ABSTRACT
Fisher had noted that childbirth was more dangerous than war, but that was before the slaughter of the Great War. The welfare systems created in most combatant nations for the bereaved and the broken of the war rarely figure in research on war and commemoration, yet they were both a costly investment of resources and may have had consequences for what could come after. Partly they have been neglected because they are seen as incapable of doing the emotional work of grieving and remembrance that has so fruitfully been the focus of recent research. 1 As Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan suggest:
In the aftermath of the Great War, a huge bureaucracy handled legitimate claims for compensation for war injury and loss. These bulky, rationalized, and hierarchical institutions exasperated survivors, by their inefficiency and their insensitivity to the personal dimensions of loss. To fill in that empty space, small-scale groups appeared. They provided the assistance in mourning and mutual help which no state apparatus offered. 2
