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Tag: First World War

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

Reviewed by Alison Fell

Mark Connelly’s wonderful new book would make a great companion for a tramp across the Western Front battlefields. It draws on an impressive range of primary sources: maps, letters, diaries, novels, press articles, battlefield guides and, of course, postcards, to evoke the landscapes of Northern France and Belgium that had been so devastated by the war. The landscape constitutes the point of connection between past and present, and makes you aware not only of the ghosts of soldiers who tramped the same battlefields, but of the thousands of ‘pilgrims’ – mourners, veterans and tourists – who followed in their footsteps.

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Australian War Graves Workers and World War One: Devoted Labour for the Lost, the Unknown but not Forgotten Dead

Reviewed by Christopher Kreuzer

Published in 2019 by Palgrave Macmillan, Australian War Graves Workers and World War One: Devoted Labour for the Lost, the Unknown but not Forgotten Dead, is a multi-author collaborative work between two university academics (Fred Cahir and Sara Weuffen) and three other authors (Matt Smith, Peter Bakker and Jo Caminiti). As such, it spans the academic and public history fields, with well-chosen archival photographs, biographical vignettes, and moving personal accounts giving an insight into the gruesome nature and psychological impact of this post-war work.

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Entrenched

Written by Andrew McCarthy

“‘You’re in a tight corner, Richard Hannay’, I said to myself. I was crouching behind the Chesterfield in the drawing room. Von Schwabing’s men kept up a steady fire. Bullets had shattered the French windows, and the curtains billowed in the breeze. I knew that Sandy and his men were on the other side of the garden wall. If I could cut across the lawn and reach the wall, I might have a chance. I buttoned my Aquascutum, and made sure that my pistol was secure on its lanyard. I stepped through the shattered windows, and took aim at a rifleman kneeling beside a tree. A pistol bullet bored through my hat. I fired. The rifleman slumped to the ground. This was going to be a first-class show.”

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Red Cross Rose: An Aussie Civilian in France, 1916-1920

Reviewed by Emma Hanna

In recent years, the wartime service of civilians near the battlefields of the Great War has been highlighted by histories of the organisations with whom they worked. Historians such as Geoffrey Reznick and Michael Snape have worked to explain how and why voluntary-aid organisations such as the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) sought to care for servicemen’s well-being wherever they were fighting. The service of hundreds of men and women who worked along the lines of communication, in camps, ports, hospitals and by prisoner of war camps, should be more visible in the war’s histories. These workers fulfilled the roles which military authorities were unable or unwilling to do. They were proud to have shared similar dangers and deprivations to those bearing arms, although they were not permitted to wear any uniform or identifying insignia until late 1917.

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Im Westen etwas Neues: The Modernisation of All Quiet on the Western Front

Written by Helena Power

One of the legacies of the Great War Centenary is that there is a plethora of ‘forgotten’ stories about the war that remain to be explored. It is therefore somewhat ironic that the latest film about the conflict is a new adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel, All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues). The original film adaptation was released in 1930, so this presents an interesting opportunity to look at the retelling of an adaptation almost a century later. By comparing and contrasting the 2022 remake with the 1930 film, we can observe how modern filmography trends have changed the ways we tell stories about the past. For brevity, I will avoid the 1979 film adaptation. For ease of reference, the 2022 film will be referred to by its German title of Im Westen nichts Neues (or Im Westen), and the 1930 film as All Quiet on the Western Front (or All Quiet).

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‘Today we have the Naming of Parts’: Words, Language and Military History

Written by Mark Connelly

In August 1942 the New Statesman and Nation published Henry Reed’s poem, ‘Naming of Parts,’ which has become one his most famous works. Its focus is a sergeant instructing the men in the handling of their rifle. The instructor luxuriates in the technical language of the weapon. We are told of the lower sling swivel, the piling swivel, the safety catch (and how quickly it can be released with a simple flick of the thumb), the bolt, the breach, the cocking-piece, the point of balance. The rifle is a welter of technical terms and understanding those technical terms means mastering a mystery, it means initiation into a distinct community; it means power.

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Ironic and Iconic: My relationship with Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory

Written by Mark Connelly

Every now and then a book comes along that meets truly the hyperbole of blurbs and testimonials found in reviews and adorning dustjacket covers. For me, one of those texts is Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory. First published by Oxford University Press in 1975, it has achieved something rare for an academic text: global fame and global notoriety. His argument that the Great War ushered in irony as the dominant mode of modern discourse was ever-present set people talking, thinking and writing, some furiously, others ecstatically. My first engagement with it was as a teenager and through the lenses of others. The first was provided by an English teacher at school who, on finding out about my interest in the First World War, urged me to read it. With the persistence of a Great War general hammering away at a strongpoint regardless of cost, he kept returning to the recommendation. I noted his enthusiasm and realised there was something special about this work, but I had a pile of other war books to get through including Wyn Griffiths’s Up to Mametz and the diaries of Edwin Campion Vaughan published under the title Some Desperate Glory. My next encounter with it came at Christmas when my parents indulged me with another pile of First World War books as presents. Among them were two other seminal texts (if you’re unlucky, I’ll write about those in another blog!), John Terraine’s The Smoke and the Fire and The White Heat. Reading The Smoke and the Fire was epiphanic (that’s a great word, isn’t it?). I went from being a full-blown Joan Littlewoodite to a full-blown revisionist in one move. And of course, a significant casualty was my open-mindedness about Fussell. This Fussell chap now looked distinctly suspect and out of his depth. As Bertie Wooster might have said, ‘Fussell can eat cake as far as I am concerned’, and that was him struck from my reading list.

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A Personal Reflection on the Recent War Graves Controversy

Written by Mark Connelly I first visited a Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery when I was sixteen years old. It was Dud Corner Cemetery and the Loos Memorial in France. I can remember the moment vividly. Having developed a deep interest in the First World War, I was on my first battlefield trip. Although my reading had made me aware of the work of the Commission, nothing prepared me for the beauty, calm and dignity of…

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Art, Men, and Masculinity in the Great War

Written by Laura Waters

People have been drawing people for millennia. Art is crucial to how we perceive ourselves, it both forms us and we form it. So when we think about identity during wartime, especially masculine identity as it relates to the male body, art is a vital source, often giving us as much information as written primary documents. Going into the Great War, we know that masculinity and gender expression were sometimes hotly contested in British society. The rise of eugenics, the classical body aesthetic, and the numerous debates over sports and exercise in schools all pushed and pulled at an ideal image of the male body, cementing its importance to one’s masculinity. As an added concern, men were expected to fulfil the role of heterosexual patriarch, to be domestic, to emote (but only within specific parameters).

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