‘Doing One’s Bit’

Abstract

This chapter focusses on the war-time discourse of the volunteer, recruiting, and the eventual move to conscription, while exploring the rhetorical patterns of patriotism and identity (and identity politics) which result. As Clark records, in war-time use, to do one’s bit was to be both prominent and remarkably polysemous, spanning collective and individual agency on the Home Front (a new collocation in its own right) alongside the diction of recruiting and active service. The volunteer and voluntary enlistment (and the conflicted semantics that these and related words reveal) were, on one level, presented as a prime means by which one’s bit was done in the early years of war. Nevertheless, the diction of identity, hegemonic masculinity (and its failure or rejection) were further key elements, evident in the over-lexicalisation and gendered usage of the stay-at-home, slacker, Cuthbert, or knut (and the targeted semantic shifts that these and other words reveal). The shift to conscription, and the stigmatization of those who chose not to fight, presents, as Clark records, still other conflicted forms.