'Remember Me Most Kindly': Identity, Memory, and Mundanity in British Letter-Writing from the First World War

British history of the First World War has often turned to the letters written between soldiers and civilians as a means to understand the experience of the conflict. With a focus on trauma, emotional survival, censorship, and testimony, what is often lacking from this analysis is the sheer mundanity within these letters, which often dwelled far more on everyday life, ordinary routine, and other topics that fall outside of ‘the war’. This study, turning to emotional and epistolary history, argues that this mundane content was a conscious choice by both the writer and reader to shape their wartime experiences into a shared ‘mundane’ experience of war to allow for private prewar identity to navigate and survive the First World War. Driven by emotional urgency, the translation of war and various shared fragments of identity outside of it into the ‘mundane’ allowed soldiers to survive their experiences and be ‘remembered most kindly’ in the postwar world.