In the Great War, home front schemes in support of wartime causes included the making and transportation of what were called smellies: homemade tokens and commercial gifts that invoked supposedly traditional British scents. For volunteers, this entailed the collection and distribution of homemade lavender and verbena bags as an allegedly effective—and practical—means of aiding those injured at the front. For others, like commercial perfumers, this meant the production of scented commodities like lavender water and eau de Cologne for transport to troops overseas. In both cases, supporters mobilized the symbolic power of perfumed items to promote a fictitious version of rural, white, English life that could allegedly be resumed after the conflict. These campaigns obscured the social, racial, gendered, and material realities of war. What resulted was a profoundly limited definition of British smells and, by extension, their idealized British recipients: white, English-born servicemen from across classes. While perfumed gifts were designed to comfort these select recipients and bring a sense of order to the front, accounts of gifts’ production and reception ultimately reveal fractures—and failures—in the deployment of national smells to order the disordered smellscapes of war.

在第一次世界大战中，支持战时事业的后方计划包括制造和运输所谓的臭味：自制的代币和商业礼品，这些东西会唤起所谓的传统英国气味。对于志愿者来说，这需要收集和分发自制的薰衣草和马鞭草袋，据称这是帮助前线受伤人员的有效且实用的手段。对于商业调香商等其他人来说，这意味着生产薰衣草水和古龙水等香味商品，然后运往海外部队。在这两起事件中，支持者都利用香水的象征力量来宣传虚构的英国乡村白人生活，据称这种生活可以在冲突后恢复。这些运动掩盖了战争的社会、种族、性别和物质现实。其结果是对英国气味的定义极其有限，进而延伸到其理想化的英国接受者：来自各个阶级的、英国出生的白人军人。虽然香水礼物的目的是安慰这些选定的接受者并带来一种秩序感，但礼物的制作和接收的记录最终揭示了在利用国家气味来整理战争无序气味景观方面的断裂和失败。