Communities Under Fire: Urban Life at the Western Front, 1914–1918

A vast amount has been written about this war. I was recently in Toronto University library, one of the world’s major research libraries, whose books on the World War fill some thirty bays of shelving: equivalent to a couple of hundred linear metres of books – just on this one war. So much has been published on the theme that one might be forgiven for thinking that little more of originality could be written about it, and yet new and fresh interpretations of all aspects of the war continue to appear on the shelves, on diverse areas of military, diplomatic and social history. One might mention, just considering English-language books, the general histories by Strachan, Stone and Ferguson; military histories such as the book by Alexander Watson; diplomatic histories like the influential volume by Hamilton and Herwig; and social histories such as Chickering’s on urban life in Germany during the war and Richard Holmes’ study of the British regular soldier. There have also been recent important works of bibliography on the War, and books covering such subjects as media representation and propaganda, as well as countless journal articles. In this issue of Film History we add to the Great War literature, looking at the film industry strictly during the period 1914–1918. This circumscription by date means that there is nothing here on later cinematic reflections of the War (The Big Parade, All Quiet on the Western Front, etc) – after all, a large literature already surrounds such cinematic reimaginings, Kelly’s aforementioned book being a leading example. Of course, a good deal has also been written about film within the 1914–18 period itself, but much remains to be done, as this issue demonstrates. For one thing, many of the articles here are about the situation in non English-speaking countries, whereas most of the existing writings in English (certainly in this journal) have dealt with British or American aspects of the War. This issue opens with Richard Abel’s examination of a spate of “feature” documentaries about the World War that were shown in the United States as the conflict was taking place. His principal sources are newspaper ads for the films, and from these it seems that many of them took a partisan line, with a striking number having a pro-German tone. Cooper Graham and Ron van Dopperen investigate the film career of Edwin F. Weigle, war cameraman for the Chicago Tribune, who filmed aspects of the defeat of Belgium in 1914, and also in Germany in 1915. Laurent Veray has studied film and the First World War for many years, and has published much on this theme, mainly in French: his paper in this issue summarises several aspects of his earlier work about official production by France during the war. Sabine Lenk’s article, based on documents in the Dusseldorf municipal archives, examines film censorship in that German city during the conflict. Then follow two papers on the situation in the Netherlands, which remained neutral in the War. Karel Dibbetts and Wouter Groot look at the exhibition of The Battle of the Somme (1916), as well as war Film History, Volume 22, pp. 363–365, 2010. Copyright © John Libbey Publishing ISSN: 0892-2160. Printed in United States of America

Communities under Fire: Urban Life at the Western Front, 1914–1918, by Alex Dowdall

ABSTRACT:This article explores the importance that accessing urban life assumed for British soldiers stationed in France during World War I. Many who fought on the Western Front had never visited a foreign country before sailing to France. Drawing on contemporary letters and diaries and later memoirs, it considers how men responded to the new experiences they found in French towns and cities behind the lines. Through exploring activities from shopping and dining to cinema and prostitution, it argues that urban outings became critical to sustaining morale by offering opportunities to engage with civilian life on a reasonably regular basis.

Chapter 3 uncovers the dynamics of the military occupation regimes put in place on both sides of the lines during the First World War, and demonstrates how they impacted civilian life in the front-line towns. It provides the first comparative analysis of military occupation on both sides of the Western Front, and argues that although some of the methods employed differed from one side of the lines to the other, the main objectives were fundamentally the same. In all cases civilian freedoms were curtailed on the basis of military necessity. It describes the German and Allied occupation regimes side by side, before moving on to a discussion of the face-to-face encounters and relationships that developed between individual civilians and soldiers. It demonstrates that three types of encounter between civilians and soldiers had particularly strong impacts on the social dynamics of urban communities on both sides of the Western Front. They arose from military indiscipline, platonic relationships, and sexual encounters. The chapter argues that although the German occupation regime was notably harsher than that on the Allied side, and forced civilians to navigate complex issues of resistance and collaboration, in both cases urban life near the front was profoundly shaped by the military presence.