Category Archives: First World War

Letter to an Unknown Soldier

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A couple of months ago, I wrote a post about the 1418Now project, Letter to an Unknown Soldier. Since then the project has been running and, as of my writing this, over 15,000 letters have been received, with more than two weeks left to run.  In my previous post, I said I was going to write my own letter.  Here it is.

Dear Bill, or is it David?

It could be either, couldn’t it: ol’ Bill, still and stoical in his endurance of all the laughable horrors that war throws at him; young David, so beautiful in his youth and ‘all the glory of his joy’ and sacrifice. You might be either, or indeed both.

Is that too simplistic, asking you to stand for two figures emblematic in their own right? How can we ask you to embody the experiences of 5 million men, the rich and the poor, the educated and the ignorant, those who served on the front lines and those who worked behind them, those who survived and those who didn’t? As has been pointed out to me, and as I fully acknowledge, speaking of the men of this war only in terms of unity can never be a full reflection of the huge variety of the experiences encompassed by so many men over four and more years of a world war.

And yet… And yet, after a decade and a half reading the words you wrote, in letters, in diaries, in memoirs, some intended for public consumption but most written only for the loving, private eyes of friends and family, your voice speaks to me in tones at once both varied and familiar. Each fragile sheet, telling its unique story, does so in a voice so completely of its time that I could not mistake it for anything else, that I recognise it the moment I see it, scribbled in indelible pencil, poorly typed on flimsy forms, etched in elegant ink penmanship. Its tones, by turns mundane, flippant, horror and grief struck, or simply relieved, groping for words to describe the previously indescribable or relishing the simple pleasures of life as only young men can, has invaded my own, shaping my thinking and my writing as surely as the images described have shaped my understanding of war and how it was experienced.

I do not always like you. You are, inevitably, of your time, with all the attitudes towards women, class, empire that this implies. But for every statement of belief in a eugenicist solution to a predicted post-war crisis or casual patronising of those not of your class, there have been twice as many to remind me of your common humanity, your youth, your idealism, your sensitivities to sight and smell and taste, your artistic impulses, your lust for adventure, for experience, for life. You have made me laugh and made me cry, yes, even in the public space of the archive. You have moved me beyond measure and you continue to do so.

I would like to believe that, after all this time, these 15 years in which you have become my profession as well as my obsession, that I know you. Or at least that I know you better than most. I have read the counter-examples to the clichés, can cite the exceptions to any generalisation about you or your experience, even as I try to pin you down by making generalisations of my own.

Yet that sense of knowledge is as much a myth as any, isn’t it? I can never know you any more than you would understand me and my interest in your story. You remain standing there, aloof and ultimately impenetrable, leaving me, as always, with more questions than answers.

And still I long to know. Who were you? What was it like? How did war shape you and through you the society you left behind or, for the majority of you, in which you had to carry on living? These are the questions that define me as a historian, and my search for the answers, hidden in your millions of words, in those stories that made it home to the attic and the archive, waiting to be uncovered, has helped define me as a person, too. I have been shaped and changed by all that I have read and heard, by all that I now think I know. I hope it is for the better; I believe it cannot be for the worse than I might have become in other circumstances. I may not know you, but you have made me and will continue to do so until the day I stop asking questions. And for that knowledge, for all that you have done for me and continue to do, for all the inspiration you have granted me, the tears you have provoked, the insight into men and mankind that you have provided, for all the lessons you have taught me, I thank you.

Yours, with affection and gratitude,

Jessica Meyer

Enduring War: A review

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So I am currently in London, part way through the first of a mad pair of weeks encompassing a meeting, two conferences, a couple of days in the archives and two days with the BBC at the Great Yorkshire Show. To ease myself in, I began Monday morning with a wander around the Enduring War exhibition at the British Library.

This is an ambitious exhibition, given the size of the space it occupies. Divided in to six sections, from the ‘The Call to Arms’ to ‘Grief and Memory’, the exhibition not only tries to tell a complete story of the war, but as a contributing partner in the Europeana 1914-1918 project, attempts to do it from an international perspective. Inevitably, some things are missed, while others are under-analysed. For instance, the caption to one photograph ends with the statement ‘There was an increase in Protestant church attendance in Britain in the first weeks of the war but, for a number of reasons, this was not sustained.’ There is no indication as to possible reasons why church attendance was not sustained, leaving this viewer with a sense of incompleteness.

In fact, the section on ‘Faith Under Fire’ is possibly the least satisfactory of the six. The claim about the prevalence of protective charms and rituals is never really demonstrated, in part because the use of the library’s resources places limits on what is available for display. The original manuscript of Ruper Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’ in the first section is extraordinarily moving, but there is no equivalent of, say, Adolphus, the mascot who has become the face of the Liddle Collection at the University of Leeds. Excellent use is made of posters, particularly in illustrating the Russian perspective, and the use of ANZAC trench journals makes a double point with an elegant lightness of touch. Nonetheless, the material on display does not consistently feel capable of carrying the full breadth of the story that the exhibition is attempting to tell. Indeed, so broad is the narrative that it isn’t always evident what the curators understood by the exhibition’s subtitle, ‘Grief, Grit and Humour’.  All three elements are addressed episodically but don’t really feel as if they are the central thread of a coherent narrative.

Having entered the exhibition from the side, and followed the chronological path to the dead end around a corner in the separate space that houses the section on ‘Grief and Morning’, I ended my visit by deliberately walking back around to look at the audiovisual displays at the front entrance. And here the exhibition managed to produce what was for me its most powerful and moving display through its series of video booths of montages of postcards from the front, the accompanying audio just the messages scrawled on each one. Very simple, yet entirely mesmeric, the displays demonstrate the art of the everyday that, as much as the war poets, artists and musicians whose work is, once again, presented throughout the exhibition, defined the First World War as a profound cultural experience in Britain and across Europe.

‘Men whose minds the dead have ravished’

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A new public sculpture was unveiled in Seaham, Co. Durham on 29th May.  Entitled 1101, the piece, by the sculptor Ray Lonsdale, shows a 9.5 foot soldier in First World War uniform sitting at rest and is intended to reflect a moment of contemplation in the immediate aftermath of the conflict.  It is also, apparently, supposed to represent ‘what is now known as Post Traumatic Street Syndrome [sic] (PTSD) which many faced as they returned from the battlefields.’ [1]  Even ignoring the typos, this interpretation worries me for two reasons.

The first has to do with the fact that I don’t think we should retrospectively diagnose soldiers of the First World War with a psychiatric condition which was not fully defined until 1980 and which remains contentious today.  This is not to say that First World War servicemen didn’t suffer from psychological wounds; many most certainly did.  But, as I have explained in more detail here, shell shock (and or indeed hysteria, neurasthenia, disordered action of the heart or any of the other names given to psychological disability during and after the war) is not same thing as PTSD.

Setting the question of labeling aside, however, I still have serious reservations about this work of art as a representation of psychological war disability, whatever name we give it.  It shows the soldier as calm, contemplative, tired perhaps, maybe even sad, but seemingly in control of body and mind. There can be few adjectives further from the experiences of shell-shocked servicemen, as depicted in the literature and art of the time, than ‘calm’, ‘contemplative’ or ‘controlled’.  These were men whose bodies jerked and twitched, who woke screaming from nightmares, who leaped violently at sudden noises, who stuttered, struggled physically to overcome hysterical mutism or groped blindly through hysterical blindness. They had lost control of both mind and body, a condition that was fearful both to experience and behold. These men were not calm or contemplative about their condition.

The pain of psychological wounding comes across viscerally in some of the great literature and art of the period.  Wilfred Owen’s ‘Mental Cases’ is powerfully physical in its description and the disgust and pity it evokes.  The art of Otto Dix is agonizing to look at.

Dix Shell Shock 127-otto-dix-verwundeter-map-der-krieg-jpgThe viewer recoils from the pain and violence of the images.  This is how psychological disability was experienced by many First World War servicemen and those who lived with them – as pain, fear, disgust and violence. To represent the condition through a generic image of a soldier, as something calm and totalizing, runs the risk of whitewashing from history the individual subjective pain suffered by many that made their condition as disabling as any physical wound or amputation.  Too many shell-shocked ex-servicemen suffered stigma and poor treatment throughout their lives.  I would hate to see the very real pain they suffered written out of history because it is too painful for us to contemplate today.

[1] ‘New World War One statue for Seaham seafront’, Sunderland Echo, 22nd May, 2014, http://www.sunderlandecho.com/what-s-on/new-world-war-one-statue-for-seaham-seafront-1-6630051, last accessed 25th June, 2014.

2 for 1

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I realise it has been a long time since I have posted anything.  I am still writing a lot – conference papers, a journal article, an introduction and a couple of guest posts on other blogs.  I have just been gifted a bit of time today, so I am hoping there will be a new post later this morning.

In the meantime, in case you missed them, my guest posts on disability and masculinity and the medical evacuation process can be found here and here.

Calm down, dear, it’s only a drama!

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We are now three weeks into the six-week run of The Crimson Field, BBC 1’s Sunday night drama set in a First World War ‘field hospital’ ‘somewhere in France’.  The quotation marks around ‘field hospital’ may give some indication as to my opinion of the programme.  It is one of a number of small inaccuracies that, like lice in a uniform, have been driving me (and a number of other historians of British medical care in the First World War) a bit nuts.

In fact, ‘field hospital’ was a term used very little after the Boer War.  I have come across a Territorial medical unit which used the term in relation to the hospital where they trained recruits before they were sent overseas as a field hospital, but the hospitals along the lines of communication were, by 1916, when The Crimson Field is ostensibly set, known as either Casualty Clearing Stations (what would formerly have been referred to as field hospitals) or Stationary or Base Hospitals (of which this appears to be one).

Is this sort of criticism too nit-picky?  Certainly, one of the reactions on Twitter to this type of comment (which I have been making a fair amount of over the past three weeks) has been ‘It isn’t a history lesson, it’s a drama!’ with the implication that criticizing the historical accuracy of the depiction is both unfair and detracts from others’ pleasure in watching.  Essentially, this reaction is a version of ‘If you have nothing nice to say, don’t say it.’

At one level, this is fair enough.  The Crimson Field is a drama rather than a history lesson, and I don’t have any problem with cosy Sunday evening historical dramas.  I actually have a soft spot (as well as remarkably high tolerance for a historian) for such dramas, having recently enjoyed The Musketeers and Call the Midwife, and even, once I had properly suspended disbelief, still relish a good episode of Downton Abbey.  But the BBC itself is creating a block to the sort of suspension of disbelief that I have achieved with Downton by attempting to locate The Crimson Field within its own narrative of historical commemoration.  The programme is part of the ‘World War One’ season and there are regular tweets and links to related factual content on the BBC’s website.  In other words, the BBC is presenting this as both drama and history, even though they are getting quite a lot of that history wrong.

Which brings me to the other reason I have problems with the ‘It’s drama, not history’ criticism.  Because a great deal of my criticism actually is of the programme as a drama.  Having started out quite well, introducing several strong female characters with the potential to develop into interesting individuals opening up new perspectives on the popular understanding of the First World War, the dramatic arc has all too rapidly declined into a series of mythic clichés enacted by stock figures who simply represent modern ideas rather than having any real personality, historic or otherwise.  As Amanda Vickery has pointed out, the plot predominantly involves the imposition of 21st-century ideas and concerns on characters placed rather than fully located in 1916. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the drama feels clichéd and inauthentic as it tries to crowbar issues of class, race and sexuality into story lines that use endless accusations of cowardice as a shorthand for reactions to the horrors of war or attempts to deal with the complicated question of Irish politics in part of one sixty-minute episode.  In other words, The Crimson Field is not only poor history, but also not very good drama, by whatever standards you judge it.

So why do I keep watching?  Why not give it up as a bad job and let those who are enjoying the drama enjoy it in peace?  Two reasons, one superficial, one (I hope) rather less so.  The superficial reason is that, whatever the quality of the drama, the casting is, on the whole, very good.  It is not simply that I would watch Hermione Norris and Suranne Jones in pretty much anything they appeared in, however terrible, but also that they are good enough to bring depth to their parts.  Norris, in particular, has created a believably restrained and awe-inspiring matron, thankfully setting off the bizarre characterization of the hospital CO as a weak and deeply un-awe-inspiring figure.  I will probably keep watching to the end for her alone.

There is, however, a more important reason for why I will keep watching and, for that matter, keep tweeting as I do so.  It might be described as the ‘teachable moment’ excuse, to use a truly abominable American phrase.  Because I am trying to do is not merely criticize for the sake of finding fault, but to explain, insofar as 140 characters lets me, what my research has taught me about the historic reality of medical care in the First World War.  I can not only complain about the representation of a shell shock sufferer in the first episode, but also point out that he would most likely have been treated in isolation for the sake of general morale. Nor is the process only one way.  So far, questions I have had or points I have made have led to interesting discussions of how laundry was done at Base hospitals and the date at which female radiographers began working overseas.  I have thus learned something indirectly from the programme as well as, I hope, giving a little more historic depth to the understanding of a few viewers.

There is also an element of ‘Know thy enemy’ to this.  Yes, I despaired when the one fully-formed orderly character was revealed to be gay in the most historically unlikely of circumstances.  But this particular bit of trite 21st-century plot does provide an opportunity to explain that, while the masculinity of medical orderlies might be (and often was) impugned, it was, as far as I have been able to uncover, never in terms of suspect or criminal sexuality, but rather in terms of age and physical health.  Homosexuality as a pathology affecting war service was an accusation more commonly (although still not very often) leveled at men who failed to enlist or were diagnosed with shell shock, another symptom of an inherent physical and moral insufficiency which signified male degeneracy.  Exploring these distinctions in masculinity is a key element of my research project; finding and exploiting the opportunities to disseminate my research and analysis more widely, in whatever unlikely form, is thus part of my professional remit.  In other words, I watch and critique because it is my job.

This is, of course, fundamentally the same defense for using Blackadder as a teaching tool about the history of the First World War.  The drama or comedy is the starting point, not the destination, and they probably have  more to tell us about the social and cultural context in which they have been created than about the historic realities of the period that they represent.  Using them in this way is not always comfortable.  For historians it means tackling popular historical misconceptions head on and sitting through the itchy discomfort of historically inaccurate dramas to find out what, exactly, has been portrayed and how.  For non-historians who wish to engage, it can mean having assumptions and beliefs punctured and deflated. At the very least, it means being forced out of a comfortable Sunday night of suspended disbelief.  Not everyone wants to spend their Sunday evening leisure engaging critically with what they are watching, and that of course is their prerogative. No one has to either watch and critique or read critical commentary if they choose not to. But I have to admit to enjoy bringing my practice of critical analysis to The Crimson Field of a Sunday, so I will carry on. And maybe in doing so I can also make a not very good drama at least a slightly better history lesson.

The $64,000 question

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When I posted last month about all the topics that I was planning forthcoming posts on, the one that the overwhelming majority of readers (well, three) wanted to know more about was why shell shock is not ‘what we now know as PTSD’.  In fact, one reader was so keen to know more that she emailed me, asking me for a one-line summary to discuss with a student.  After some thought, I replied that the soundbite answer is that PTSD is a medical diagnosis, while shell shock is a cultural idea.

It is, of course, more complicated than this, although being forced to summarize my rather disparate ideas on the subject was a useful discipline and I hope that my reader and her student found enough meat on those rather bare bones to chew over in the interim.  But it is just a sound bite, so the question remains, why don’t I think that PTSD and shell shock are different terms for the same thing?

I will start with PTSD, the condition that I know rather less about but which I understand primarily as a medical diagnosis.  It has been part of public consciousness since 1980, when it was first officially recognised and appeared in DSM III, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.  DSM V has recently been published, including a revised, hotly contested definition of PTSD which complicates the ‘constellation of symptoms’ that are classified as defining the condition.  Indeed, PTSD has never not been contested.  As Ben Shephard has pointed out, the recognition of the condition was viewed by some from the outset as politically driven, to improve state benefits for Vietnam veterans.  He also notes, however, that the recognition of PTSD in DSM III gave a previously ‘vague and emotive “post-Vietnam syndrome” … real intellectual authority.’ [1] This is an authority that the term has, despite much argument, maintained for over thirty years. It is not only ‘the overriding diagnosis for the psychiatric disorders of war’, [2] it is also a legally and medically recognized response to civilian traumas, diagnosed in victims of crime, industrial accident and medical traumas.

So how does this differ from shell shock? Shell shock was, after all, a term coined by a doctor attempting to diagnose a constellation of inexplicable symptoms which are now recognized as those associated with psychological wounding. The problem is that, as a medical concept, ‘shell shock’ was originally used in relation to the theory that shell blast (and burial alive caused by shell fire) resulted in microscopic neurological damage which in turn caused the more visible and seemingly inexplicable symptoms on display. Although an idea that continued to have its supporters throughout the First World War, it was one which did not stand up to scrutiny and, by mid-1916, shell shock was generally discredited as a medical term. Indeed, Charles Myers, credited with coining the term, would later write that it was ‘a singularly ill-chosen term; and in other respects … has proved a singularly harmful one’, [3] distracting, as it seemed to Myers, from a proper understanding of the psychic damage men were suffering from in response to the traumas of danger, pain and, above all, fear. At the same time, the British military authorities, concerned that the vibrant phrase was encouraging an epidemic of incurable nervous responses and convinced that the weakness it appeared to expose was contagious, with one shell-shocked soldier within a unit causing others to suffer, or pretend to suffer, from the condition as well, forbad its use in favour of more bureaucratic terms such as ‘Not Yet Diagnosed (Nervous).’

Yet the phrase did not disappear. Almost as soon as it was coined it took on a life of its own, moving, as Jay Winter has argued, ‘from the medical to the metaphysical’ and turning ‘from a diagnosis into a metaphor.’ [4] From soldiers who, on seeing their comrades suffering from psychological wounds commented, ‘there was such a thing as shell shock’ to contemporary usage where to be shell-shocked by something is the common rhetorical response to almost any unexpected event, the term has become deeply embedded in the English language. Beyond this, shell shock has, for many years, been the symbolic wound of the war, the condition which all men suffered from and which was the clearest expression not only of their suffering and silencing (hysterical mutism was one symptom of the condition), but of the madness of war itself. It is not for nothing that the image of Blackadder with underpants on his head and pencils up his nose, feigning insanity as the only way out of an insane situation, is one of the two most iconic of the final episode of Blackadder Goes Forth. (The other, of course, is the final fade from men charging over the top to a poppy field, with death being the only other exit from the insanity of warfare.) Shell shock, then, has come to represent the psychological damage that war inflicts on men in a way that was not only not intended originally but also in ways that go far beyond any medical understanding of the psychological trauma of war.

Yet it is not simply that shell shock is, in one way, far more wide-ranging as a term than PTSD. Because in another way it is a far narrower term. PTSD did not merely refashion pre-existing ideas, as Allan Young has argued. [5] It also forged ‘A bridge … between “war neurosis” and the victims of civilian trauma that had never really existed before …. [In doing so it] helped to create a new, unitary kind of “trauma”.’ [6] Despite the almost reflexive use of ‘shell shock’ in moments of not-necessarily-traumatic shock, shell shock remains primarily a metaphor for the trauma and madness of warfare. By comparison, PTSD encompasses the psychological responses to a far greater variety of traumas. Amanda Holden may recently have expressed surprise at being diagnosed with PTSD following the traumatic birth of her daughter, claiming that she associated the condition primarily with the battlefield, but PTSD is regularly diagnosed in women who have had traumatic births, as well as victims of domestic violence and civil catastrophes such as railway accidents, taking it back to one of the earliest formulations of responses to psychological trauma, the 19th century condition ‘railway spine’.

Is PTSD becoming a cultural idea, then, through its use to define responses to traumas beyond the battlefield? I don’t think so. The framework within which it is used are still primarily medical, or medico-legal, and seek to limit the definition of those suffering from the condition, rather than expand it. No one has ever claimed of PTSD, as has been claimed of shell shock, that an entire generation suffered from it, and I doubt anyone will.

So no, PTSD is not simply ‘what we now call shell shock’, although it is possible to identify the condition initially termed as shell shock as an ancestor of what is now known as PTSD. But, as Hazel Croft argues, ‘Although each configuration of psychiatric injury draws on previous concepts, trauma has to be situated in the particular social, cultural and political circumstances … in which it is interpreted.’ [7] It is still possible to contextualised much of what is defined as PTSD this way; I am not sure the same can be said about the range of meanings that, today, the idea of shell shock is asked to encompass. It is not only that PTSD encompasses a potentially more sophisticated understanding of psychiatric disorder but that shell shock is not, and never really has been, a diagnostic term.  It is far, far more than that.

Disclaimer: All of the above refers exclusively to my reading of the history of shell shock in Britain and the resonance of the term in British culture.  The formulations of the meaning and significance of PTSD and shell shock as both terms and ideas in other cultures and other languages are different but are beyond my current competence and the scope of this post.

[1] Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists 1914-1994 (London: Pimlico, 2000), p.367.

[2] Hazel Croft, ‘Gendered Diagnostics from Shellshock to PTSD, 1914-2010’ in Ana Carden-Coyne (ed.), Gender and Conflict Since 1914 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p117

[3] C.S. Myers, Shell Shock in France 1914-1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), p.26

[4] Jay Winter, ‘Shell-shock and the Cultural History of the Great War’, Journal of Contemporary History , 35(1), 2000: 7.

[5] Allan Young, The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

[6] Shephard, p.367

[7] Croft, p.110.

Very well then, I contradict myself…

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Last Friday, I went to the final showcase for the Legacies of War Leeds Stories of the Great War project.  I haven’t had a huge amount to do with this project, so it was both a surprise and a delight of an event, with results (many of them ongoing) of six exciting community projects on display.  Of the six, two stood out, the year 11 students from Roundhay School who produced two films, one silent, one a pastiche news bulletin, inspired by the history of Belgian refugees in Leeds, and Urban Sprawl theatre company, Leeds’ sole homeless theatre company, who came up with a touching, funny, vulgar music hall riff on the theme of enlistment.  All the projects were moving, informed and passionate, but these two groups stood out for their creativity and humour that, in the case of Urban Sprawl, was true enough to the spirit of the times they evoked that it had me referencing Frederick Manning’s Her Privates We.

Which brings me to another First World War event from last week, this one a launch rather than a culmination.  14-18 NOW, which launched officially on 27th March, is an Arts Council and Heritage Lottery Fund funded series of events, hosted by the Imperial War Museum and taking place around the country.  Projects range from a Royal de Luxe production telling the story of the Accrington Pals using giant puppets in the streets of Liverpool to 1914 told day-by-day through cartoons.

The reactions have been almost as varied as the proposed artistic outputs.  The first response on Twitter was, in general, a rather patronising, ‘These people need to learn some “real” history.’  The mainstream media tended to pick up on the project to paint warships using First World War-era ‘Dazzle’ camouflage techniques, sparking this bizarre but somehow predictable response from the Guardian.  By the weekend there were some more detailed, considered response emerging on blogs, most notably those of George Simmers and Jonathan Boff. More recently, Gary Sheffield has pitched in with this interesting discussion of why the idea of turning off lights to mark the start of the war is historically uninformed.

By rights, I should be in complete agreement with these posts, and to some extent I am, having done my fair share of fulminating about luvvies voicing ill-informed opinions about how the war should be commemorated.  I agree that Stephen Fry’s letter to an unknown soldier, as well as several of the projects on 14-18 NOW, are deeply clichéd.  And yet overall I find myself intrigued and excited by the majority of ideas on display, and particularly by the Letter to Unknown Soldier soldier project.

Part of this is due to a huge personal affection for the Charles Jagger memorial sculpture honouring the dead of the Great Western Railway on platform 1 of Paddington Station, the Unknown Soldier of the title.  Reading his letter from home, he forms the cover of my monograph on writing wartime masculinity, in stunning a photograph by my brother, photographer Sebastian Meyer. Men of War coverAnything that makes people more aware of this particular statue is liable to get my attention and my approbation.

But I also keep coming back to those amazingly creative responses to the history of the war on display last week.  The Letter to the Unknown Soldier invites similar creativity from participants.  I doubt it will come from well-known artistic or creative figures, given the evidence so far available.  But I love the idea of a busy commuter, looking for the first time at that beautiful, powerful face, being inspired to engage with the history of the First World War enough to write their own letter, an act of commemoration speaking not only to Jagger’s vision but also that of Eliot and Auden.  Or maybe it will be a local homeless person who, like the clients of Urban Sprawl, locates a sense of identity and community in this imagined figure of the past.  Yes, these will be the projection of 21st-century ideas, concerns, aspirations on to an image almost a century old.  But in looking to the wider public, there is the potential for an artistic engagement with history beyond the clichés that, so often, have dominated Britain’s commemorations. It is an artistic response, certainly, but given the richness and complexity of artistic responses across the past century, responses which have led to their own branch of academic study, this too will be ‘real’ history.

At the heart of my unease at the response to 14-18 NOW, however, is, I realise after a week of thinking about it, actually very similar to the annoyance I felt at the luvvies’ letter (see above).  I resent, deeply, being told how to commemorate the First World War, whether it is by artists or historians.  Both groups have important contributions to make to the way in which the war is remembered.  At their best, the disciplines can combine in extraordinary and unexpected ways that enlighten the past anew, as was perfectly demonstrated at the Tetley last Friday night. As a historian, not only do I think that there is potential for the continuation of artistic commemorations that have been part of British culture since the war years in the 14-18 NOW project, but I hope that, given the opportunity to contribute through active engagement rather than holding aloof or, in the worst cases, simply sneering, my discipline may enable these artistic events to have real resonance throughout the centenary.  On which note, I am off to write my own letter to the unknown soldier of platform 1.

What fresh hell is this?

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This post is one of an occasional series that might be entitled ‘Sorry I haven’t posted anything in a while’.  In fact, my silence on the blogging front has been something of a frustration as I have at least three posts that I want/need to write.  The problem, as always, is finding the time between grant deadlines, an overdue book review, an even more overdue article, teaching, marking and, oh yes, the research project that I am actually contracted to be undertaking!

And that is just on the formal professional front.  As a (semi-)public historian in this centenary year, I find myself juggling interviews, requests for interviews, requests for articles and comments, as well as the private demands of family life which, as my tag-line for this blog indicates, are as much a part of my identity as anything related to the histories of gender or the First World War.  So the post I had planned to coincide with International Women’s Day has been rather swamped by the fact that my son still hasn’t written his thank you cards for his birthday presents (meeting deadlines is clearly not a skill that runs in the family). Such are the ironies of working motherhood.

So yes, there is a lot going on in my life, but probably not any more than any other working parent, and I am blessed by having a job with a certain amount of flexibility built into it.  It is when I bump up against immovable deadlines, like the current grant application which is due next week and which has been slowly driving me mad with its looming urgency and terrifying complexity, that something, somewhere, has to give.  Generally speaking, it is this blog, the space where I explore the aspects of my life and work that I find thought-provoking but not necessarily immediately productive.

My apologies, therefore, if you have been eagerly awaiting my comments on the spate of recent First World War media outputs (and for once I know that this group includes more than just my mum as I did promise someone a comment on the Max Hastings/Niall Ferguson debate).  There will be, I promise, some thoughts on being a female First World War historian, on why shell shock is not the same thing as PTSD, and how I have been haunted by a (still unfulfilled) research project since I wrote my PhD, eventually.  But not until after 25th March.  Sorry.

Some more about footnotes

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Jeremy Paxman’s Britain’s Great War finished its four-part broadcast on BBC 1 last week.  Billed as the BBC’s flagship centenary programme, and the starting point for its commemorative activities, which now appear to reaching fever pitch in advance of the launch of the regional and online World War One at Home project, despite it only being February, the programme was a bit of a curate’s egg, although one that, on the whole, I enjoyed.

Four hours to cover the entire course of the First World War, principally from the perspective of the British ‘home front’, although with bits and pieces about the Western Front tucked in as well, is not a lot, and many topics were, inevitably, simplified or simply omitted.  To some extent, this doesn’t matter.  The BBC has, as it keeps informing us, over 2,500 hours of programming devoted to the war planned for the centenary years and many of the topics, including the global reach of the war, the relationships between Britain and her allies and even straightforward military history will, doubtless, be dealt with elsewhere and in more detail.

Other aspects were more troubling.  Choosing to focus, often in some detail, on particular topics ended up giving an oddly skewed impression. Shell shock and facial disfigurement, currently vying for the status of symbolic wound of the war, were by no means the only life-altering medical conditions that men survived with, yet there was no mention of disease, amputation or the long-term affects of gas.  Fronts beyond the Western Front had little impact on this narrative of war, despite their impact on the consciousness of the British population at the time. And the limiting of the discussion of the importance of letters to a brief section on the postal system and the perspective of a single officer on the process of censoring letters was, for me as someone who has worked extensively on the letters men wrote home, extremely reductive.

Which brings me to the real problem I had with the programme, which has at its hearts a fairly fundamental contradiction.  Paxman has gained many plaudits for his authoritative and, on the whole, sensitive presentation of a range of material which was new to many viewers and which reflected many of the more cutting-edge and original arguments made in recent years by academic historians.  He also interviewed a number of people, most memorably the centenarian Violet Muers, whose eye-witness account of the German bombardment of Hartlepool made for powerful television.  But not one of these interviewees was a professional historian, a deliberate decision on the part of the producers who wanted to use the programme to emphasize familial connections between the war and their audience.

This in itself is not a problem.  As programmes such as ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ have shown, family connections to the past make for good television and are a powerful way of connecting contemporary audiences to history.  It is the attempt to combine cutting-edge historical arguments with the perspective of the interested descendent that creates issues.  Because the overall effect was to invest all the authority for the arguments made entirely in Paxman himself.  And while he is an authoritative figure, and I can well believe read widely around the subject and come to his own conclusions about what points to make, he is not, in fact, the historian who has undertaken the research that backs so many of the claims he made over the course of the programme.

Some of that research has been done by programme’s historical adviser, Adrian Gregory, who published The Last Great War (Cambridge University Press, 2008), an excellent piece of social history that is both scholarly and accessible and which I would highly recommend to anyone interested in the topic. Presumably the interested audience member would be able to pick Adrian’s name from the credits and track down his publications if they wanted to read more about the subject.  But Adrian’s is not the only original research to influence Paxman’s arguments.  David Cannadine’s The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (Yale University Press, 1990), Dan Todman’s The Great War: Myth and Memory (Hambledon and London, 2005), Michael Roper’s The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester University Press, 2009) and, most recently of all, Laura Ugolini’s Civvies: Middle-Class Men on the English Home Front (Manchester University Press, 2013) all contributed to at least some part of the argument being made.  And these are simply the works that spring most immediately to mind, reflecting as they do my own particular research interests. With greater concentration (and rather more time at my disposal), I suspect I could compile a further reading list of recent scholarly research so extensive as to be potentially daunting to an undergraduate, let alone a curious but not obsessive Monday night television viewer.

The problem this highlights is the fact that, as there are no footnotes on television, how do professional historians (both academic and otherwise) working on the history of the First World War ensure that their work is properly acknowledged?  Many have spent a great deal of time and effort, not to mention funds, sourcing and interpreting the primary source material, as well as formulating the arguments that Paxman so authoritatively deploys.  For academic historians, this work forms the basis of their professional reputations and the intellectual capital that they deploy to make a living.  As such, that work needs to be recognised not simply by specialists but, if those arguments are going to be deployed more widely, then by all those who are making use of them.  This is not merely good manners; it is the very foundation of intellectual exchange and honesty.  But how to do this in a way that is both engaging to a broad non-specialist audience and is fair to researchers remains something that needs urgently to be discussed.  I have been mooting the idea of topic-specific further reading lists to be publicised alongside future programmes, but who compiles these and how their time is paid for remains an open question.  Equally problematic, from the perspective of engagement, is the ethics of recommending books that may have cover prices beyond not merely the interested individual but also the cash-strapped local library.  The Cambridge History of the First World War may be one of the most important recent publications on the subject, but at £90 a volume (£240 for all three), it is hardly going to have a wide circulation beyond university and other specialist libraries.

There is also the related problem in the BBC’s apparent fear of historians as specialist commentators, at least in relation to its most prominent offerings on the First World War.  While BBC 2 and BBC 4 television both seem willing to interview historians as specialists, BBC 1 so far prefers to use Paxman, Kate Adie and Dan Snow for almost all commentary related to the First World War.  Regional radio, working in partnership with the AHRC, has made extensive use of specialist historical knowledge in producing the World War One at Home project. It remains to be seen how the programme is received more widely, but as a researcher and contributor it has, to date, been a positive and highly informative experience.  Yet Woman’s Hour has run a number of features on First World War topics (including Edith Cavell and the aftermath of the war) with no input from historians, despite there being not merely experts but indeed female experts in these fields who might have added useful perspective.* And the major on-line offering, the interactive guides to various aspects of the war, are predominantly fronted by either media personalities or those with contemporary professional interests in the subject, with historical expertise usually tucked away at the end.**  This is the most public and accessible display of historical knowledge of the war that the BBC is providing, yet the role of the historian in all of this is too often hidden and unacknowledged.  This is troubling given that most historians are fundamentally communicators, interested in ensuring that other people know about the work they do and the stories that they uncover.  And many are not only presentable but are capable of learning the skills necessary to engage with a popular audience.  Indeed, in the current academic climate, with its emphasis on impact and engagement, many are not merely willing but feel compelled to do so, whether through formal media training or less formal practices including blogging.

None of this, of course, is new or specific to the centenary of the First World War, or even to the popular media.  Recent impassioned blogs by Matt Houlbrook and Lesley Hall point to the pervasiveness of the potential for mistreatment and exploitation of academics, particularly early-career researchers, by both the media and well-known established historians (and their publishers).  For historians of the First World War, however, this centenary moment presents both a challenge and an opportunity, to ensure not only that our research, in all its originality, is made accessible to a wide audience, but that we gain due credit for we have done and are doing, both those of us who choose to work directly with media outlets and those who do not.  There are no easy answers as to how we do this, but the moment to have the discussions is too opportune to be missed.

In the meantime, I will start compiling my further reading list, to be posted on here at a later date.  Please do get in touch if there is a particular volume that you think should have been cited in relation to Paxman’s programme (preferably with a note as to the bit it relates to) and I will make sure it is included.

*The special extended programme on 5th February made excellent use of Professor Joanna Bourke and Professor Maggie Andrews as commentators, but again, Kate Adie and Baroness Shirley Williams were the guests who names featured most prominently in the publicity.

**Honourable exceptions here are Gary Sheffield and Sam Willis.

A question about a footnote

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Yesterday I attended the launch of the new British Council report Remember the World as Well as the War at the House of Lords.  The report explores international knowledge and understanding of the First World War, and the headlines here in Britain have mainly focused on the apparent lack of British knowledge of the war. This, interestingly, was not the tone of the discussion which took place yesterday.  The document was introduced by John Dubber, who co-authored it with Dr Anne Bostanci, before being discussed by Parliamentarians Keith Simpson and Baroness Young of Hornsey, with a final contribution from Dr Catriona Pennell, the historical consultant.  The debate was then opened up to contributions from the floor, which included, most pertinently, inquiries as to how the British Council was planning to use the document to engage the public with the debates it raises, as well as suggestions that similar, comparative research be carried out in the US and proposals for collaboration with other organisations to spread the document’s reach.

One of Catriona’s key points was that working as historical consultant had been, for her, a good exercise in academic discipline and concision, forcing her to think critically about how to present a huge range of historical argument, covering at least the past 30 years, in 10,000 words.  Indeed, she noted that she had originally presented her collaborators with 17,000 and that, in the editing process, large swathes of the history of the war, including the conflict’s impact on gender and on science and technology had had to be removed.  I have not yet had time read the document in great detail (I spent the train ride home last night reading the book I am supposed to have written a review for by the end of the week) but, as a historian of precisely those two facets of the history of the war, my initial glance the through did suggest that their importance is implicit in parts of the discussion, particularly the complications that they bring to our understanding of the war.

Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the graph on page 7 which charts UK responses to the question ‘Were members of your family/your local community involved in, or directly affected by, the First World War?’  The first responses listed are ‘Yes, a family member fought in the First World War’ (37%) and ‘Yes, a family/community member was involved in the war effort in another way’ (9%).  This second response is glossed with a footnote which reads ‘as carrier, labourer or other support staff (for example munitions support or digging trenches); as medical staff; on the home front (for example in factories) etc.’ [My italics.]

Now, I haven’t been blogging directly about my own research recently, but that footnote goes right to the heart of the question that is at its centre, namely how was the war experienced by men who served in military uniform in non-combatant medical roles during the First World War.  Because the structure of the responses as set out creates a seemingly unbridgable gap between combat and non-combat in terms of war service, a gulf that I am increasingly coming to believe did not exist, or at least could not be sustained, throughout the course of the conflict, within the British armed forces.  R.A.M.C. servicemen certainly saw themselves as soldiers, the comrades and equals of their combatant fellow servicemen, even if they didn’t bear arms.  And those fellow servicemen increasingly viewed R.A.M.C. as equals in terms of service rendered, acclaiming the qualities of endurance and comradeship that were key to understandings of heroism during the war years. Military medical service personnel served and were seen to serve, even if they did not fight, a fact which rather nuances not only the question of in what ways family members engaged with the war, but an earlier one about how the war should be commemorated, illustrated on page 5. In answer to this question, 64% (the decided majority) of UK respondents answered that a focus on human suffering and loss of lives should form the focus of commemorations over the next four years.  Yet the broader, more complex question of how the war was experienced, by those who survived as well as those who did not, was not, apparently an option given to respondents.  It is this question that forms the thrust of my research as a historian, as it does for many other social and cultural historians, and, I believe, motivates the large numbers of people engage in personal, local and regional research and commemoration projects taking place around Britain in response to the centenary.

So I had a rather pernickity question about the methodology used by YouGov (who carried out the polling for the survey) and about how the questions and responses presented to respondents were decided upon, as well as a rather broader one about how the material on gender, medicine and everything else that had to be edited out might be utilised in future to enhance the findings already published.  Last night’s launch, however, focusing as it did, quite rightly, on the global nature of the conflict and its continuing, multifaceted, global legacies, was not the right place to ask those questions.  So instead I am asking them here, or at least, to bring it back to Catriona’s own final question about how projects such as this facilitate the communication of cutting-edge scholarly ideas to a wider public, how do we make pernickity questions about footnotes relevant to that wider audience that is keen to find out how the war affected their family, their town, their region?  Buried in that footnote are some really interesting debates about the nature of service, for men and for women, in wartime and the impact of war on international medical and philanthropic ideals of care and compassion.  These are debates that still have relevance today, for medics in the battlefield and for NGOs such as the Red Cross and Red Crescent, attempting to alleviate the suffering of all involved in contemporary conflicts.  These are discussions that academics are having.  Now, how do we make sure that they form part of the discussion when it comes to international commemoration as well?