‘A Wave on to Our Shores’: The Exile and Resettlement of Refugees from the Western Front, 1914–1918

Abstract

AbstractIn the wake of the German invasion of Belgium and France in August 1914, four million persons went into exile. While such a displacement of population testified to a dramatic change in the character of war in western Europe, historiography and collective memory alike have so far concurred in marginalising the experience of refugees during the First World War. This article examines their unprecedented encounter with host communities in France and Great Britain. It demonstrates that the refugees' plight reveals the strengths as well as the tensions inherent in the process of social mobilisation that was inseparable from the First World War.