In an article in The Listener (6 October 1955) Gibbs politely but firmly criticised past historians for bringing their histories to a stop when the guns started firing and in opening a new chapter only with the return of peace and of normal diplomatic and institutional relationships between sovereign states. Gibbs was faced with a lack of balance in the material available to him in reflecting upon the nature of war and society. He could hardly complain, however, about the quantity of historical studies at his disposal. Military and naval documents, regimental histories, the lives of captains and kings, political, diplomatic and even philosophical works jostle each other for a place in the crowded ‘war’ index and bear witness to the energy and interests of past students of war and to the endemic character of war in the history of man.

By contrast, I am doubly handicapped in discussing the relationship of war and social policy. So far as the story of modern war before 1939 is concerned, little has been recorded in any systematic way about the social and economic effects of war on the population as a whole. Only long and patient research in out of the way documentary places can reveal something of the characteristics and flavour of social life during the experience of wars in the past, and these records are often undisciplined and unreliable. There are, for example, somewhat highly coloured accounts of popular reactions on the south coasts of England to the threat of invasion when Napoleon Bonaparte was master of all western Europe: of the effects of the Crimean and Boer Wars on Poor Law policy in those days; of a remarkable decline in criminal behaviour among civilians in Britain during the First World War and an equally remarkable outbreak of panic among the civilians of London when the first Zeppelins arrived with their primitive bombs, most of which failed to explode (Titmuss, 1950; Trotter, 1916).