When a British soldier was deployed to the Front in 1914, a short message was folded into his Pay Book from Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener. It read, “In this new experience you may find temptations both in wine and women. You must entirely resist both.” What is noticeably absent from Lord Kitchener’s adorable edict is exactly how this was to be accomplished. In his memoirs, Private Frank Richards wrote of Kitchener’s message: “They may as well have not been issued at all for all the notice we took of them.” The young, lonely, and frightened soldiers were understandably insubordinate and frequented sex workers with regularity. Army brass was well aware of what happened when its enlisted men were on leave but its policy towards hiring sex workers vacillated between crude pragmatism and Kitchener’s idealism. The British army encouraged abstinence but there was no punishment for contracting VD, only for concealing it.

In her article, “Male Heterosexuality and Prostitution During The Great War,” cultural historian Clare Makepeace identifies the two primary reasons why soldiers chose to frequent brothels. The British Army chose to turn a blind eye to brothel visits because of a prevalent belief that it was unhealthy for men, especially married ones, to abstain from sex for too long. Rather than as a means of satisfying physiological impulses, soldiers’ letters and memoirs reveal that they visited sex workers either as a reward for surviving battle or as a means of escaping a culture of immanent death. Second Lieutenant Dennis Wheatley asked, “Why should a man who had been deprived of women for possibly many months and might be dead within a week, be denied a little fun?” Canadian novels of the First World War confirm this view but add an element not discussed by Makepeace – the desire of Canadian soldiers to create a proxy domestic space overseas, the desire for the comforts of home.

The experiences soldiers had with sex workers were by no means monolithic. Many soldiers queued up behind their comrades for a brief turn with a woman. Corporal Jack Wood described the scene outside one such establishment as “a crowd, waiting for a cup-tie at a football final in Blighty.” Canadian novelists, however, deemphasize these mercenary encounters and depict affairs that almost resemble courtship. In Harrison’s Generals Die in Bed, for example, the unnamed narrator comes to associate sex workers with the idea of home before he is even shipped out: “I like this girl’s brazenness. She is the last link between what I am leaving and the war.” While on leave in London, he enlists the services of a sex worker named Gladys whom he calls “that delightful combination of wife, mother, and courtesan – and I, a common soldier on leave, have her!” The Freudian implications are fairly obvious: “She does not call me by name but uses ‘boy’ instead. I like it. In a dozen different ways she makes me happy.” The physical act of sex is barely mentioned. Instead, Gladys satisfies his other non-carnal needs: “There is a glorious breakfast on the table… How well this woman understands what a lonely soldier on leave requires.” For Gladys, sex work is inextricably linked to the performance of domesticity: “She is a capable cook, and delights in showing me that her domestic virtues are as great as her amorous ones. I do not gainsay either.”

The sex workers in Canadian war fiction are usually one-dimensional and are not afforded much of an interior life. Gladys exists primarily to help the protagonist recover from trauma. He confesses, “I am a criminal. Did I ever tell you that I committed murder?” This takes Gladys aback. When the narrator clarifies that the “murder” he committed was of an enemy in the trenches, Gladys is relieved, “You silly boy. I thought you had really murdered someone.” The ideological schism between those who have been to the front and those who have not is exacerbated when Gladys takes the protagonist out for a night on the town. As the burlesque dancers sing an up-tempo version of “Oh, It’s a Lovely War” in front of the Union Jack, Gladys and the rest of the audience erupt in applause. The narrator cannot share in their revelry: “These people have no right to laugh… They should be made to remember.” He is grateful for the respite Gladys has given him but the disparity between propaganda and reality reveals the pretence of their domesticity.

Sex work remains an understudied aspect of the First World War. It’s not clear what has caused this cultural amnesia but it does a disservice to the enlisted man not to conceive of him as a full person with desires. It also does a disservice to the sex workers who, although they may have chosen their profession out of financial necessity, provided soldiers with a brief reprieve from their duty. The two most enduring archetypes of the Great War soldier in the popular imagination cannot accommodate this discussion. The image of the soldier as the saintly knight of Romance still persists to some extent. Arthurian knights tend not to frequent prostitutes. The other lasting archetype, the young innocent sent to his death by old fools, similarly does not allow for much nuance. State sanctioned efforts at memorialisation, in addition to allowing for sincere expressions of grief, lean heavily on allegory and tend to reinforce socially conservative values. Fiction, on the other hand, allows for the representation of a full person’s interior life. In a realist novel, characters transcend allegory and soldiers are permitted to be flawed human beings whose sexuality and sexual choices were understandably influenced by the war. It is no surprise, then, that novels offer a unique space for dealing with taboo aspects of the wartime experience.

—Text by Zachary Abram. This article was originally published as part of Canada's First World War: A Centennial Series on ActiveHistory.ca. For this article's bibliography and other related information, visit ActiveHistory.ca.

Zachary Abram is a doctoral candidate in English/Canadian Studies at the University of Ottawa. His dissertation traces the representation of the soldier in Canadian war fiction. His written work has appeared in Studies in Canadian Literature, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, The Dalhousie Review and others. He is assistant editor of The Bull Calf Literary Review.