Soldiers

Although the story of the British Empire has often been told in terms of its military campaigns, and although military heroism was part of the lore of empire, Chapter 4 shows that by the mid-nineteenth century soldiers were spending much of their time sitting in tents in the heat with little to do but drink. Many soldiers, in fact, went years without participating in a single skirmish. In combination with the army’s enormous advantage in firepower following the invention of the repeating rifle, battles were shorter, more one-sided, and increasingly described as banal. The increase in references to boredom align with new definitions of masculinity, suggesting that the boredom soldiers expressed was at least partly related to their inability to demonstrate bravery and physical prowess in the absence of hand-to-hand combat. In the end, many soldiers found themselves deeply disillusioned with imperial service. The well-known saying that war consists of “Months of boredom punctuated by moments of terror,” a phrase first used during the First World War, had its figurative origins in the nineteenth-century British empire.