Civilian Identities under Fire

Abstract

Chapter 2 charts the impact of militarization and military violence, in particular intense artillery bombardment, on civilian identities on both sides of the lines. It begins with a discussion of the Allied case, where a new form of civilian identity was clearly expressed in public representations. In both the national media and the local press, civilians at the front were represented in soldier-like terms, heroically resisting the enemy in their homes like the soldiers in the trenches nearby. Civilians at the front were urged to identify with the soldiers, but also with their local communities, which came under enemy assault. In this context, notable architectural features including churches, town halls, and cathedrals became rallying points. Private letters and censorship reports demonstrate that many civilians identified with these publicly constructed forms of identity, and used them to respond to the traumatic experience of bombardment. The result was that civilians at the front on the Allied side saw themselves as a distinct and privileged group within the national wartime community. Responses to artillery bombardment were more ambiguous under German occupation, where death and destruction came from Allied guns. The attempts of German propaganda to use bombardment to turn civilians against the Allied war effort were unsuccessful. But civilians’ reactions to Allied shelling, as they emerge in personal diaries, remained ambiguous and troubled, especially when Allied bombardment caused death and injury within the occupied populations.