Wednesday 29 January 2014
Saturday 25 January 2014
5 Big Evangelical Trends for 2014By Chuck Warnock
What’s in store for the church this year? Read Chuck Warnock’s astute predictions.
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5 Big Evangelical Trends for 2014
In keeping with end of the year predictions, here are mine. Of course, several years ago I predicted $5 per gallon gas. Thankfully, we never got to that point. But in light of my obvious fallibility, I’m framing my prognostications in the familiar “what’s in and what’s out” categories. Here’s what I think (and hope) are in and out for 2014:
1. Out: Celebrity Christians. In: Communities that model love for God and others.
More articles and blog posts appeared in 2013 lamenting the culture of “celebrity” that has infected the evangelical world. Celebrity Christians include people who are already celebrities, like Paula Deen and the Duck Commander, but celebrity Christians also include regular guys and gals who are clawing their way to the top of the bestseller list and the next big conference. Christian book publishers love the celebrity culture, but the rest of us are beginning to feel a little used.
In for 2014 are faith communities that model love for God and others. These communities are multiplying in American Christian culture, and have great appeal to everyone’s target group, Millennials. Beyond their attractiveness, communities like Grace and Main in Danville, Va., are replacing celebrity with service and fame with friendship. Watch for more like them in 2014.
2. Out: Big evangelical conferences. In: Small local peer groups.
Apparently, there are about 75 major evangelical conferences each year. Most of these target pastors, and obviously no pastor can attend all or even most of these conferences. The big conference model is coming to an end, just like the big electronic conventions of years past. Time and cost will be major factors in their decline. Also, if celebrity Christians are out, conferences which feature celebrity Christians will also fade away.
In for 2014 are small local peer group conversations. Book discussions over lunch, peer-to-peer support and contextual problem-solving will grow in importance in 2014.
3. Out: Coaching. In: Spiritual direction.
Coaching has reached critical mass in the church world. Anyone can be a coach, and unlike in the sports world, church and pastoral coaches aren’t graded on the success of their coaching. Coaching is a metaphor borrowed from the sports world that is losing currency in the church world.
Spiritual direction, on the other hand, is a traditional and appropriate helping ministry in the Christian community. Spiritual direction focuses on spiritual disciplines and insights such as discernment, guidance, insight, wisdom, vocation and mission. The growth of spiritual practices such as lectio divina, the daily office and the use of prayer books portend the rise of the ministry spiritual direction in 2014.
4. Out: Major Christian publishers. In: Self-publishing for local ministry.
With a few notable exceptions, major Christian publishers continue to churn out pop books from celebrity authors. The costs, distribution, marketing and mass audience targeting of Christian publishing results in fewer authors with higher profiles (“celebrities,” see Item 1).
However, self-publishing platforms like Amazon provide free access to the author who has something to say, but has a limited audience. More self-published books will be available in 2014, and more of these will be written for a specific congregation or community. Mass marketing, in other words, is out, and contextual publishing is in.
5. Out: Preaching for “life change.” In: Pastoral care.
Rick Warren popularized “preaching for life change,” which most pastors interpreted as preaching topical sermons on practical subjects like parenting, finances and marriage. But not everyone is as good as Rick Warren at this type of preaching, and it easily degenerates into telling people how to live.
Pastoral care in sermon and practice, however, walks with individuals and families through all of the significant passages of life, and life’s unexpected difficulties, too. This “alongside” preaching and practice ministers to people in their life experiences, and encourages them to find God’s presence in moments of joy and sadness.
Those are the trends I see for the coming year. Of course, there are negative trends that we in churches will have to deal with, too. I’ll leave those to others, and wish you a Happy New Year!
Chuck Warnock pastors Chatham Baptist Church in Chatham, VA and writes the popular Confessions of a Small-Church Pastor, a blog especially for pastors of churches with up to 300 in attendance. Chuck is a contributing editor for Outreach magazine writing their “Small Church, Big Idea” column, writes prolifically for Leadership Journal and Christianity Today, and is a frequent conference speaker on the subject of church leadership. He is currently working on his D.Min. at Fuller Seminary. Learn more »
Two faces of Benefits Street: No drugs, no drunks, no crime - and no foul language! Now our hard-working community's turned into a moral cesspit, say families raised there in a prouder age
- Photographs taken of residents of James Turner Street in post-war Britain
- Location is now featured in Channel 4's Benefits Street
- Residents, almost all of whom are on benefits, shown living in squalor
- Locals say area was starkly different after the war - with a strong community spirit and work ethic
By PAUL BENTLEY
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A little girl in a white silk dress poses shyly with a basket of flowers, in a garden bordered by a neat privet hedge. The roofs of terraced houses can be seen beyond. She is about to attend a church parade.
A small boy, of perhaps the same age, stands to attention in a double-breasted coat and school cap outside the bay window of his redbrick home. His shoes and shirt are immaculate and only an errant right sock, which has begun to wrinkle and slide down his leg, suggests anything less than a dedication to military smartness - by his parents, at least.
Both photographs were taken in the same street, in the same period of immediate post-war Britain. No litter. No television aerials. Both evoke an urban working-class pride in family, home and hard work, as well as a sense of community and making the best of a tough situation.
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Looking smart: Martin Hanchett (left) stands in his school uniform on the street and Nina Clayton, aged 6, all dressed up for the church procession
The girl’s dress is made from parachute silk; a luxury commodity only made available by a parent’s involvement in the recently ended world war.
In that respect the photographs are wholly unremarkable. Thousands like them must exist. And yet they are not mundane. In their modest good order they are both shocking and sad, because the street in which they were taken is today the most notorious in Britain; made so by a television programme which has shown the current residents’ lifestyles, squalor, habitual criminality and an overall social disintegration.
James Turner Street in Winson Green, Birmingham, is infamous after being featured in Channel 4’s highly controversial series Benefits Street.
Today the majority of residents in the Victorian terrace houses claim benefits. The road is filthy, with rubbish strewn across the street and dirty mattresses abandoned on the pavements.
Many of those featured are criminals, drunks or class-A drug addicts. Neighbours rob each other and children fend for themselves while their parents smoke and drink outside.
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Nina Clayton, aged 6, pictured middle, with her family all dressed up for the church procession
But it was not always this way. This week, we spoke to members of families who lived in the ‘golden age’ of ‘Benefits Street’ in the Forties through to the Seventies. They have long since moved away and now say they are saddened by how far their former home has fallen and the ‘scrounging vermin’ who live there now.
Martin Hanchett was the small chap in the cap and wrinkled sock. His family lived two doors away from the house now inhabited by the mother known as White Dee.
His great-grandparents, grandparents and his mother Helen all lived on the road, the family having settled there at the start of the 20th century.
Mr Hanchett, 65, said the family all worked in manual jobs, some from as young as ten years old, and moved to the area from Nottingham because Birmingham was renowned as the ‘city of 1,000 trades’.
The women would work in cafes or wash neighbours’ clothes for change, he recalled.
‘Everybody was working,’ he said. ‘People had to because there was no welfare. Attitudes are different now. There’s a lot of people on benefits today. My parents and grandparents wouldn’t believe it. When they were alive, if you didn’t work you didn’t get anything.’
The retired engraver, who now lives in Halesowen, West Midlands, with his wife said he was dismayed at the state of the street and how moral standards have disappeared.
‘Nobody ever swore like that when we were there. If you were caught swearing in the street and a passer-by heard you, he’d give you a clip round the ear. That’s how it was.
‘The way they now swear at the young kids is dreadful.
‘I can’t remember as a kid any robberies or thefts. I never knew anyone who was a drunk. There wasn’t anyone taking drugs. There was never rubbish on the road like there is now.
‘You kept your doors open. It used to be a nice road, with privet bushes outside every house. People had pride in their appearance.
‘It was a community — a village within a city, really.
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Changes: The street is now featured in Channel 4 documentary Benefits Street
‘A lot of people I know can’t bring themselves to watch the programme. We’re shocked at what has happened to the street.’
Nina Clayton was six when her photograph was taken as she wore the parachute silk dress, made by her mother.
In the Forties she lived with her parents and two brothers a few houses away from where White Dee now lives.
‘Our house was a small grocer’s shop,’ she said. ‘I was only five or six at the time but I remember it so well, cigarettes kept under the counter for regulars, sacks of liquorice root, the fish and chip shop around the corner where you could get free scratchings.’
John Cahill, 56, lived on the street in the Sixties and Seventies before leaving to join the forces. He is now a bricklayer and lives in Wolverhampton with his wife, with whom he has three adult children.
He said: ‘It infuriates me that these people are wallowing in their mire. They enjoy the lifestyle they are leading. It just dismays me to see what sort of vermin have colonised the area. They have turned it into a cesspit.
‘It is such a shame because of all the happy memories I had growing up there. I am ashamed to tell anyone I spent my childhood there because people will think I am as bad as the people in the programme. But my parents and their neighbours were a world apart.
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Two residents sit drinking beer on their doorstep while talking to a child on a bicycle
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Piles of rubbish are often seen scattered all over the street - which was very different in the post-war era
‘My parents would be disgusted if they saw what it was like now.’
Mr Cahill was brought up with his three siblings on James Turner Street by his father Joseph, a lathe turner, and mother Edna, who worked in a factory.
He said all the residents worked, even most mothers, and they took pride in their children’s discipline and appearance.
‘My dad worked all the time. My mum was also at work. They couldn’t afford not to.
‘You never swore in front of your parents because you knew what you were going to get if you answered back. Now the children are effing and blinding, and that’s even the toddlers.
‘I can’t believe how bad it has got. It is filthy now. There is this greed — people want something for nothing.’
The road is believed to be named after James Turner, a 19th-century master at the local King Edward’s School, who never missed a day of work.
‘He went out, worked hard and earned that honour,’ says Mr Cahill. ‘Now his name is associated with everything he was not.’
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2545563/Two-faces-Benefits-Street-No-drugs-no-drunks-no-crime-no-foul-language-Now-hard-working-communitys-turned-moral-cesspit-say-families-raised-prouder-age.html#ixzz2rNigEOup
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Wednesday 22 January 2014
Monday 20 January 2014
Housing benefit ban on jobless migrants: Ministers' new crackdown to stop Britain's welfare system being magnet to citizens of other EU states, Daily Mail
- New rules mean EU arrivals claiming jobseeker's allowance will not be able to receive housing benefit as well
- Those who get jobs but then lose them will only be entitled to housing benefit for six months
- Ministers hope the measures will cut migration to the UK from EU states
- But both Iain Duncan Smith and Theresa May say more needs to be done
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Jobless immigrants are to be denied housing benefit.
Writing in the Mail today, Iain Duncan Smith and Theresa May say Britain’s generous welfare system should no longer be a magnet for citizens of other EU states.
The Work and Pensions Secretary and the Home Secretary claim Labour doled out millions of pounds ‘for people to sit on benefits’ while opening the door to mass migration.
They pointed to incendiary figures showing the number of Britons in jobs plunged by 413,000 between 2005 and 2010, while the number of working foreigners soared by 736,000.
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Less appealing: Ministers have outlined a tough new crackdown on migrants claiming benefits in a bid to get annual net migration down to the tens of thousands
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New rules: Home secretary Theresa May, pictured left, and Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Iain Duncan Smith, pictured right, claim the Government's reforms to welfare and immigration systems are beginning to pay off
They said this was a shameful betrayal and evidence that immigration can displace some British workers and depress wages for the low-skilled.
Under the new rules, to be introduced in April, new European arrivals claiming jobseeker’s allowance will not be able to receive housing benefit as well.
Those who get jobs but then go on to out-of-work handouts will be able to claim housing benefit for up to six months.
After this they will have to show they have a genuine prospect of work.
Housing benefit helps cover accommodation costs for people who are out of work or on low incomes.
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Strict: Under the new regulations, EU arrivals claiming jobseeker's allowance will not be able to claim housing benefit as well
Under emergency regulations that took effect on January 1, all new EU migrants now have to wait for at least three months before they can claim out-of-work benefits.
In their article, Mr Duncan Smith and Mrs May say the Government’s reforms to the welfare and immigration systems are beginning to pay off.
Between 2010 and 2013, the number of Britons in jobs rose by 538,000, while the number of working foreigners increased by 247,000.
The figures are even more striking for the year 2012-13 with 348,000 more British workers and only 26,000 from abroad.
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Employment minister Esther McVey has claimed the Government's long-term economic plan has helped create 1.6million private sector jobs
The ministers say the new £26,000-a-year cap on household benefit claims has affected 33,000 families and encouraged up to 19,000 to return to work.
A limit on economic migrants from outside the EU, changes to the rules on family and student visas and a crackdown on bogus colleges have helped bring down net migration by nearly a third from its peak.
However, Mr Duncan Smith and Mrs May admit there is ‘much more to do’ to meet a Tory target of getting annual net migration down to the tens of thousands.
Ministers have set out a series of measures to limit migrant access to public services and benefits to try to reduce further so-called ‘pull factors’ to the UK.
Landlords will be fined up to £3,000 if they rent a property to an illegal immigrant, while non-EU migrants will be expected to pay a levy of £200 a year to access the NHS if they do not have private healthcare.
The changes to the housing benefit rules will not affect UK and Irish Republic nationals, or European migrants genuinely self-employed or in a job.
European nationals who have been working in the UK, and are subsequently made redundant and claim benefits, will not be affected.
Historically, EU migrants have been able to lodge a claim for the benefit as soon as they arrive in Britain and pass a ‘habitual residence test’ under EU rules.
The Government’s reforms mean they will not be able to make a housing benefit claim at any point unless they are in work.
Employment minister Esther McVey said the Government’s long-term economic plan had helped create 1.6million private sector jobs.
This shameful betrayal
It was a shameful betrayal of thousands of British workers. For years Labour presided over a labour market where the number of foreign people in jobs rocketed to record levels – while thousands of British workers were left on the sidelines, facing the prospect of long-term unemployment.
Today – as Work and Pensions Secretary and Home Secretary – we publish a devastating analysis which lays bare the shocking scale of Labour’s failure.
But this analysis also demonstrates how this Government’s long-term economic plan is putting things right.
Welfare reform and controlling immigration are at the very core of this plan – and if we are to strike the right balance for a strong, sustainable economy, we cannot look at these issues in isolation.
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Both Home Secretary Theresa May, pictured with Prime Minister David Cameron, and Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith claim Labour doled out millions in benefits while allowing mass migration
Labour failed to recognise that if you have a welfare system that doesn’t make work worthwhile or support people into jobs, you pay the price elsewhere.
With one hand, Labour doled out millions of pounds for people to sit on benefits. With the other, they opened the door to mass migration, with those from abroad filling jobs which our own people didn’t want or couldn’t get.
In just five years between 2005 and 2010, for every British person who fell out of work, almost two foreign nationals gained employment.
Now, the Home Office and Department for Work and Pensions are working together to put this travesty right.
Already, we are seeing success in reforming welfare and restoring the incentive for British people to get back to work.
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Iain Duncan Smith argues that the Government is now reversing the damage done under Labour
Take the benefit cap: already 33,000 households have had their benefits cut so they receive no more than average earnings, and 19,000 potentially capped claimants have returned to work.
As a result, as our economy picks up, we have reversed the damaging trend under Labour. The latest data shows that of the rise in employment over the past year, over 90 per cent went to UK nationals.
We’re also putting right the mess Labour left on immigration. Of course immigration, over the generations, has made a tremendously rich contribution to our country, both culturally and in terms of the talent it brings – but it must be controlled.
We know that the idea there’s a set number of jobs to be divided up and handed around is wrong, and things are far more complicated than the simplistic notion that all immigrants come and ‘take British jobs’.
But evidence from the Migration Advisory Committee and other academic studies has demonstrated that immigration can displace some British workers in the labour market. So we have tightened up the system... and the latest figures show our reforms are working.
For those migrants who do come here, we’re ensuring they are unable to take unfair advantage of our system by accessing benefits as soon as they arrive.
For example, we introduced rules so that from January 1 this year we are banning individuals from receiving out-of-work benefits until they have been living in the UK for three months. And we will go still further: from the beginning of April we will be removing entitlement to housing benefit altogether for this group.
In addition, EU migrants can only claim jobseeker’s allowance for six months unless they have genuine prospects of finding work. No longer can people come here from abroad and expect to get something for nothing.
Together, these new immigration and benefit checks will clamp down on those trying to exploit the system. We can ensure that Britain’s growing economy and dynamic jobs market deliver for those who work hard and play by the rules.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2542352/Exclusive-Ministers-new-crackdown-Housing-benefit-ban-jobless-migrants.html#ixzz2qurATAEH
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Lions and donkeys: 10 big myths about World War One debunked, Dan Show BBC News
Much of what we think we know about the 1914-18 conflict is wrong, writes historian Dan Snow.
No war in history attracts more controversy and myth than World War One.
For the soldiers who fought it was in some ways better than previous conflicts, and in some ways worse.
By setting it apart as uniquely awful we are blinding ourselves to the reality of not just WW1 but war in general. We are also in danger of belittling the experience of soldiers and civilians caught up in countless other appalling conflicts throughout history and the present day.
It was the bloodiest war in history to that point
Fifty years before WW1 broke out, southern China was torn apart by an even bloodier conflict. Conservative estimates of the dead in the 14-year Taiping rebellion start at between 20 and 30 million. Around 17 million soldiers and civilians were killed during WW1.
Although more Britons died in WW1 than any other conflict, the bloodiest war in our history relative to population size is the Civil War which raged in the mid-17th Century. It saw a far higher proportion of the population of the British Isles killed than the less than 2% who died in WW1. By contrast around 4% of the population of England and Wales, and considerably more than that in Scotland and Ireland, are thought to have been killed in the Civil War.
Most soldiers died
In the UK around six million men were mobilised, and of those just over 700,000 were killed. That's around 11.5%.
In fact, as a British soldier you were more likely to die during the Crimean War (1853-1856) than in WW1.
Men lived in the trenches for years on end
Frontline trenches could be a terribly hostile place to live. Often wet, cold and exposed to the enemy, units would quickly lose their morale if they spent too much time in them.
As a result, the British army rotated men in and out continuously. Between battles, a unit spent perhaps 10 days a month in the trench system, and of those, rarely more than three days right up on the frontline. It was not unusual to be out of the line for a month.
During moments of crisis, such as big offensives, the British could occasionally spend up to seven days on the frontline but were far more often rotated out after just a day or two.
The upper class got off lightly
Although the great majority of casualties in WW1 were from the working class, the social and political elite was hit disproportionately hard by WW1. Their sons provided the junior officers whose job it was to lead the way over the top and expose themselves to the greatest danger as an example to their men.
Some 12% of the British army's ordinary soldiers were killed during the war, compared with 17% of its officers. Eton alone lost more than 1,000 former pupils - 20% of those who served. UK wartime Prime Minister Herbert Asquith lost a son, while future Prime Minister Bonar Law lost two. Anthony Eden lost two brothers, another brother of his was terribly wounded and an uncle was captured.
'Lions led by donkeys'
George V and his generals, Buckingham Palace 1918
This saying was supposed to have come from senior German commanders describing brave British soldiers led by incompetent old toffs from their chateaux. In fact it was made up by historian Alan Clark.
During the war more than 200 generals were killed, wounded or captured. Most visited the frontlines every day. In battle they were considerably closer to the action than generals are today.
Naturally, some generals were not up to the job, but others were brilliant, such as Arthur Currie, a middle-class Canadian failed insurance broker and property developer.
Rarely in history have commanders had to adapt to a more radically different technological environment.
British commanders had been trained to fight small colonial wars, now they were thrust into a massive industrial struggle unlike anything the British army had ever seen.
Despite this, within three years the British had effectively invented a method of warfare still recognisable today. By the summer of 1918 the British army was probably at its best ever and it inflicted crushing defeats on the Germans.
Gallipoli was fought by Australians and New Zealanders
Australians and New Zealanders mark Anzac Day in Gallipoli, 2011
Far more British soldiers fought on the Gallipoli peninsula than Australians and New Zealanders put together.
The UK lost four or five times as many men in the brutal campaign as her imperial Anzac contingents. The French also lost more men than the Australians.
The Aussies and Kiwis commemorate Gallipoli ardently, and understandably so, as their casualties do represent terrible losses both as a proportion of their forces committed and of their small populations.
Tactics on the Western Front remained unchanged despite repeated failure
Never have tactics and technology changed so radically in four years of fighting. It was a time of extraordinary innovation. In 1914 generals on horseback galloped across battlefields as men in cloth caps charged the enemy without the necessary covering fire. Both sides were overwhelmingly armed with rifles. Four years later, steel-helmeted combat teams dashed forward protected by a curtain of artillery shells.
They were now armed with flame throwers, portable machine guns and grenades fired from rifles. Above, planes, that in 1914 would have appeared unimaginably sophisticated duelled in the skies, some carrying experimental wireless radio sets, reporting real-time reconnaissance.
Huge artillery pieces fired with pinpoint accuracy - using only aerial photos and maths they could score a hit on the first shot. Tanks had gone from the drawing board to the battlefield in just two years, also changing war forever.
No one won
Swathes of Europe lay wasted, millions were dead or wounded. Survivors lived on with severe mental trauma. The UK was broke. It is odd to talk about winning.
However, in a narrow military sense, the UK and her allies convincingly won. Germany's battleships had been bottled up by the Royal Navy until their crews mutinied rather than make a suicidal attack against the British fleet.
Germany's Army collapsed as a series of mighty allied blows scythed through supposedly impregnable defences.
By late September 1918 the German emperor and his military mastermind Erich Ludendorff admitted that there was no hope and Germany must beg for peace. The 11 November Armistice was essentially a German surrender.
Unlike Hitler in 1945, the German government did not insist on a hopeless, pointless struggle until the allies were in Berlin - a decision that saved countless lives, but was seized upon later to claim Germany never really lost.
The Versailles Treaty was extremely harsh
The treaty of Versailles confiscated 10% of Germany's territory but left it the largest, richest nation in central Europe.
It was largely unoccupied and financial reparations were linked to its ability to pay, which mostly went unenforced anyway.
The treaty was notably less harsh than treaties that ended the 1870-1 Franco-Prussian War and World War Two. The German victors in the former annexed large chunks of two rich French provinces, part of France for around 300 years, and home to most of French iron ore production, as well as presenting France with a massive bill for immediate payment.
Treaty of Versailles, 1919
After WW2 Germany was occupied, split up, her factory machinery smashed or stolen and millions of prisoners forced to stay with their captors and work as slave labourers. Germany lost all the territory it had lost after WW1 and another giant slice on top of that.
Versailles was not harsh but was portrayed as such by Hitler who sought to create a tidal wave of anti-Versailles sentiment on which he could then ride into power.
Everyone hated it
Like any war, it all comes down to luck. You may witness unimaginable horrors that leave you mentally and physically incapacitated for life, or you might get away without a scrape. It could be the best of times, or the worst of times.
Many soldiers enjoyed WW1. If they were lucky they would avoid a big offensive, and much of the time, conditions might be better than at home.
For the British there was meat every day - a rare luxury back home - cigarettes, tea and rum, part of a daily diet of over 4,000 calories.
Absentee rates due to sickness, an important barometer of a unit's morale were, remarkably, hardly above peacetime rates. Many young men enjoyed the guaranteed pay, the intense comradeship, the responsibility and a much greater sexual freedom than in peacetime Britain.
Find out more from Dan Snow on how so many soldiers survived the trenches and Michael Mosley on the plastic surgery techniques pioneered in WW1.
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