Jean Norton Cru and combatants' literature of the First World War

Using the unpublished archives of Jean Norton Cru, held at the University of Aix-en-Provence, this article provides a new interpretation of Cru's famous book on First World War literature, Témoins, first published in 1929. This work severely criticised a large number of books of soldiers' experiences of combat. Here a new reading of Cru's motives is offered, looking in particular at the author's Protestant background as well as at the links between reading and writing strategies.

The Literature of Absolute War: Transnationalism and World War II

In the last decade, cultural historians have debated whether the literature of World War I constituted a modernist break with the past, or rather nostalgically attempted to sustain traditional values in order to shape incomprehensible experience into meaningful forms of memory and mourning. Within the context of this debate, however, little attention has been paid to the vibrant and varied war poetry of women such as the Comtesse de Noailles, Berta Lask, or Eleanor Farjeon. Beyond these major figures, however, lies another cohort of elegists, including Anna Akhmatova, Zinaida Gippius, and Mary Borden whose work is especially provocative in its modernist rupture with poetic conventions in order to express their loss of faith, their despair, and their rage about a war that they had no political voice to oppose. And geographically removed, but touched by the world war, lie yet other mourning women in the colonies, some of them illiterate and therefore never considered as participating in the literature of war. These women, such as the Bambara and Malawi women's songs I discuss in the essay, speak across national boundaries of a rupture that has broken down speech itself and has thus turned them into what we may call female modernists. Thus war as a force of globalization at once unifies women who mourn their losses by drawing on traditionally assigned roles and forms, and also locates them at a fissure in literary history.

Effective counteraction to the recent armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine has exacerbated the need to summarize and put into operation the Ukrainian Army combat experience gained in the anti-terrorist operation / operation of the United Forces. In order to make this work more effective, you need to learn from the past. The article analyzes the scientific and memoir literature, the documentary source base on the creation and operation of bodies to study and use the combat experience of the RSCA during the Second World War. The results of these bodies constitute a valuable array for historiography. And the organization of their work is of practical importance in modern conditions. To study the experience of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the fight against Russian aggression, we propose the author's periodization of the evolution of the RSCA bodies to study and use the combat experience in 1939-1945. Even before the outbreak of Second World War, the armies that eventually joined the anti-Hitler coalition and their opponents began work on generalizing, studying, and using experience in the use of armed forces, armies, and forces, and organizing their interaction in combat. For the study and implementation of the experience of war, structures were established in the military authorities to study, summarize, and use combat experience, the activities of which are of great interest to modern researchers, scientists, and military specialists. Combat experience is required to develop and implement the newest methods of conducting armed combat, organizing and conducting military operations, developing instructions, manuals and techniques for the preparation of units of troops and special forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Therefore, in order to streamline this work in the Armed Forces of Ukraine and to avoid mistakes, it is urgent to take into account foreign experience, especially in all – countries of the North Atlantic Alliance, as well as to conduct military-historical researches on the history of creation and activity of structures for studying, generalization and use of combat experience. during the Second World War, particularly in the RSCA.

This Special Issue of First World War Studies considers the specifically American literary and cultural production of the First World War and what distinguishes it from other national war literatures and cultures. Together the articles seek to assess how we should characterize, theorize and categorize American First World War cultural production. Despite the many memorials and memory sites to American participation, and the impact of the recent centenary, public memory of the conflict in the US remains minimal, overshadowed by the Civil War on one side and the Second World War and the Vietnam War on the other. The Eurocentric focus of the key works of First World War cultural criticism – by Paul Fussell, Samuel Hynes, Modris Eksteins and Jay Winter – is perhaps due to what Hazel Hutchison notes as the strange place of the war in American cultural memory, as a war which ‘has never quite captured the public imagination’ (The War That Used Up Words: American Writers and the First World War, 2015). Instead it is usually focused through the ‘lost generation’ writers of the 1920s: Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, et al. Bringing together a range of scholars and drawing predominantly on literature and film by male and female non-combatants as well as participants, the case studies here consider American First World War novels, poetry, political papers, film, and screenplays. Interdisciplinary readings allow the contributors to find generic tropes and connections across different media. In this way we seek to contribute to an ongoing conversation about American First World War cultural production, and a critical field that is very much still in the process of formation and consolidation.

Combat Gnosticism: The Ideology of First World War Poetry Criticism James Campbell (bio) The war hastened everything—in politics, in economics, in behavior—but it started nothing. George Dangerfield 1 In The Romantic Ideology, Jerome McGann famously proclaimed that the criticism of literary Romanticism (that of M. H. Abrams in particular) was more concerned with promulgating the worldview of its topic than subjecting it to rigorous critique. For McGann, mainstream Romantic criticism was not criticism at all, but the application of literary/aesthetic criteria to a period of literary history that that period had itself generated: "the scholarship and criticism of Romanticism and its works are dominated by a Romantic Ideology, by an uncritical absorption in Romanticism's own self-representations." 2 I want to borrow McGann's terms, if not his entire methodology, to make some similar inquiries into the criticism of First World War poetry. I see a comparable genealogy operating within this critical discourse: the mainstream criticism of First World War poetry, most conspicuously Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory, has formed itself around a certain set of aesthetic and ethical principles that it garners from its own subject. 3 In other words, the scholarship in question does not so much criticize the poetry which forms its subject as replicate the poetry's ideology. I see this ideology primarily in two forms: an aesthetic criterion of realism and an ethical criterion of a humanism of passivity. Furthermore, these criteria are combined by both the poets and their critics to create an ideology of what I term "combat gnosticism," the belief that combat represents a qualitatively separate order of experience that is difficult if not impossible to communicate to any who have not undergone an identical experience. Such an ideology has served both to limit severely the canon of texts that mainstream First World War criticism has seen as legitimate war writing and has simultaneously promoted war literature's status as a discrete body of work with almost no relation to non-war writing. The critical tradition that I identify as mainstream and dominant is [End Page 203] one that equates the term "war" with the term "combat." As a result, what it legitimates as war literature is produced exclusively by combat experience; the knowledge of combat is a prerequisite for the production of a literary text that adequately deals with war. This is what I mean by combat gnosticism: a construction that gives us war experience as a kind of gnosis, a secret knowledge which only an initiated elite knows. Only men (there is, of course, a tacit gender exclusion operating here) who have actively engaged in combat have access to certain experiences that are productive of, perhaps even constitutive of, an arcane knowledge. Furthermore, mere military status does not signify initiation, but only status as a combatant. It is not the label of "soldier" that is privileged so much as the label of "warrior." The results of such a construction are fairly obvious: the canonization of male war writers who not only have combat experience but represent such experience in their texts. Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Robert Graves become the exemplary figures of the genre. The attitude toward war of any particular writer is less an issue than his first-hand experience; Sassoon's use of his war experience to promote a sort of pacifism and his friend Graves's opposing occasional retention of militarism are seen less as contradictions than contrasting uses of a commodity (war experience) that remains essentially unaltered. 4 To use the language set forth in Eric Leed's No Man's Land, combat is a liminal experience that sets the veteran irrevocably apart from those who have not crossed the ritual threshold of war. 5 It can, indeed has, been seen as the ultimate rite of passage: a definitive coming to manhood for the industrial age, in which boys become men by confronting mechanical horror and discovering their essential masculinity, perhaps even their essential humanity, in a realm from which feminine presence is banished. The primary type of literary text that generates this ideology of combat gnosticism is what I would like to refer to as the...

Review Article| June 01 2011 Learning to Hate the Hun For Home and Country: World War I Propaganda on the Home Front, by Kingsbury, Celia Malone, University of Nebraska Press, 2010. 309 pages. Brooke Horvath Brooke Horvath Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2011) 57 (2): 264–271. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2011-3006 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Brooke Horvath; Learning to Hate the Hun. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 June 2011; 57 (2): 264–271. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2011-3006 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

<p class="EW-abstract"><strong>Abstract:</strong> Ol'ha Kobylians'ka’s short stories about the First World War constitute a rare case of a Ukrainian woman writing on one of the greatest catastrophes in modern history, a subject neglected even in Ukraine. Drawing on recent scholarship on First World War literature, this research proves that Kobylians'ka’s war stories deserve a re-evaluation, not as long-ignored curiosities from the pen of Ukraine’s most sophisticated writer of the time, but as insightful psychological studies of Western Ukrainians and as valuable cultural documents that present an original perspective on the common European experience of 1914-1918. The article pays particular attention to Kobylians'ka’s creative assessment of the Austrian and Russian treatment of Western Ukrainians during different stages of the First World War, which exposes anew fatal political weaknesses in Europe’s old imperial order and facilitates a better understanding of why Ukrainians, like many other ethnic groups in Europe without a state of their own, began to pursue their national goals more aggressively as the war progressed. Alongside popular texts, such as “Na zustrich doli” (“To Meet Their Fate,” 1917), “Iuda” (“Judas,” 1917), and “Lyst zasudzhenoho voiaka do svoiei zhinky” (“A Letter from a Convicted Soldier to His Wife,” 1917), this article examines Kobylians'ka’s three little-known stories—“Lisova maty” (“The Forest Mother,” 1915), “Shchyra liubov” (“Sincere Love,” 1916), and “Vasylka” (“Vasylka,” 1922)—thus presenting the most complete analysis of Kobylians'ka’s war fiction in any language.</p><p class="EW-Keyword">Keywords: Modernist Literature, Literature of the First World War, Women Writings of the First World War, Ol'ha Kobylians'ka’s War Fiction</p>

The literature of the First World War has become an area of study which has encompassed many diverse disciplines. Fields such as poetry (whether good or bad, personal or epic), the diaries and journals of participants (both the famous and the ordinary), autobiography (including the non-fiction and the fictional versions), short stories and novels (written by both participants and non-combatants), and letters (to and from the front) have been studied under the rubric of First World War literature. It seems almost any form of writing now can be considered ‘literature’. However, newspapers appear to remain excluded from this literary clique. This is indeed a pity, for newspapers as a historical source are unequalled in this period. They also contain within their pages all of the elements of war literature. Newspapers published poetry, mostly of the bad variety, spontaneously submitted to the local and national press during times of martial activity. Diaries, memoirs and short stories written by soldier or war correspondent observers were often serialized and read with interest. Letters to and from the front were sent to the editor and published either to condone or condemn a particular issue the newspaper had championed. The press, then, can be used to ascertain the literary perception of warfare held by contemporaries.

Reviewed by: The War That Used Up Words: American Writers and the First World War by Hazel Hutchison Alice Kelly The War That Used Up Words: American Writers and the First World War. Hazel Hutchison. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015. Pp. 26 + 242. $45.00 (cloth). Opening with a reading of a wartime poem by the non-canonical writer Mary Borden, the first pages of Hazel Hutchison’s The War That Used Up Words establish an ambition to destabilize our conceptions and categories of American First World War literature. Hutchison notes the strange place of the war in American cultural memory as a war which “has never quite captured the public imagination” and is usually focused through the “lost generation” writers of the 1920s: Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, et al. (14, 2). Hutchison instead chooses to study “a group of American authors who observed the war in Europe between 1914 and 1918, and who wrote about what they saw,” namely Mary Borden, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Ellen La Motte, Grace Fallow Norton, E. E. Cummings, and John Dos Passos (2). She makes the case for the distinctive nature of American First World War literature, suggesting that America’s initially neutral status and lack of censorship (until 1917) “allowed its authors and journalists an experimental and polemical freedom that was not available to British writers,” which “quickened their sense of the war as a cultural rather than a sociopolitical event” (3). In contrast to their European counterparts, “American readers had almost three years to think and read about the war before it became their national business” (119). Attempting to theorize and recategorize a diverse body of work (or at least to open up established categories), the success of Hutchison’s argument is in its amalgamation of biographical and historical information with close readings, its lively intellectual and imaginative engagement with the period, and its emphasis on lesser-known, but highly important, texts. Offering an overview of the profound changes that America’s involvement wrought on domestic social, political, economic, and military life, Hutchison argues that, most importantly, it gave the nation “a new sense of itself as … a powerful arbitrating presence on the international stage” (13). She suggests the belated nature of inquiries that look to 1920s writings for “the origins of traits which emerged so distinctly from the conflict: detachment, disillusionment, disparate perspectives, montage, irony, the renegotiation of gender, the disruption of time, the inadequacy of language” (3). She argues instead that “the really creative moment, the ignition spark of innovation, happened during the war,” whilst acknowledging the “many lines of continuity that run through the narrative of change” and citing writers such as Wharton, who “maintained her measured prose” after the war (3, 19). The War That Used Up Words therefore “aims to map that shift of balance from the old to the new,” which goes “in search of early glimpses of disillusionment, irony, and fragmentation” but “also seeks to understand the sense of social and political responsibility” that led writers to participate, and explores how their writings were received in the wartime publishing context (19). Put more simply, it is “about how the war first imprinted itself onto the patterns of American writing” (17). Positioning her scholarship amongst the recent broadening of the field of war studies to encompass previously marginalized aspects and experiences of the war (the colonial, gendered, medical, etc.), Hutchison suggests that “the group of writers at the heart of this study emerged distinctly from their surroundings, for reasons which … have over time become positively disruptive” (19-20). Her selection of authors, “all self-conscious literary artists, who had published in other areas before observing the war,” might seem strange, she tells us, “because it cuts across a number of the familiar categories and binary opposites within which writing of the war is more usually understood: modernist, conservative, pacifist, interventionist, male, female, young, old, canonical, obscure” (21). The sole connecting factor between her authors is their shared sense [End Page 266] that “artistic response had to be matched by action,” meaning that each was driven to participation in one mode or another (21). The consequent “intensely personal and autobiographical nature” of American First...

ABSTRACTWhile there has been increased interest in women's writing from the First World War, there has been less critical attention devoted to the development of the First World War short story, especially supernatural short fiction from the war. This article combines each of these avenues for studying First World War literature—the female perspective, the short-story form and the supernatural—by examining the First World War supernatural fiction of Henrietta Dorothy Everett. “Over the Wires” (1920), “The Whispering Wall” (1916) and “A Perplexing Case” (1920) each highlight the supernatural as a means of coping with wartime trauma and grief. In stories that center on war crimes, ancestral ghosts and shell shock, Everett gives readers a unique female perspective on the aftermath of war, as these stories concern how those on both the home front and the battlefield experience mysterious supernatural events that reflect the often inexplicable and unpredictable nature of war.

Reviewed by: Cinderella Army: The Canadians in Northwest Europe 1944–1945 Patrick H. Brennan Cinderella Army: The Canadians in Northwest Europe 1944–1945. Terry Copp. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Pp. 392, $45 Incorporating much new research from Canadian, British, and American archives, as well as numerous interviews of veterans, Cinderella Army, the follow-on volume to the author’s acclaimed Fields of Fire, adds much to our appreciation of the Canadian role in the Northwest European campaign. In contrast to C.P. Stacey’s venerable official history, The Victory Campaign, Cinderella Army incorporates both a bottom-up and a top-down study. Copp spends a majority of the narrative very productively focusing on ‘meat and potatoes’ combat waged by the infantry battalion and armoured regiment, and his sources reflect this with their heavy emphasis on after-action reports, battle message logs, and operational research reports, as well as the author’s personal appreciation of the terrain over which Canadian soldiers fought and died in the major and lesser engagements during the last nine months of the war. Cinderella Army is not cheerleading history. In keeping with the author’s previous work, his analysis is more in the nature of ‘understanding’ the Canadian army’s performance – from senior commanders to lowly riflemen, gunners, sappers, and tankers – than ‘forgiving’ it. Mistakes of judgment, the consequences of inadequate training and planning, and sheer incompetence are highlighted alongside individual (and collective) bravery, endurance, and military insight and innovation. Copp spends much of his analysis undermining the ‘learning curve’ paradigm, and he certainly strengthens the case that this interpretation is too entrenched in the writing of Canadian military history (in both world wars, one might add). Still, whether one can expect to see definitive evidence of its presence or absence in such a brief campaign is open to question. While admirably attempting to ‘humanize’ the army’s experiences –there are moving accounts of fear, battle exhaustion, and the pressures of command at all levels – the author could have avoided the excessive employment of folksy unit nicknames – the endless repetition of ‘Rileys’ and ‘Canscots’ wears thin. Copp’s assessment of senior commanders – Vokes being the notable exception – will not stir controversy. His account of Simonds is balanced and there is little added to our understanding of Crerar, who remains the Canadian army’s phantom leader. While readers are given some titillating British assessments of Canadian generalship, one hungers for the reverse appraisals. Like most military historians, Copp periodically falls into the trap of talking about enemy forces without accounting for their [End Page 271] numbers of men and equipment – divisions, after all, are like dollars –not all of equal size. It’s fine to talk of infantry regiments and panzer divisions, but precisely how many German soldiers and tanks were we facing? Finally, like any book that tries to provide all perspectives –from senior staff officers at First Canadian Army Headquarters to the section leader hugging a muddy dyke under fire – some readers will no doubt complain that there’s not enough of either viewpoint. In fact the mix selected is one of the book’s strong points. In conclusion, Cinderella Army offers a nuanced, insightful, and unvarnished – not to mention exceptionally well-written – account of the Canadian army’s performance from late August 1944 through ve-Day. Copp asserts that it performed well in the difficult and largely ignored battles to clear the Channel ports and the approaches to Antwerp, break through Germany’s Ruhr defences, and liberate Holland. Indeed, when they had the benefit of sufficient resources, and decent ground, and the lessons learned from that hardest of teachers – combat experience – his verdict is better than well. Copp roots the Canadian story in the larger context of Allied operations and performance, neither overrating nor understating them. Graduate students will find the book particularly helpful with its directions for future study. Engagingly written and based on solid research, Cinderella Army is more likely to be read by military history buffs and scholars alike than Victory Campaign, and one hopes will ensure that the British and American historians, in particular, have a firmer –and fairer – appreciation of the Canadian army’s performance than has...

This chapter surveys the context of the 1940s, examining the contrasting phases of the war years, the emergence of a ‘postwar’ sensibility, the ‘age of austerity’, and the political and imaginative reconstruction of the nation in the aftermath of conflict. It examines trends in the production of fiction and poetry, and considers the transformation of theatrical infrastructures. It surveys the state of criticism surrounding the literature of the Second World War and the 1940s, and debates the value of modernism as an interpretative category for the period. The chapter also introduces significant thematic preoccupations – such as, the difficulties of writing about war, the impact of conflict on constructions of gender and sexuality, homosocial bonding, the experience of combat, national identity, childhood, memory, violence – and notes the emergence of new discourses surrounding citizenship, empire and modernity. The chapter concludes by evoking Elizabeth Bowen to suggest that the decade is best understood as an age of ‘lucid abnormality’.

The disciplinary and analytic models of shell shock treatment at Queen Square and Maghull give some indication of how soldiers encountered military medicine and hospitals during the Great War. In this and the following chapter, by exploring both soldiers'and doctors'perspectives on treatment in practice, a more detailed picture emerges of how institutions and individuals were involved in making shell shock; of how the condition emerged in the interaction between doctor and patient, in the implementation of institutional rules and treatment techniques, in the antagonistic friction between doctor, patient and military authority. One instance of the way traumatic neurosis was marked by social interaction is in its definition and treatment according to rank. Within the Army, and therefore within the Army Medical Service, rank decisively influenced the opportunities and rights of the individual soldier. In combat rank shaped life-chances, in social encounter rank defined peer group reaction and self-perception, and in sickness too, rank fashioned attitude and expectation, which then guided the formation and presentation of symptoms as well as sanctioning the type and extent of treatment. The collective, popular memory of shell shock treatment is also influenced by rank. United by upbringing, education and social status, officers have been better able to describe their experiences of combat, and these accounts are more widely known in both the medical literature and memoirs of the Great War.

Mud and the First World War are inextricably linked. Almost any account of the Western Front features complaints about the wet terrain of France and Flanders: its numbing physicality, its cheerless visual homogeneity, its often deadly power. John Ellis, in Eye-Deep in Hell (1975), reports that rainfall during March 1916 was the heaviest in thirty-five years. On 30 July 1917, during the third battle of Ypres, a drizzle began that lasted for the whole of August; an officer asked to consolidate his position responded to his superiors: 'It is impossible to consolidate porridge.'1Mud made even the simplest tasks laborious. The ubiquitous British greatcoat could be so clogged with rain and mud that it could weigh over thirty pounds, adding to an already heavy load that would combine to drag Tommies deep into the wet ground. Infantrymen would urinate in their clogged rifles. One soldier wrote that 'The mud makes it all but impassable, and now sunk in it up to the knees, I have the momentary terror of never being able to pull myself out. Such horror gives frenzied energy, and I tear my legs free and go on'.2 He was lucky: many never emerged from mud holes, as Liam O'Flaherty so graphically depicted in The Return of the Brute:No. 8470 Private George Appleby, formerly a worker in a chocolate factory, recently a member of the bombing section of No. 2 Platoon, at that moment ceased to exist as a living organism. He had thrown back his head and started at the sky with fixed eyes, with his tongue hanging out, thick and still and yellow, on his green lower lip. Rain drops fell into his open mouth. Then he disappeared with a gentle, sucking sound into the morass, unnoticed by Friel, who gaped at him in horror. In another moment, all that was left to mark his sojourn on this earth was a series of circular wrinkles in the slime that covered the surface of the quagmire and five orphan children, fathered by him, living with their widowed mother in Canning Town, London: all proudly bearing his name, that of a hero who died in action, fighting for his king and country.3O'Flaherty's ghastly scene is just one of many from First World War literature that uses mud to signal, not just the horror, but the futility of the war. The thinly-veiled sarcasm of the closing lines echo poems like 'Mud and Rain' by Siegfried Sassoon and 'Apologia Pro Poemate Meo' by Wilfred Owen. For many writers mud was shorthand for military disillusionment.Dan Todman's The First World War: Myth and Memory (2007) begins with a chapter titled 'Mud':mud stands for much more than a mere amalgam of water and soil. It is made up of excrement, dead soldiers and animals, shrapnel, barbed wire and the remnants of poison gas. For all the opportunities it offered to bacteria, surrounding splintered trees and dead men, it seems to be opposed to nature. This mud bears the terrifying potential to engulf the soldiers who struggle within it, to suck them down - spluttering, choking, drowning - and to convert their corpses into yet more mud.4For Todman, mud becomes a metaphor for the war itself, selfdestructive, all-encompassing, deadly and drab. Similarly, Santanu Das's chapter 'Slimescapes', in Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (2005), analyzes fiction and poetry for responses to mud. He quotes one front-line newspaper account from 1917:At night, crouching in a shell-hole and filling it, the mud watches, like an enormous octopus. The victim arrives. It throws its poisonous slobber out at him, blinds him, closes round him, buries him. . . . For men die of mud, as they die from bullets, but more horribly. Mud is where men sink and - what is worse - where their soul sinks. . . . Hell is not fire, that would not be the ultimate in suffering. Hell is mud.5Das interprets this widespread and visceral fear of mud as ultimately a fear of the 'dissolution into formless matter' that modem weaponry inflicted on soldiers in the trenches. …