William Loh’s battle against boredom, his hunger for something to read or watch or listen to, and his hope to hear a literary voice from home were common concerns for Australian soldiers in the age of mass, infantry-based armies. His affection for a book like Read’s, though, would have struck most of his mates as a little pompous. What was wrong with that detective novel they were passing around the company, or the new Rita Hayworth film at which everyone ogled? And if too few books, films, or concerts reached Loh’s corner of the war, it would have been a rare failure in the vast effort by government, business, charities, and families to swamp the troops with anything in the way of cultural recreation they might have wanted, and quite a bit they didn’t.

We can calibrate an Australian military appetite for cultural recreation, and the official and unofficial efforts to satisfy or shape it, thanks to Amanda Laugesen’s brilliantly conceived and nicely executed study of the reading, watching, and listening habits of Australian soldiers (plus a few airmen, though no sailors) in the world wars and Vietnam. Laugesen strives to conjure up the history of an audience, but we never quite comprehend the intellectual life of these soldiers. Few were as concerned as William Loh with what they read, or with recording the kinds of cultural recreation they sought, rejected, or tolerated. Laugesen has to rely more heavily on records and reports from providers than from consumers. Perhaps this encouraged her to let us in on the vast open conspiracy to improve military readers as well as divert them.

For much of World War I, the emphasis was on moral uplift. To have so many young men gambling, drinking, and whoring in uniform, not to mention killing, was a new and disturbing experience for English-speaking societies. The great wartime charities were careful to pack improving books as well as diverting ones among all those jam tins, socks, and other ‘comforts’ sent to the front. By 1918 civic uplift seemed more important. It was paramount by 1942, amid a war understood as the child of economic depression, fascism, and militarism. Ignorance and a refusal to think for oneself, the director of army education warned the troops in the pages of the magazine Salt, confined soldiers to a mental Maginot Line. Victory, he claimed, would go to the army that used its brains; and, after victory, only citizens who built a thriving economy and saw through would-be dictators would preserve peace. The intended finished product of civic uplift was something like a sceptical patriot, though, as the mood of political and intellectual leaders swung to the left, the patriot was bound to show greater scepticism toward the right. No wonder a lecture on agriculture smelt, to at least one soldier, of something ‘very like communism’.

There was a whiff of culture, too, rising from all the official and private efforts to lift the quality of what soldiers were reading. Penguin paperbacks were common gifts as much for their good writing as for the way they fitted neatly into tunic pockets. But most troops craved diversion. Marie Corelli, whose indifferent novels stirred the romantic and mystical yearnings of millions, was as popular during World War I as westerns, detective stories, and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind were in World War II. Many soldiers shared Loh’s yearning for an Australian voice, though they wanted one that didn’t seem to talk down to them. C.J. Dennis’s Songs of a Sentimental Bloke (1915) was a common choice, with its silent tears for tough guys and for women who domesticate them. ‘All men are more or less sentimental,’ a captain tried to explain, ‘and the sentiments hidden in this poem behind the slang seem to appeal to most of us’.

Even more popular was the New Testament. Communing with the Almighty was a prudent strategy when enemy bombers were overhead or a cloud of mustard gas was approaching. For all the exhortation to love your enemy, the book could resolve some of the dissonance between increasing expectations of a long, healthy, and fulfilled life and the unyielding social duty to surrender it, to see it hacked apart. But what made the New Testament a talisman for many men was that the one they carried was often a family gift. ‘To Sid from sisters May, Ivy & Father, wishing him all the best that God can give, 6/6/42’ reads the inscription inside a small blue bible that my grandfather, a pagan if ever there was one, carried into war – and, even more improbably, back home again.

The most devoted readers were probably prisoners of war. A truly captive audience, they found in books, and also in concerts and lectures, a virtual escape, even momentary transcendence. ‘We try to communicate the faith,’ explained a ‘university’ set up in Stalag Luft VI, ‘that there are things of the mind unbounded by time and place and that captives may escape beyond the barbed wire into fields of knowledge and delight’. Sometimes joy was easier found by rolling the thin, durable leaves of a bible into cigarette papers. As the chaplains said, better to inhale the Word than ignore it. They might have been less tolerant of the ignorance in Vietnam. Gambling, sport, and sex trumped cultural recreation there. Reading was rare, and touring comedians and musicians were usually superannuated bores or provincial try-hards. Barry Humphries was judged too highbrow to visit – or was it that lampooning Australian life risked further eroding the will to fight?

‘Boredom is the Enemy’ is good academic writing, faithful to its sources and cautious in its conclusions. It introduces us to film viewers, concert-goers, music and radio listeners, and above all to readers who generally had little time for the Herbert Reads of the world, let alone the even loftier Robert Bridges. Yet throughout Laugesen’s pages these soldiers show an innate good sense. A few transcended hell by fixing their minds on the peaks of human thought. Most lowered the temperature a little by simply entertaining themselves. Few wanted to master hell itself. ‘There was a heavy demand for library books,’ an education officer reported on a transport bringing troops home from the trenches, but one was never removed from the shelves. It was titled Principles of War.