The War for Civilization

2021 ◽  
pp. 191-230
Author(s):  
Bill Bell
Keyword(s):  
British Government ◽  
Reading Habits ◽  
Western Front ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Reading Materials ◽  
Active Service ◽  
Common Practices ◽  
Reading Culture ◽  
First World

This final chapter examines the reading habits of troops on the Western Front during the First World War. Literary levels among soldiers were a major preoccupation among many commentators in the period. At the beginning of the war a scarcity of reading matter was often remarked on at the front. Eventually, many means, official and unofficial, were used to acquire books by those on active service: borrowing, sharing, theft were common practices in reading culture. Among the official means for print distribution, several effective schemes were promoted. The Camps Library Scheme of the YMCA enabled book provision all along the Western Front. While the British government invested in propagandizing mentalities among the ranks, soldiers themselves used books, newspapers, and trench journals for their own ends. The varieties of literacy among troops in this period were as diverse as the reading materials themselves.

The East Wind

2018 ◽  
pp. 179-192
Author(s):  
Andrew Glazzard
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Western Front ◽  
East Wind ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

Holmes’s words to Watson at the end of ‘His Last Bow’ (1917) express an idea of warfare that sits uneasily with our contemporary perception of the First World War. Today we are accustomed to associate that war with the horrors of the Western Front: the battles of the Somme (1916) and Passchendaele (1917) loom large in our cultural memory as paradigms of unnecessary bloodshed and strategic incompetence. But this was not how Conan Doyle saw it – and he saw the Western Front at first hand, while both his brother, Brigadier-General Innes ‘Duff’ Doyle, and his son Kingsley were in the thick of the action. At the invitation of the War Office, Doyle toured the British, Italian and French Fronts in 1916, and the Australian Front in 1918, using his authority as Deputy Lieutenant of Surrey to don an improvised khaki uniform ‘which was something between that of a Colonel and Brigadier, with silver roses instead of stars or crowns upon the shoulder-states’.1

Mutinies after War

2021 ◽  
pp. 166-190
Author(s):  
Keith Grint
Keyword(s):  
Far East ◽  
First World War ◽  
Canadian Forces ◽  
British Government ◽  
World War ◽  
Canadian Army ◽  
The Far East ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Return Home ◽  
First World

If mutinies are significant threats to those military parties facing defeat during wars, they are still more dangerous to the victors after the war is ended, when those conscripted for the duration of the war are desperate to return home. This chapter covers three such mutinies: those affecting British forces in 1918 and 1919; those facing Canadian forces in 1919; and finally the mutiny that literally grounded the RAF in 1946 in India and the Far East. The first cases occur in the south of England and France as the First World War is ending, but Churchill in particular was keen to retain both naval and army units to continue the fight against the fledgling Bolshevik regime. What is intriguing about these is just how militant the mutineers were and how the British government treated them with kid gloves, unlike those in the British Foreign Labour units who we meet in chapter 6. For the Canadian army the problem starts in Russia but end up in Wales, as the troops kick their heels waiting to return home and frustrations boil over into gunfights near Rhyl in 1919. Finally, we consider the similar issues prevailing over the RAF in India and the Far East as it becomes clear to the subordinates that they are a long way from home and have little immediate prospect of going home—unless they mutiny.

War Work

Russomania ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 241-318
Author(s):  
Rebecca Beasley
Keyword(s):  
Russian Literature ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
British Government ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Travel Writings ◽  
John Middleton Murry ◽  
Western Civilisation ◽  
War Propaganda ◽  
First World

Alliance with tsarist Russia during the First World War presented a propaganda challenge for the British government: many believed that to support Russia against Germany was to support a barbarous nation against its own subjects, and to risk tipping the balance of power in Europe away from democracy. Russian literature was strategically deployed by the War Propaganda Bureau as evidence of Russia’s civilization, and writers and critics were marshalled to overturn the anti-tsarist interpretations of Russian literature put in place by the Russian populists. Russian literature now appeared in a new guise, read not through realism but symbolism, a movement introduced to Britain through the performances of the Ballets Russes, the travel writings of Stephen Graham, and reappraisals of Dostoevsky’s writings. The chapter concludes by examining the fiction of D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, and John Middleton Murry, which resists wartime propaganda, and finds in Russian literature a critique of Western civilisation and its war.

scholarly journals Ernest Harold Farmer 1890-1952

1952 ◽  
Vol 8 (21) ◽  
pp. 159-169
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Teaching Profession ◽  
Early Career ◽  
World War ◽  
Surgical Skill ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Active Service ◽  
Degree Of Disability ◽  
First World ◽  
Substantial Degree

Ernest Harold Farmer was born at Longford, Derbyshire, on 3 March 1890, and was educated at the Municipal School, Derby, and University College, Nottingham. He studied chemistry under Professor F. S. Kipping, F.R.S., and took his first degree in 1911. His early career gave no indication that he was to become one of the country’s leading research chemists, and on graduation he entered the teaching profession, holding posts successively at Daventry Grammar School and at the Municipal College, Bury, Lancashire. The first world war interrupted his career; he volunteered for active service, and in 1915 was gazetted to the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment, serving with them until his demobilization in 1919. In 1917, at the battle of Messines, he was severely injured, and spent the next two years in hospital and nursing home, while surgeons struggled to save his right arm. Surgical skill, aided by Farmer’s own perseverance and courage, finally gained a substantial victory, but a substantial degree of disability remained throughout his life. The extent of this was realized by few, but it was a fact that when lecturing he found it necessary to wear an elbow support to enable him to raise his arm to write on a blackboard. In view of the delicate experimental work which he carried out, it is hard to realize that he never recovered the full use of his right hand. Incidentally, his writing remained fluent and legible, and it was not unduly difficult to decipher one of his manuscripts, even when it had been subjected to the repeated editing which always resulted from his ceaseless striving for perfection.

‘A Wave on to Our Shores’: The Exile and Resettlement of Refugees from the Western Front, 1914–1918

2007 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 427-444 ◽  
Author(s):  
PIERRE PURSEIGLE
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Western Front ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Social Mobilisation ◽  
First World

AbstractIn the wake of the German invasion of Belgium and France in August 1914, four million persons went into exile. While such a displacement of population testified to a dramatic change in the character of war in western Europe, historiography and collective memory alike have so far concurred in marginalising the experience of refugees during the First World War. This article examines their unprecedented encounter with host communities in France and Great Britain. It demonstrates that the refugees' plight reveals the strengths as well as the tensions inherent in the process of social mobilisation that was inseparable from the First World War.

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