Landscapes of the First World War

Selena Daly, Martina Salvante, Vanda Wilcox, Selena Daly, Martina Salvante, Vanda Wilcox

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319894119
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'armée et de la marine

This comparative and transnational study of landscapes in the First World War offers new perspectives on the ways in which landscapes were idealised, mobilised, interpreted, exploited, transformed and destroyed by the conflict. The collection focuses on four themes: environment and climate, industrial and urban landscapes, cross-cultural encounters, and legacies of the war. The chapters cover Europe, Russia, the Middle East, Africa and the US, drawing on a range of approaches including battlefield archaeology, military history, medical humanities, architecture, literary analysis and environmental history.

This volume explores the environmental impact of the war on diverse landscapes and how landscapes shaped soldiers' experiences at the front. It investigates how rural and urban locales were mobilised to cater to the demands of industry and agriculture. The enduring physical scars and the role of landscape as a crucial locus of memory and commemoration are also analysed.

The chapter 'The Long Carry: Landscapes and the Shaping of British Medical Masculinities in the First World War' is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com.

© The Author(s) 2018

Selena Daly, Martina Salvante and Vanda Wilcox (eds.)Landscapes of the First World Warhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89411-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Landscapes of War: A Fertile Terrain for First World War Scholarship

Selena Daly¹ , Martina Salvante² and Vanda Wilcox^{3, 4}

(1)

University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

(2)

University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

(3)

John Cabot University, Rome, Italy

(4)

Trinity College, Rome Campus, Rome, Italy

Selena Daly (Corresponding author)

Martina Salvante

Vanda Wilcox

End Abstract

Perhaps the most famous of all English-language First World War poems begins with a powerful evocation of landscape: ‘In Flanders Fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row’. John McCrae’s 1915 reflection on a comrade’s death, which became instantly popular upon its first publication, gave rise to the enduring use of the poppy as a symbol which resonates across the nations of the former British Empire as an emblem of the Great War. ¹ It is a symbol that is profoundly embedded in landscape: beyond its evocative blood-red colour and innate fragility, resonant of life and death in war, the flower is rooted in the soil in which the war dead are interred. Without this inextricable tie to the earth and the battlefields upon which it blooms and where men died, it would lose its resonance. The overwhelmingly popular artwork by Paul Cummins and Tom Piper, installed at the Tower of London in 2014 and subsequently sent to tour the United Kingdom, made this link explicit. Entitled Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, the installation consisted of 888,246 red ceramic poppies, each symbolising a British or colonial soldier killed in the war (Fig. 1.1). They flowed in a seemingly unstoppable tide across the ground, like a spreading pool of blood on the earth.

Fig. 1.1

Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, 9 August 2014. Wikipedia CC BY 3.0. (Art by Paul Cummins and Tom Piper)

(https://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​Blood_​Swept_​Lands_​and_​Seas_​of_​Red#/​media/​File:​Blood_​Swept_​Lands_​And_​Seas_​Of_​Red_​9_​Aug_​2014.​JPG)

Landscape is also front and centre of another important strand of contemporary commemorative and educational practice: battlefield tourism , which has replaced what for earlier generations was most accurately termed battlefield pilgrimage. A visit to the physical location of events is often conceived as intrinsic to gaining a deeper understanding of their nature. This is unarguably true from the perspective of military history: to understand the course of a battle requires a solid understanding of the terrain and its morphology. For many visitors, however, it would appear to be more of an emotional need than a historical one. The opportunity to walk imaginatively in the shoes of the men who fought a hundred years ago draws many thousands each year to the former Western Front, to Gallipoli, and to the mountains of the Italo-Austrian frontline. ² The centrality of landscape to memory has been highlighted recently by the joint Franco-Belgian project Paysages et sites de memoire de la Grande Guerre, which is endeavouring to secure World Heritage Site status for the entire landscape of cemeteries and funeral monuments from the Swiss border to the North Sea, as embodied in eighty key French locations and a further twenty-five in Belgium. ³

Beyond the formal processes of commemoration and memory which battlefield visits and memorial sites represent, landscape is profoundly embedded into the cultural imaginary of the conflict. In Italy, the conflict on the Austro-Italian Front has been often described as the ‘white war’ (guerra bianca). The colour here immediately evokes the snow in the Alps, where the fighting took place. ⁴ The uniqueness of this operational environment is also conveyed by referring to its spatial verticality. ⁵ The Alps and Dolomites were significantly scarred, and their images profoundly changed, by these violent human interactions that also lived on in the memories of servicemen after the war. ⁶ More recently, the melting glaciers of these mountain chains and ridges have revealed many material traces, such as human remains and shells, of that protracted coexistence. ⁷ Significantly, the image of the ‘white war’ is popularly used as a synecdoche for the whole theatre, including the plains and low-lands where snow did not fall, demonstrating the power of landscape to shape popular perceptions of the war. Likewise, as Daniel Todman has noted, the ‘dead landscape’ of mud ‘form[s] a visual shorthand for the British experience in th[e] war’. ⁸

Of course, the First World War also unfolded in landscapes far removed from Flemish mud or Alpine glaciers. In the ancient forests of the Vosges or Augustów, in Egypt’s Western Desert, in the Cameroonian jungle, on the lower slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro or in the rocky deserts and swampy alluvial plains of Mesopotamia, soldiers’ experiences were shaped by the landscapes they inhabited and by their ideas and expectations of them. The fighting would serve in turn to reshape these landscapes, sometimes permanently. The landscapes of war also include spaces beyond those used for military purposes, such as home-front landscapes in cities and towns at varying distances from the battlefields, and even across oceans from the actual fighting. On these home fronts, the many demands of industry and agriculture placed societies in a new relationship with landscapes, whether through the quest for new raw materials or the need to find substitutes for products no longer easily available. Cityscapes were transformed by new economic, political and social uses of public and private space. Once the war had ended, its physical scars and environmental damage were enduring legacies; the landscape was also the locus of commemoration, with different national narratives about the war reflected in the various strategies adopted for the creation of permanent memorials both on the former battlefields and at home. Not all of these are equally prominent in popular memories or understanding of the war; some have become wholly forgotten, while others remain emblematic, even stereotyped.

Yet despite the centrality of landscape to the experience of the war and its prominence in many popular understandings of the war, it has only become the subject of scholarly attention relatively recently. It is an inherently interdisciplinary topic, existing as it does as the nexus between the material world and human interpretation, and the research which has been published in the field reflects this. Art history, the study of visual representations, architectural history and the study of memorials have offered one important set of approaches, but in recent years environmental history, battlefield archaeology and medical humanities have also opened up new ways to think about war and the physical spaces in which it occurs. As a consequence, in recent years there has been growing scholarly interest in ‘landscapes of war’, and indeed it was selected as the theme for the Society for Military History conference in 2018. ⁹

This book aims both to showcase some of the diverse and fruitful ways in which landscape is currently being analysed, or used as a lens for analysis of the First World War more generally, and to open up lines for further research in relation to other conflicts. It seeks to suggest the value of dialogue between multiple methodologies and objects of enquiry, whilst also reflecting the emphasis that the ‘global turn’ has placed on a more geographically diverse approach to the Great War. This volume should thus prove useful not only to historians of that conflict, but to anyone interested in the history of human interactions with landscape. But before considering the ways in which the First World War might be better understood through this lens, it is worth first examining what we mean by landscape, and specifically by a ‘landscape of war’.

Defining Landscapes of War

Firstly, a landscape is limited in space, and must have some kind of boundaries; we cannot speak of ‘the earth’s landscape’ but rather of many landscapes. Consequently, landscape is an inherently anthropocentric idea, requiring human interactions, at the very least from a viewer or viewpoint, since it is not delimited by any inherent geographical feature but instead defined by the person (or people) who is observing, describing or representing it. It is human categorisation and interpretation which distinguish one landscape from another, though that process of definition might be based on many different criteria, such as agricultural usage, political or administrative boundaries, customs and tradition, or visual features.

Moreover, the concept brackets the geomorphology of a designated area together with human interventions into, and interpretations of, its features. Thus, landscape is not only mountains, plains, beaches, forests or deserts, but also the physical modifications made to them by successive generations of humans, and the cultural beliefs and practices which are embedded in and projected onto the terrain. Since a landscape includes both man-made physical features such as buildings, roads, farms, ditches or quarries, and cultural features such as sacred sites, landmarks, burial places or holiday locations, it is intrinsically mutable and transient, since both types of human modification inevitably change over time.

Simon Schama’s 1995 book, Landscape and Memory, offers a densely argued proposition of landscape as a cultural creation, endowed with complex and mutable meanings by successive societies. Through investigating the three key elements of wood, water and rock, he showed that it is not merely human use or modification of landscape which invests it with meaning, but rather numerous acts of interpretation, belief and myth-making. ¹⁰ This position echoes the 1992 decision by UNESCO to include ‘cultural landscapes’ in the World Heritage Convention (in addition to ‘natural heritage’ such as forests or marine environments). UNESCO defines cultural landscapes as the ‘combined works of nature and of man’ (Article 1 of the Convention) and describes three distinct types: landscapes planned and defined entirely by man (which in the context of war studies might include city streets, trenches, memorial gardens and parks); organically evolved landscapes, where man-made elements have developed in response to natural features (battlefields, olive groves, oil wells); and associative cultural landscapes, where even without any man-made features, the nat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Landscapes of War: A Fertile Terrain for First World War Scholarship
• Part I. Environment, Climate and Weather at War
• Part II. Urban and Industrial Landscapes Transformed
• Part III. Cross-Cultural Encounters With Landscapes
• Part IV. Legacies of the First World War in Landscapes
• Back Matter