War is often seen as both morally repugnant and as a heroic activity conducted in the national interest. This introduction outlines some conditions in which this moral dualism appears and is managed in eighteenth-century Britain. It surveys the financial, social, and cultural pressures that could influence public attitudes to war. Focusing on selected examples, it explores the role of humanitarian feeling in justifying particular acts of violence, in enabling a general, compassionate acquiescence in war, and in encouraging the emergence of anti-war attitudes that eventually led to organised opposition to war.

The poetry designated ‘non-combatant’ comes from a hugely disparate group. This chapter explores its range and diversity, illustrating how even those designated ‘non-combatant’ necessarily had their lives circumscribed by war. The poetry contests the assumption that non-combatant meant a naive response to the war that saw it in terms of adventure and sanitised sacrifice. Although this perspective exists, anxiety and loss are dominant themes, and many non-combatants attempted to understand the combatant experience. Others draw on their immediate domestic environment to contest the war, or to consider their peripheral position on the home front. Poetry can articulate the bitterness of those who felt excluded from participation, or the political stance of conscientious objectors asserting the validity of their position. Others, such as nurses, use their poetry to bear witness to suffering, and to memorialise non-combatant women who died in the service of their country.

Many of the most vivid American accounts of the First World War were written not by front-line troops, but by non-combatant volunteers who witnessed the conflict as nurses, aid-workers or ambulance drivers. Drawn to the war-zone by a humanitarian desire to serve, or simply by the lure of adventure, these volunteers often came to feel a sense of unease at their own complicity in the machinery of war, and developed a powerful sense of detachment from the military systems within which they worked. This chapter explores a range of such writers, noting how early war memoirs established repeating tropes that would be adapted and subverted by later more nuanced responses to the war. For some, the insight generated by these wartime experiences, and the verbal skills required to articulate them, would inform a lifetime of literary production.