Poetry and the First World War

The Journal of Military History, 2005

Track Changes, 2014

In light of the recent centenary of the beginning of the First World War, this paper explores how the people of Sheffield in England experienced the outbreak of the conflict in the summer of 1914. The debates around the supposed existence of 'war enthusiasm' across major European cities has been contested by several historians, started with Jean-Jacques Becker (1977) who studied the French reactions. Jeffrey Verhey (2000) explored the 'spirit of 1914' in Imperial Germany, while Benjamin Ziemann (2007) took a closer look at experience of rural Bavaria. Britain's case was later studied in detail by Catriona Pennell (2012), who agreed with her predecessors that 'war enthusiasm' was an oversimplification of the mood that surrounded Britain's entrance in the First World War. This thesis applies directly to Sheffield, which was similarly marked by a sense of anxiety and uncertainty on 4 August 1914, later turning to acceptance and cooperation as the war became a reality that the city as a whole had to adjust to.

2017

fighting Americans from Wisconsin, a state that in 1910 had a majority who spoke German as their first language. Although on the Western Front the war ended at 11.00 a.m. (British time) on 11 November 1918, the fighting did not. What may be called the 'aftershock wars' or 'successor wars' to the First World War continued in regions as diverse as Mesopotamia, Ukraine and Ireland well into the 1920s. How to expand the scope of the history of the First World War was shown at the turn of the millennium by the monumental collaboration between German and American scholars studying the nature of total war, orchestrated by the German Historical Institute in London. 4 Only a decade later, the sheer breadth and depth of the current approaches to the First World War has been well illustrated by the publication in 2014 (in English and French) of the new three-volume Cambridge History of the First World War, edited by Jay Winter. 5 This encompassed the work of scholars of many nationalities, ranging across all countries and cultures affected, from narratives and theatres of war through to the broader role of the state at war, and the role of civil society including the war's aftermath and memorialisation. III. Cultures of Remembrance The centenary anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War has been a particularly piquant challenge, which the British have taken extremely seriously. In October 2012, at the main London site of the Imperial War Museums, Prime Minister David Cameron announced plans for an extensive British official commemoration programme for the First World War which has now started, and which is intended to last until the end of 2018. 6 For the British (and for most English-speakers), and in contrast to the rest of Europe except for Belgium, it has always been the First World War rather than the Second World War which was the great tragic event of the 20th Century. The central paradox of the British experience of the First World War is that the war enjoyed massive popular support from the British civilian

Second language learning and teaching, 2018

The First World War retains a profound hold over the contemporary consciousness. In Britain those who fought for the country in all wars are still remembered on the anniversary of Armistice Day in 1918, while one web-site lists over 200 books in English published in the past five years about the conflict which include "the Great War" in the title (Amazon 2015). The fact that the phrase "the Great War" still has currency in reference to a century-old experience, and after all of the wars that have happened since, implies the degree to which its impact is still felt, and also the possibility that if its "greatness" ever meant it was a glorious enterprise, it no longer applies. However, the notion that British political leaders used the phrase liberally in the hope of winning a propaganda and recruiting victory 100 years ago would not be accurate, and instead a brief survey of its use (and non-use) at that time provides a revealing image in which some of the most powerful political and media figures often acted with public trepidation, while those who overtly promoted war against Germany were relatively marginal. I include a relatively full examination of opinions expressed in Punch magazine because I believe its attempts to appeal to a conservative, well-healed, distinctly nonintellectual readership, a constant pursuit of current conformity, offer a good guide to "respectable" views of the time. 1 The Oxford English Dictionary records the first use of the phrase about the 1914-1918 war as being in a Canadian publication, Maclean's Magazine, in October 1914, 2 in an article about the nascent conflict: "Some wars name themselves. .. This is the great war" (Simpson 1991, 703). Other accounts, such as Patricia Treble's (2014), accept this as the earliest known use about the First World War. Earlier campaigns had been given the description, so that the Napoleonic Wars, for example in the 1911 book British Statesmen of the Great War: 1793-1814 and Narratives in Some Passages from the Great War with France, from 1799 to 1810, from 1854, were thought to have been "great", plausibly both to signify how momentous it was and that "we" (Napoleon's opponents) won. Judging by the later of the two above-mentioned publications, for a hundred years right until the start of World War One, in Britain "the Great War" had meant the series of battles against

In the summer of 1914 most of Europe went to war. The legend of unprecedented euphoria of patriotism and war-readiness, which swept across all the layers of society (and was immortalized by terms as Kriegsbegeisterung, Spirit of 1914 and Augusterlebnis), has during the years become an intricate part of the growing myth about the First World War. Publically, the war was almost universally accepted with every nation carrying its own version of nationalism into it. In Germany it was greeted as the salvation of man and Europe from modern materialism and loss of spiritual values, as well as a way for the German nation to achieve their spiritual unity. Although the British politicians and public had opposed the war during the pre-war international tensions, the invasion of Belgium provided the pro-war political actors with a necessary discourse of preservation of the British way of life against German hegemony, which swung not only the cabinet but the vast majority of the country behind the war. Unification of the nation in spiritual solidarity dominated all the European nations leaning on an already constructed nationalism of the nineteenth century and the Napoleonic wars. However, this idea was most strongly felt in Germany, where the political unification of 1871 had not yet been complemented by the overall sense of national identity. The press played also a key role in disseminating this Kriegsbegeisterung by reports of the volunteers merrily going off to the front wearing their Tauglichkeits-Sträußerln – plant and floral sprays as trophies of their fitness to serve.

Irish Marxist Review, 2014

The RUSI Journal, 2014

This book achieves two aims: to locate the Great War in the history of the 20th century, and to show how, as the 20th century unfolded, our understanding of the meaning and significance of the Great War changed as well. In effect, Reynolds argues that it was the contrast with the Second World War which made the First World War appear to be a futile bloodbath, which is not as it appeared to millions of men and women in Britain and France who believed the war had to be fought and that it had to be fought to the bitter end, which indeed they did. This is what Reynolds means when he says that, as moving as Wilfred Owen's poetry is, we cannot distill history into poetry. I will have more to say about this below, but it is undoubtedly true that we cannot take the war poets as representative of the attitudes of contemporaries about whether the war had to be fought. The intriguing question is why over the course of the 20th century the war poets' view, if there was one, has come to dominate later understandings of the 1914-18 conflict in Britain, and to a certain degree in France.

Power, Violence and Mass Death in Pre-Modern and Modern Times, 2017

The war on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918 was the subject of a wide variety of representations while it was being waged. After the Armistice, there followed a virtual riot of representations, in prose, in poetry, in film, in painting and sculpture, in photography, in commemorative sites and rituals, in political discourse. This is hardly surprising, given the wartime presence there of over 10 million men, and the belief-which I share-that it was on the Western Front that the war was won and lost. But there is another level of symbolic notation I would like to address today. With reference primarily to British evidence, I want to trace prewar and wartime representations of war, and show how these symbolic systems accommodated configuring a kind of war no one had ever seen before. But I also want to show how the enormity of the casualties suffered on the Western Front, and the nature of the war fought there, helped configure this part of the conflict as iconic. The Western Front became iconic in the inter-war years and after in part because it stood for industrial warfare as a whole; but in part, its iconic status was related not to a precise meaning it conveyed, but to its power to evoke the notion that the war had no meaning at all. The Western Front is the site where mass death converted war from a conventional contest to a puzzling, unprecedented catastrophe. In this sense, it was there, in the 400 kilometres or so that separated the Belgian coast from the Swiss border in Alsace, that the Apocalypse arrived. As I have argued elsewhere, it was an Apocalypse truncated, an Apocalypse without hope, 1 inscribed

In For Whom the Bell Tolls, the famous American novelist Ernest Hemingway wrote, "Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime." While Hemingway was writing decades later, his time as an 18-year-old ambulance driver in the Great War had convinced him of a great truth-there was nothing glorious about unleashing the fury of modern warfare upon one's fellow man. The Great War, which Woodrow Wilson had deemed "the war to end all wars," was the single most significant event of the twentieth century. Modern technology had transformed the very nature of war. The casualties were higher, the destruction was greater, and the depravity was deeper. When the bullets finally ceased in November 1918, the world that survived was fundamentally different than the world that had existed in July 1914.