On the eve of the outbreak of war in August 1914, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was more socially and politically divided than it had been at any other stage since its inception in 1800. Militant campaigns for workers’ rights and female suffrage, combined with an escalating crisis over Irish home rule, directly threatened the ability of the Liberal government to rule effectively and were undermining social cohesion.1 The formation, arming and drilling of paramilitary organisations in Ireland in the eighteen months before the war had generated particularly intractable tensions between state and society and given rise to a threat of civil war that had no had parallel elsewhere in Western Europe.2 These deep-seated divisions in British and Irish society meant that the support of significant swathes of the population, and Irish nationalists in particular, could not be taken for granted when Britain intervened in the European conflagration. The process of mobilising the state for war was further complicated by the fact that Britain, alone among the belligerents, could not rely on conscription to expand its comparatively small peacetime army and would have to encourage men to freely volunteer for military service.