Your country needs you – and hundreds of thousands had come forwards. So at first, it was a war of the willing.
But by late 1916, the Western Front had consumed three armies – the Regulars, the Territorials, and then the Kitchener volunteers – and it became, perforce, a war of the conscripted.
Taken from our article To the Trenches – Conscription and the First World War, here are a few iconic images of WW1 conscription.
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