War

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Saylor
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Home Front ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World ◽  
At Home

Pastoral music was one of the most important methods by which composers engaged with the horrors of the First World War, both at home and abroad. This chapter is divided into three sections, each focusing on pairs of composers who experienced the war in different ways: those who were unable to serve but engaged with the conflict at the home front; those who died in combat, and whose musical legacies have taken markedly different forms; and veterans whose memories catalyzed a new and distinctively modern expression of the pastoral in the decade after the war.

The Motif of Sacrifice in the Literature and Culture of the Second World War

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Rawlinson
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
First World War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Home Front ◽  
World War ◽  
War Poetry ◽  
Anglophone Literature ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Second World ◽  
First World

This chapter explores how Anglophone literature and culture envisioned and questioned an economy of sacrificial exchange, particularly its symbolic aspect, as driving the compulsions entangled in the Second World War. After considering how Elizabeth Bowen’s short stories cast light on the Home Front rhetorics of sacrifice and reconstruction, it looks at how poets Robert Graves, Keith Douglas, and Alun Lewis reflect on First World War poetry of sacrifice. With reference to René Girard’s and Carl von Clausewitz’s writings on war, I take up Elaine Cobley’s assertion about the differing valencies of the First and Second World Wars, arguing that the contrast is better seen in terms of sacrificial economy. I develop that argument with reference to examples from Second World War literature depicting sacrificial exchange (while often harking back to the First World War), including Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour Trilogy (1952–61), and William Wharton’s memoir Shrapnel (2012).

scholarly journals “Buried Alive”: Experience, Memory, and the Interwar Publishing of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force in Postwar Britain, 1915-1939

2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 212-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Fantauzzo
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Home Front ◽  
Sinai Peninsula ◽  
World War ◽  
The Road ◽  
The Past ◽  
War Narrative ◽  
War Machine ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

Over 450,000 British soldiers fought as part of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force during the First World War. Between 1915-1918, they fought their way across the Sinai Peninsula, into southern Palestine, captured Jerusalem, and overran the Turkish Army, leading to the surrender of the Ottoman Empire in October 1918. Despite being the war’s most successful sideshow, the Egypt and Palestine campaign struggled to gain popular attention and has largely been excluded from First World War scholarship. This article argues that returning soldiers used war books to rehabilitate the campaign’s public profile and to renegotiate the meaning of wartime service in interwar Britain. The result of sporadic press attention and censorship during the war, the British public’s understanding of the campaign was poor. Periodic access to home front news meant that most soldiers likely learnt of their absence from Britain’s war narrative during the war years. Confronting the belief that the campaign, prior to the capture of Jerusalem, was an inactive theatre of war, British soldiers refashioned themselves as military labourers, paving the road to Jerusalem and building the British war machine. As offensive action intensified, soldiers could look to the past to provide meaning to the present. Allusions to the campaign as a crusade were frequently made and used to compete with the moral righteousness of the liberation of Belgium.

The “knowledge front”, women, war and peace

2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Horne
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Scientific Activity ◽  
Home Front ◽  
Professional Lives ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
World War ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Medical Researcher ◽  
First World

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to introduce the idea of the “knowledge front” alongside ideas of “home” and “war” front as a way of understanding the expertise of university-educated women in an examination of the First World War and its aftermath. The paper explores the professional lives of two women, the medical researcher, Elsie Dalyell, and the teacher, feminist and unionist, Lucy Woodcock. The paper examines their professional lives and acquisition and use of university expertise both on the war and home fronts, and shows how women’s intellectual and scientific activity established during the war continued long after as a way to repair what many believed to be a society damaged by war. It argues that the idea of “knowledge front” reveals a continuity of intellectual and scientific activity from war to peace, and offers “space” to examine the professional lives of university-educated women in this period. Design/methodology/approach The paper is structured as an analytical narrative interweaving the professional lives of two women, medical researcher Elsie Dalyell and teacher/unionist Lucy Woodcock to illuminate the contributions of university-educated women’s expertise from 1914 to the outbreak of the Second World War. Findings The emergence of university-educated women in the First World War and the interwar years participated in the civic structure of Australian society in innovative and important ways that challenged the “soldier citizen” ethos of this era. The paper offers a way to examine university-educated women’s professional lives as they unfolded during the course of war and peace that focuses on what they did with their expertise. Thus, the “knowledge front” provides more ways to examine these lives than the more narrowly articulated ideas of “home” and “war” front. Research limitations/implications The idea of the “knowledge front” applied to women in this paper also has implications for how to analyse the meaning of the First World War-focused university expertise more generally both during war and peace. Practical implications The usual view of women’s participation in war is as nurses in field hospitals. This paper broadens the notion of war to see war as having many interconnected fronts including the battle front and home front (Beaumont, 2013). By doing so, not only can we see a much larger involvement of women in the war, but we also see the involvement of university-educated women. Social implications The paper shows that while the guns may have ceased on 11 November 1918, women’s lives continued as they grappled with their war experience and aimed to reassert their professional lives in Australian society in the 1920s and 1930s. Originality/value The paper contains original biographical research of the lives of two women. It also conceptualises the idea of “knowledge front” in terms of war/home front to examine how the expertise of university-educated career women contributed to the social fabric of a nation recovering from war.

Voluntarism and the impact of the First World War

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Grant
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Home Front ◽  
Director General ◽  
World War ◽  
Voluntary Activity ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Relief Fund ◽  
The Impact ◽  
First World ◽  
Voluntary Organisations

This chapter considers the experience of the First World War to demonstrate that state mobilisation does not necessarily crowd out voluntary endeavour. While the scale of volunteering to fight in that conflict has long been appreciated, the equivalent voluntary effort on the home front has been neglected by historians. This chapter charts the scale, coordination and regulation of this voluntary activity, from the establishment of the National Relief Fund, to the appointment of a Director General of Voluntary Organisations in 1915 and the 1916 War Charities Act. It is argued that the War encouraged professionalisation and innovation within the charity sector, while also embedding a notion of voluntarism working hand in hand with the state.

III Woolton at the Ministry of Food

2020 ◽  
pp. 39-70
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Home Front ◽  
Food Control ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Second World ◽  
First World

The Ministry of Food was essentially created during the War, and survived until it was reabsorbed into the Ministry of Agriculture in 1958. It has been the subject of extensive popular and scholarly interest as part of research into the management of the Second World War on the Home Front. Lessons about food control had been learned from the experiences of the First World War, which were consciously applied to this war. This was in part because so many of the men had been involved in that conflict in some way, including Woolton himself. They had personal memories of what had worked well then, but were also very aware of the mistakes that had been made, which they did not wanted repeated. Woolton certainly was, as his ...

Australian and New Zealand women teachers in the First World War

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-45
Author(s):  
Kay Morris Matthews ◽  
Kay Whitehead
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
First World War ◽  
Women Teachers ◽  
Secondary Source ◽  
World War ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The First World War ◽  
War Effort ◽  
First World ◽  
At Home

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to highlight the contributions of women teachers to the war effort at home in Australia and New Zealand and in Egypt and Europe between 1914 and 1918. Design/methodology/approach Framed as a feminist transnational history, this research paper drew upon extensive primary and secondary source material in order to identify the women teachers. It provides comparative analyses using a thematic approach providing examples of women teachers war work at home and abroad. Findings Insights are offered into the opportunities provided by the First World War for channelling the abilities and leadership skills of women teachers at home and abroad. Canvassed also are the tensions for German heritage teachers; ideological differences concerning patriotism and pacifism and issues arising from government attitudes on both sides of the Tasman towards women’s war service. Originality/value This is likely the only research offering combined Australian–New Zealand analyses of women teacher’s war service, either in support at home in Australia and New Zealand or working as volunteers abroad. To date, the efforts of Australian and New Zealand women teachers have largely gone unrecognised.

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