Three Publications about Archaeology of a Segment of the First World War's Forgotten Eastern Front

While the horrors of the trench warfare on the Western Front in Belgium and France are part of the European cultural memory, to some degree the much more extensive and mobile Eastern Front of the 1914–1918 conflict has become the forgotten front (Die vergessene Front). Although for just over eleven months in 1914/15, the central part of a major front, some 1000 km long on which three million people died ran through the middle of what is now Poland, for a number of reasons the memory of this has there been all but erased from memory and from the cultural landscape. The reviewed three volumes are the result of a project that has attempted to address the poor state of historical memory of the momentous events and human drama that took place a century earlier on the segment of the front, 55 km west of Warsaw. Here, from mid-December 1914, the Russian Imperial army tried to hold back the eastward advance of the German troops on defences built along the Bzura and Rawka rivers. For the next seven months, the fighting here took the form of the same type of prolonged static trench warfare more familiar on the Western Front (the only place in the eastern sphere of war that this happened). The German army made every effort (including mining and several major gas attacks), to advance on Warsaw but failed to break through. It was only after the Great Retreat of the Russian army in the summer of 1915 that these defences were overrun and Warsaw fell.

The Langscape of War

This chapter documents the ways in which an aggressively modern war took shape in language in World War One, yielding, in Clark’s notebooks, a real-time engagement with the fleeting diction of vernacular geography at the front, the weapons of industrial warfare, and the diverse taxonomies of mud or sound. It explores the emergence of trench warfare, and its own distinctive patterns of use (and variability), alongside the reconceptualization of fundamental terms such as battle and battlefield. Here, too, is a shifting language of attack and resistance and of ‘them’ and ‘us’, in which air warfare, or amphibious warfare, or gas warfare, or the brief efflorescence of Turpiite, offer striking lexical fertility alongside their new capacities for destruction.

Written on the Body

This chapter examines the language of illness, sickness, and death in war-time use – in a domain which offered its own conflicted spaces of both erasure and over-lexicalisation, and euphemism alongside dysphemism. As Clark’s ‘Words in War-Time’, records, popular discourses of health readily appropriated military metaphors in ways that evoked other synergies between Home and active fronts (‘If your line of health is “weakly held” strengthen your forces with Bovril’, as advertising in the Scotsman announced in March 1915). In contrast, human vulnerabilities as embedded in trench warfare as literal rather than metaphorical process yielded a rapidly expanding lexicon, evident in the shifting understanding of trench foot, trench fever, and frostbite, or the reorientation of the diction of nerves and nerviness in which shellshock (and raid-shock on the Home Front) can remain prominent legacies.

The forgotten Eastern Front: dealing with the social and archaeological legacies of the Battle of the Rawka and Bzura Rivers (1914–1915), central Poland

While the Western Front of the Great (or First World) War is deeply engrained in the European historical consciousness, memories of the Eastern Front are less prominent. Here, events have been repressed, obscured by the subsequent experience of the Second World War and by heritage policy in the region. The authors present the results of archaeological investigations of a battlefield in central Poland, where static trench warfare was fought between December 1914 and July 1915. A unique landscape palimpsest was formed, the present neglected state of which is a material expression of contemporary attitudes to the legacy of the forgotten Eastern Front. The study illustrates the wider intersection of warfare, identity and memory.

1479 Trench Foot: A Rare and Unusual Presentation of a World War I Disease

Introduction 'Trench foot' is a serious disorder of the lower limb, involving damage to the skin, nerves, and muscle, previously described in World War I soldiers during trench warfare. We present a rare and unusual case of ‘trench foot' sustained at home in a 20-year-old female. Case Report A 20-year-old woman presented to the Plastic Surgery department with pain and numbness affecting both feet, following failed trials of antibiotics. She managed her symptoms at home by immersing her feet in ice baths for 18-23 hours per day. She was tachycardic with raised inflammatory markers. Examination revealed breakdown of the skin bilaterally, with full thickness eschar. MRI showed extensive subcutaneous oedema and myositis. Initial surgical plan consisted of antibiotics and debridement of necrotic tissue with a view to grafting the skin later. Intra-operative findings included necrosis of the subcutaneous tissues and muscles. The patient deteriorated post-operatively with sepsis and underwent urgent Guillotine-style bilateral amputations. She was discharged home 18 days later. Discussion 'Trench foot' can be mistaken for soft tissue infections or frostbite. It is attributed to vasoconstriction followed by neurovascular changes and repeated cycles of thawing and freezing, acquired above freezing temperatures, unlike frostbite which occurs below freezing temperatures. The patient was initially reviewed by non-specialist teams without a clear diagnosis and sustained more pervasive tissue destruction than was originally apparent on examination. Prevention remains the best cure for ‘trench foot'. It is therefore important to familiarise ourselves with this rare disease. Where prevention or early detection is not possible, amputation can reduce the morbidity and mortality of the ensuing sepsis.

Italians on the Battlefield

From the period of neutrality onwards, Italy mobilized a mass conscript army which drew on Italians from around the peninsula as well as emigrants overseas, though after much debate colonial troops were not brought to Italy. Despite the lack of widespread war enthusiasm, most men within Italy complied with the draft, and the army was soon able to deploy over a million men at the front. For emigrants, the decision to return and fight was complex yet many did so. Fighting was concentrated along the Italo-Austrian border, where chief of general staff Cadorna hoped to break through Austrian defences. The tactical difficulties of trench warfare combined with difficult terrain led to strategic immobility along this front, with eleven battles fought along the river Isonzo. In 1917 a joint Austro-German attack at Caporetto achieved a major victory but Italy was able to recover and defend itself successfully, with Allied support, before eventually returning to the offensive in 1918.

Trenches, Cadences, and Faces

Nancy Sherman examines the lived experience of World War I British soldiers engaged in trench warfare through David Jones’s epic war poem In Parenthesis and Pat Barker’s Toby’s Room. In Sherman’s telling, In Parenthesis demonstrates how the morale and social connectivity of a unit of soldiers is built through verbal and nonverbal interactions alike. Sherman demonstrates how Jones is able to convey these tendencies through the structure and meter of his poem, in concert with its lines. This is the before; Toby’s Room, the second novel in Pat Barker’s second World War I trilogy, addresses itself to the after. Tens of thousands of British soldiers suffered horrific facial wounds in World War I, often repaired or covered up in ways that made it impossible for the soldiers to display emotions or demonstrate motives. Sherman suggests that “to have a massively disfigured face is, in a sense, to lose a social self.” Hiding the face behind a mask, however palatable to the outside world, will never offer an adequate solution.

Imago proelii. La cartografia storica della Prima Guerra Mondiale dal Museo Storico della Terza Armata: spigolature per una analisi tipologica e semiologica

International historiography has extensively assessed the innovations in war practice experienced during the First World War. However, the consequences of trench warfare in military cartographic production have not been fully investigated yet. Following this line, the essay presents the cartographic corpus of the historical archive of the Terza Armata (Third Army); the Terza Armata had a fundamental role in the conflict, settling on the Piave river after Caporetto and leading the final advance towards Istria. The analysis of the collection, which is still unpublished, can open a new front of research aimed at developing categories of semiological analysis and typological classification of military maps as sources produced in fieri, i.e. manuscript IGM maps that were constantly updated during war operations. First, the cartographic corpus is presented; second, a first typological classification and a semiological decoding of maps are proposed, based on the interpretation of the symbols used, of the legend and of the methods of representation. In particular, the contribution focuses on tactical maps, i.e. cartographies that were continuously updated in proelio to document the evolution of war events on the front line.