ABSTRACT
The Great War introduced brutality and human cruelty at an unprecedented level. The conflict was the first among the industrialised global powers; it blew away faith in progress and unveiled the dehumanised violence that engulfed soldiers and civilians alike on a global scale. Horror and despair haunted civilian populations as the fear, uncertainty, and carnage provoked by modern warfare technologies transformed battlefields into killing fields. This period also witnessed the most important military deployment carried out by Portuguese troops outside the country’s borders throughout the first half of the twentieth century, and mass death and industrial destruction were responsible for the creation of extensive forms of interconnectedness.
The horrors that the conflict produced had a tremendous impact on individual engagement with aid initiatives, laying the foundations for a “Lusophone” response to the war’s impact and levels of destruction, triggering a “humanitarian revolution” in which small and peripheral countries such as Portugal took part.
This chapter analyses the humanitarian mobilisation carried out in support of Portugal’s participation in the First World War to disclose the efforts made by individuals and institutions to mediate suffering between the battlefield and the home front and into the peripheries of a networked and global world
