“To fly is more fascinating than to read about flying”: British R.F.C. Memoirs of the First World War, 1918-1939

Literature concerning aerial warfare was a new genre created by the First World War. With manned flight in its infancy, there were no significant novels or memoirs of pilots in combat before 1914. It was apparent to British publishers during the war that the new technology afforded a unique perspective on the battlefield, one that was practically made for an expanding literary marketplace. As such former Royal Flying Corps pilots created a new type of war book, one written by authors self-described as “Knights in the Air”, a literary mythology carefully constructed by pilots and publishers and propagated in the inter-war period through flight memoirs. [excerpt

Remembering the Somme: This Watershed Battle of World War I Still Echoes with Honor, Sacrifice and Horror 100 Years Later

The Western Front was a cacophonous mixture of men and material. Airplanes buzzed slowly above the thousands of miles of zigzagged trenches carved into the chalky soil. Motorized lorries stalled, started and then plodded behind the lines, bringing up shells, water, tinned beef, bullets and soldier’s rum, etc., everything needed to sustain the armies astride the Somme. [excerpt

What Would Florence Do?

Mercy Street has no shortage of nineteenth century medical trivia. Dr. Foster repeatedly invokes his stellar medical education, which includes not only study in Philadelphia, America’s medical Mecca of that time, but also a grand tour abroad where he learned all kinds of fancy techniques from some of the great medical minds of the era. Similarly, we have been introduced to Anne Hastings, the alleged Crimean War nurse, her character no doubt causing many to brush up on their nineteenth century European history. [excerpt

Remembering the Great War: Writing and Publishing the Experiences of WWI

The horrors and tragedies of the First World War produced some of the finest literature of the century: including Memoirs of an Infantry Officer; Goodbye to All That; the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas; and the novels of Ford Madox Ford. Collectively detailing every campaign and action, together with the emotions and motives of the men on the ground, these \u27war books\u27 are the most important set of sources on the Great War that we have. Through looking at the war poems, memoirs and accounts published after the First World War, Ian Andrew Isherwood addresses the key issues of wartime historiography-patriotism, cowardice, publishers and their motives, readers and their motives, masculinity and propaganda. He also analyses the culture, society and politics of the world left behind. Remembering the Great War is a valuable, fascinating and stirring addition to our knowledge of the experiences of WWI.https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/books/1115/thumbnail.jp

When the Hurlyburly\u27s Done / When the Battle\u27s Lost and Won: Service, Suffering, and Survival of Civil War and Great War Veterans

Marching in the Gettysburg Liberty Parade in May 1918 was a drum corps consisting entirely of Civil War veterans. As local citizens demonstrated their patriotism—notably with the Kaiser hanging in effigy—the old soldiers helped keep the pace for two thousand citizens who turned out to vigorously support the Great War. It was no doubt a moving moment, the nation\u27s largest veteran demographic encouraging and supporting the next generation of soldiers to fight for cause and country in a very different war waged on a very different continent. Though fifty years separated the trenches of Petersburg from those of the western front, for one moment, the men who fought in the nation\u27s bloodiest war marched alongside doughboys who were training, on a battlefield of that war, to fight in France

Review of The War that Used up Words: American Writers and the First World War, by Hazel Hutchison

There is a vast array of scholarship on the literature of the First World War, much of it concerning British authors. When American war literature is considered, it is usually the so-called “Lost Generation” writers of the 1920s and 1930s. If the war had a significant effect upon American literature, it is argued, then it served as a trope for some of the great writers of the 1920s—Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner—who wrote of living in its generational shadow in the following decades of so-called peace. Hazel Hutchison’s book is a corrective to the many assumptions about the war in American letters. In her beautifully written cultural history, The War That Used Up Words, Hutchison demonstrates to readers just how significant the war was to Americans writers who lived through it, served in it, and were writing about it while it was ongoing. She writes, “the really creative moment, the ignition spark of innovation, happened during the war through the work of such writers as Mary Borden and Henry James, Edith Wharton, Ellen La Motte, Grace Fallow Norton, E. E. Cummings, and John Dos Passos” (p. 3). This focus on American writers during the war changes our perceptions on the war’s impact as it has been traditionally interpreted after the war. [excerpt

Review of Baptism of Fire: The Birth of the Modern British Fantastic in World War I

The Great War had a lasting influence on literature and literary culture in Britain. Spanning the ‘brows’ of literary taste were authors writing in response to the cataclysmic violence experienced by the war generation, at both the war front and the home front. The war\u27s shadow permeated all aspects of cultural expression; its experience found authors who, with varying degrees of success, wrote on its lasting influence to a readership that, as the decades wore on, grew increasingly afraid of another world war. One of the responses undoubtedly influenced by the war was the genre of fantasy. As one of the contributors to this volume, John Garrad, reminds us, both high modernism and epic fantasy ‘are cast from the same source’, each a response to the lingering shock of war (277). The fantastic was one of the many British cultural biproducts of the horrific violence experienced and perpetrated in France and Flanders. [excerpt

July 3, 2013 Reflection: A Chance Encounter

In a July 4 letter to his father-in-law, General Alexander Hays expressed reserve. “Yesterday was a warm one for us,” he wrote. “The fight of my division was a perfect success […] We are all sanguine of ridding our soil of the invaders.” The “perfect success” for Hays was his command’s role in the repulse of Pettigrew’s division in what has become known as Pickett’s Charge. It was an unquestionable victory for his division and the Army of the Potomac. Yet Alex Hays’s matter-of-fact letter was not buoyant with the egoism so easily ascribed to generals after their victories. Hays does not mention, in any detail, his actions of July 3, where he remained in the saddle under artillery fire, inspiring his troops with his personal bravery so that his example would assuage their own fears of the looming Confederate assault. Nor does he detail the fight itself – the laying down of a wall of brutal fire by his men against their attackers – the melting away of enemy brigades to his front, the rebels falling dead and wounded as his men cheered for their destruction. Perhaps the greatest moment of Alex Hays’s life, certainly the pinnacle of his career as a soldier, his famed dragging of a Confederate battle standard in the dirt in front of his cheering men (and also in front of dying enemy soldiers) is also unmentioned, though, to do so in a after-action letter to his father-in-law would have been viewed, perhaps, as gauche. [excerpt