Eric Bogle’s No Man’s Land and the grave of Willie McBride at the Somme

ABSTRACT

Eric Bogle wrote No Man’s Land in 1975. When it was released as The Green Fields of France by Davey Arthur and the Fureys in 1979 the song topped the Irish charts, while as far away as Australia it was declared one ‘of the most striking musical essays yet written on the futility of war.’ Yet No Man’s Land has been associated with controversy too: branded a rebel song in Ulster during The Troubles, singled out by Tony Blair as a ‘peace anthem’ and prelude to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, and controversially chosen by the Royal British Legion for the Poppy Day appeal in 2014. In addition to exploring the ‘complex relations between cultural and political history’ in Ireland, this article also looks at the making of the documentary film ‘Eric Bogle: Return to No Man’s Land’ (by Dan Frodsham) in which Bogle returned to the grave of Willie McBride on the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme to recite his poem to the now famous Inniskilling. To Bogle’s surprise the grave had become a pilgrimage site for this, an entirely fictional, Irish martyr created then immortalized in his own composition written four decades earlier.     

Tyrtaeus and the Civilian Poet of the Crimean War

Recent scholarship has delved into the impact of newspaper press upon Crimean War poetry and highlighted the challenges of war representation facing non-combatant poets. The Crimean conflict (1854–56), this essay will show, was not only a ‘media war’ but also a ‘literary’ one, during which mid-Victorian commentators and poets consciously reworked an array of established traditions of war poetry, especially those of Tyrtaeus, the Greek martial poet of the seventh century, to negotiate the duties and artistic endeavours of the civilian poet. Tracing the construction of a ‘Tyrtaean’ tradition from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815), it explores how a Romantic reworking of Tyrtaeus’ war songs served as a precedent for the civilian poets of the Crimean conflict, and how newspaper reports of the suffering of soldiers intensified a widespread scepticism of the civilian’s knowledge and bodily experience of war, which in turn instigated a reconfiguration of the ‘Tyrtaean’ poet. It argues that whilst the poetic efforts of Tom Taylor, Louisa Shore, and Alfred Tennyson to refashion the figure of the civilian manifest Crimean War poets’ anxiety about their non-combatant status and the use of poetry, they evacuated the ‘Tyrtaean mode’, a poetic mode intended to arouse people’s patriotic sentiment and exhort them to military action, forging a new image of war poet within their work marked by the civilian’s detachment from the spectacle of war and critical engagement with distant suffering.     

日本古代小说的佛学烙印与文化成因

日本古代小说大都具有浓郁的佛学色彩,净土、无常、果报是最典型的三个侧面。净土思想是日本佛教的主流且具有明显的现世特征：平安物语的净土信仰成为救赎宫廷贵族脱离苦难的精神支柱;中世战记物语的净土信仰多与死亡紧密相连,成为对战乱中人们渴求来世幸福的终极关怀。无常是日本小说尤其是中世物语中最浓墨重彩的一笔,无常既是对人间永无常住的感性叹息,也是对盛者必衰社会法则的理论解释,更成为武家社会切身感受的“生死观”。因果报应思想贯穿日本小说史的始终,它与宿世、轮回、转生等观念互为表里,成为孕育日本怪异小说流行的土壤之一,并表现出与儒家劝惩观念相结合的世俗化趋势。     

“Hangd for the True Faith”: Embodied Devotion in Early Modern English Carmelite Cloisters

The annals of the English Carmelites of Antwerp document religious devotions which were intensely corporeal. Biographical sketches of individual sisters describe spiritual practices in which prayer and meditation, often enhanced by visual or bodily contact with devotional objects, fostered mystical encounters with Christ, saints, and martyrs. The Passion and the physical torment of holy figures who died for their faith infused the cloister's spirituality. At Antwerp, nuns encountered stories of suffering in devotional books and in hagiographical accounts of both the early Christian, and the more recent English, martyrs. They might also engage physically with Christ and saints through the cloister's relic collection and other objects of devotion. This article explores the religious milieu at Antwerp, considering the nuns' spiritual proclivity for suffering, which was inspired in part by their religious exile from England. It argues that a culture of martyrdom infused private devotional practices and shaped the convent's corporate identity.     

Justifying sacrifice: Barack Obama and the selling and ending of the war in Afghanistan

Since taking office, United States President Barack Obama has attempted to refocus and revitalize the US war against terrorism. The centrepiece of this effort has been an increased emphasis on the war in Afghanistan, which he has characterized as the real frontline of the war on terror—as opposed to the ‘distraction’ of the Iraq war. After years of fighting under the Bush administration, Obama has had to ‘sell’ to the US public the renewed effort in Afghanistan and bordering Pakistan in order to maintain support for his policy. In speeches and other public pronouncements, Obama has drawn heavily on the idea of ‘sacrifice’ to justify the deepening of the commitment to the war, arguing that the costs of the war are necessary in order to keep the US safe from further terrorist attacks. This article explores this symbolic engagement with the sacrifices being made in the name of keeping the United States ‘safe’ from terrorism. It considers whether this approach resonates with public and elite opinion; it also considers the sustainability of underlying public support for the war and analyses how Obama has adapted his approach in order to fulfil his goal of drawing the US intervention to a close. While Obama appears to have judged well the price that the US public is willing to pay to defend against terrorism, it is argued that there are major risks involved in using the central principle of sacrifice when justifying the war. Obama has risked creating a ‘sacrifice trap’ whereby the more emphasis is placed on the sacrifices being made, the more necessary it becomes to demonstrate outcomes that make those sacrifices worthwhile. Obama's ultimate objective of withdrawing US forces from Afghanistan may yet be undermined, therefore, by the justifications he has given for the continued importance of the commitment.     

“Appear as Crucified for Me”: Sight,Suffering, and Spiritual Transformation in the Hymns of Charles Wesley

Early Methodist laypeople often described their conversion experiences in terms of seeing the suffering of Christ. This article considers this theme within early Methodist culture by examining the relationship between sight, suffering, and spiritual transformation in the hymns of Charles Wesley. Many of Wesley's hymns depict the suffering of Christ in evocative detail, encouraging the singer or reader to imagine and respond to this suffering in particular ways. I argue that Wesley presents the sight of Christ's suffering as having profound transformative power, at the heart of Christian experience. In doing so he constructs Methodist spirituality in a way that draws upon both the ancient Christian tradition of Passion devotion and contemporary eighteenth‐century convictions about the power of the sight of suffering.     

Inspecting the pious body: Christological morphology and the ritual-crucifixion allegation

The first ritual-murder accusations appeared at a time in which a theology that was increasingly invested in Christ's human body was articulated. Forms of mimetic devotion emerged across Latin Christendom, but were considered highly controversial. The Life and Miracles of St William of Norwich, this essay argues, is an attempt to think about some of the problems that arise from this theology. By interpreting Jewish actions, both real and alleged, the author, Thomas of Monmouth, deployed a Christian bodily logic in order to make a claim about William's sanctity based on his physical ‘likeness’ to Christ in suffering. While in the end this rhetorical and theological scheme was not widely accepted by the author's contemporaries, the Christological grammar of bodily hermeneutics that the Vita articulates resonated in the language of subsequent allegations.     

The Riddle of Paul de Man

The discovery in 1987 of Paul de Man’s pro‐Nazi literary activities in wartime Belgium prompted a debate over the fact that de Man neither publicly declared his collaboration, nor clarified the relationship between his wartime experience and his post‐war work. De Man’s detractors argued that he insidiously hid his past. The evidence of his concealment, they maintained, was his silence and unwavering conviction in his mature work that the meaning of every text contains its opposite. De Man guaranteed the impossibility of knowing the original meanings of his wartime articles. In contrast, de Man’s supporters argued that what appeared to be de Man’s silence masked his life‐long critique of his wartime errors. His heroic analysis, they maintained, was expressed in his post‐war work. In contrast to these interpretations, it is argued that de Man’s silence and post‐war work resulted from his rejection of his former self and the influence of its unacknowledged presence. The unintentional presence of his past caused de Man’s inability to speak openly about his coll aboration and shaped the content of his late work.     

Howard's War on Terror: A Conceivable,Communicable and Coercive Foreign Policy Discourse

This article explores the relationship between language and political possibility. It is argued that John Howard's language from 11 September 2001 to mid 2003 helped to enable the ‘War on Terror’ in an Australian context in three principal ways. Firstly, through contingent and contestable constructions of Australia, the world and their relationship, Howard's language made interventionism conceivable. Secondly, emphasising shared values, mateship and mutual sacrifice in war, Howard embedded his foreign policy discourse in the cultural terrain of ‘mainstream Australia’, specifically framing a foreign policy discourse that was communicable to ‘battlers’ and disillusioned ‘Hansonites’. Thirdly, positioning alternatives as ‘un-Australian’, Howard's language was particularly coercive, silencing potential oppositional voices.     

Going to war democratically: lessons for Australia from Canada and the UK

This article addresses the role of democracy in Australia’s foreign policy formation. It argues that public debate and deliberation on foreign policy is a normative good. When there is a lack of debate on a government decision, a democratic deficit occurs. Such a deficit is evident in the way Australia goes to war; however, the examples of Canada and the UK show that reforming parliamentary practice is possible. In the context of the ‘war on terror’, this article compares Australia, Canada, and the UK from 2001 to 2015 with regards to ‘war powers’. Drawing from debates recorded in Hansard, it finds that while Canada and the UK took steps to ‘parliamentarise’ their foreign policy formation, the war-powers prerogative of the Australian government remained absolute. It concludes that increasing the role of parliament may go a long way towards democratising the decision of when Australia goes to war. This has practical as well as normative benefits, since it may prevent governments from entering wars that are unsupported by the public. At minimum, it will compel governments to engage more thoroughly in public debate about their proposed policies, and justify their decisions to the nation.     

The Great War,the child’s body and the American Red Cross

Abstract

This article examines the child-relief activities of the American Red Cross in Hungary in the aftermath of the Great War, offering an insight into the workings of humanitarianism in interwar Europe. A close look at this one Central European ‘playground’ of transatlantic intervention helps us understand the logic and the underlying political, economic and ideological motives behind Allied humanitarian aid to ‘enemy’ children. Analysis of the ways in which the war’s aftermath affected children, their bodies and their relief throws light on the relationship between violent conflicts, children in need and humanitarian intervention. The article looks particularly at the role of the child’s damaged body and its photographic representation, making it what Cathleen Canning calls an ‘embodied experience of war’. Exploration of the humanitarian discourse around the suffering child helps us identify the humanitarian reaction to the unforeseen social consequences of wartime confrontation. The article argues that the harmed body of the ‘enemy child’ served to mobilise transnational compassion that challenged the war’s deeply anchored ‘friend–foe’ mentality. The child turned into a means of configuring and translating human suffering beyond ideological and political borders. At the same time humanitarian child relief helped to further consolidate asymmetric international power relations.     

Cogs in the Machine: The Experiences of Female Munitions Workers and Members of the Australian Women’s Land Army in South Australia, 1940–45

Mobilisation on the Australian ‘home front’ during the Second World War enabled some women to move temporarily into employment usually reserved for men, and to earn significantly higher wages than they were accustomed to, but the benefits of this have been often overstated. Focusing on South Australian women in the city and rural areas who took up the new working opportunities — in munitions factories and the Australian Women’s Land Army in particular — this article demonstrates that relatively few women were entitled to higher wages, such wages were lower and paid later in South Australia than in other states, and that working conditions were unattractive and often dangerous. At the war’s end, the social imperative to marry and raise children, coupled with demands that they give up their place for male workers, then saw many women return to domesticity or less-rewarded and lower status ‘female occupations’.     

Fictions and artifices

This article is in part a critique of Laura Nader's position on the three jihads (as published in AT 31,4). The author argues that Nader's critique of the privileges afforded to Zionism, specifically the failure to prosecute foreign British‐Jewish enlistees who served in the Israel Defence Forces program (Mahal), under the Foreign Enlistment Act of 1870 is misconstrued in Law. It further maintains that Nader's obfuscation of the term jihad as a ‘catch all’ in the framework of Jewish Christian and Islamic war ethics (‘holy war’) ignores the independent development and uniqueness of these phenomena which are necessarily historically and substantively distinct. The prevalence of metaphorical language, notably the modern use and abuse of the terms ‘jihad’ and ‘crusade’, denigrates the agency of medieval Christians and Muslims at the same time as it exculpates the agency of man today.     

The Injustice of Some Attacks: A Response to Stephen Strehle

Abstract

Despite Stephen Strehle's criticisms, the ‘just war’ tradition can be a useful and appropriate way of thinking through the ethical problems of war. If it remains grounded in the memory of human suffering, including the suffering of the enemy, then it is a flexible framework, open to new developments, which can guide ethical reflection. In fact, the just war tradition is a good example of the appropriate relation of religion to politics. Religious traditions must neither dictate political options directly, nor be separated from them entirely, but must engage the political sphere ‘indirectly’, via reasoned argumentation. Four elements of this indirect relation are described.     

Anthropology,Self-determination and Aboriginal Belief in the Christian God

Over the past forty years the Aboriginal people of Galiwin'ku (Elcho Island) in north-east Arnhem Land have successfully incorporated Christianity into their world view. However, a Uniting Church report characterises members of this same Yolngu (Aboriginal) community as being overwhelmed with feelings of inferiority and powerlessness and unable to function within structures established by Balanda (non-Aborigines). This paper contrasts the ways in which Christianity has helped break down the separation between cultural groups with its function as a structure for explicit discourse on Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal relations and inequality. While some Elcho Islanders see anthropologists as people who listen in order to work for Aborigines, Aboriginal Christians see them and other ‘scientists’ as attempting to undermine Aboriginal belief in the Christian God. They are seen as degrading a spiritual movement which has its foundation in the Dreaming and as posing a potential threat to the momentum of Aboriginal directed change in the community.     

Eliza’s Babes: Poetry ‘Proceeding from Divinity’ in Seventeenth–Century England

This article examines the poetry and prose meditations in the anonymous 1652 volume Eliza’s Babes: or The Virgins–offering. The article begins by reconsidering Liam Semler’s recent assertion that Eliza was a Parliamentarian and religiously radical, arguing instead that she was a centrist, loyalist Protestant. The article then examines the handbooks to devotion and meditation from this loyalist tradition that helped define Eliza’s understanding of public and private and how these concepts were gendered. In keeping with writers such as Joseph Hall and Daniel Featly, Eliza views her private devotion as on a continuum which leads to public worship, or ‘thanks’ as she terms it. Eliza uses this paradigm of public and private to justify both the printing of her poems and her very unusual theology of marriage, in which she considers Christ her only true husband. The final section of the article considers whether Eliza’s understanding of public and private offers her more ‘freedom’ than other women writers, and concludes that any judgement of her freedom must be carefully calibrated to the religious and political contexts of her book.     

The Spanish American War’s ‘Most Durable Hero’: Admiral Pasquale Cervera and Popular Heroic Values in the United States, 1898–1909

The United States honored a host of military heroes during the Spanish American War including Pasqual Cervera y Topete, the enemy admiral who had experienced a humiliating defeat at the Battle of Santiago Bay, Cuba (3 June 1898) at the hands of US naval forces. Over the course of the war and in the year that followed, American public opinion of the admiral became positive and increasingly laudatory. By late 1899, Life Magazine, followed by other popular publications, claimed that Cervera was a better war hero then Admiral George Dewey and other American officers who had been wildly celebrated for their wartime heroics. The enemy admiral’s heroic rise was possible because of a fundamental change in the relationship between the press and the nation’s war heroes that sped up each champion’s ultimate decline. In the late nineteenth century Americans sought chivalrous, selfless men of action for their heroes. As journalists began covering each war hero’s daily life as they did other celebrities, however, they discovered character flaws in the nation’s homegrown champions. This examination of Cervera’s gradual rise as an American hero through his death in 1909 includes an overview of the American hero-making process and lifecycle and how celebrity journalism shortened the reign of most war heroes. After identifying the complicated set of values the nation sought in its war heroes at the end of the century, this study will also explain why journalists considered naval heroes as better representatives of those cherished ideals than those from the Army (including volunteer Theodore Roosevelt) until well after the end of the war. Roosevelt was honored as a hero during the war and won the 1899 New York gubernatorial election largely because of his wartime popularity, but was not considered selfless because of his clear political ambitions. American hero-worship of Cervera developed slowly, was considerably more subdued than the public enthusiasm displayed for America’s native-born champions, and was undoubtedly bestowed, in part, as a criticism of the failure of American heroes to live up to the heroic narrative created for them by reporters and biographers. Cervera’s ranking as Life’s ‘most durable hero’ of the war, while seemingly nonsensical, begins to make more sense when the Spanish admiral is reconfigured as a national cultural hero instead of an American military champion. Despite his enemy status, Cervera came to epitomise important military values of the day, because of the rapid decline of the nation’s American-born war heroes brought about by celebrity journalism.     

A Religious Response Veiled in a Presidential Address: A Theological Study of Bush's Speech on 20 september 2001

Abstract

The speech met the moment. The moment was like none experienced before. The speech transformed a presidency and rallied a nation. But what was this pivotal response to a critical moment in American history? Was it a call to a just and holy war? Is God really on the president's ‘side’? This article analyzes the speech delivered by President George W. Bush on 20 September 2001, to a joint session of Congress and to a troubled nation. It was a speech that depended on intimations of righteous indignation, a clear demarcation of good and evil, and a God who is not neutral. The article looks at the religious themes overtly and subtly stated in this speech, to discern what was actually a religious response to a global crisis that took the form of a presidential address.     

作为“遗产线路”的文物南迁与“遗产线路”概念再认识

文物南迁是20世纪30至50年代为保护故宫等机构文物而进行的文物大迁徙活动。这次迁徙在20余座城市留下了丰富的史迹遗产和报纸档案资料。文物南迁至今已有近百年历史,期间由于战争与和平、文物价值与文化认同的变迁,南迁之举被不断赋予了新的历史价值和精神文化意义,使得这一历史事件的遗迹可以被放到"遗产线路"的视角下去看待,并对该遗产概念的发展完善具有推动作用。