high. Twenty millions soldiers were wounded, and over eight million were killed. In the British army, one in five of the soldiers never came home. The casualties meant immense sadness not only for those who witnessed the horror of war, but also for those at home who lived in hope of the safe return of their loved ones.
Another major change the government introduced from DORA was conscription. This was only introduced much later into the war when less and less people were signing up voluntarily. The reason for this is likely to be figures of battle casualties getting through, war weariness, the news of trench warfare. Or the fact that letters sent from the government telling certain civilians that their loved ones had been killed got through to many people and many people were able to identify their grief with other people in the same situation. Another reason why conscription was introduced is that the wrong kind of people were signing up: coal miners and munitions workers were needed at home. So less and less people were signing up because of changing attitudes of civilians to the war.
At first thousands answered Lord Kitchener’s appeal and joined up in a great wave of enthusiasm for the war.
The reason for this was probably a mixture of patriotism, the belief that the war would be short (“…over by Christmas…” ), fear of being called a coward, and because of the introduction of “…pals battalions...” where soldiers who were mates could join up together and fight together. The end result being that they saw each other getting horrifically killed. By 1916, 2 million had ‘taken the King’s shilling’ i.e. they had joined up.
When conscription was introduced in 1916 for 18-41 year olds, the skilled workers remained and worked in exempt occupations such as mining and farming. Conscientious objectors (‘conchies’) weren’t signing up either. They existed well before war broke out as Quakers. They only became noticed when refusing to sign up when conscription was introduced. Some people used it as an excuse to ‘skive off’. Some extremists refused to do any work, which directly or indirectly helped the war effort, i.e. by not working in coalmines that produces coal which fuels munitions factories and hence used in guns to kill. But some refused to fight because of certain moral attitudes or religious reasons. Conscientious objectors also had their own magazines in circulation. They too used propaganda to incriminate the government of its harsh laws on conchies, even though many people had no sympathy for them e.g. with the handing out of white feather to conchies (symbolising cowardice). The government also published propaganda to counter that of conscientious objectors’ propaganda.
Gradually many soldiers realised that the fighting was not only not going to be over by Christmas but could go on for years. New methods of warfare were introduced: tanks; planes; and gas added to the sheer misery of most of the soldiers. The thing that most soldiers remember about WWI is mud in the trenches. Plagues by cold, rats, fleas, lice and a shortage of food, many homesick soldiers began to question what they were doing.
“While Haig slept in a cosy bed in a quiet country chateau and dined on the best food available, his men lived in muddy, noisy trenches sharing their bully beef, and biscuits with big, bloated rats. It apparently did not bother Haig that his war was so much more comfortable than that of the men he commanded.”
“We are lousy, stinking, ragged, unshaven and sleepless. My tunic is rotten with other men’s blood and partly spattered with a friend’s brains. It is horrible, but why should you people at home not know? The horror was indescribable… I want to tell you so that it maybe on record, that I honestly believe that Goldie [a mate] and many others were murdered through the stupidity of those in authority.”
“We are slowly but surely killing off the best of the male population of these Islands. Can we afford to go on paying the same sort of prize for the same sort of gain?”
One particular example of a soldier’s changing attitude is of Siegfried Sassoon. He had enlisted before war broke out, and found it glorious. But as he saw more and more people unnecessarily dieing, is attitude changed.
“A Soldier’s Declaration – I believe the war is being prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I believe that this war upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of conquest and aggression. I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.”
However not all soldiers or civilians became war weary. Some fight through thick and thin.
“Living through war is living deep. Its crowded, glorious living. If I’d never had a shell rushed at me I’d never have known the swift thrill of approaching death – which is a wonderful sensation not o be missed.”
Almost every family were affected throughout the course of this long war. Because it was long, war weariness developed within civilians’ attitudes and that of soldiers. Most families knew a friend or were related to someone who had lost a loved one from this war. So almost everyone in this country were affected. Total war was also a major factor, with the bombing of eastern and southern towns, to DORA. 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 productions of arms or other wartime necessities. Many civil liberties that were taken for granted were temporarily suspended.
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 dieing 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.
However civilians did celebrate 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 though that the “war to end all wars” would be a lesson no one could forget.
