The Ends of War

2020 ◽  
pp. 249-310
Author(s):  
Radhika Singha
Keyword(s):  
Central Asia ◽  
Military Personnel ◽  
Great War ◽  
Mass Movements ◽  
Prisoner Of War ◽  
Military Recruitment ◽  
Return Home ◽  
War Experience ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Crucial Part

This chapter explores the termination of the Great War as a prolonged event, marked by de-mobilisation and re-mobilisation, and shaped by a variety of political interventions. The return home, in the various forms that it took, was an exercise government had to manage throughout the war. It was a crucial part of the war experience for military personnel and one they sought to shape. The chapter examines the ‘returnee’ in his various avatars – as deserter, disabled service-man, and prisoner- of- war, and discharged veteran. It suggests that returning personnel explored a wider range of political options than allowed for in existing literature, where the key question is whether de-mobilised personnel returned with anti-imperialist views and participated in the seething mass movements of 1919-21. The widening arc of military recruitment in 1917-1919 had synergized with the hectic forging of new political constituencies to intensify expectations and anxieties among military personnel. Their prolonged post-Armistice deployment, even as British and Dominion troops were being de-mobilised, gave them the confidence to question race and institutional hierarchies in the army and this was not an apolitical response. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the politics of commemoration and the invocation of an ‘Asia’ stretching from West and Central Asia into India, united by an imagination of self-government.

scholarly journals “Prefer not, eh?”: Re-Scribing the Lives of the Great War Poets in Contemporary British Historical Fiction

2018 ◽  
pp. 125
Author(s):  
María Cristina Pividori
Keyword(s):  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Great War ◽  
Historiographic Metafiction ◽  
Siegfried Sassoon ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
The Past ◽  
British Fiction ◽  
Post War ◽  
War Experience ◽  
The Great War

Although the First World War has become history by now, the memory of the war continues to be repeatedly fictionalised: retrospectively inspired narratives are often regarded as more genuine and far-reaching than historical or documentary accounts in their rendition of the past. Yet, memory is creatively selective, reflecting a highly-conflicted process of sifting and discerning what should be remembered, neglected or amplified from the stream of war experience. In his book about Pat Barker, Mark Rawlinson argues that “historical fiction has been transformed in the post-war period by the way writers have exploited the porous and unstable demarcation between fiction and no fiction, stories and history” (14). Jill Dawson’s The Great Lover (2009), Geoff Akers’s Beating for the Light: The Story of Isaac Rosenberg (2006) and Robert Edric’s In Zodiac Light (2008) have not become best sellers like Barker’s Regeneration trilogy; yet, they too represent the predominant commemorative drift in contemporary British fiction about the Great War. Without doubt, these three authors have followed in Barker’s steps in their purpose of holding a mirror to real people and real events in the past and of deciphering the deleted text of ‘the war to end all wars.’ However, while Barker chose to write about the often-anthologised Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Dawson, Akers and Edric base their narratives on the writings, and lives, of Rupert Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg and Ivor Gurney respectively. My discussion of these three novels will explore the various ways in which the past can be accessed and interpreted from the present and represented in fiction. The authors’ decisions as to what historical instances to unravel do not just reveal the relation that contemporary British fiction entertains with the Great War and with history, but also how the past erupts in the present to interrogate it. Taking three salient features of Hutcheon’s “historiographic metafiction” (1988)—intertextuality, parody and paratextuality—as my theoretical points of departure, I will explore the dominant frameworks and cultural conditions (that is the propagation of either patriotic or protest readings) within which the Great War has been narrated in the novels and the new approaches, opportunities and ethical implications of using historical and literary sources to re-scribe a previously non-existent version of the lives of the iconic Great War Poets.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 186-190
Author(s):  
David A. Rennie
Keyword(s):  
Professional Development ◽  
Great War ◽  
Historical Culture ◽  
Professional Authorship ◽  
War Experience ◽  
The Great War

Rather than being defined by their membership of a particular constituency of ideological or sociopolitical war experience, writers hold and express complex and evolving views on the war. Studying authors’ careers reveals not only that their writing was influenced by the war, but that, simultaneously, the circumstances of their artistic and professional development shaped the manner and mode of their literary reactions. More than has been fully appreciated, American writers drew on native literary and historical culture to assess the Great War. Ultimately, however, American writing about the war was idiosyncratic, complex, and subject to change, as writers’ ongoing reactions to the war were influenced by the intricate group of intrapersonal and interpersonal variables that shaped professional authorship.

scholarly journals Futurist Suggestions in the War Poems by Josip (Sibe) Miličić

2020 ◽  
pp. 67-82
Author(s):  
Nicoletta Cabassi
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great War ◽  
European Continent ◽  
National Cultures ◽  
Mature Phase ◽  
South Slavs ◽  
War Experience ◽  
Direct Encounter ◽  
The Great War

With the opening of the twentieth century, the beneficial river of the avant-gardes seemed to flood the entire European continent in a happy contamination of national cultures, giving life to an authentic supranational koine of artists: it was sometimes fusion of forms, styles, environments, cultures, a salutary effort to rejuvenate languages. The particular attention of the Italian Futurists to the new national realities was among the factors of particular attraction to the movement for South Slavs whose representative was Josip (Sibe) Miličić, who called for cultural and political renewal of his country. His direct encounter with Marinetti and Boccioni seems to leave its mark on his poetry both structurally and thematically: in the collection from 1914, Miličić reveals a new sensibility and a new rhythm: in one of his war lyrics, the futurist suggestions materialize in his first onomatopoeic attempt, suitable to undermine the lyricism of the verse by intensifying the link between the phonic aspect and the meaning. Despite their common interventionism, the Great War found the Croat and the Italian Futurists on opposite political positions concerning the Dalmatian islands and the Italian expansionism on the Adriatic. The poet’s war experience lead him to a “mature” phase starting in the twenties with his first article-manifesto. At this time he was able to reprocess his own critical identity: affirming his deeply anti-materialist and anti-industrial spiritualism, his standpoints by then had become very distant from Marinetti’s insights.

State Failure, Social Disaster, and Refugee Politics During the Great War

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomas Balkelis
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Responses ◽  
State Failure ◽  
Great War ◽  
Ethnic Population ◽  
German Occupation ◽  
Ethnic Tensions ◽  
Personal Transformations ◽  
Social Disaster ◽  
War Experience ◽  
The Great War

This chapter focuses on the transformative effect that the outbreak of the Great War and German occupation had on the civilians in Lithuania. It traces the early war experience of local Catholic and Lutheran Lithuanian peasants and Jews. The focus here is on their emotional responses to war and everyday strategies of survival in the context of various German occupation policies. The experiences of locally mobilized conscripts are also discussed to track down their personal transformations from civilians into soldiers, as well as the massive displacement of war refugees and the emergence of refugee relief networks. The chapter argues that the German policy to introduce ethnic markers among the multi-ethnic population of Lithuania as a means of more efficient colonial control led to its nationalization and the increase of social and ethnic tensions.

scholarly journals The Politics of War and the “Battle of Balaklava”

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 83-95
Author(s):  
John Maynard
Keyword(s):  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
World War One ◽  
Aboriginal Communities ◽  
Return Home ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Great War ◽  
At Home

This paper seeks to aid and open further discussion on the impact upon Aboriginal communities and lives during and after World War One. We now know that over a thousand Aboriginal men enlisted and went overseas to fight for their so-called country during the Great War and that many made the ultimate sacrifice. But what was happening at home to their families and communities whilst they were away? Did they receive just recognition on their return home? These are some of the questions this paper will reveal and analyse.

The Need for the Development of Political Science Engineering

1932 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry S. Dennison
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Great War ◽  
General Belief ◽  
Management Measures ◽  
War Experience ◽  
The Great War

In the early days of factory management, when the problems and conditions were relatively simple, it fell to the lot of all sorts of human folk to manage the various jobs involved. Each used his own peculiar method and, naturally enough, it came into general belief that ability in management was an instinctive knack, that managers were born, not made, that few if any rules could be laid down, and that little could be learned by one from another. Even in the earliest days, a small handful of men called attention to the fact that management measures and forms of organization could be better or worse adapted to their uses; but for generations the suggestion passed unheeded.As the problems and conditions of factory management grew more complex and exacting, more men came to believe that the art of management was something more than an intuitive and highly personal knack. Before the Great War, a fair nucleus was beginning to study the art from the point of view of the forces involved, and with an eye to causes and effects. And the war experience of manufacturing strange materials, shifting conditions upside down, built up this nucleus into a very fair working minority.

War, Memory, and Politics: The Fate of the Film All Quiet on the Western Front

1980 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Modris Eksteins
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Expression ◽  
Great War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Commercial Exploitation ◽  
Accurate Representation ◽  
War Memory ◽  
Western Front ◽  
Heated Debate ◽  
War Experience ◽  
The Great War

Within months of its publication in January 1929 Erich Maria Remarque's novel All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues) was the world's best-selling book. It provoked a feverish controversy between those who claimed that it was an accurate representation of the war experience of 1914–18, portraying the utter futility of war, and those who denounced it as propaganda and an irreverent commercial exploitation of the Great War. Ironically, despite the intended focus of this heated debate, both the novel and the response which it elicited were more an emotional expression of postwar disillusionment and distress than a contribution to the understanding of the actual war experience.

Growing, Controlling, and Fighting Imperial Armies, 1914–1918

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas E. Delaney
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Great War ◽  
Ability To Work ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
War Experience ◽  
The Great War ◽  
National Control

No one in the United Kingdom, India, or the dominions forecasted the magnitude of the war efforts that took place between 1914 and 1918. Just as no one in Whitehall predicted a British Expeditionary Force (BEF) of sixty divisions, no one in Melbourne foresaw an Australian Imperial Force (AIF) of five divisions in France. But they were not entirely without some solid building blocks—common staff procedures, training, organizations, and equipment, plus a small cadre of highly-trained professionals—for the massive task that confronted them. Chapter 3 explores three aspects of the Great War experience for the British, Indian, and dominion armies: (a) their expansion; (b) national control; and (c) their ability to work together. Based on an assessment of how tactical lessons were integrated across armies, how readily formations were attached or detached between national contingents, and how fire was controlled across national lines, it concludes that they worked quite well together.

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