Review: Shell Shock: Traumatic Neurosis and the British Soldiers of the First World War * Review: Blindfold and Alone: British Military Executions in the Great War

It is widely assumed that after 1918 the British general staff ignored the experience it had gained from fighting a first-class European enemy and that it was not until the establishment of the Kirke committee in 1932 that it began to garner the lessons of the Great War and incorporate them into its doctrine. This article demonstrates that in fact British military doctrine underwent a continuous process of development in the 1920s. Far from turning its back on new military technologies, the general staff rejected the manpower-intensive doctrine that had sustained the army in 1914 in favour of one that placed modernity and machinery at the very core of its thinking. Between 1919 and 1931 the general staff did assimilate the lessons of the First World War into the army's written doctrine. But what it failed to do was to impose a common understanding of the meaning of that doctrine throughout the army.

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Shell Shock and the Legacy of the Victorian Past in the Present: Remembering WWI in Pat Barker’s Another World

Humanities ◽

10.3390/h9010026 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 9 (1) ◽

pp. 26

Author(s):

Elodie Rousselot

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

First World War ◽

Great War ◽

Great Success ◽

The Novel ◽

World War ◽

Shell Shock ◽

The First World War ◽

The Great War ◽

First World

In her 1998 novel Another World, Pat Barker draws from a topic on which she has written previously with great success—the First World War and the experiences of its combatants—and yet approaches that topic from a completely different perspective. The novel returns to the Great War to consider notions of ‘shell shock’, attitudes towards WWI veterans, and the problems surrounding remembering past violence, but what is perhaps surprising about Another World is that it uses a Victorian storyline to address these concerns, and presents the First World War through the means of references to nineteenth-century culture.

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A New History for a New Channel: The Great War and the Launch of BBC2

Journal of British Cinema and Television ◽

10.3366/jbctv.2017.0374 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 14 (3) ◽

pp. 283-297 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Taylor Downing

Keyword(s):

First World War ◽

Great War ◽

World War ◽

Front Line ◽

Television History ◽

The First World War ◽

The Great War ◽

First World ◽

Intense Debate ◽

Do So

This article considers the making of the BBC2 series, The Great War, and examines issues around the treatment and presentation of the First World War on television, the reception of the series in 1964 and its impact on the making of television history over the last fifty years. The Great War combined archive film with interviews from front-line soldiers, nurses and war workers, giving a totally new feel to the depiction of history on television. Many aspects of The Great War were controversial and raised intense debate at the time and have continued to do so ever since.

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