The Soldiers' Peace: Demobilizing the British Army, 1919

Armistice in 1918 presented the British government with an enormous challenge how could the British army that had been built up on an unprecedented scale during the war be cut back to a peacetime size and how could millions of soldiers be returned to civilian life?In November 1918, the last month of the war, the British army numbered 3.75 million. One year later that number was reduced to 890,000. This was a remarkable feat of demobilization but, as Michael Senior shows, it was by no means ...