Blood,Mud and Futility? Patrick MacGill and the Experience of the Great War

Despite a growing body of detailed studies of key aspects of the Great War, there remains a dominant image of the war as a major tragedy in which the idealism of a generation of young men was exploited by their incompetent and callous elders and out of which there emerged a profound disillusionment and rejection of past values. Such an interpretation rests on the evidence of a small, and untypical, number of ‘soldier-writers’. By exploring the contemporaneous writings of a relatively unknown figure, Patrick MacGill, this article offers an alternative perspective that recognises both the well-known horrors of the Great War but also the persistence of certain ‘heroic’ values that have been misleadingly obscured by the well-known retrospective accounts of the war.

Résumé:?Malgré de nombreuses études détaillées sur la grande guerre, une image domine qui présente le conflit comme le tombeau des idéalismes et dont ne sortiraient que la désillusion et le rejet des valeurs du passé. Bien des éléments de cette interprétation dépendent des écrits de quelques auteurs atypiques. Une lecture de Patrick MacGill permet de voir en son contexte la persistance des valeurs héroïques de la grande guerre souvent minimisées par la suite.     

‘Tokens of Fritz’: Canadian Soldiers and the Art of Souveneering in the Great War

Abstract

This article examines the US Army’s role in the post-war refugee crisis in American-occupied Germany. American policy placed all responsibility for ethnic German expellees in the hands of German authorities. However, as the example of the Bavarian city of Würzburg illustrates, the expellee issue played a prominent role in relations between Americans, Germans, and refugees during the post-war and early Cold War periods. By outlining the synergistic relationship between these groups, this article proposes to integrate the social history of West Germany within the speci?c context of the changing security situation in Europe and American Cold War planning.     

‘Business as usual’: the impact of the Great War on the British ceramics industry

SUMMARY: The Great War had a dramatic impact upon the manufacturing industries and trade of the United Kingdom, and not least upon the ceramics industry. Manufacturers faced tremendous difficulties, including a massive decline in the overseas trade essential to their survival. At the same time, however, the war itself presented opportunities for the expansion and development of British ceramic manufacture and the repositioning of British ceramics in the global market. In August 1914 the British ceramics trade was in a precarious state, threatened both at home and in long-held overseas markets by low-priced porcelains from German and Austria–Hungary. However, the naval blockade of Continental ports which followed the outbreak of war denied these countries access to what had been an extremely lucrative overseas trade, leaving customers in many countries desperate for replacements for the goods no longer available. British manufacturers rose to the challenge, maintaining production, developing new lines and taking trade from its enemies. The war halted the steady decline of the British ceramics industry, but its post-war future was by no means secured.     

Mythologising the Dominion Fighting Man: Australian and Canadian Narratives of the First World War Soldier, 1914–39

A stereotypical image of the nation's First World War soldiers—and a conventional understanding of their war experience and its meaning—is not a concept unique to the British Empire's former Pacific Dominions, but is also promulgated in other parts of the Empire. During the First World War and interwar period, Canada also saw the emergence of a ‘Myth of the Soldier’ that paralleled the Anzac legend in many ways. This article focuses on some of the similarities and differences in Australia and Canada's mythologising of their First World War soldiers, proposing that this process reflects aspects of identity formation common to settler societies within the British world.     

The future of Poland, 1914–1917: France and Great Britain in the Triple Entente

Abstract

THE POLISH QUESTION — whether, and if so how and in what form, to recreate an independent Polish state — was one of the most vexing problems that faced European diplomats during the First World War. Believing that aroused Polish patriotism could be a powerful weapon against the Central Powers, yet fearing that support for Polish national aspirations would alienate their Russian ally and fracture the Triple Entente, British and French statesmen had to decide whether they could include the recreation of Poland among their war aims without jeopardizing the Entente, and hence the chances of victory. Given their different strategic priorities, the French and the British gave different answers.     

The imperial race and the immigration sieve: The Canadian debate on assisted British migration and empire settlement, 1900–30

During the 1920s assisted migration from Britain sparked a complex and often bitter debate in Canada. It had long been held that migrants who required assistance were highly unlikely to make desirable new citizens. While the great majority of Anglo-Canadians wished to see increased British immigration in order to strengthen imperial ties and maintain the cultural character of their nation, they feared an influx of ‘unfit’, unemployed urban workers. In some quarters, these negative attitudes intensified as a result of Empire settlement schemes. Complaints about assisted migrants have been interpreted by some historians as evidence of growing nationalist, anti-imperial feeling in Canada. However, a broader overview of the debate indicates that many observers blamed the problems of Empire settlement on Canadian economic and social conditions, calling for reforms that would help British newcomers to succeed. At the end of the 1920s, even the strongest critics of assisted migration were still eager to encourage British settlement, provided that the immigrants could be drawn from rural areas rather than the cities.     

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.     

What Remains: Repatriating and Entombing a Canadian Unknown Soldier of the Great War in the Nation’s Capital

This article chronicles and contextualizes the creation of a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Canada’s capital. In so doing, it traces the myriad considerations, as well as complexities — political, procedural, and practical — that abounded in bringing this major memorial installation into being, namely the repatriation, from a Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in France, of a Canadian unknown soldier of the Great War and his ceremonial reburial in Ottawa. Moreover, it argues that the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, situated within an existing monumental space, functions, in the coinage of geographer Owen Dwyer, as an allied symbolic accretion to the National War Memorial.     

The Battle of Sha’iba, 1915: Ottomanism,British Imperialism and Shia Religious Activism during the Mesopotamian Campaign

This article analyses relations among the Ottoman Empire, British imperialism and Shia religious proto-nationalism in the period before and after the battle of Sha’iba of 1915, one of the pivotal engagements of the Mesopotamian campaign. It illustrates how the narrow victory of the British at the battle led them to draw a number of over-optimistic conclusions regarding their role in Iraq and their ability to co-opt the Arabs of the province against their ‘Turkish’ overlords. The victory at Sha’iba and in particular the ambivalent role played by a number of the Arab mujahidin volunteers led the British to conclude that there had never been any real enthusiasm for the jihad declared by the Ottomans against the British occupiers. However, this was based on the false perception that lack of commitment to Ottomanism could be equated with sympathy for British imperialism. In particular, the British failed to recognise that the Ottoman summons to jihad had strengthened the developing forms of Shia proto-nationalist consciousness led by various mujtahids influenced by the Iranian Constitutional Revolution.