Epilogue: Towards Reconstruction, 1914–1920

The epilogue sketches an approach to the subject of reconstruction, by demonstrating how contemporaries prepared for, imagined, and began the rebuilding of the front-line towns. It demonstrates that the issue of reconstruction arose early in the war itself, and pitted the proponents of modernization against those who advocated traditionalism and a return to pre-war normality, and professional architects and urban planners against local communities. It outlines the wide-ranging debates over the nature reconstruction should take, and describes the practical challenges facing civilians as they returned to their destroyed home towns after November 1918. It also discusses commemoration and the construction of public memory around the front-line towns in the years after 1918. It demonstrates that these issues were contested between front-line civilians and a variety of other actors who claimed ownership over the wartime legacies of these towns, from architects, to planners, reconstruction workers, veterans, and the families of those soldiers who died near them. It argues that although civilians from the front-line towns may have experienced the war as members of distinct ‘communities under fire’, this is not necessarily how they experienced the peace. The processes of cultural demobilization were slow, but as the years progressed civilians’ wartime identities eroded and fragmented. As the urban battlefields of the Western Front slowly transformed back into towns, the experiences of front-line civilians were pushed to the margins of collective memories of the conflict.