tag:theconversation.com,2011:/global/topics/world-war-i-series-15586/articles
World War I series – The Conversation
2018-11-08T18:05:29Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/105587
2018-11-08T18:05:29Z
2018-11-08T18:05:29Z
A glimmer of light amidst the darkness: honour in the First World War
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243907/original/file-20181105-83641-k751ei.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=1%2C11%2C797%2C543&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A display of acrobatics by German internees at the prisoner of war camp at Newbury Racecourse in Berkshire in October 1914.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/German_Prisoners_of_War_in_Britain_during_the_First_World_War_Q53357.jpg">Imperial War Museum/Wikimedia</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The first lines of Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57258/insensibility">Insensibility</a>’ (1893 – 1918) bear testament to the chilling impact of the First World War on those who participated in it:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Happy are men who yet before they are killed<br>
Can let their veins run cold.<br>
Whom no compassion fleers<br>
Or makes their feet<br>
Sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The sacrifice of more than 16 million lives on the altar of an unfeeling war machine and the traumatisation of millions more, which Owen, writer <a href="https://www.cairn.info/revue-d-histoire-moderne-et-contemporaine-2001-4-page-160.htm">Jean Norton Cru</a> and other like-minded eyewitnesses so evocatively captured, have become the point of reference for the modern remembrance of 1914-18. It is easy enough to understand why the horrors of the trenches, the introduction of ever more efficient methods of killing and atrocities like the Armenian genocide have left such an indelible impression on the collective imagination.</p>
<p>And yet societies’ adaptation to what the Dublin historian John Horne has termed the <a href="https://zeithistorische-forschungen.de/3-2004/id%3D4534">“totalitarian tendencies”</a> of the Great War cannot be reduced to the corrosive effects of trauma alone. Rather than rendering combatants “insensible”, as Owen believed, the long duration of the war actually owed a great deal to citizens’ emotional mobilisation for higher ideals. While the choice of belligerent nations to frame their struggle in terms of a <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Great_War_and_Medieval_Memory.html?id=pgY_V8I9WyIC&redir_esc=y">“last crusade”</a> might be dismissed as a propagandistic tool to shame the enemy, the rhetoric of chivalry counteracted the inhumanity of the conflict in sometimes surprising ways.</p>
<h2>Captivity and honour</h2>
<p>Consider the 8 million soldiers who ended up in captivity during the course of the war. The capture of so many troops presented armies with serious challenges. <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0968344507083992?journalCode=wiha">Protocols of surrender</a> were ill-defined and facilities for housing the men limited. Although prisoners consequently experienced <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/violence-against-prisoners-of-war-in-the-first-world-war/4DECCAF83694C8DE3B47CA6920BD97DC">abuse on a massive scale</a>, the hopes of one German pre-war legal scholar, Paul Wünnenberg, that captives should regain their freedom as long as they gave their word of honour to henceforth accept only non-combat duties were realised in a selective fashion.</p>
<p>For instance, in September 1914 the French war ministry issued <a href="https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006028796">special instructions</a> that allowed captured officers to keep their sword and to rent comfortable private accommodations in picturesque towns, where they could walk about if they consented in writing to abstain from escape attempts.</p>
<p>Avoiding the cost and inconvenience of having to employ guards, the British and German authorities early in the war likewise opted to release captured civilians and merchant crews once they had promised not to serve against the captor state. In at least <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/einestages/britischer-kriegsgefangener-robert-campbell-hafturlaub-vom-kaiser-hoechstpersoenlich-a-951254.html">one case</a>, a British officer even gained temporary release from captivity to visit his dying mother after pledging his personal honour to return, which he did.</p>
<p>To be sure, even though international humanitarian law in the shape of the <a href="https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/ihl/INTRO/150?OpenDocument">Hague Conventions</a> (1899/1907) endorsed parole agreements, belligerents largely abandoned the custom in the first year of the war. In itself this development was perhaps not surprising, for parole agreements imposed a moral obligation on prisoners to eschew escape, which deprived governments of their service. Furthermore, the option to enter into contracts with the enemy injected a democratic element into warfare by empowering the individual soldier to decide for himself when to quit the fight.</p>
<h2>Parole agreements</h2>
<p>More remarkable was the return of parole agreements in modified form during the second half of the Great War. The proliferation of “barbed wire disease” among long-term prisoners led to a series of bilateral treaties between Britain, France and Germany that provided for the internment of sick captives in neutral Switzerland as well as the Netherlands. These agreements entitled internees to visit local towns in return for their word of honour not to escape. The option to take short walks outside the camp walls also became available to officers who remained behind in Germany and agreed to sign so-called parole cards.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243920/original/file-20181105-12015-2nyeh5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243920/original/file-20181105-12015-2nyeh5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243920/original/file-20181105-12015-2nyeh5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243920/original/file-20181105-12015-2nyeh5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243920/original/file-20181105-12015-2nyeh5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243920/original/file-20181105-12015-2nyeh5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243920/original/file-20181105-12015-2nyeh5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Parole card, 1918.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Council of the National Army Museum</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The resurrection of parole as part of wider endeavours to improve captivity remind us that the cataclysm of the First World War was more than just a race to the bottom. Though too uncoordinated in the final resort to stem the systemic violence unleashed by the conflict’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/books/review/Sebag-Montefiore-t.html">“dynamic of destruction”</a>, these philanthropic impulses held important lessons for the subsequent course of humanitarian thought and practice (as evidenced, for instance, by the new <a href="https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/ihl/INTRO/305">Geneva Convention of 1929</a>).</p>
<p>The “sentiment d’honneur” was integral to this learning process because it constituted the primary guarantee for soldiers’ good conduct, as the Belgian international lawyer Gustave Rolin-Jacquemyns <a href="https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01856134/document">had pointed out</a> as early as 1871. Many years later a German peer commented on the <a href="https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k61390625/f161.image.r=Du%20manque%20de%20parole%20des%20prisonniers%20de%20guerreHenri%20HarburgerDu%20manque%20de%20parole%20des%20prisonniers%20de%20guerre">reciprocal nature of honour</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Even in war and between hostile armies, there needs to exist something like loyalty and good faith. In the absence of this principle no pause, cease-fire or capitulation are possible.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As the centenary of Armistice Day approaches, we would do well to commemorate this lesson.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/105587/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jasper Heinzen received funding from EURIAS, Institut d'études avancées de Paris and British Academy.</span></em></p>
During First World War, the rhetoric of chivalry counteracted the inhumanity of the conflict in sometimes surprising ways.
Jasper Heinzen, Maitre de conferences en histoire de l'Europe moderne, Université de York, Fellow 2018 - IEA de Paris, Institut d'études avancées de Paris (IEA) – RFIEA
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/106091
2018-11-07T09:26:45Z
2018-11-07T09:26:45Z
The Irish settlement: an often ignored legacy of World War I
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/244109/original/file-20181106-74787-2x5gwq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=93%2C82%2C2357%2C1684&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/nlireland/10990906846">National Library of Ireland</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The centenary of the end of World War I comes as the UK is seeking to finalise the terms of its exit from the European Union. There is a strong historical resonance between both events. The issue of Ireland’s relationship with the UK, the nature of the Irish border, and the exertion of Ulster unionists in Westminster are as central to British politics today as they were in 1918.</p>
<p>The final details of the UK’s divorce from Europe are complicated by the Irish border. And the origins of that border lie in a previous secession from a wider political union – that of the independent Irish state from the United Kingdom in 1921. The process which led to the partition of Ireland and Irish independence owed much to political and military developments within the United Kingdom as a direct result of the end of the Great War.</p>
<p>When the war ended in 1918, the British government had to resolve the issue of devolved government for all or part of Ireland. Legislation to do this had been passed in September 1914 but was sidelined at the outbreak of war.</p>
<p>By November 1918, it was not simply a question of seeking to implement the suspended legislation. Public opinion in nationalist southern Ireland had changed during the war. Resentment at the suppression of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-caused-irelands-easter-rising-57159">1916 Easter Rising</a> and the abortive effort to introduce conscription in Ireland earlier in 1918 had radicalised Irish nationalist opinion. The limited offer of devolution that had been acceptable in 1914 was no longer adequate to satisfy Irish demands for greater self-determination. That was especially true in a post-war context, in which new nation states were emerging from the ruins of European empires.</p>
<p>The post-war general election in the UK, held in December 1918, revealed the extent to which Irish political opinion had changed. The pro home-rule Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), which had held the majority of Irish seats at Westminster in the preceding 1910 general election, was reduced to holding just six of the 105 Irish seats in parliament.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/244131/original/file-20181106-74754-6do5o4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/244131/original/file-20181106-74754-6do5o4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/244131/original/file-20181106-74754-6do5o4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=829&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244131/original/file-20181106-74754-6do5o4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=829&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244131/original/file-20181106-74754-6do5o4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=829&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244131/original/file-20181106-74754-6do5o4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1042&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244131/original/file-20181106-74754-6do5o4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1042&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/244131/original/file-20181106-74754-6do5o4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1042&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A 1918 Sinn Féin election poster.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sinn_F%C3%A9in_election_poster_-_1918.jpg#/media/File:Sinn_F%C3%A9in_election_poster_-_1918.jpg">Wikimedia commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Sinn Féin, meanwhile, took 73 of the Irish seats, interpreting the result as a mandate to establish a republic by withdrawing from Westminster and founding an alternative constituent assembly in Ireland. This was achieved the following year with the inaugural sitting of the <a href="https://www.historyireland.com/20th-century-contemporary-history/the-first-dail-eireann/">Dáil Éireann</a>. The establishment of an alternative administration in Ireland between 1919 and 1921 coincided with the Irish Republican Army’s (IRA) guerrilla campaign for independence. But Ulster unionists also did well in the 1918 election, taking 23 of the 30 seats contested in what would become Northern Ireland. </p>
<p>The election outcome was significant for the Irish settlement that would emerge in 1921. Liberal leader <a href="https://theconversation.com/david-lloyd-george-the-welshman-who-won-world-war-i-106081">David Lloyd George</a> was returned as prime minister but his coalition government was dominated by the Conservative Party, which would ensure that the best interests of Ulster unionists were protected. As a result, when Ireland was partitioned, the six (of nine) Ulster counties that comprised Northern Ireland were selected to protect the unionist majority. </p>
<p>Skillful exploitation of political allies in Westminster ensured that unionists achieved the deal that they felt offered the best protection of their status within the UK. The border distanced them further from “disloyal” southern nationalists. Many unionist Brexit supporters also saw the 2016 referendum as an opportunity to reinforce that distance.</p>
<h2>End of empire</h2>
<p>Events in Ireland are not adequately recognised when we talk about how the war affected the United Kingdom. The defeated powers saw their empires broken but the UK did not emerge territorially intact either. The political entity that entered the war in 1914 would emerge in 1921 minus over one-fifth of its landmass. The UK that had been created in 1801 (when Ireland was added) had begun to break up. </p>
<p>What’s more, the Irish served as an example to other colonial nationalists seeking independence, especially in <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/indian-independence-anniversary-41753">India</a>. In this sense, the war can be seen as marking the beginning of the end of the empire – not a strengthening of it.</p>
<p>An Irish partitionist settlement that evolved in 1921, as a consequence of the war’s end, and which was later replicated with equally problematic consequences in India in 1947, continues to cause geo-political and economic problems for Anglo-Irish and wider European relations, as evidenced by the current impasse over Brexit. </p>
<p>The nature of Irish partition was the result of unionists capitalising on their political influence at Westminster to ensure the most favourable delineation of the boundaries of Northern Ireland. A century later, their political descendants are exerting similar influence to ensure the continuation and strengthening of that border.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/106091/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Marie Coleman receives funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. </span></em></p>
The events of the war caused Irish nationalists to push harder for their independence.
Marie Coleman, Senior Lecturer in Modern Irish History, Queen's University Belfast
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/106014
2018-11-04T10:32:00Z
2018-11-04T10:32:00Z
Wilfred Owen 100 years on: poet gave voice to a generation of doomed youth
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243778/original/file-20181104-83641-1klrd4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C14%2C1370%2C1281&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Wilfred Owen was killed in action on November 4, 1918.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Frontispiece from Poems of Wilfred Owen (1920)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>For many people, most of what they know about the futility, sacrifice and tragedy of World War I, they learned through reading the poetry of Wilfred Owen. But what they may not be aware of is how close the Armistice was when Owen was killed at the age of 25.</p>
<p>On November 4 1918, the 2nd Manchester Regiment received orders to cross the Sambre and Oise Canal near the village of Ors to capture German positions at the opposite side. But as the troops attempted to build a pontoon bridge, they came under heavy machine gun fire. Against the odds, they forced a crossing and routed the enemy, but in so doing they suffered more than 200 casualties. </p>
<p>The attack was one of multiple attempts made up and down the canal to push back the Germans, all with similar consequences. But what made the crossing at Ors different however was the death of its most celebrated officer – <a href="https://www.thegazette.co.uk/all-notices/content/344">Lieutenant Wilfred Owen</a> – who was hit while helping the men who were building the bridge.</p>
<p>The tragedy of Owen’s end, just seven days before the guns fell silent, stands out in the cultural memory ahead of the thousands of men who died – or were yet to die – during the final moments of World War I. As a poet, Owen understood the irony of heroism very well. He resisted giving concrete identities to the soldiers who populate his poems to stop their experiences from becoming mere anecdotes. One man’s suffering is not more tragic than that of another. </p>
<p>In a provisional preface, written for a collection of his verse he would never see published, he set down his belief in what poetry could do – or could not do – to appropriately remember the atrocity of war:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War.<br>
Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.<br>
My subject is War, and the pity of War.<br>
The Poetry is in the pity.<br>
Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The sentiment here echoes a shift in war poetry, away from the jingoistic tenor of <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/rupert-brooke">Rupert Brooke</a>’s sonnets from 1914 about “some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England” and the men that gave their life for “immortality” to <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/siegfried-sassoon">Siegfried Sassoon</a>’s defiant denunciations of the evils of war. </p>
<p>The “big” words “War” and “Poetry” were ultimately not important for Owen – the more humane invocation of “pity” was poignantly written in lowercase. What the country needed, what the world needed, was empathy and regret, not hero worship – there was nothing glorious in being dead. But the time for this was not now. He disbelieved whether his own generation would ever be able to deal truthfully with the trauma. He was probably correct.</p>
<h2>Early promise</h2>
<p>Owen had aspired to become a poet since boyhood. His early lyric verse written before the war showed promise, but it didn’t set him apart. The effects of war, and of his reading Sassoon, would change all that. Traditional lyricism gave way to starker rhythms, direct imagery and extensive use of assonance and half rhyme, which at once created sonic cohesion within a broken, phantasmagoric world. The protagonists in Owen’s poems are often no more than a spectre of themselves, mere voices who have lost all sense of their surroundings –- “unremembering” souls “[o]n dithering feet” who have “cease[d] feeling | Even themselves or for themselves”.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243717/original/file-20181102-12015-1i5o38g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243717/original/file-20181102-12015-1i5o38g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243717/original/file-20181102-12015-1i5o38g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243717/original/file-20181102-12015-1i5o38g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243717/original/file-20181102-12015-1i5o38g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243717/original/file-20181102-12015-1i5o38g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243717/original/file-20181102-12015-1i5o38g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Wilfred Owen’s grave at Ors Cemetery in France.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Hektor via Wikimedia Commons</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>These poetic phantoms, spectres, ghosts were not shaped by the fighting alone; more than the trenches, it was Owen’s experiences at the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/guides/z9g7fg8">Craiglockhart War Hospital for Officers</a>, near Edinburgh, that coloured his vision. The four months spent there convalescing from shell shock would prove highly significant. Not only did he meet Sassoon there, who encouraged his poetic sensibilities, it was conducive to his creativity. </p>
<p>As part of their treatment, patients were subjected to <a href="http://ww1lit.nsms.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/exhibits/show/neilmclennan-vb3n19/16">ergotherapy</a>, a behavioural therapy developed by Dr Arthur Brock, who believed that through useful work and activity patients would regain healthy links with the world around them. Owen was put in charge of The Hydra, the hospital’s literary magazine, and encouraged to write poetry. But his surroundings also furnished Owen with something more valuable: a space to process the suffering he had seen and was seeing around him. This emotion, recollected in tranquillity, is crystallised in the subject matter of some of his best known poems – characterised by an evocation of the sick, the wounded and the dying. </p>
<p>His manuscripts reflect that state of mind. Composition for Owen was neither frenzied nor easy, but rather it involved a steady process of probing words and phrases from which he manufactured the emotional intensity in his poetry. Differences in pen and ink show how Owen revisited his drafts and touched them up at different moments in time, at Craiglockhart and also afterwards when awaiting medical clearance at Scarborough Barracks.</p>
<p>In May 1918, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/20/chasing-lost-time-life-ck-scott-moncrieff-soldier-spy-translator-jean-findlay-review">C K Scott-Moncrief</a>, who had tried and failed to secure Owen a Home posting as cadet instructor, told the young poet he ought to send his work to the publisher Heinemann. Owen was enthused by the encouragement. He drafted his Preface and hastily drew up a table of contents.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243769/original/file-20181104-83629-1hmchka.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243769/original/file-20181104-83629-1hmchka.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243769/original/file-20181104-83629-1hmchka.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243769/original/file-20181104-83629-1hmchka.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243769/original/file-20181104-83629-1hmchka.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1134&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243769/original/file-20181104-83629-1hmchka.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1134&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243769/original/file-20181104-83629-1hmchka.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1134&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Strange Meeting by Wilfred Owen.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">This item is from The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, University of Oxford (www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit); © University of Oxford</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But it is likely that getting his work in order led to more writing and rewriting. Two poems, <a href="http://ww1lit.nsms.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/collections/item/3311">Hospital Barge</a> and <a href="http://ww1lit.nsms.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/collections/item/3308">Futility</a> (one revised, the other new), appeared in The Nation a month later – in August he received his embarkation orders to return to France. On September 17, at 7.35am, he boarded a military train to Folkestone from where he crossed the English Channel. With the exception of just five poems published in magazines, he never prepared any of his poems for the press, leaving the bulk of his work in various stages of completion.</p>
<h2>Reluctant posthumous hero</h2>
<p>In 1920, his friend Sassoon published a slim volume from the surviving manuscripts with Chatto & Windus, soon followed by a reprint in 1921, which indicates reasonable sales. (A more complete edition appeared in 1931.) The critical response, however, was mixed. Writing in The Athenaeum, John Middleton Murray praised Owen for achieving “the most magnificent expression of the emotional significance of the War”. </p>
<p>The hidebound <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/profile/basil-de-s-lincourt">Basil de Selincourt</a>, on the other hand, dismissed Owen’s “soothing bitterness” in the Times Literary Supplement. He countered that “[t]he only glory imperishably associated with war is that of the supreme sacrifice which it entails; the trumpets and the banners are poor humanity’s imperfect tribute to that sublime implication”.</p>
<p>Owen’s posthumous reputation, however, owes much to the way that first volume introduced his work to the public. “All that was strongest in Wilfred Owen survives in his poems”, Sassoon wrote in his introduction. Unwittingly, perhaps, that phrase – and the frontispiece of Owen in his regimental uniform – entailed an act of monumentalisation that went against Owen’s preface that his book was “not about heroes”. </p>
<p>Owen’s legacy is inscribed into a culture of remembrance (that persists to this day) which seems to go against his own views. By 1920 the nation was in the grip of commemoration as it began the erection of monuments to the war dead all across the country – and the language adopted was the language of glory, honour, dominion and power which Owen had found repugnant: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est<br>
Pro patria mori.</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/106014/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Wim Van Mierlo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Dead at 25, a week before World War I ended, Owen summed up the conflict’s waste and futility.
Wim Van Mierlo, Lecturer in Publishing and English, Loughborough University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/38491
2015-03-24T02:50:16Z
2015-03-24T02:50:16Z
Who tells our stories? The first world war on the small screen
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75018/original/image-20150317-23797-fftjhc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Archival photographs such as the above, from Gallipoli, are one resource documentary makers draw upon to communicate understandings of historical events. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Australian War Memorial/Flickr</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the early years of the television age one name stood out as a communicator of history to the masses: the celebrated British historian, A.J.P. Taylor. In the 1950s and 60s Taylor used the force of his personality and compelling storytelling to give a version of his Oxford University lectures to television audiences, including a six-part series, <a href="http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/838462/">First World War</a>, on ITV in 1961. </p>
<p>Taylor appeared first on radio then television, on panels and alone, but the most indelible memory he left was of a don who talked direct to camera, unadorned by props and without notes.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ngjTnXVD06A?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">A 1977 AJP Taylor lecture on railway timetables and mobilisation plans.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the 1970s, Jeremy Isaacs and Thames Television produced the 26-part series <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00hkpq6/episodes/guide">The World at War</a>, then considered to be the gold standard of traditional documentary. The series was anchored around the principles of an unseen narrator vested in a male authority voice (in this case, Laurence Olivier), archival or “found” footage and in-depth interviews with talking heads. </p>
<p>These days much has changed about the way history is brought to a television audience in response to both audience demand and evolving technologies. Although there have been some standout examples in the past 20 years of the “telly don” presenting history in the form of a personal essay, particularly in Britain, other forms now predominate. </p>
<p>In its most popular form on Australian commercial television, the historical documentary is now based on dramatic reconstruction interspersed with sound-bites from a diversity of celebrity talking heads. We can see how this works in practice on Channel 7’s sweeping overview of Australian history, <a href="https://au.tv.yahoo.com/plus7/australia-the-story-of-us/">The Story of Us</a>. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ua2-AbwTyew?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Trailer for Channel 7’s The Story of Us.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A recent episode on the first world war featured quick grabs from a cocktail of high profile voices – journalists, politicians, modern-day veterans – in addition to a few historians whose expertise we might expect the producers to draw on. </p>
<p>Multiple talking heads could be interpreted as a worthy gesture to plurality. Or is this approach merely ratings-driven? The capacity of such populist television to deepen the historical understanding of an audience is doubtful when those voices are a blend of expert and infotainment, and when consistently subordinated to an emphasis on dramatic action. </p>
<p>And although the story arc included a focus on AE2 – a lesser-known narrative about the Gallipoli campaign – its nationalist frame is unable to place the campaign in a more meaningful international context.</p>
<h2>Gallipoli on the small screen</h2>
<p>As we draw ever closer to April 25 2015, popular representations of the first world war through television and other media will grow in intensity, threatening to drown out the parallel but separate narratives of professional historians on the conflict. </p>
<p>One clear indication of the limitations of popular understanding of the most visible campaign of the war, Gallipoli, is an observation in a <a href="http://www.anzaccentenary.gov.au/documents/anzac_centenary_report.pdf">2011 document</a> prepared by the National Commission on the Commemoration of the Anzac Centenary. The Commission noted:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>there is a perception that there is as much information as anyone could want about Gallipoli already available – but despite this actual knowledge is poor. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>One major contributing factor to the limited state of knowledge is an exaggerated nationalist preoccupation with the campaign that airbrushes out some of the critical wider factors. </p>
<p>When audiences are offered an opportunity to renegotiate their exclusive national alignments by presenting universal features of the campaign, understandings may be altered. One way to achieve this is to refocus discussion by considering recent scholarship that presents Gallipoli through an explicitly international lens. </p>
<p>Two documentaries produced for the 90th anniversary of the campaign in 2005 help a mass audience to recover memory of the campaign in its broadest sense and to explore its multiple meanings: Melbourne-based Wain Fimeri’s television documentary <a href="http://www.wainfimeri.com/pgs/revealing-gallipoli.html">Revealing Gallipoli</a>, and Turkish filmmaker Tolga Örnek’s <a href="http://www.nzonscreen.com/title/gallipoli-the-frontline-experience-2005">Gallipoli: The Frontline Experience</a>. </p>
<p>Of the two companion documentaries, Revealing Gallipoli was perhaps the more innovative. December Films made 13 versions for various broadcast partners in three languages (English, Welsh and Turkish), with the Welsh and New Zealanders using their own presenters. Historian Peter Stanley, former principal historian at the Australian War Memorial, has <a href="http://bit.ly/1x0gY5j">written in depth</a> about his experience as a historical consultant on the film.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/r2Y41ucxL_E?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Trailer for Revealing Gallipoli.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In a carefully choreographed performance, the three historian presenters cross paths with each other on set. The camera moves between them, reflecting the importance of perspective and its ever-shifting nature in this complex campaign. The constantly changing perspective has the effect of subverting traditional expectations of whose voice we will hear, and demonstrates how perspective is contingent. </p>
<p>While Revealing Gallipoli and Gallipoli: The Frontline Experience are distinctive in their approach and aesthetic, the commonalities are perhaps more striking. The narrative structure of each documentary is anchored around mini-biographies of selected men from several participant nations supported by archival images and quotations from their letters and diaries. Both are devoid of jingoism and sentimentalism and their anti-war tone is unmistakeable. </p>
<p>The films emphasise the universal experience of war, supported by the unvarnished words of the common man revealed through letters and diaries. They make a forceful case for rethinking the campaign and what it meant to all of the major combatants.</p>
<p>They are among the best examples of the new hybrid form of documentary that can at once engage generalist audiences and function as an educational tool to promote a better appreciation of wartime heritage in and between the combatant nations. Like Taylor in his era they illustrate the effectiveness of innovation and compelling talking heads for communicating historical ideas.</p>
<p><br>
<em>This is a version of an article entitled <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10304312.2014.942023#.VQIZs47LdcQ">Breaking out of the nationalist/ic paradigm: international screen texts on the 1915 Gallipoli campaign</a> published in Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies in August 2014. The author is co-convenor of The First World War: Local, Global and Imperial Perspectives which will be held in Newcastle later this month. Details <a href="http://www.newcastle.edu.au/events/faculty-of-education-and-arts/conference-first-world-war">here</a></em>. </p>
<p><strong>See also:</strong><br>
<a href="https://theconversation.com/1916-how-the-events-of-the-first-world-war-shifted-global-history-38282">1916: how the events of the first world war shifted global history</a> <br>
<a href="https://theconversation.com/gargoyles-and-silence-our-story-at-the-australian-war-memorial-38829">Gargoyles and silence: ‘our story’ at the Australian War Memorial</a><br>
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-forgotten-australian-women-doctors-of-the-great-war-38289">The forgotten Australian women doctors of the Great War</a></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/38491/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>James Bennett does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
War history used to be brought to TV audiences by donnish lecturers but historical reconstructions now hold sway. Two recent docos about Gallipoli are hybrid examples of the form that help us better understand the past.
James Bennett, Senior Lecturer in History in the School of Humanities and Social Science, University of Newcastle
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.