The introduction offers a wide-reaching conceptual overview of Making Sense of the Great War’s approach to morale, as well as outlining its structure. It foregrounds the monograph’s key concepts and contributions. It defines morale in both its historical and historiographical context, before offering this monograph’s conceptualisation of the phenomenon as a process as well as an end state. It argues that to understand morale, one must study how combatants either positively or negatively rationalised their role as soldiers and constructive members of the military. The monograph’s methodology and source material are also described – with a particular focus on its interdisciplinarity and use of a large swathe of contemporary ego-documents. The definitions of chronic and acute crisis are discussed alongside descriptions of the scholarly debates revolving around the three major ‘crisis periods’ the book covers. The introduction explains the book’s focus on the ways in which the physical environment, social groups, and individual psychologies interacted as men made sense of war.

The physical world could drain and erode morale. The weather proved to be a central feature in the infantrymen’s experience of war. This chapter considers key themes that emerge from soldiers’ descriptions of winter: the cold, the rain, the mud, the snow, all of which were exacerbated by soldiers’ exhaustion. It discusses in turn the experience of winter 1914, winter 1916, and winter through spring 1917/18. These experiences fed negative perceptions of the military and encouraged men to view the war more pessimistically. They complained about trench conditions, clothing, and food. Furthermore, the anticipation of winter (as much as the experience of it) harmed motivation and morale. It undermined soldiers’ ability to visualise the future as they became frozen in time. Yet, soldiers’ negativity and pessimism after Passchendaele indicate that a deeper, more problematic, and increasingly pervasive gloom descended over the BEF in winter 1917/18. Yet, even then, men fell back on coping mechanisms. Their resilience shone through as they were able to project their discomfort onto the enemy and rationalise their winter experiences as a necessary (and temporary) trial. In fact, the experience of winter transformed soldiers’ perceptions of the campaigning season, which they viewed in a much more positive light. Spring and summer were preferable to the impotence of winter. Even if the warmer months promised more fighting, there was some agency to be found in battle. Furthermore, military action might end the war before the onset of the next winter.

The Unvanquished and Go Down, Moses present a striking response to the earliest cognitive cartography of the Sartoris plantation house. While ideology continues to be preserved and replicated within the principal nodes of social space, Faulkner turns his attention in these works to the disruptive and resistant activity of a hidden interiority within these systems. He employs a variety of images to evoke this emergent interior dimension – from the creek bottom to the burial mound, to the fiery hearth, to the symbolic motif, most importantly, of a submerged woman in the depths, a motif that begins with Eunice’s suicidal act of defiance in Go Down, Moses. Around this last image, Faulkner develops the possibility of alterity, of producing an alternative hub of information flow that is capable of resisting, challenging, and even upending the top-down vertical hegemony that defines the cognitive cartographies of the plantation system. In this chapter, I trace this paradigm as an emergent Faulknerian ethics that emphasizes, above all, the possibility of spontaneous and free movement in social space as well as the paramount value of immanence and interpersonal relationships.

This essay traces Daniel Defoe’s understanding of a word that he probably never wrote: environment. Where we today conceive of environments ecologically as organic totalities or natural habitats, Defoe and his contemporaries employed the verb environ to signify the more general process by which something encircles, surrounds, or occupies something else. Through brief close readings of Robinson Crusoe, Captain Singleton, Moll Flanders, The Storm, and other works, I show how Defoe uses environ to signify an array of situations, or circumstances, in which multiple objects and actors interact. Far from suggesting his uninterest in ecological matters, I claim that Defoe’s inscription of environment as a grammatical predicate indifferent to the content it arranges anticipates later eco-critical ideas, such as Lawrence Buell’s understanding of nature as ’a process rather than as a constant’.

In the 21st century, educators are expected to have knowledge and understanding of sustainable environmental practices and the inherent value in, and opportunities for, connecting with the natural world. Furthermore, early childhood teachers have a social and moral responsibility to enact and model sustainable practices, involving young children in the conversation about the benefits of being in harmony with the natural world around them. This chapter investigates relationships that can be built between the child and the environment within our educational settings and communities, thinking about the natural and human-made resources we use, the fluidity and choices we provide to be indoors and outdoors, and the role that local ecologies play in our practice. Illustrations of practice from carbon-neutral settings, local ‘bush kindergartens’ and ‘Forest Schools’, and the pedagogical practices of specific outdoor teachers will encourage readers to consider how children’s positive relationships with nature can be facilitated and sustained in early childhood settings.