Dominion cartoon satire as trench culture narratives: complaints, endurance and stoicism

Although Dominion soldiers’ Great War field publications are relatively well known, the way troops created cartoon multi-panel formats in some of them has been neglected as a record of satirical social observation. Visual narrative humour provides a ‘bottom-up’ perspective for journalistic observations that in many cases capture the spirit of the army in terms of stoicism, buoyed by a culture of internal complaints. Troop concerns expressed in the early comic strips of Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders and British were similar. They shared a collective editorial purpose of morale boosting among the ranks through the use of everyday narratives that elevated the anti-heroism of the citizen soldier, portrayed as a transnational everyman in the service of empire. The regenerative value of disparagement humour provided a redefinition of courage as the very act of endurance on the Western Front

'Crawling in the Flanders mud': Samuel Beckett, war writing and scatological pacifism

This article explores the depiction of wounded soldiers in Samuel Beckett’s novel Mercier and Camier (written in French in 1946, published in 1970, and translated and published in English in 1974). This aspect of the novel is discussed from two perspectives: the Irish military history which Beckett repeatedly invokes in the novel, notably the Boer War and World War I; and the relation between the novel and the ‘war books’ which followed World War I, many of which express pacifist ideals by laying bare the suffering which combatant bodies experience. Drawing attention to the hitherto neglected context of war writing for the image of the wounded soldier in Beckett’s work, this article uses Mercier and Camier to consider the political implications of the author’s allusions to military history following World War II

The great European Cup-Tie final, East Surreys v Bavarians, kick off at zero, NO REFEREE!

The image of British troops advancing into battle kicking a football is part of Britain’s First World War collective memory. However, research suggests that this happened only twice, with the better-known event being on the opening day of the Battle of the Somme when ‘B’ Company of the 8 Battalion of the East Surrey Regiment kicked two footballs ahead of them. The East Surreys were one of the few battalions to reach their objective. However on this bloodiest day in the history of the British Army, the football charge is but a footnote to military historians despite becoming a national ‘micro-level’ myth. This paper, researched in an antiquarian spirit, is concerned with the recovery of the empirical detail of the event motivated by a desire to discover the objective reality of the collective memory and explore the underlying rationale of this football charge