The War to End All Wars

Oh! Oh! Oh! it's a lovely war, Who wouldn't be a soldier eh? Oh! It's a shame to take the pay. As soon as reveille is gone We feel just as heavy as lead, But we never get up till the sergeant brings Our breakfast up to bed Oh! Oh! Oh! it's a lovely war, What do we want with eggs and ham When we've got plum and apple jam? Form fours! Right turn! How shall we spend the money we earn? Oh! Oh! Oh! it's a lovely war. --- by ringlunatic with ♥

[memory-of-the-romanovs]

2 August 1914, Russia, St. Petersburg, the Winter Palace.

The Russian Tsar Nicholas II comes to the balcony in person to read the declaration of War. The Russian empire declares the war on Germany.

Imperial  Manifesto

«BY the Grace of God, We, Nicholas II, Emperor and Autocrat of all Russia, Tsar of Poland, Grand Duke of Finland, etc., etc., etc., proclaim to all Our loyal subjects:

Following her historical traditions, Russia, united in faith and blood with the Slav nations, has never regarded their fate with indifference. The unanimous fraternal sentiments of the Russian people for the Slavs have been aroused to special intensity in the past few days, when Austria-Hungary presented to Serbia demands which she foresaw would be unacceptable to a Sovereign State.

Having disregarded the conciliatory and peaceable reply of the Serbian Government, and having declined Russia’s well-intentioned mediation, Austria hastened to launch an armed attack in a bombardment of unprotected Belgrad.

Compelled, by the force of circumstances thus created, to adopt the necessary measures of precaution, We commanded that the army and the navy be put on a war footing, but, at the same time, holding the blood and the treasure of Our subjects dear, We made every effort to obtain a peaceable issue of the negotiations that had been started.

In the midst of friendly communications, Austria’s Ally, Germany, contrary to our trust in century-old relations of neighborliness, and paying no heed to Our assurances that the measures We had adopted implied no hostile aims whatever, insisted upon their immediate abandonment, and, meeting with a rejection of this demand, suddenly declared war on Russia.

We have now to intercede not only for a related country, unjustly attacked, but also to safeguard the honor, dignity, and integrity of Russia, and her position among the Great Powers. We firmly believe that all Our loyal subjects will rally self-sacrificingly and with one accord to the defense of the Russian soil.

At this hour of threatening danger, let domestic strife be forgotten. Let the union between the Tsar and His people be stronger than ever, and let Russia, rising like one man, repel the insolent assault of the enemy.

With a profound faith in the justice of Our cause, and trusting humbly in Almighty Providence, We invoke prayerfully the Divine blessing for Holy Russia and our valiant troops.

Given at Saint Petersburg, on the second day of August, in the year of Our Lord one thousand nine hundred and fourteen, and the twentieth year of Our reign.

NICHOLAS.»

[unsecolobreve-blog]

1 August 1914: frontpages

[joachimmurat-archive-deactivate]

The guns of August…

[lord-kitschener]

Jessica Meyer: "The Myth of War Literature"

Posted on November 27, 2012 by Jessica Meyer

‘Veterans did not start to produce war novels until the later 1920s’

This quotation comes from Fiona Reid’s Broken Men: Shell Shock, Treatment and Recovery in Britain 1914-1930  (2010), a book I am thoroughly enjoying (more on which later) but which has raised a couple of issues relating to the sort of assumptions we make about the war.  Reid’s book is about the myths that have grown up around shell shock as a symbolic image of the First World War in British culture, a condition that has moved from being historically specific to being cultural shorthand for what we think we know about the experience of war as a whole.  Yet, despite much excellent work on examining myths related to shell shock and placing the condition in a clear historical and cultural context, she can still come out with this statement which, despite being widely repeated in both academic and popular histories of the war, simply is wrong.

Veterans of the First World War began publishing novels about the war and its aftermath as early as 1919.  H.C. McNeil (better known as ‘Sapper’) published Mufti that year.  It is not a good book, to be sure, nor did it sell particularly well (19,636 copies by 1939 compared with 162,432 for The Lieutenant and Others, his most popular collection of short stories and 396,302 for Bulldog Drummond, the novel which he remains best known for), but it is a novel about the war and its aftermath that found a publisher and an audience in the early 1920s.

And there were plenty of other, more popular novels, published in the early 1920s.  Rosa Maria Bracco, inMerchants of Hope: British Middlebrow Writers and the First World War, 1919-1939 (1993), identifies three out-and-out bestsellers: The Way of Revelation (1921), Simon Called Peter (1921) and Tell England (1922).  R.H. Mottram published the first volume of his Spanish Farm trilogy in 1924 and Warwick Deeping’s best known novel, Sorrel and Son, was published in 1925.  Bracco notes that ‘After a spate of novels in 1919 there was a sharp decrease in numbers during the following years (from thirty-nine in 1919 to seven in 1925)’ but this is a decrease, not a silence, as Reid’s statement implies.

Reid is not alone in her assumption about publishing patterns of novels about the war.  The general belief is that no one wrote or published ‘war books’ until the boom of 1929-30.  Why?  Partly, I suspect, because of a general oversimplification of an actual phenomena.  There was a war books boom in those years, much of it literature of the ‘disenchantment’ variety, although Bracco argues persuasively that there was also a great deal of popular, middlebrow literature in circulation at the time which presented a view of war that can’t be classified as disenchanted.  It is easier to understand and explain this fairly dramatic cultural shift (and to underline its dramatic nature) by arguing that there was no significant literature being published beforehand.

‘Significant’ gives a hint as to the other part of the explanation, the extent to which our understanding of war literature (like our understanding of the war) is dominated by our interpretation of what is ‘good’ literature.  All Quiet on The Western Front, Goodbye to All That, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, Parade’s End(first published between 1924 and 1928) are all classed as literary classics.  Tell England, Simon Called Peter and Sorrell and Son, are not, despite being bestsellers in their day.  Many of the war novels published in the early 1920s are bad books, or, more properly ‘good bad books’, the classic definition of the middlebrow.

Should they still be read and studied today?  Possibly not, although they can be great fun to read and the field of middlebrow studies is a growing one in its own right.  But scholars of the cultural history of the First World War cannot simply write them out of existence because they do not fit comfortably with a narrative of post-war veteran silence that we have come to accept and aren’t very good in literary terms.  Veterans were not silent; whether the public wanted to hear what they were saying is another matter entirely.  To ignore the existence of these novels and their popularity in the 1920s is the equivalent of ignoring the cultural impact ofThe Da Vinci Code or Fifty Shades of Gray in commentaries about Anglophone culture in the early 21st century.  They may not have a great deal to say, they may not be very good books, but ignoring them entirely is intellectually dishonest.

So this is a plea that we finally start laying to rest the great myth of First World War literature. The books of the war books boom and the literature of disenchantment are hugely important parts of our understanding of the cultural legacy of the war in Britain, but they are by no means the whole story.

[willigula]

Weltkrieg 1914/1916 (World War)An odd set of German postcards from WWI that combine to form a single figure.

[the-seed-of-europe]

Puns were aimed at German self-assurance: a notice hung on the barbed wire with the words Gott Mit Uns (‘God with us,’ the motto on German belt-buckles) provoked the scribbled reply ‘Don’t swank! We’ve got mittens too!’

- Peter Doyle and Julian Walker, Trench Talk: Words of the First World War. (via the-seed-of-europe)

[nondescripthistory-deactivated2]

Trench maneuvering during the Battle of Cambrai. France, 1917. Underwood & Underwood

[lostsplendor]

French Wartime Postcard Reading “We know how to defend against the invader”, c. WWI

[lostsplendor]

Helmets of the First World War (via)

[lostsplendor]

Hats of the European Armies, c. WWI (via)

[lostsplendor]

British Army and Navy Caps of the First World War (via)

[lostsplendor]

British Army Officers’ Shoulder Insignia, c. WWI: The Chicago Daily News War Book (via)

[lostsplendor]

Soliders Returning Home from the Great War, Washington D.C c. 1919 (via)

[lienatik]

Inspired on the Western Front: The gallows humour cartoons and poignant sketches injured Tommies entrusted to WWI nurse These remarkable sketches drawn by First World War soldiers recovering from horrific injuries in the trenches have been discovered after nearly 100 years. The collection of cartoons, poignant messages to loved-ones and pictures of their children, were found in the pages of an autograph book which belonging to auxiliary nurse Adeline Louise Wadlow. Adeline, known affectionately as Lina, volunteered as a nurse treating soldiers who were sent to Hildern House in Shropshire to recuperate after being injured on the frontline. (more)

[the-seed-of-europe]

Major Edward Corringham “Mick” Mannock, May 24, 1887 – July 26, 1918. A British fighter ace credited with 61 air victories and awarded the Distinguished Service Order and Two Bars, Military Cross and Bar and a posthumous Victoria Cross.

Mick Mannock was one of the greatest aces of the war, and a very conflicted figure. He was renowned for his prudent and aggressive leadership, and was one of the world’s first theorists of aviation tactics, and yet he was also a nervous and high-strung man prone to phobias (he was notoriously afraid of burning to death in his plane - a reasonable enough fear, but was also neurotically tidy and paranoid). He was also famous for his zealous devotion to the British Empire and hatred of the Germans, saying of one air victory “I sent one of them to Hell in flames today … I wish Kaiser Bill could have seen him sizzle.” At another point, he crashed a German two-seater, but was unsatisfied with the fact that its two men survived and machine-gunned them down. When a squadron mate demanded an explanation for the slaughter of the helpless crew, Mannock’s response was, “The swines are better dead - no prisoners.”

And yet the escalating number of killings behind his name eventually began to catch up with Mannock:

“In his diary, he recorded visiting the site where one of his victims had crashed near the front-line: ‘The journey to the trenches was rather nauseating - dead men’s legs sticking through the sides with puttees and boots still on - bits of bones and skulls with the hair peeling off, and tons of equipment and clothing lying about. This sort of thing, together with the strong graveyard stench and the dead and mangled body of the pilot combined to upset me for a few days.’ Mannock became especially upset when he saw one of his victims catch fire on its way to the ground. His fear of ‘flamerinoes’ meant that from that date on, he always carried a revolver with him in his cockpit. As he told his friend Lieutenant MacLanachan, ‘The other fellows all laugh at me for carrying a revolver. They think I’m going to shoot down a machine with it, but they’re wrong. The reason I bought it was to finish myself as soon as I see the first signs of flames. They’ll never burn me.’”

The tragic irony, of course, was that this was in fact how Mannock’s plane finally went down on July 26th, 1918 behind the German frontline. A body was recovered from the wreckage, but it was never finally proven whether or not it was Mannock’s. Though he vowed to shoot himself should his plane catch fire, there were no gunshot wounds on the body.

Only four days earlier, Mannock’s squadron mate congratulated him on shooting down an enemy plane by saying that a red carpet would await Mick upon his return to Britain after the war. Mannock’s only reply was, “There won’t be any ‘after the war’ for me.”

(Source.)

[todaysdocument]

[ohwhatalovelywar]

todaysdocument:

September 20, 1918 - Shattered church serves as temporary shelter for wounded 

Original caption: 

This shattered church in the ruins of Neuvilly furnished a temporary shelter for American wounded being treated by 110th Sanitary Train, 4th Ambulance Corps. France, September 20, 1918.  

[ohwhatalovelywar]

Józef Kowalski

[ohwhatalovelywar]

Can you imagine how it feels to be one of the last ones? Always hearing that another has just died, then another and another, waiting to hear who’s gone and always wondering if you’re next. Well, if they’ve written the obituary, all I can say is that I hope to live long enough that they will have to update it, and more than once! Then I can fade away. Isn’t that what old soldiers are meant to do?

Harry Patch