The spectacular collapse of the Liberal Party in Britain has often been regarded as the result of a crisis in Liberal values, supposedly provoked by the unprecedented militarization of British society during the Great War. However, this interpretation typically fails to recognize the extent to which the most important and visible legacies of that process of militarization were accommodated within the Liberal Party itself. Between 1918 and 1929, more than a hundred ex-servicemen were elected to Parliament as Liberal MPs, and scores more stood as Liberal candidates. This article examines how these men negotiated, presented, and performed their military identities within the framework of postwar electoral politics; analyzes how they operated in Parliament; and traces the longer-term trajectories of their political careers. It challenges the assumption that Liberals were temperamentally or ideologically incapable of engaging with the war's legacies, demonstrating the ability of Liberal candidates to exploit the iconography and rhetorical tropes of military service when appealing to an electorate that had been profoundly shaped by the experience of war and military mobilization. Liberals sought to contest Conservative Party attempts to monopolize the politics of patriotism after 1918 by constructing gendered electoral appeals that acknowledged the unstable meanings of the Great War and the ambiguous status of the men who had fought in it. However, the inability of Liberal politicians to unite around a shared understanding of what the war had meant ultimately prevented them from exploiting the memory of the conflict as effectively as their Conservative and Labour rivals.

英国自由党的惨败通常被认为是自由价值观危机的结果，据称是由第一次世界大战期间英国社会前所未有的军事化引发的。然而，这种解释通常未能认识到军事化进程最重要和最明显的遗产在多大程度上被容纳在自由党内部。1918 年至 1929 年间，有一百多名退伍军人作为自由党议员当选为议会议员，还有数十人作为自由党候选人。本文探讨了这些人如何在战后选举政治的框架内谈判、呈现和表现他们的军事身份；分析他们如何在议会运作；并追踪他们政治生涯的长期轨迹。它挑战了自由党在性格上或意识形态上无法参与战争遗产的假设，证明了自由党候选人在吸引深受战争和战争经历影响的选民时，有能力利用服兵役的形象和修辞手法来吸引选民。军事动员。自由派试图通过构建性别化的选举诉求来对抗保守党在 1918 年后垄断爱国主义政治的企图，这些诉求承认一战的不稳定意义以及参战者的模糊地位。然而，