This site uses cookies

Some of these cookies are essential, while others help us to improve your experience by providing insights into how the site is being used.

For more detailed information please check our Cookie notice


Necessary cookies

Necessary cookies enable core functionality. This website cannot function properly without these cookies.


Cookies that measure website use

If you provide permission, we will use Google Analytics to measure how you use the website so we can improve it based on our understanding of user needs. Google Analytics sets cookies that store anonymised information about how you got to the site, the pages you visit, how long you spend on each page and what you click on while you’re visiting the site.

The secret battle: Emotional survival in the First World War

Author: Michael Roper
Institution: University of Essex
Type of case study: Research

About the research

As part of his research into the Great War, Roper exhaustively researched over eighty collections of wartime correspondence, alongside forty published and unpublished memoirs of the war. He used psychoanalysis to help explore the emotional survival of men fighting in the war, as well as a way to understanding their lives and personal relationships.

One of Roper’s key sources was Paul Thompson’s life story interviews conducted for Family Life and Work Experience before 1918, 1870-1973. From this collection he was able to investigate how young soldiers survived trench warfare on the Western Front by drawing on the emotional and practical support of their families.

The material gave him a way of linking the experiences of men from working and lower-middle-class families, who constituted the mainstay among rank-and-file soldiers, thus countering the middle-class emphasis of the more generally known written memoirs. Michael Roper searched the collection with key words such as servant/death/First World War/veteran/wound.

He commented that: “Sometimes an interviewee will be cut off in mid-stream when talking about the war – the interviewers were clearly keen to try and get people to stay with the Edwardian period – but the advantage of this is a wealth of data about households and families before the war.”

Publications

Roper, M. (2009), The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War, Manchester University Press.