Looking at developments from the beginning of the First World War until the early 1920s, this chapter considers the impact of ethnic belonging on the treatment of refugees and the changes in ethnic policies over the course of the war and the first years of independent statehood. The focus is on Lithuania and Courland for two reasons, firstly because they both formed part of Ober Ost and therefore shared many of the consequences of occupation. However, displacement and repatriation differed quite significantly between the two regions. The refugee crisis of the First World War and ensuing repatriation irrevocably changed the ethnic fabric of Latvia and Lithuania. Tomas Balkelis considers the process of repatriation and emphasises that refugees 'had to be persuaded or forced to abandon their divergent and multiple identities' in order to become citizens of the newly established independent nation state.

This chapter concentrates on the impact of war on displaced Ukrainians before and after the collapse of tsarism in February 1917, whose lives were beset by political uncertainty, economic deprivation and social conflict. In the first months of the war, the Russian authorities failed to understand the scale and the challenge posted by mass displacement. In Ukraine, as throughout the Russian Empire, provincial councils were established and chaired by provincial governors who co-ordinated the arrangements for refugee relief. In fact most refugees managed to find work in agriculture, in the coal and iron ore mines in the Donbass and Kryvyi Rih (Krivoi Rog), and in newly created workshops. The refugee phenomenon during the First World War was a new social phenomenon that embraced the European continent. It produced moral and psychological damage on a large scale.

This chapter turns to the ways in which stadia, sport and spectators both in France and elsewhere around the globe helped generate changing place-based communities and identities. French stadia created discourses about local places through the depiction of spectators within their confines. But stadium spectatorship also helped define the national collective, through literal and imaginary voyages within France and abroad to other stadia around the world. These latter voyages generated a series of comparisons that provided French men and women with convenient benchmarks for monitoring the perceived vitality and social cohesion of France in relation to its rivals on the world stage. These comparisons predominantly reinforced a sense of French inadequacy and decline throughout the interwar period, if not necessarily after the Second World War. At the same time, however, the comparisons with the wider world testified to the global character of sport itself in the first half of the twentieth century, as a mass media complex in Western Europe and North America publicised and promoted sporting competitions that helped create transnational communities of spectators invested in the same sporting events.

This chapter focuses on the debates over the construction of a monumental, 100,000-person stadium in advance of the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris. The stadium’s advocates argued that it would spark a nationwide revival of French physical fitness, deemed critical in light of demographic anxieties generated by the First World War, while its detractors saw the stadium as an expensive space for parasitic mass spectatorship. Yet even the promoters of the Olympic Games (both in France and outside its borders) were leery of the crowds that they hoped to attract: they feared that the mass public was disorderly and dangerous, and that it showed an alarming propensity to seek out the ‘spectacle’ of sport rather than appreciate the latter’s higher moral and physical purpose. This ambivalence contributed to the Paris municipal council’s refusal to support the stadium. While the Olympics still took place, at a privately-owned stadium in the suburb of Colombes northwest of Paris, the Olympic stadium crisis ultimately revealed deep fractures over spectator sport as a matter of official public policy and in relation to urban development, and set the template for sporting practices and further debates that continued well into the 1950s.

This chapter explores the impact of death and incapacity on veterans and dependants. It looks at issues that veterans faced after returning and resettling into Cypriot life, which had changed dramatically because of the Great War. The chapter discusses what the Cypriot government and military authorities did to alleviate the social and financial difficulties of veterans and their families, and what private organisations, namely the British Legion, did to aid those in need. It also looks at one of the solutions found by the men, emigration. Emigrating was one way out of the poverty. Military service had given the men a taste of working overseas. Many veterans were repatriated only to soon emigrate, while others stayed behind. Many members of the Cypriot Mule Corps remained in the Ottoman Empire/Turkey to continue to serve or had settled in Constantinople and wanted their medals.

Why did the whole idea and ethos of the Supreme Being disappear so quickly and completely? Was the reason that Robespierre took no steps to establish firmly his new moral system because he fatally mis-evaluated the level of public support? What should the final evaluation of the effect of the Festival be both on the problem of and acceptable republican national morality and on the progress of the Revolution? The final analysis of the Festival must be that it was a great day of national solidarity during which the entire nation celebrated joyfully.

This chapter attempts to understand the individual and collective memory of the Cypriot Mule Corps from the 1920s until today. This necessitates exploring the post-war attitudes of the men who served towards their service and how it is remembered more broadly in the Cypriot national consciousness. It was not until the Second World War that the Cypriot Mule Corps was remembered, and it took an Englishman in Australia, Michael Terry. One reason for the Cypriots 'forgetting' the Mule Corps was the failure of the colonial government and local political elites to exploit it during and after the Great War for their own political ends. Despite the monumental contribution of Cypriot men in the Mule Corps, various issues and developments came together to result in its silencing.

This is probably the most original chapter of the book. No-one has previously attempted to analyse the actual costs of such an event as a Republican Festival. New detailed research in national and local archives by the author has unearthed a series of financial documents, illustrating the costs of the Festival. The costs in Paris are shown in detail and are compared closely with those of previous festivals. The details of the costs in the various provincial towns are sometimes clearly defined, as is the case with Amiens. More often they are either partially detailed while the major expenses are concealed in general expenditure budgets or even completely unavailable. The available evidence, particularly the details in Paris and Amiens, allows the author to propose detailed costs estimates for the major cities and more general estimates of the costs in smaller areas. To establish a true estimate of cost, the details from Paris are compared with the costs of labour and of basic foodstuffs in other areas of France and the equivalent values in England. This permits a final carefully researched evaluation of the average costs throughout France in both large and small communities.

As a region bordering the Russian Empire, East Prussia was, apart from Alsace-Lorraine, the only part of the German Empire to be directly affected by the military operations of the First World War. At the beginning of the civil war, the population displacements and resulting drama were broadly publicised in the media, provoking a surge of solidarity among the German public. Very quickly there was a clear appreciation on the part of German society of the situation emerging in East Prussia and of the difficult circumstances for the population that resulted from it. Starting with the liberation of the province, publications such as The East Prussian War Journal were launched in order to put on record the experience of the events of the war and the rushed departure. Within the province, the 'East Prussian Refugee Care' was primarily responsible for material support.

This chapter describes in detail the preparations for the great Festival between the speech of 18 Floréal and at the event itself on 20 Prairial. There is a detailed comparison of this festival with the previous Fête de la Réunion in August 1793 with special reference to the attempts to avoid the organisational problems of the 1793 festival. The problems relating to the construction of the major items particular to this Festival, in particular the Statue of Hideous Atheism, set on fire to reveal a Statue of Wisdom and the famous Mountain constructed in the Champs de la Réunion (the Champ de Mars) are discussed in detail. The author is able, for the first time, to estimate reasonably accurately the actual size of the Mountain, using a previously disregarded archival source. The organisation and details of the procession are discussed in detail; the chapter includes a map of the route and illustrations of the major constructions. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the contents of Robespierre’s speeches at the event and the public verbal attacks on him by his enemies in the Convention.

This chapter contributes to the ongoing debates (Mansfield, Osborne, Pennell and McCartney) about enlistment in the Great War. It argues that mules were procured and muleteers were enlisted by using legal methods that left mule owners and men of military age with little alternative. Before discussing muleteer recruitment, it is important to understand mule procurement because initially, as reflected in the name of the operation at Famagusta, the Mule Purchasing Commission, the focus was on purchasing mules. By July 1917, the focus had clearly switched to muleteers when the name changed to Muleteer Recruiting and Supply Purchasing Staff and greater numbers of muleteers were recruited in comparison to mules. In the case of the Cypriot Mule Corps the peasant and labouring classes were given little option but to enlist to serve in the British army, as the British were able to play on local push factors to pull in volunteers.