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Tag: Nursing

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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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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