Domestic Soldiers Read Free Page A

from the actionthey had witnessed in the trenches during the Great War. The scale of everyday death and destruction in the trenches is unimaginable: on average, nearly 7,000 British soldiers were killed or wounded on any given day; the officers called it ‘wastage’. 2 In the end, over 600,000 British soldiers were killed, and more than two million were wounded or missing.
    It is little wonder, suffocating under the weight of a never-ending war, as soldiers were drowned and churned into the mud of the Western Front, that in her son Helen could only fathom ‘future cannon fodder’. Indeed, Mitchell’s vision in 1917 seemed eerily prophetic in 1940, when her son William, now twenty-three, was conscripted into the army. When war on the Continent emerged once again in 1939 for the next generation, those who had personally endured and remembered the random, senseless death of the trenches and the grief of the Rolls of Honour could only imagine the horror that waited.
    Those who lived through the First World War continued to carry the scars of the conflict well beyond 1918. Though different in age during the war – some were married, and others young teenagers – every woman in this story felt the war deeply, and each was shaped by its long-term effects. For Helen, the trauma of the Great War was inbred in her infant, ultimately poisoning the bond between mother and son. But the scars were as varied as they were deep. Returning veterans came home to an uncertain economy and often found that their patriotic service had ruined them for the post-war world.
       
    Edie Rutherford was a young teenager living in South Africa during the war, but her future husband, Sid, wasold enough to fight. He was injured on Vimy Ridge in 1917 and suffered shell shock. Afterwards, he was sent on military duty to Burma, where he endured bouts of malaria and dysentery that adversely affected his health for the rest of his life: his military service left him suffering severe shortness of breath, heart problems and psychological trauma.
    Sid and Edie met in South Africa and were married soon afterwards in Australia, where they lived until moving to Sheffield in 1934. Australia did not experience the depth of economic troubles that Britain did during the 1920s, but Sid’s war disabilities nonetheless made it difficult for him to keep a job for any significant length of time. Reasoning that he could never reliably provide for a family, and feeling it unwise to bring up children they could not afford, Edie and Sid decided to forgo having children. Furthermore, Rutherford explained to M-O, her husband’s shell shock made it difficult to cope with the inevitable racket raised by children. As it was, Edie’s diary had to be suspended when he was home because she used a typewriter, and the noise was too much for him.
       
    Like Sid and Edie, Irene Grant’s young family struggled to survive the severe economic downturns in 1921–2 and the more famous global depression of the early 1930s. The mounting casualties of the Great War that so depressed Helen Mitchell instead motivated Irene to create life. She couldn’t bear to send her husband to the Western Front without having his child, so Irene and Tom conceived a baby girl just before he left for France in 1918.
    After Tom returned from France, they had another child. ‘But that’, Irene confessed, ‘was a mistake.’Marjorie was born in 1921, right as the post-war boom collapsed. Irene would have liked four children, but the economic reality of the 1920s made that hope impossible. By 1922, unemployment had soared to a national average of 15 per cent, causing the government to extend both the length of assistance and the monetary benefit of the dole for the unemployed. In July 1922, the rates given to out-of-work men, women and juveniles were raised by 3 shillings a week and the number of weeks of benefit extended from fifteen to twenty-six. The increase was welcome, but it was hardly