First World War

The First World War is both a public crisis and a force acting on private lives in the novel: it takes men from their families, changes the demands placed on Emma Harte Lowther’s businesses, and leaves grief and disability that persist beyond the fighting. Its pressures emerge in a sequence from financial warning signs and rapid mobilization to compulsory service, battlefield losses, and a postwar memory that shapes how Emma later experiences the threat of another war.

War and the pressures of mobilization

The approach of war is registered first as a political and financial crisis. Emma studies a report that the London Stock Exchange has closed and that the bank rate has risen from 4 to 8 percent. She interprets the closure as a measure intended to steady the City before unsettled accounts must be paid, and the increased rate as an attempt to prevent gold from leaving the country. To her, the financial response is a warning that war is imminent. Rather than abandon an enterprise she has been considering, she proceeds, but rejects her original plan to borrow from a bank because the higher rate makes that source of finance less attractive.

The public declaration turns foreboding into fact. In a newspaper boardroom, a copy boy delivers the damp proof of the front page, whose headline announces that Britain has declared war on Germany. The smaller headlines describe the conflict’s widening consequences: Belgium has been invaded, a British minelayer sunk, the government is taking control of railways, and food supplies and risks at sea require attention. War is thus presented not as a distant military contest alone, but as a crisis already reorganizing transport, provisioning, and commercial life.

The national response is swift. Lord Kitchener’s first appeal raises an army of 100,000 volunteers; the first four divisions of the British Expeditionary Force cross the Channel between August 6 and August 20, followed by two more divisions early in September. The mobilization is described as affecting the country as a whole. The fighting then continues from August 1914 through the months that follow and into 1915, bringing slaughter and misery to France and Belgium. For the British and their allies, the stakes are framed as national survival and the right of nations to develop as they choose, rather than possession of a single fortress or territory.

Conscription and departures from home

As casualties accumulate, the volunteer system gives way to compulsory service. On January 4, 1916, Prime Minister Henry Asquith introduces a bill applying to single men deemed fit for enlistment. The proposal faces substantial opposition from defenders of voluntary military service, but passes its third reading on January 24 by 347 votes to 36. The first Compulsory Service Act comes into force on March 2. Emma follows the news and recognizes that the continuing need for soldiers will bring married men within reach of the same demand. A report in The Times in early May confirms that a further Military Service Bill is being brought forward.

The changing policy becomes painfully personal. David Kallinski leaves for the infantry. At the end of May, Joe Lowther and Blackie O’Neill join the Seaforth Highlanders, a regiment especially favoured by Yorkshiremen. Their enlistment places three men important to Emma among those pulled into the war. Joe and Blackie are sent to Ripon for field training, a town already associated with Emma’s earlier life. After two weeks they return home for a twenty-four-hour leave before travelling to Tilbury to embark for France.

Emma accompanies them to the railway station on a damp June morning. Laura O’Neill, pregnant at the time, wants to go too, but Blackie insists that she stay behind. As the train departs, Emma watches until it disappears, then leaves through the crowd in tears, uncertain whether she will see either man again. The scene gives military movement its domestic measure: the departure is not an abstract transfer of troops, but a separation that leaves those at home to wait without knowing the outcome.

The front, losses, and the home front

The account of the fighting follows the Seaforth Highlanders advancing toward Trônes Wood during the Somme campaign. Behind a moving barrage, the 51st Division crosses ground cut by trenches and wire, moving through a landscape of mud and shelling toward its objective. German positions in the wood are reinforced with trenches, wire entanglements, and machine guns. The military geography makes clear why an advance could be so costly: the contested wood lies between several towns and forms a defended approach toward the enemy’s second line.

At home, war also changes the conditions under which Emma runs her businesses. The West Riding’s textile industry rests on local resources: short-haired sheep thrive on the coarse grass and oats of the millstone-grit country, while streams fed by the region’s rain provide soft water that is kinder to fibres than limestone water. Wool and suitable water had helped make cloth production a regional strength; wartime demand now gives that productive base a new purpose. Emma expects manufacturers to redirect their factories toward government supplies, including uniforms, and sees her existing stocks as an advantage rather than a liability. If necessary, she can sell them through her stores while other goods become scarce.

The pressure is visible in her financial decisions as well as her inventory. Emma calculates that nearly £180,000 is owed by stores in London, Manchester, and Scotland, and identifies overdue accounts that must be pursued. She has previously allowed valued customers longer credit, but now decides that this leniency must end. At the same time, she resists borrowing at the raised bank rate and adapts her enterprise to the expected shortage of merchandise. Her response is practical rather than speculative: secure payment, preserve stock, and prepare for demand created by manufacturers’ transfer to government contracts.

The war’s industrial effects continue as military needs expand. Emma races between Harte’s, Gregson Warehouse, Layton’s mill, and the clothing factory, while acknowledging that work is consuming time that might otherwise go to her family. Harte’s remains steady, Gregson’s stocks last because she rations them and finds new sources of supply, and Layton’s meets large government contracts under Ben Andrews’s management. Emma and David suspend the Lady Hamilton Clothes line at the beginning of the war, converting the factory’s production to uniforms. The mill and factory become highly efficient and profitable, while serving the state’s demand for clothing. Commercial success and national emergency therefore advance together, though the book also registers the personal cost of the hours and attention Emma gives to work.

A war remembered in the next generation

The effects of the First World War do not end with its immediate military and commercial pressures. Frank Harte is wounded in November and returns to England to recover, prompting Emma to plan a Christmas at home that will offer him rest and care. She hopes that Winston Harte might also return on leave, but recognizes that the navy is heavily engaged and that this is unlikely. Family celebration is organized around absence and uncertainty as much as around the comforts Emma can provide.

Winston’s later recovery from the loss of a leg makes the war’s bodily consequences part of the family’s continuing life. When doctors warn that he may not be able to use an artificial limb, Emma insists on a future in which he can walk. His rehabilitation is difficult: his moods shift between relief, depression, anger, and renewed hope. Emma persistently encourages and challenges him, and he eventually learns to use an artificial leg. After treatment at Chapel Allerton Hospital in Leeds, he lives with Emma while recuperating. The episode makes recovery a prolonged undertaking shared by the injured man and the family member determined to help him regain independence.

More than two decades later, the approaching Second World War revives these earlier losses. At a gathering in New York, Emma thinks of her sons’ eligibility for military service and recalls the destruction wrought by the Great War, wondering whether the intervening years had amounted only to an armed truce. During the evacuation from Dunkirk, the return of men from France intensifies that memory: Kit comes home on leave, and Emma holds him while thinking of Joe, who died in France in 1916. The later crisis is not part of the First World War, but the novel uses it to show how the first war remains active in family feeling. Its defining legacy is not only the reorganization of labor and industry, but a lasting inheritance of separation, bereavement, and vigilance whenever a new generation is placed in danger.