Postcards from the Western Front Pilgrims Veterans and Tourists after the Great War

The English Historical Review, 2010

's newest book presents an analysis of Western Front memoirs written by British and Commonwealth authors, acting as an analogous volume to The Unquiet Western Front: Britain's Role in Literature and History.(1) The study is organised into a series of essays discussing individual authors, which are in turn complemented by comparative thematic chapters. Chapter titles indicate, roughly, the representative roles of the various servicemen selected: for example, Alfred Pollard and John Reith as the 'Fire-eaters'; General F. P. Crozier as 'Martinet, militarist and opponent of war; and Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan, somewhat ironically, 'having a "good war"'. Within these general topical divisions one finds a breadth of experiences and opinions, which Bond conveys through a series of well-selected quotations from the memoirs, supplemented by published and unpublished works by the highlighted authors, letters, regimental histories and contemporary biographies. Robert Graves' 1929 memoir Goodbye to All That (2) is addressed in the opening chapter, and is presented as a product of the author's 'mordant contempt for all the conventional values of the time' (p. 3). It serves as a foil to Charles Carrington's A Subaltern's War (3), also published in 1929 but written ten years earlier. Carrington's account implicitly rebuts Graves' characterisation of the war as an engine for disillusionment, instead arguing that 1919 and peace provided 'the real moment of disenchantment' (p. 16), the point at which the serving generation lost confidence in the meaning of their collective experience. These two books offer contrasting, but not necessarily binary archetypes; what links all of the memoirs is a respect for fellow soldiers, particularly those that did not survive the war. While Graves' literary talents serve him well, 'transforming it [his war experience] into his own brilliantly colourful myth' (p. 3), Bond points out that much of the bitterness conveyed by the memoir is tempered by his tangible and 'undoubted

Historical Research 80(211) (150- 166)

Recent scholarship has reinvigorated the study of the battlefields of the Western Front. Inspired by these advances and, especially, the advent of an archaeological agenda on the former fields of conflict, this article examines how British soldiers reacted with the landscape and materials which surrounded them. Using archive material to build an ethnographic study, the article investigates violence and death in the battlefield and how the soldiers responded to this hostile environment.

This chapter examines the way in which the memory of the First World War in Britain has altered with the creation of new sites of remembrance to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the conflict from 2014.

E.Waterton and S. Watson (eds.) Cultural Heritage and Representation: Perspectives on visuality and the past. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 75-90

Flemish Peace Institute

The 2014-2018 commemoration period marks a hundred years since the First World War. The Flemish government has made it one of the objectives of its project for the WWI Centenary that the commemorations should convey a message of peace. This report studies how this objective can be achieved. This is done, firstly, by critically examining the conditions under which peaceoriented war commemorations can be set up in a normatively and historically well-considered manner. Secondly, based on a survey of stakeholders and practice experts, this study investigates how contemporary commemorations can be linked to the idea of peace in practice.

Catalogue of the 'The War Beyond The Western Front: Hidden Histories of the First World War' exhibition hosted at the Glass Tank Gallery at Oxford Brookes University in Nov-Dec 2016, featuring 3D anaglyph conversions of contemporary stereoscopic images courtesy of Simon Wilson, and the individual research projects conducted at the Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum (Sofo) as part of our AHRC funded research development project with Stephen Barker and the Centre for Hidden Histories at the University of Nottingham.

Assemblage 11 (1-14)

The archaeology of the battlefields of the Western Front has provided an alternative perspective in the development of a new agenda in Great War studies. Excavations provide a viewpoint into the materiality and spatial dimension of the world’s first industrialised conflict. This however is not the only way in which the interests of archaeology can be served. The vast amount of archive material available forms an as yet untapped source of data to examine the landscapes, spaces and material culture of the war. This information which has already been rigorously studied by historians, can be reinvigorated by using archaeological research questions which address unexplored aspects of the conflict. This paper will demonstrate this potential by using archive material from British soldiers who served on the battlefields to construct an ethnographic study of the Western Front. Utilising postprocessual landscape theories, this ethnography will explore how soldiers reacted to the trenches, weapons and the threat of death and mutilation in the war landscape. This not only contributes to the development of archaeology in the study of the Western Front but by viewing the war in a different manner, archaeology can also construct a different remembrance of the conflict.

"Introduction: ‘plinth and/or place’ In the four weeks leading to 11th November 1928 the now defunct illustrated newspaper Answers published a ‘magnificent series of plates celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Armistice’. Under the strapline ‘Ten years after, 1918 - 1928’ the plates were published as four pairs of pencil drawings by the former soldier-artist Adrian Hill. They depicted the principle buildings on the old Western Front in Belgium and France as they appeared in ruins in late 1918, and under restoration ten years later. Arras Cathedral, the Cloth Hall at Ypres, Albert Basilica, and the Menin Road had become icons across the British Empire as the immutable symbols of the trauma of the Great War. Indeed, in the months after the Armistice, Winston Churchill had strongly advocated ‘freezing’ the remains of Ypres and preserving it forever as an ossified commemoration of the war. Its pulverised medieval buildings, he argued, would be more articulate than any carved memorial or reverential monument. Churchill’s predilection for bombed ruins surfaced again during the Second World War when he argued that a portion of the blitzed House of Commons ought also to be preserved as a reminder of the bombing of the capital. (Hansard 25 January 1945) As with many grand commemorative schemes, Churchill’s vision was not to be realised. Indeed, after both wars many of the grander commemorative schemes floundered: a national war memorial garden in the precincts of St Paul’s Cathedral was abandoned as a project in the late 1940’s; ambitious plans to house the national war art collection in an imposing ‘Hall of Remembrance’ came to nothing twenty years earlier, as did a similar architectural scheme in Canada. Although, many ideas were realised, though few were achieved without some degree of argument. In this chapter I will examine how the desire to produce a common understanding of the past has resulted in material forms such as the plinth and the pedestal which have become the key visual components of ideological and rhetorical urban topography, I want to contrast them with the concept of ‘reified place’, in particular preserved or reconstructed battlefields which have become the focus of commemorative rites; the places where ‘one takes personal narratives’. Most of the examples used to illustrate this tension will be drawn from the northern European theatres of war, although reference will be made to certain far-flung conflicts – such as the Battle of Gettysburg – which became the template for historic conservation and the embellishment of military memory. In concentrating on idealised objects on the one hand, and recuperated landscapes on the other I will have to set aside consideration of other acts of commemoration: by these we might include ritual, song and poetry, but also the material culture of war such as artwork, paintings and sculpture which were commissioned by national governments as both propaganda and as evidence of cultural superiority. When considering how warfare might variously be commemorated it is clear that every act is highly contested. Even the granting of war trophies could stir dissent and disagreement. In 1919, when the small east Lancashire town of Haslingden was offered a tank as a gift from the government in recognition of its contribution to war savings, the local branch of the Discharged Soldiers and Sailors Association (DSSA) rejected it as an inappropriate emblem of commemoration. ‘This tank’, wrote their President, ‘will remind us of things we do not want to be reminded of, and one which would be an expense to the town.’ (Haslingden Gazette 1919) He asked instead that the government send an army-hut as a club-room for the veterans, and ensure them a fitting place in the coming Peace Day celebrations – the protocols for the latter proving to be as equally contested as the gift of a redundant military vehicle. (Turner 1999, 58) Of course, many of the tensions between ‘plinth’ and ‘place’ had been played out long before the Great War. The construction of monuments and memorials on sites of battle has a history reaching back to the classical periods of Greece and Rome (Borg, 1991; Carman and Carman, 2006). However, the demarcation of battlefield sites so as to accentuate the material remains of the past is a fairly recent phenomenon. In their analysis of twenty-three north European battle sites, covering nine centuries (from the Battle of Maldon in 991, to the Spanish battle of Sorauren in 1813) Carmen and Carmen note (2006, 184-86) that only five are marked by contemporary memorials, while all but three are furnished with modern memorials, of which all take monumental form. Six of these sites also host a museum or have heritage status, usually dating from the twentieth century, thus reflecting the idea that such places have only latterly been considered worthy of note and subject to demarcation, textual display and commodification. Such spaces are invariably politicized, dynamic and contested. As Bender notes, they are constantly open to negotiation. (Bender, 1983) They are also complex sites of social construction. As we shall see in our examination of twentieth century wars in northern Europe, it is best not to view such sites as the location of single events but as ‘a palimpsest of overlapping, multi-vocal landscapes’. (Saunders 2001, 37) "

This dissertation examines a collection of rich oral histories, and emotional reactions gathered from the visitors to two major museum exhibitions, both covering the same harrowing subject. ‘La Grande Guerre’ exhibition, which opened at the Fitzwilliam Museum in June 2014, and ‘Les Desastres de la Guerre’ exhibition at the Louvre in Lens, which opened in May of the same year. The exhibitions are on the subject of the First World War and these poignant narratives tell the stories of just some of those who lived and died during this dark period. My research focuses primarily on the collection housed in the Fitzwilliam museum, and the visitors it receives, but I draw parallels and comparisons with the work displayed at the Louvre. I have explored the contributions that philosophers and artists have made to the debate on the subject of the ‘Great War’ and discuss how they have sought to influence the people of the time, and the extent to which they succeed in influencing a contemporary audience. I have found that even today, one hundred years since the outbreak of the First World War, I was hearing the same views from modern day visitors to the art and artifacts on display, as I read about in the collections housed by the museums, these stories expressed the horrors of war. I have touched upon how technology for example, mustard gas and how it contributed in making World War One a horrific, bloody war, which is again, expressed through the art of this period. The loss of animal life was also significant and the suffering that many horses endured on the battlefield at the beginning of the war, is included in my findings. This social experiment can now form a short introduction into what is a fascinating collection of stories, to be retained for future generations. The First World War was truly a great disaster, and the art portrays that in these exhibitions.