A Shared Rhetoric: The Western Front in 1914/15 as reported by Harry Gullett and Philip Gibbs

Abstract

The newspaper articles written by the Australian Harry Gullett and his English counterpart Philip Gibbs during the opening months of the First World War provide important insights into the nature of war reporting, propaganda, censorship, and the relationship between the press and the military. Despite differences in background and temperament, their reports, which were written prior to official accreditation, were remarkably similar in tone and content for Gullett and Gibbs shared the belief that war was a regenerative force that would purify and strengthen a degenerate pre-war Britain. Both writers adopted a rhetoric in their initial wartime correspondence that emphasized traditional martial and patriotic values that they believed were an antidote to the weakness and disunity of a pre-war Britain beset by industrial, social and political upheaval. Battles would therefore be best presented as extended heroic narratives in which there was order, honour and greatness. This approach exerted an influence as pervasive as censorship itself.