Entangled Emotions

Undivided India contributed to the First World War more than one million men who served in places as diverse as France, Mesopotamia and East Africa and forged a remarkable range of encounters across the lines of race, religion and nationality. This essay investigates the fraught inner histories of these encounters – their affective, experiential and representational structures – through a range of archival, historical and literary material, as produced by Indian combatant and civilian writers, including Mulk Raj Anand and Rabindranath Tagore. Focusing on three kinds of encounters – behind the battlefield of the Western Front, in a hospital in Mesopotamia, and a series of wartime lectures delivered in the United States – it reflects on the role of the ‘literary’ in such cross-cultural encounters and their representations, and how such moments and processes at once expand our understandings of a more ‘global’ war and put pressure on conventional understandings of ideas of ‘modernity’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’.

The Zeppelin in the Sky of the Mind

While First World War historians often emphasize civilians’ experience of ‘war at a distance’, the military dirigible floated over the divide between civilian and soldier, brought aerial warfare to Britain’s island fortress, and inaugurated a mode of modern warfare that defies spatial and temporal containment. This essay foregrounds the zeppelin’s psychic impact on the civilian imaginary from 1914 through the Spanish Civil War to the Blitz, tracing its conceptual and aesthetic representation in diaries, letters, novels, essays, and plays by Virginia Woolf, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Rukeyser, Julian Bell and others. These writings document an unending European-civil-imperial-global war in which aerial technologies at once enlarge human powers almost beyond imagining and dwarf them to the point of negation. Inspiring both wonder and the new terror of total war, the zeppelin created a permanent change in civilians’ psychic weather and remains an inescapable presence in the sky of the mind.

Imbalances: Mass Death and the Economy of ‘Sacrifice’ in the Great War

This essay engages the values, attitudes, and practices of ‘sacrifice’ in the cultural history and literary and visual representations of the Great War (discussing works by Richard Aldington, David Jones and Ford Madox Ford). It demonstrates how extensively the idea of sacrifice was appealed to in the official record, and it shows how this political construction was responded to, almost always critically and negatively, in a literature of major record. The chief ideas turn around the fact that a sacrificial victim, in order to be effective, needs to be ‘worth’ a good deal; this calculation is profoundly altered in the ongoing, increasingly wholesale character of slaughter in the war. This disenchantment provides a major point of reference for our understanding of the war as a watershed in European and world-cultural history.

Scaling War

David Jones’s In Parenthesis (1937) communicates the excessive character of war experiences by depicting the breaking of measuring instruments. It meditates on the difficulty of conveying the impact of these experiences when the clichéd overuse of violent imagery in everyday contexts has desensitized readers and listeners. A modernist, seeking new representational modes, Jones calls for a recalibration of the scale by which experience is measured. Showing how clichés literalize once transported to the battlefield, he communicates sensory overload in a way that avoids both the reduction of war to shorthand metaphors and aggressive hyperbole. With mythical analogy he offers an alternative to the empirical measures he shows to be inadequate, and finds a way of weighing up experiences without laying down universalizing laws.

Encountering War, Encountering Others: Enid Bagnold and Mary Borden

This essay examines the literary and cultural trope of the colonial encounter as it appears in the work of First World War women writers. It focuses on British modernist Enid Bagnold and American modernist Mary Borden, comparing their representation of women war workers’ encounters with soldiers and labourers from the colonial world. The essay argues that Bagnold’s memoir Diary Without Dates (1918) and her novel The Happy Foreigner (1920) with Borden’s poem ‘The Hill’ are quite unusual for the visibility they give such encounters. Rather than reveal moments of identification and empathy across marginalized categories of gendered and racial otherness, these encounters import strangeness, discomfort and alterity into the texts. The essay concludes that Bagnold and Borden put at the centre of the First World War literary canon the uneven experiences of modernity that characterized the war’s displacements and disruptions.

Three War Veterans Who Don’t Tell War Stories

Veterancy is a natural figure for the kind of wisdom-through-experience that is purveyed, as Walter Benjamin noted in ‘The Storyteller’ (1936), through traditional storytelling. But these three veterans have been stupefied by their experiences in mass, industrial, globalized war – William Wordsworth’s ‘Discharged Soldier’ in the French Revolutionary Wars, Rebecca West’s Chris Baldry (The Return of the Soldier (1918)) and Virginia Woolf’s Septimus Warren Smith (Mrs Dalloway (1925)) in the First World War. Consequently, they are unable to process their experiences into communicable wisdom – a different thing from being able to describe them. Those who encounter these veterans (and this includes the texts’ readers) may feel sadness or anger at their plight. But, though there is affect, there is no empathy, whether through body or mind. All that remains is to look upon these unfathoming, unfathomable characters with consternation.

Maternal Cosmopoetics

Käthe Kollwitz’s 1922–3 cycle War addresses themes of maternal sacrifice and nationalist mobilization that also figure in women’s poetry. Her anti-war protest in Sacrifice depicts a mother who raises her infant, echoing Jacques Louis David’s defiant mother in his Sabine Women. Likewise Anna Akhmatova’s blasphemous ‘Prayer’ offers to sacrifice her child and poetry to halt the war, and poems by Berta Lask and Claire Studer Goll condemn women’s own silence for the mobilization of their dead sons. Kollwitz’s cosmopoetic theme of maternal solidarity in The Mothers binds figures visually, just as dialogue in Lask weaves a sisterhood of protest. The woodcut Volunteers places her son Peter with his blinded, suicidal friends led by Death; similarly, Ricarda Huch’s poems of 1917 expose hollow wartime exhortations to heroic combat that blind and destroy young men. Kollwitz’s post-war poster Never Again War complements Gertrud Kolmar’s protest against war commemorations as the tawdry dazzle of nationalist remobilization.

‘Cosmopolitan Sympathies’: Poetry of the First Global War

In keeping with recent attention to the global dimensions of the First World War, this essay explores how Isaac Rosenberg, Thomas Hardy, Robert Service, Wilfred Owen, Mary Borden and other wartime poets seized on and developed the cosmopolitan potentialities of poetry, in the sense of grounded attachments that span specific cultural and national differences. While the anti-heroism of First World War poetry has been amply discussed, its overlapping but distinct capacity for imaginative solidarity across enemy lines, if often acknowledged, remains less fully explored. Drawing on the theoretical work of Paul Gilroy, Richard Rorty, Martha Nussbaum and Sigmund Freud, but above all attending to the poetry, this chapter examines First World War poems that not only state but linguistically, formally, and thematically enact what Rosenberg called ‘cosmopolitan sympathies’ with the enemy other.

Dissent and the Literature of the First World War

This essay assesses the after-life of early twentieth-century literary protest against war, and its surprisingly ambiguous relationship to bellicose values. The writings of Henry Williamson and Percy Wyndham Lewis are used to open up the consequences of attributing political and moral meanings to combatant experience. The visibility of these motifs in heterodox, ideologically-suspect writing draws attention to the way ambivalent symbols of war function in literary and commemorative culture more generally.

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.