A Fate Worse Than Death? Lamenting First World War Captivity

Abstract

This article explores grief regarding British servicemen captured by the Germans during the First World War. It examines prisoner of war (POW) mortality and analyses how death in captivity was privately mourned and publically represented. This study reveals that fallen POWs were subsumed as part of the homogenized war dead, facilitating their conceptualization within a wartime narrative that valorized their sacrifice. However, for POWs who did not die (and for their families), cultural discourses about capture ascribed meanings which resulted in their fate being both lamented and being seen as lamentable. The post-war results were a silencing of POW experiences within the collective memory and history of the war: dead POWs were obscured, indistinct among the fallen; returning POWs largely chose to remain silent and, in any case, the post-war lionization of the battlefield dead denied them a language to vocalize and memorialize their distinct wartime experiences.