WWI was spawned in 1914 and lasted until 1918, four years. The way people mainly got sucked into doing this crazy war is that the government would print these posters that persuaded people to join the army by it looking nice, otherwise known as false advertising if you wish. The main cause of WWI was in 1914 when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated. The war started the same year and conflict spread across the world very quickly.
On the outbreak of war in August 1914, Britain had 247,432 regular troops.
On 7th August 1914, Lord Kitchener, the war minister, immediately began a recruiting campaign by calling for men aged between 19 and 30 to join the British Army. This was very successful with an average of 33,000 men joining every day. That’s about three quarters of a million volunteering each 2 months. Three weeks later Kitchener rose the recruiting age to 35 and by the middle of September over 500,000 men had volunteered their services.
The campaign recruitment was so successful because of the pressure that was given out by the government in the First World War. The recruiters also told lies such as, ‘They will eat your children’ or ‘They will hunt down your family.’
They lied that ‘you are much more likely to get murdered in your hometown than you are to get killed or wounded in combat’ and they also made fake slogans on their recruitment picture such as “German will eat your kids”
Lord Kitchener decided to ask for volunteers aged between 19 and 30 to sign up and form a unit called 'Pals Battalions'. One of the main reasons he did this was to avoid compulsory conscription. The idea of this unit was to get men from the same area (friends, relatives, pals) to join the army knowing that they would be placed in platoons together. This would increase the army number because you can go off to war with people you know and it would make it easier to handle the stress.
A form of Trauma known as ‘Shell Shock’ was very