492 EHR, CXXIX. 537 (April. 2014) BOOK REVIEWS War as determined citizen-soldiers, a deft attack on official claims (grounded partly in the poor performance of two battalions of the black 368th Regiment in the Meuse-Argonne offensive of 1918) that ‘coloured’ troops could not fight and therefore were not entitled to equal rights. Trout devotes an entire chapter to the efforts of the country’s largest veterans’ organisation, the American Legion, to construct its own memory of the war. While he notes the broadly right-wing drift of the Legion’s activities after 1918, he also demonstrates how this increasingly super-patriotic group found itself at odds with the federal government over the vexed issue of bonus payments to impoverished veterans of the Great War. Tensions came to a head in July 1932 when regular army troops under the command of General Douglas MacArthur expelled remnants of the ‘Bonus Expeditionary Force’ from their camp in Washington. Four years later, however, the Legion secured victory when Congress belatedly agreed to pay a government bonus to the nation’s neglected heroes. That the Great War failed to generate a consensual memory in the United States is hardly surprising, not least because the experiences of the veterans themselves were so diverse. It was perhaps a tribute to the effectiveness of the Legion’s memory-making efforts that so many doughboys could remember the war as inherently character-building when only half of those called up actually left the country. Although Trout’s account of the absence of an American consensus on the First World War is one of the best we have to date, it does not delineate precisely the impact of highly politicised unofficial memories on the increasingly bitter inter-war debate over America’s relationship to the wider world. A professor of English at the University of South Alabama, Trout proves more adept at teasing out the cultural meanings of Quentin Roosevelt’s grave in northern France, E.M. Viquesney’s ubiquitous statue of the doughboy, and Mary Lee’s long-forgotten novel, It’s a Great War!, than mapping the key strains of memory onto the principal internationalists and isolationists of the inter-war period. In fact, recent scholarship threatens to demolish simplistic notions of a two-way domestic struggle over US engagement with Europe after 1918. This fine study is richly suggestive of the role played by Great War memories of all kinds in a complex national debate of relevance far beyond the United States. It deserves to be read by anyone interested in the legacy of the first global war and the coming of the even ghastlier one that was soon to follow. ROBERT COOK doi:10.1093/ehr/ceu062 University of Sussex The Edwardian Army: Recruiting, Training, and Deploying the British Army, 1902–1914, by Timothy Bowman and Mark Connelly (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2012; pp. 243. £60). The Edwardian period was a challenging time for the British army. Setbacks experienced during the unexpectedly costly and protracted war in South Africa at the turn of the century provoked grave concern about the efficiency of the nation’s armed forces. The end of Britain’s ‘splendid isolation’ in Europe, characterised by new diplomatic arrangements with France and Russia, raised new questions about the army’s strategic role, while the industrial and naval challenge from imperial Germany gave rise to renewed fears about the at Durham University on December 2, 2016 http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from