Keep the Home Fires Burning
Propaganda in the First World War
Publisher
Allen Lane
Published
1977
During the First World War, Britain developed propaganda as a weapon of war on a scale never known before.
In this, the first total war which demanded the mobilisation of all the nation’s resources, the barometer of civilian morale at home would have as much influence on the outcome of the war as the fitness of the fighting forces at the front.
Propaganda was used to persuade men to fight, and civilians to support – and continue to support the war effort, even as the battlefront deteriorated into stalemate and mass slaughter in the trenches. Propagandists and press crafted the enemy as ‘The Evil Hun’ and the war as a ‘Crusade of Heaven against Hell’ and withheld the brutal truth from the home front, while the propaganda of hate inflamed vicious fury against all enemy aliens living in Britain, and contributed finally to the blighted peace of 1918.
EXTRACT
Reviews
[Haste] graphically and convincingly depicts the manipulation of home opinion in stoking the fires of a supremely unlovely war. This is a work of high journalism. ... It is a supreme merit of Cate Haste’s book that, more effectively than the recent literature from military historians, it so forcibly reminds us of the wretched reality of this so-called “people’s war”.
Times Literary Supplement. Kenneth O.Morgan
Here is a well-written, lively and interesting popular study of British propaganda in the First World War. “Lest we forget” indeed. .... The book is well-researched, full of fascinating quotations from wartime propaganda put in a clear historical context and very well illustrated.
Guardian. Bernard Crick
One puts down this book feeling uneasy as well as grateful.
The Sunday Times. Angus Calder
One can only hope that this important book will make it more difficult for any British government so deeply to deceive its people ever again.
Spectator. Philip Knightley
This scholarly, thoughtful, readable and important book. ... Cate Haste is to be congratulated for putting so much flesh onto bones that were already visible but often ill-defined. ... Students and teachers of the period, as well as the “general reader” will be indebted to her.