ABSTRACT
In this article, I examine the complexities of men’s personal identification with the image of soldier as represented primarily on the pages of combatant diaries. The diary, as a private, self-reflexive form, allows for an examination of what Michael Roper has rightly highlighted as a consistently neglected area of First World War scholarship: ‘the behaviour and emotional dispositions of individual men’ as they attempt to navigate the inherent contradictions and complexities of their new role as heroic soldier. As government worked to recode (and control) the wartime behaviour of its citizens, the diary often provided a rare venue through which the individual could reevaluate his newly militarised identity. As the diarists draw on martial metaphors and make allusions to ancient mythologies, they betray a desire rhetorically to authenticate the newly militarised, masculine self. Of course, as the civilian experiences industrialised combat, the language of traditional rhetoric often comes to seem inadequate – if not callous – in the face of the war’s indiscriminate brutality. As a result, many attempt to present a more accurate, or ‘authentic’, picture of war and its horrors. Traditional rhetoric is replaced by graphic depictions of broken and fragmented things – a change in style that signifies a change in self-perception.
