Expeditionary Forces in the First World War, 1st ed. 2019

When war engulfed Europe in 1914, the conflict quickly took on global dimensions. Although fighting erupted in Africa and Asia, the Great War primarily pulled troops from around the world into Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Amid the fighting were large numbers of expeditionary forces?and yet they have remained largely unstudied as a collective phenomenon, along with the term ?expeditionary force? itself. 

This collection examines the expeditionary experience through a wide range of case studies. They cover major themes such as the recruitment, transport, and supply of far-flung troops; the cultural and linguistic dissonance, as well as gender relations, navigated by soldiers in foreign lands; the political challenge of providing a rationale to justify their dislocation and sacrifice; and the role of memory and memorialization. Together, these essays open up new avenues for understanding the experiences of soldiers who fought the First World War far from home.

2. A Tale of Two Expeditionary Forces:  Religion and Race in the Dardanelles and France

3. Far from Home? Perceptions and Experiences of the First World War Nurses and Their Patients

4. The Enemy Lurking Behind the Front: Controlling Sex in the German Forces Sent to Eastern and Western Europe, 1914–1918

5. Vietnamese Contingents to the Western Front, 1915–1919

6. Expeditionary Forces in the Shatterzone: German, British and French Soldiers on the Macedonian Front, 1915–1918

7. An Alliance of Competing Identities: Stereotypes and Hierarchies among Entente Expeditionary Forces on the Western Front

8. Empire, Oil, and Bavarians: The German Expeditionary Force in the Caucasus, 1918–1919

9. Freikorps in the Baltics: German Expeditionary Forces in Eastern Europe, 1918–1919

10. From Galicia to Galilee: The Ottoman and German Expeditionary Experiences in the First World War in Comparison

11. “Some corner of a foreign field that is forever England”: The Western Front as the British Soldiers’ Sacred Land

12. Conclusion: On the Conduct and Consequences of Expeditionary Forces

Alan Beyerchen is an emeritus faculty member of the History Department at Ohio State University, USA. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Emre Sencer is Associate Professor of History at Knox College, USA. He is the author of Order and Insecurity in Germany and Turkey: Military Cultures of the 1930s (2017).