Remembering the First World War

Bart Ziino

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317573708
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Remembering the First World War brings together a group of international scholars to understand how and why the past quarter of a century has witnessed such an extraordinary increase in global popular and academic interest in the First World War, both as an event and in the ways it is remembered.

The book discusses this phenomenon across three key areas. The first section looks at family history, genealogy and the First World War, seeking to understand the power of family history in shaping and reshaping remembrance of the War at the smallest levels, as well as popular media and the continuing role of the state and its agencies. The second part discusses practices of remembering and the more public forms of representation and negotiation through film, literature, museums, monuments and heritage sites, focusing on agency in representing and remembering war. The third section covers the return of the War and the increasing determination among individuals to acknowledge and participate in public rituals of remembrance with their own contemporary politics. What, for instance, does it mean to wear a poppy on armistice/remembrance day? How do symbols like this operate today? These chapters will investigate these aspects through a series of case studies.

Placing remembrance of the First World War in its longer historical and broader transnational context and including illustrations and an afterword by Professor David Reynolds, this is the ideal book for all those interested in the history of the Great War and its aftermath.

Part 1
Family history, genealogy and the First World War

1 'Great-grandfather, what did you do in the Great War?'

The phenomenon of conducting First World War family history research

James Wallis

There will soon be men and women, to whom the war is not even a memory — nothing but a great adventure just missed through an unlucky accident of birth. They'd like to know, they say; and their children's children rise in vision plying our ears with questions easy to be answered now, but unanswerable when the moss is thick on our graves.¹

Max Plowman's 1928 forecast is coming true. The generation that fought the First World War is now gone, and yet the great-grandchildren of those who fought it would still ply the ears of their ancestors. This chapter considers how amateur family history, as a contemporary grass-roots commemorative practice, is reshaping the landscape of modern First World War remembrance. Though this conflict no longer resides within living memory, it has retained a high level of interest within academic circles, public debate and popular concern. In particular, the increasingly widespread practice of family history is transforming both public understanding and continued commemoration of the war. The availability of digitized war records online, coupled with the material remnants of wartime, offer researchers unique and highly personal understandings of the war. Furthermore, the chapter explores how such individual interpretations of the past do not always fit within wider national narratives. It contemplates how the process of enacting family history contributes towards an individual's sense of identity and ontological security through a social performance of narrative practices. This will be brought together through a discussion about the 'Lives of the First World War' digital commemoration project, which will enable the general public to uncover and share their family history research. Thus by unpacking these discourses of duty and memory, this chapter critically engages with a form of remembrance that will increasingly feature in public and private life over the course of the war's centenary.

At first glance, the leaflet shown in Figure 1.1 is perhaps an unusual place to begin an examination of the phenomenon of amateur family history and the First World War. The motifs are all fairly familiar: the sun setting on a field of crimson poppies, the abbreviated title strikingly similar to the successful British charity 'Help for Heroes', and in the centre, a slate medallion with the engraved outline

Figure 1.1 'Heirlooms 4 Heroes' leaflet. Courtesy of Allison Kesterton (www.fasttrackengraving.wix.co.uk/heroes!facilities/c66t)

of an advancing (at what looks like walking pace) British Tommy. The reverse of the leaflet reveals that these medallions can be purchased, in order to commemorate 'YOUR family member who Fought or died in WWI". Purchasers may include personalized information about any relatives who fought, and the medallions will thus act as individually designed memorials which 'will last for generations to come'. The assertion that the object will retain a sufficient level of significance for it to resonate with families is reinforced by the somewhat insistent instructions of the twice appealing sentence, 'Don't let them Fade Away', and the more forceful invocation to 'Tell the next generation'. Admittedly, it is something of an easy target to critique the incoming — indeed already materializing — wave of commercialization in connection with the conflict's centenary which begins in the summer of 2014. But can we draw something out from this example of a highly sanitized and heroic commemorative narrative? We have reached a point where the notion of 'family heirloom' carries such value within society that it can be purchased - that even with temporal distance from the event depicted, these physical pieces of meaningful remembrance can be, quite literally, forged on demand.

The chances are that, if you are reading this chapter, you already have an impression or understanding of what your relatives did during the First World War. Discussing familial involvement may have been one of your first encounters with the conflict. Many writers and academic historians who have gone on to write about the war can trace their interest back to the process of uncovering what their relatives had done, sparking a long-burning interest in the subject. Awareness of family involvement represents a clear and evidence-based marker of one's dedication to the subject; such investigation is recognized as a symbol of status, because it culminates in knowledge that has high value within contemporary British society. It is thus commonplace for authors to dedicate their works to wartime relatives. Some provide detailed historical accounts about an individual's wartime contribution;² others record how the war impacted family life after 1918, as well as the more commonplace personalized textual memorials to those who did not return. For this latter category, the healing effects of time have quelled what had originally been heartfelt grief, and over the years, morphed it into intrigue. This notion has developed to such an extent that the historian David Reynolds hints at an unsaid pressure to conform, writing: 'It seems customary for historians of my generation to dedicate books about the Great War to the memory of soldierly grandparents.' In his case, Reynolds applies the trope for a particular purpose, by informing the reader that both of his grandfathers were in reserved occupations, and so 'for a book that aspires to shift our view of the Great War out of the trenches, these two men seem rather apt dedicatees'.³ The wider point he makes is symptomatic of a desire to understand the First World War as a multi-dimensional and global event.⁴ To a greater or lesser extent, members of the public are becoming more receptive to this idea. With increased interest being generated by the centenary, they are able to witness established historians expounding their views on the latest historical debates in the popular media, and in their historical works, which with High Street bookshops' requirement for high sales volumes, are now targeted as much at the public as they are towards fellow academics.

There seems little doubt that the general public's keenness to get to grips with the latest historical thinking, and learn about this subject for themselves, is unprecedented. This signals a narrowing of the gap between historians and the public — which becomes more apparent when one considers how far removed the staunch revisionist movement, led by military historians principally during the 1990s and early 2000s, was from the widespread and commonly held popular understanding of the war.⁵ The more recent assertion within academic environs has been to re-adjust emphasis from the national to the global, back to its 'original 1914—18 definition ... as a "world" war'.⁶ This desire to move the conflict away from popular stereotypes of the Western Front, and thus expand public understanding of the war's global nature, is slowly trickling through to the grass-roots level. This has largely been due to the fact that this academic learning has been able to capitalize on the public's enthusiasm for accessing the conflict through the individual stories of those who experienced it firsthand. In response, historians have adapted a combination of these approaches to conduct research that sheds new light on previously held understandings. Catriona Pennell's research on the 1914 British public's response to the outbreak of war consciously sought to 'reconstruct the feelings, emotions and actions of the British and Irish people faced with the outbreak of war', because 'an entire population's feelings cannot be adequately described by the monolithic label of war enthusiasm'.⁷ Exposing the diversity of individual experiences of the conflict in this way not only serves academic innovation, but also often modes of engagement favoured by more general readers.

In returning to Reynolds' 'dedicatees', and the fact that their endeavours contributed towards the war effort in very different, and perhaps unexpected, ways, it is clear that the four-year centenary represents a chance to re-appraise understanding of the conflict. There is an aspiration that a more nuanced knowledge might aid overturning of some previously held conceptions. However, even if the public appear receptive to these efforts, will academics match this spirit by engaging with the concept of investigating personal stories of the war through the cultural practice of family history? This method is expected to play a fundamental role in promoting public engagement with the First World War over the course of the centenary. Initial impressions hint at a gradual acceptance amongst some historians that this will inevitably be one of the ways through which members of the public can attain a degree of personal relevance to the events of 1914—18. This is in rather stark contrast to the more traditional view taken by the historical discipline; that family history should be taken at arm's length, because it lacks methodological rigour, objectivity and credibility. Any integration would be somewhat contested, because as Tanya Evans put it, family history was considered 'misty-eyed and syrupy', a hobby conducted by self-absorbing narcissists that could not reveal any insight of interest to any 'proper' historian.⁸ Now, with this aforementioned degree of re-alignment and increased interaction between both parties, things have the potential to be different — even if only in a temporary four-year trace. Within Britain, the monumental change occurred in July 2009, with the passing of Private Harry Patch in Somerset, the last veteran of the trenches. At this point, the final tantalizing piece of direct living memory of the First World War was extinguished. There was duly much fanfare over the occurrence of this highly anticipated moment, as Britain stood to acknowledge the symbolic status of this 111-year-old man as the last of the 'Tommies'.⁹ A few months later, the 'Service to Mark the Passing of the World War One Generation' at Westminster Abbey on Armistice Day brought about a conscious and acute sense of loss - an awareness that the final human tie to the conflict had been cut. Patch's portrayal in the media highlighted his 'everydayness' as an 'ordinary' individual, who could be related to through some unspecified personal connection. Through this, an onus was placed on the post 'living memory' generation to go and (re)discover their familial connections to the conflict.¹⁰ That juncture represented the point when family history took on a heightened and significant burden as a discourse of commemoration. For the sociologist Anthony King, this was a 'significant re-invention' that aligned it with current memorial practices. In contrast to the more collective-focused, traditional forms of national commemoration, soldiers from the conflict were now being 'personalized and re-situated in a network of existing familial relations'.¹¹

This sensibility was being embedded well in advance of the war's centenary: over the traditional period of remembrance within the British calendar, a Daily Mail supplement informed its readers that 'it couldn't be a better - or more fitting — time to find out more' about their wartime family history. Here was a phenomenon with the potential to provide intimate links to the war: 'it seems we can all tell of a great-great uncle who made the ultimate sacrifice or a great-grandfather who miraculously survived the Somme'.¹² The risk is that such generalizations establish a false understanding amongst those embarking on their family history; that they will uncover tales of heroism, sacrifice and bravery amongst the horrors of the battlefield. Unacknowledged was the fact that family history could be engaged to overturn these preconceptions by showing that not every fighting soldier fought on the Western Front. Descendants might trace relatives to the fightin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Seriespage
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Contributors
• Series editors' foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Remembering the First World War today
• Family history, genealogy and the First World War
• Practices of remembering
• The return of the war
• Index