Dismembering the male Book

Bourke's analysis is mired in a view of masculinity which constructs a binary masculine/feminine view of gender in warfare. Even though she allows for some fluidity between these two poles, this becomes immediately problematic because war has a way of dislodging those who experience it from comfortable peacetime constructions of gender, and any analysis which does not take into account a range of masculinity simply becomes an exercise in false dichotomy - one is either masculine, or not masculine (i.e. feminine). The fallacy of this approach is apparent even in the examples from the Front Bourke cites. A British soldier described "going over the top" with a childhood friend:

I looked at Herbert, I could see his lips move - I shouted but I couldn't hear myself at all. I wanted to tell him that we would keep together so I grabbed his hand and we went over together as we had gone to Sunday school, hand in hand.

A description of British troops enjoying a moment of cathartic recreation on 8 July 1916 further underscores the point:

It was a sight worth seeing all those big grown up men who had seen death scores & scores of times all jesting and singing in the chorus's round that fire like sand boys.

Boyhood (and childhood) - a stage of immature but developing masculinity - is a frequent frame for the way men at the Front describe their experiences with overwhelming emotion, moments of fear, and gestures of tenderness with frightened, wounded, or dying friends and comrades. These men were jarred by the violence of war out of the safe bounds of the adult masculinity into which they were socialized during peacetime. Bourke placing the experiences of these men on an artificial axis suspended between masculinity and femininity simply destroys the fidelity of their own much more sophisticated understanding of the effects of war on the psyche. It's a misdiagnosis of a very particular type of psychological wound, one which, though outside force, disrupts an individual's established understanding of himself as a mature male and elicits reactions which resemble not an opposite of masculinity, but an earlier, immature masculinity. There's a huge difference, and Bourke seems oblivious to it.