The afterlife of war and of those who wage war is now a centrepiece of historical scholarship. We have many studies of demobilisation which show graphically how difficult was the road home for the millions of men who returned after the Peace Treaties were signed. What we have lacked, though, is disaggregation, a separation of the story of a return to rural life from that of a return to the urban world.

This book fills that gap in the literature. Its portraits of ex-soldiers are drawn from painstaking and original research, which leads to a new interpretation of the transition from war to peace. Taking soldiers’ settlement as their focus, Scates and Oppenheimer show time and again how immensely difficult it was for soldiers turned farmers to create a new and viable life on the land in the interwar years. Intriguingly, they point to the way the mistakes of the post-1918 period were not repeated in Australia after 1945. This finding, while significant, provided scant solace to the post-Great War generation.

That so many men were defeated in making land settlement a road to stability and prosperity is a significant part of the Anzac story. But it is hardly limited to Australia. It echoes the hardships of soldiers who, all over the world, returned to the factories, the docks, and the mines just in time to face several interwar depressions. And this was before the world economic crisis of 1929–31 added bankers and investors to the list of those who had fallen off the economic tightrope of the post-war decades. Mass unemployment made the divide between winners and losers in the war fade rapidly, and policy responses on the part of leaders of the once-victorious Allies were not notably more successful than those of the former Central Powers, now divided into multiple successor states.

Hardship among veterans was everybody's history in the interwar years, but the story told by Scates and Oppenheimer has a particular rural taste to it. The difference is in the isolation of those working on the land.