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The Experience Of Soldiers During The First World War Essay

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This assignment will explore how the experience of soldiers differed from that of civilians in the First World War. Primary and Secondary source material alongside the course material will assess experience during the period 1914-1918 and it differed based on various factors. The assignment will be divided into five themes two on soldiers, two on civilian experience and one on shared experience. These themes are trench warfare and technology (soldiers), food crisis and occupation (civilians) and bereavement (both). The assignment will conclude by bringing together the sources to provide evidence to show that soldiers and civilians experience differed based on where they lived or served.

In war establishing what constitutes a person to be a soldier or civilian can become extremely blurred. A soldier is defined as “one who serves in an army for pay; one who takes part in military service or warfare; spec. one of the ordinary rank and file” (OED, 2016) and a civilian “a person who is not professionally employed in the armed forces; a non-military person” (OED, 2016). For this assignment these definitions will used in examining how the experience of war differed between soldier and civilian.
Firstly an experience that differs extremely between soldiers and civilians during the First World War is fighting; notably trench warfare. Soldiers from both sides fought in squalid conditions on multiple fronts, most notably the Western Front (NLS, 2016). The trenches became a daily

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