The Home Front and Nationalism

According to this source, forced drafts hurt a country's nationalism. When young men are forced to serve in a war regardless of their own beliefs and desires, the country itself looses morale and suffers because of it.

During the Great War, the home front became almost as important as the military itself. All the women and children left at home raced to do everything they could for the war effort, and war consumed everyday life. Although this effort originally resulted in huge surges of nationalism, it hurt the countries later on when the casualties were beginning to be felt. Once the war had been going on for two years, the people who had stayed away from the front lines began to loose their enthusiasm for the war. The constant presence of the war in their minds had begun to wear on their desire to help. Many women who had lost family members or husbands in the war resented the continuous fighting. Britan and France were two countries that experienced this fall of nationalism, and they rallied against it with propganda and censoring information about the war. They attempted to unite the country once again by exagerating the crimes committed against them by other countries, with varying degrees of success.