Not so Quiet on the Western Front: Progress and Prospect in the Archaeology of the First World War

2007 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. iii-xvi ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Pollard ◽  
Iain Banks
Author(s):  
Andrew Glazzard

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


2007 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 427-444 ◽  
Author(s):  
PIERRE PURSEIGLE

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.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Leverty

This thesis compared a group of personal photograph albums compiled by British soldiers during the First World War to a set of stereographs produced during the war and published after by the British company Realistic Travels, both from the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario. The development of British censorship restrictions during the First World War had a profound effect on who, what, where and how individuals were able to photograph the conflict. This thesis examines how these restrictions affected stereograph photographers and soldiers as they documented the war in order to ascertain how these effects shaped the construction of each type of photographic object. By comparing and analyzing both bodies of work as they were produced in three theatres of war -- the Western Front, Gallipoli and within Britain -- we see that objects created for public and private audiences are more similar than they initially appear.


Author(s):  
Arthur J. Pomeroy

The Memorial Window in the Hunter Building at Victoria University offers interesting insights into the commemoration of the Great War in New Zealand. The Frederick Ellis design shows  strong Anglican Christian iconography, in line with dominant traditions at the College up to the war. The Gallipoli campaign also features much more prominently than the Western Front, since it could be portrayed as a holy crusade against the Turk. As time passes, the ANZAC experience becomes part of the wider New Zealand mythology, but the religious conflict is expunged.


2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 208-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Kerby

The newspaper articles written by the Australian Harry Gullett and his English counterpart Philip Gibbs during the opening months of the First World War provide important insights into the nature of war reporting, propaganda, censorship, and the relationship between the press and the military. Despite differences in background and temperament, their reports, which were written prior to official accreditation, were remarkably similar in tone and content for Gullett and Gibbs shared the belief that war was a regenerative force that would purify and strengthen a degenerate pre-war Britain. Both writers adopted a rhetoric in their initial wartime correspondence that emphasized traditional martial and patriotic values that they believed were an antidote to the weakness and disunity of a pre-war Britain beset by industrial, social and political upheaval. Battles would therefore be best presented as extended heroic narratives in which there was order, honour and greatness. This approach exerted an influence as pervasive as censorship itself.


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