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.

Ale na razie tu cisza” – fotografie sprzed katastrofy w wybranych zapisach literackich (Stefan Chwin, Ryszard Kapuściński, Wisława Szymborska)

2020 ◽  
pp. 65-80
Author(s):  
Magdalena Strąk
Keyword(s):  
Time Perspective ◽  
Terrorist Attack ◽  
First World War ◽  
General Concept ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
The First World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
First World

The work aims to show a peculiar perspective of looking at photographs taken on the eve of the broadly understood disaster, which is specified in a slightly different way in each of the literary texts (Stefan Chwin’s autobiographical novel Krótka historia pewnego żartu [The brief history of a certain joke], a poem by Ryszard Kapuściński Na wystawie „Fotografia chłopów polskich do 1944 r.” [At an exhibition “The Polish peasants in photographs to 1944”] and Wisława Szymborska’s Fotografia z 11 września [Photograph from September 11]) – as death in a concentration camp, a general concept of the First World War or a terrorist attack. Upcoming tragic events – of which the photographed people are not yet aware – become for the subsequent recipient an inseparable element of reality contained in the frame. For the later observers, privileged with time perspective, the characters captured in the photograph are already victims of the catastrophe, which in reality was not yet recorded by the camera. It is a work about coexistence of the past and future in the field of photography.

Modernism Under Review: Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era

2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-194
Author(s):  
Marjorie Perloff
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
First World

This essay offers a critical re-assessment of Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era. It argues that Kenner's magisterial survey remains important to our understanding of Modernism, despite its frankly partisan viewpoint. Kenner's is an insider's account of the Anglo-American Modernist writing that he takes to have been significant because it sought to invent a new language consonant with the ethos of the twentieth century. The essay suggests that Kenner's impeccable attention to the Modernist renovation of language goes beyond formalism, since, for him, its ‘patterned energies’ (a term derived from Buckminster Fuller's theory of knots) relate Modernism to the larger complex of artefacts within which it functions and, beyond these, to what he takes to be the great works of the past and to the scientific-technological inventions of the present. But the essay also points out that Kenner's is an eccentric canon, which makes no room for Forster, Frost, Lawrence, or Stevens. Furthermore, Kenner's emphasis on the First World War as a great cultural rupture, while plausible, works less well for Joyce and Williams than it does for Pound and Eliot.

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).

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.

The Belgian national past: Between commemoration and silence

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerie Rosoux ◽  
Laurence van Ypersele
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Other ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The One ◽  
Memory Conflicts ◽  
Second World ◽  
First World

This article examines the gradual deconstruction of the Belgian national identity. Is it possible to speak of a de facto differentiation or even ‘federalization’ of the so-called ‘national past’ in Belgium? How do Belgians choose to remember and forget this past? To contribute to an understanding of these issues, the article considers two very different episodes of Belgian history, namely the First World War and the colonization of the Congo. On the one hand, the memory of the First World War appears to provide the template for memory conflicts in Belgium, and thus informs the memories of other tragedies such as the Second World War. On the other hand, the memory of the colonial past remains much more consensual – providing a more nuanced picture of competing views on the past. Beyond the differences between the ways in which these episodes are officially portrayed, the same fundamental trend may be observed: the gradual fragmentation of a supposedly smooth and reliable national version of history.

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.

On the Terrible War of 5675

2012 ◽  
pp. 299-309
Author(s):  
George (Gedaliah) Silverstone
Keyword(s):  
Jewish People ◽  
First World War ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Eastern Front ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Masses ◽  
First World

This chapter studies an early example of a sermon which focuses more on the toll taken by the First World War on the masses of Jewish civilians living on the contested territories of the Eastern Front rather than on the implications of the war for the general values of culture and civilization. Here the sermon of George (Gedaliah) Silverstone does not underline the patriotism of Jews towards all the countries where they lived, but rather emphasizes the underlying unity of the Jewish people, and the sometimes painful tension between that unity and such patriotism. The preacher introduces it by speaking of the reaction of his listeners to the story they have read ‘in the newspapers’, apparently within the past few days. In addition to narratives drawn from the contemporary newspapers, there are two other major components of the sermon's message, drawn from traditional Jewish literature. The source provides hope for a providential, redemptive dénouement to the bloodshed, in the traditional homiletical style.

L’Envoi

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Mass Spectrometer ◽  
Noble Gases ◽  
First World War ◽  
Neutrino Experiment ◽  
The Moon ◽  
World War ◽  
Electrical Currents ◽  
The Past ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

Churchill’s expression was glorious Rodomontade, but in the end it is still nothing but rodomontade. Understanding the causes of the First World War did not help us to understand the different factors that were operating in 1939, and understanding the results of our isolationism when Hitler began strutting around did not help us avoid the opposite mistakes we made by waging “preventive” war in Vietnam and Iraq. “The past is a different country; they do things differently there,” and we learn nothing from them except that we cannot predict the future. This is true even more with science than with politics. At the end of every century, there is a spate of experts predicting what the new century will bring. But in 1900 no one predicted radio, much less television, or antibiotics or computers or MRI or CAT scans, or cyclotrons or trips to the moon, or even that man might fly. So I cannot pretend that the history written here will tell us what breakthroughs are in store for those working with the noble gases. That’s why they call it research; if you knew what the result of your experiment was going to be, there’d be no point in doing it. I thought I knew what the result of Ray Davis’s neutrino experiment was going to be, and so I thought there was no point in doing it. I was wrong, and glad to be, for it’s the surprises that drive us forward: Rutherford’s helium particles bouncing backwards, the xenon-129 peak poking up beyond where it ought to be, the argon-39 peak appearing where it oughtn’t to be at all, the electrical currents suddenly running wild through the heliumcooled mercury, et cetera and so forth and so on. What’s coming next? I have no idea and, no matter what they tell you, neither does anyone else. Which is what makes it all so exciting. Exactly fifty years after I first met the noble gases at Brookhaven in the summer of 1958, I turned off the mass spectrometer and retired.

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