Military Mapping and Modernist Aesthetics: Blunden, Aldington, and Ford

Abstract

The Western Front in the First World War was, at its time, by far the most thoroughly and efficiently mapped battleground in history. The war came during a golden age of cartographic technology, when industrial-age techniques of material production combined with Victorian standards of analytical rigor to create or improve such advances as trigonometric surveying techniques, land-based and aerial photography, stereographic projection, multicolor lithography, and mobile printing presses. The high level of cartographic accuracy and utility that resulted from these advances proved especially valuable given certain tactical exigencies that had developed in the progress of military technology, such as the need to aim indirect artillery fire against entrenched defenders from a distance of several miles. Using refined systems of contour lines and grid references based on Cartesian spatial coordinate structures, army cartographers sought to depict the shape of the terrain and the location of enemy positions on it as precisely as possible, thereby achieving an unprecedented rationalization and ordering of space over thousands of square miles of ground (see figure 1.1).