Introduction

Abstract

Written in the early years of a new world war, Orwell’s essay on wartime patriotism evokes the image of an earlier conflict specifically in terms of gender. For Orwell, and other writers of his generation, the First World War was an important point of reference for the construction of their identity as men who had not fought. For them, the First World War was an arena in which the masculinity of those who had participated in it was defined, an experience that set them apart as a generation.2 War experience was something that five million British men had gained which Orwell and his contemporaries, because of their age, had not, and which separated those who had it from the rest of British society because of what they had seen, heard, smelt, tasted and, above all, felt in the course of four years of warfare.