During the First World War the British Red Cross Society (BRCS) served as the coordinating body for voluntary medical aid giving in Britain. Among the many units which came within its purview was the Friends' Ambulance Unit (FAU), formed by a group of young men whose desire to serve their nation in wartime conflicted with their pacifist principles. Both the BRCS and the FAU were wracked by ideological conflicts in the years which preceded and throughout the war. These struggles over voluntarist identity highlight the contested meanings of service and conscience in wartime. Through a critical examination of the language of official histories and biographies, this article will argue that the war formed a key moment in the relationship between the British state and voluntary medical aid, with the state's increasing role in the work of such organizations raising questions about the voluntarist principles to which aid organizations laid claim. The struggles that both organizations and individuals within them faced in reconciling the competing pressures that this new relationship created form a legacy of the war which continues to have important implications for the place of medical voluntarism in wartime today.

The current centenary of the First World War provides an unrivalled opportunity to uncover some of the social legacies of the war. The four articles which make up this special issue each examine a different facet of the war's impact on British society to explore an as yet untold story. The subjects investigated include logistics, the history of science, the social history of medicine and resistance to war. This article introduces the four which follow, locating them in the wider historiographic debates around the interface between warfare and societies engaged in war.

This article discusses Norwegian soldiers' experiences of fun in Afghanistan and probes the meaning of this experience and its condition of possibility. Challenging Western moralities of war, it shows that 'fun in war' can be experienced and represented as ordinary and commonsensical, but also ephemeral and immature. Moving beyond normative and functionalist approaches, it specifically highlights the importance of context, temporality, and soldiers' sense of responsibility and innocence.

This paper shows the ways that tales of stoicism during surgery at the Battle of Waterloo came to be a significant part of the ideological framework of Romantic Militarism. Celebrating the killing of enemies clashed with ideals of politeness, but hailing a soldier's powers of endurance in surgery was an acceptable way of extolling courage, framing lived experience of agony into narratives of exalted pain, masculine fortitude and quasi-religious patriotic feeling. In Britain, an extensive discourse emerged about the supposed Britishness of surgical sangfroid at Waterloo, providing a narrative of national superiority in the decades of imperial expansion that followed.

Early modern states faced numerous challenges in supporting their prisoners of war, not least the problems of remitting them money for their subsistence, which had to pass across hostile borders. Examining how the British state achieved this in the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-13) shows the limits of modern scholarship on state formation and its focus on administrative reform and domestic resource mobilisation. The projection of power continued to rely on international Huguenot and even Jacobite financial networks, held together by personal trust and private interests, sometimes even while they were working for the enemy. Success was achieved because British officials were able to tap into these networks through hubs such as London, Amsterdam, Paris and Madrid, and use them to maintain the flow of money abroad.

This paper explores how Vietnamese former combatants navigate and contest the infrastructure of care and recognition (or lack thereof) for veterans, their families, and the war dead in postwar Vietnam. It examines efforts by veterans to establish their socio-political standing through acts of claim-making, including spiritual care for the dead. We argue that through these acts of claim-making, veterans forge an alternative modality of veteranhood based not simply on state-recognised war contributions, but also on moral commitments to social justice and care for the fallen and their bereaved families in the postwar period.

When linked to the context of war, fun can be understood as an expression of both direct and indirect communication, a manner of public engagement as well as a 'ritual of inversion' in which the proprieties of structure (the declared mandate and rules of war) are lampooned and violated, yet the finalities of the project of war (dominion, control, violence, and so on) remain intact. The focus on fun is not meant to trivialise the suffering war produces. On the contrary, it encourages a more honest and accurate analysis of what actively experiencing war entails. There are different reasons for pursuing a line of research that delves into the articulation of different emotions, moralities, and fighters' perspectives, for instance the need to de-exceptionalise war's brutality.

Using the accounts of the participants in the battles of Neretva and Sutjeska, particularly the members of the Theatre of the People's Liberation (, KNO), this article focuses on ways of having fun as well as its functions among soldiers and civilians who were primarily busy with escaping enemy encirclements. It reveals the range of experiences and the accompanying emotional registers they were exposed to in everyday life while pondering the role of pleasure in the biggest battles of the Second World War in Yugoslavia.

The WARFUN taboo rules out the association of war with fun. This article explains why the taboo is particularly entrenched in Germany and demonstrates its effects: the taboo forms part of an anti-militarist political culture and has created soldier models that omit any soldierly qualities that contradict this culture. Oriented towards these models, German soldiers have internalised the taboo as well. However, this contradicts their experience of humour as an integral part of soldier culture. Consequently, soldiers cautiously control what they share with outsiders. Thereby the WARFUN taboo alienates soldiers from the society into which they are supposed to fit.

In this text, we introduce the Special Issue 'War and Fun: Exploring the Plurality of Experiences and Emotional Articulations of Warfare and Soldiering' by highlighting the need to challenge, expand, and reorient public and scholarly debates in order to address the complex interplay of emotions, moralities and agency that characterise the human experience of war from the perspective of those who fight.