NOSTALGIA AS AN EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE IN THE GREAT WAR

ABSTRACTThis article is concerned with the longing for home of British soldiers during the First World War. What, it asks, can such longings reveal about the psychological impact of trench warfare? Historians have differed in the significance that they ascribe to domestic attachments. Some argue that a ‘cultural chasm’ developed between the fronts, producing anger and disillusionment among soldiers which would surface fully fledged after the war, while others assert the continuing vitality of the links with home. Evidence for both these perceptions can be found in the letters written by British soldiers to their families. The functions of nostalgia could range from reassurance or momentary relief from boredom and impersonal army routines, through flight from intolerable anxiety, to survival through the power of love. Although animated by solitude, nostalgia provided a means of communication with loved ones. Its emotional tones varied according to the soldier's age and the nature of his attachments to home. The young soldier's reminiscences of home conveyed, not just the comforting past, but the hateful present. Nostalgia, being rooted in early memories of care, could be a potent vehicle for arousing the anxieties of loved ones, especially mothers. Among married men, the desire to return to wives and children could provide a powerful motivation for survival. This analysis suggests a different and more varied account of the genesis of the ‘disillusionment story’ of the war than is put forward in some recent studies. Among men of the ‘war generation’ particularly, disillusionment was not only a post-war construction, an artefact of cultural memory, but a powerful legacy of the emotional experience of the war itself.</jats:p

Growing Up in the Trenches: Fritz Draper Hurd and the Great War

On February 18, 1919, Second Lieutenant Fritz Draper Hurd supervised recreational activities for the men of the 103rd Field Artillery. The men breathed easy; they tossed a football and even engaged in a little gallows humor with a “gas mask race,” at last finding a use for the once fearsome yet no longer needed device. The Great War was over, and the men of the 103rd Field Artillery were content to lob footballs instead of shells as they awaited their discharge papers. [excerpt

A New Officer for a New Army: The Leadership of Major Hugh J.C. Peirs in the Great War

World War One brought dramatic changes to the officer corps of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) fighting on the Western Front. The heavy casualties sustained meant that mass mobilization at home had to take place in order to replace combat losses. As a result, the previously small, but professional British army was forced to transition into a large citizen-soldier army. This new force required not just new officers, but an entirely new leadership model. The formation and exercise of this new style of leadership is examined through the letters of Major John Hugh Chevalier Peirs, executive officer and later commander of the 8th Queen’s Royal West Surrey Regiment who served on the Western Front from 1915-1918. Major Peirs’ letters highlight the emergence of this new breed of leadership within Kitchener’s New Army and make clear why its emergence was so important to the overall morale and success of the BEF

“More a Medicine than a Beverage”: “Demon Rum” and the Canadian Trench Soldier of the First World War

A couple of months before he was killed at Vimy Ridge, Private Ronald Mackinnon noted that he had to cut his letter to his father short because he heard “the joyful cry [of] ‘rum up’.” In the renches, everyone reacted when rum was issued. The rum ration was, in the words of Private E. Seaman of the 3rd Battalion, “the highlight of the day.” First Battalion infantryman Ralph Bell wrote that “When the days shorten, and the rain never ceases; when the sky is ever grey, the nights chill, and trenches thigh deep in mud and water; when the front is altogether a beastly place, in fact, we have one consolation. It comes in gallon jars, marked simply ‘S.R.D.’” That SRD was army issued Special Red Demerara rum

Football: a counterpoint to the procession of pain on the Western Front, 1914-1918?

In this article, three artworks of the First World War containing images of recreational football are analysed. These three images, In the Wings of the Theatre of War, Artillery Men at Football and Gassed, span the war from its beginning to its conclusion and are discussed in relationship to the development of recreational football in the front-line area, the evolving policies of censorship and propaganda and in consideration of the national mood in Britain. The paper shows how football went from being a spontaneous and improvised pastime in the early stages of the war to a well organized entertainment by war’s end. The images demonstrate how the war was portrayed as a temporary affair by a confident nation in 1914 to a more resigned acceptance of a semi-permanent event to be endured by 1918; however, all three artworks show that the sporting spirit, and hence the fighting spirit, of the British soldier was intact