I've just been reading Willa Cather's One of Ours, her novel about an American soldier in the Great War. He thinks to himself that once he had scorned wristwatches as only for sissies, but his military service changed his mind. This echoes the words from the British side in the article: "The wristlet watch was little used by the sterner sex before the war, but now is seen on the wrist of nearly every man in uniform and of many men in civilian attire."