A supplementary note to 'An historical note on butterfly collecting in France during The Great War (1914–1918)'

Following a short article regarding the collection of a specimen of Iphiclides podalirius (Linnaeus, 1758) by A. A. Tullett, in France during the Battle of the Somme in 1916, further personal and entomological data regarding Tullett and others is presented.

Feeling Everyday IR: Embodied, affective, militarising movement as choreography of war

This article explores affective, embodied encounters between military and civilian bodies in the everyday as choreography of war. It argues that by paying attention to the intersecting political sphere of bodies, affect and movement – through the metaphor of ‘dance’ – we are not only able to understand how security operates as a logic reproducing the militarisation of the everyday, but also able to identify a representational gap, an aesthetic politics, potentially useful for resistance to such practices normalising war in the everyday. It draws on two British examples of where military moves disrupt civilian spaces in the everyday: an arts project commemorating the Battle of the Somme, and a football game taking place during Remembrance week. Through embodied choreographies of war in the everyday, dance is used as a metaphor to understand militarisation as an example of feeling Everyday IR. Thus, dance is useful to ‘see’ the politics of Everyday IR, but also to understand, to feel and possibly to resist the politics of normalisation of war in the everyday. This is one example of how feeling Everyday IR offers alternative openings into political puzzles of security logics informing war as practice.

First World War Film and the Face of Death

Central to a number of films made during or about the First World War is a thinned relationship between the living and the dead. The Battle of the Somme (1916) depicts a moment in which, from a row of soldiers going over the top, two slip back, shot. Their dying, or death, occurs between frames, an aperture through which the viewer may glimpse another dimension. J’Accuse (1919, 1938) employs soon-to-die soldiers as extras in a sequence in which the dead return. The result is a fantastical crossing between living and dead. In Pour la Paix du Monde (1926), soldiers whose faces have been maimed by war injuries are seen first in close-up, their mutilations covered by silken masks. Then they tear the masks off, allowing the viewer to see the war in its ‘true colours’. Affording the viewer these glimpses of the after-life, all three films create imaginative warps in space-time.

Henry Gray and John Fraser: Scottish surgeons of the Great War

Between 1914 and 1918, the British Expeditionary Force fighting in France and Flanders sustained 2.7 million battle casualties. Just over one quarter (26.1%) were never seen by the medical services. These were men who had been killed (14.2%), were missing (5.4%), or were prisoners of war (6.5%). Most of those who were missing had been killed and their bodies never recovered. Just under three-quarters of the wounded (73.9% or 1 988 969) were seen and treated by the medical services and 151 356 died.[i] The worst single day in British military history was Saturday 1 July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, when there were 57 470 casualties, of whom 20 000 were killed or died from their wounds. In nearly a quarter of a million admissions dealt with by the medical services, 58.5% of wounds were caused by high-explosive shellfire, 39% by bullets (mostly from machine guns), 2% were caused by grenades, and 0.5% from bayonets.