’An Uninteresting Mass of Correspondence’: Censorship and the Mundane in the British Epistolary History of the First World War

During the First World War, British soldiers and civilians wrote a sizeable number of letters to one another. The military mail censorship system of the British Army remains a major obstacle to understanding the epistolary practices of soldiers. Historians and literary critics claim soldiers concealed the true nature of their wartime experiences from civilians at home, resulting in the emotional isolation of soldiers and a rift in understanding the war between soldiers and civilians. This study argues that the British epistolary history of the conflict ought to be understood for the “mundane” communication it spawned between soldiers and civilians in wartime and asserts that the mundanity found within these letter-writing exchanges was a deliberate choice made by people at war. In essence, soldiers were far more invested in negotiating fragments of their nonmilitary identities through wartime than in sharing the horrors, trauma, and disillusion of their military lives.