The Soldier Factory

This is the story of how the nearly five million British men who enlisted in the British Army during the First World War were transformed from civilians into infantry soldiers, and how this process shaped their identities, their experiences of war, and their performance on the battlefield. Stephen Graham, reflecting on his wartime experiences, summed up this transformation by describing training as ‘the soldiery factory in which you go in at one end civilian and pass out eventually at the other side a soldier of the King’.

The Soldier Factory is the first study to examine the workings of the British Army’s training system in depth. It focuses on the creation of infantrymen because, although aeroplanes, artillery, chemical weapons, machine guns, and tanks transformed the battlefield into an industrialised killing zone, it was still the infantryman who led the advance and captured enemy positions. The infantry also bore the heaviest burden of the fighting: of the 1,677,163 British casualties sustained on the Western Front, 1,372,117 were infantrymen.

The Soldier Factory reveals that training was an inconsistent process, marked by periods of innovation, adaptation, improvement, and regression. These fluctuations shaped the type of infantryman the army produced, altered the very nature of what it meant to be a British infantryman, and affected battlefield effectiveness at different stages of the war.The infantryman who arrived at the front in 1914 was almost unrecognisable from his counterpart of 1916, who in turn was almost unrecognisable from the infantryman of 1918.