Your King and Country need you.

“Your King and Country need you” is best understood as a British patriotic recruiting slogan associated with the early months of the First World War. It echoes the language used in mass enlistment appeals and is closely linked to Lord Kitchener’s famous 1914 recruitment campaign, in which posters and newspaper advertisements urged men to join the army. The most iconic formulation—“Your Country Needs YOU”—appeared with Kitchener’s pointing portrait and became emblematic of wartime propaganda. The “King and Country” wording reflects the monarch-centered civic identity of the United Kingdom and was used in various recruiting contexts rather than originating as a single authored literary line.

The phrase compresses a moral summons into a simple claim of necessity: the nation (and the sovereign as its symbol) “needs” the individual. By pairing “King” with “Country,” it fuses personal loyalty to the monarch with duty to the state, framing enlistment as both patriotic obligation and honorable service. The direct address (“you”) personalizes responsibility and implies that refusal would be a failure of civic character. As propaganda, its power lies in converting a vast geopolitical conflict into an intimate call to action, making national survival feel contingent on the listener’s immediate choice.

“Your Country Needs YOU.”
“Your King and Country Need You.”
“Your King and Country Want You.”