The Centurion and the Sapper: Did Australian Soldiers Souvenir Roman Artefacts While Training at Brightlingsea During World War I?

IntroductionThey shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old; Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them.Recited at many Anzac and Remembrance Day services, ‘The Ode’, an excerpt from a poem by Laurence Binyon, speaks of a timelessness within the inexorable march of time. When we memorialise those for whom time no longer matters, time stands still. Whether those who died in service of their country have finally “beaten time” or been forced to acknowledge that “their time on earth was up”, depends on your preference for clichés. Time and death are natural bedfellows. War memorials, be they physical or digital, declare a commitment to “remember them”. This article will compare and contrast the purpose of, and community response to, virtual and physical war memorials. It will examine whether virtual war memorials are a sign of the times – a natural response to the internet era. If, as Marshall McLuhan says, the medium is the message, what experiences do we gain and lose through online war memorials?Physical War MemorialsDuring and immediately after the First World War, physical war memorials were built in almost every city, town and village of the Allied countries involved in the war. They served many purposes. One of the roles of physical war memorials was to keep the impact of war at the centre of a town’s consciousness. In a regional centre like Bathurst, in New South Wales, the town appears to be built around the memorial – the court, council chambers, library, churches and pubs gather around the war memorials.Similarly, in small towns such as Bega, Picton and Kiama, war memorial arches form a gateway to the town centre. It is an architectural signal that you are entering a community that has known pain, death and immense loss. Time has passed, but the names of the men and women who served remain etched in stone: “lest we forget”.The names are listed in a democratic fashion: usually in alphabetical order without their rank. However, including all those who offered their service to “God, King and Country” (not just those who died) also had a more sinister and divisive effect. It reminded communities of those “eligibles” in their midst whom some regarded as “shirkers”, even if they were conscientious objectors or needed to stay and continue vital industries, like farming (Inglis & Phillips 186).Ken Inglis (97) estimated that every second Australian family was in mourning after the Great War. Jay Winter (Sites 2) goes further arguing that “almost every family” in the British Commonwealth was grieving, either for a relative; or for a friend, work colleague, neighbour or lover. Nations were traumatised. Physical war memorials provided a focal point for that universal grief. They signalled, through their prominence in the landscape or dominance of a hilltop, that it was acceptable to grieve. Mourners were encouraged to gather around the memorial in a public place, particularly on Anzac Day and Remembrance Day each year. Grief was seen, observed, respected.Such was the industrial carnage of the Western Front, that about one third of Australia and New Zealand’s fatal casualties were not brought home. Families lost a family member, body and soul, in the Great War. For those people who subscribed to a Victorian view of death, who needed a body to grieve over, the war memorial took on the role of a gravesite and became a place where people would place a sprig of wattle, poke a poppy into the crevice beside a name, or simply touch the letters etched or embossed in the stone (Winter, Experience 206). As Ken Inglis states: “the statue on its pedestal does stand for each dead man whose body, identified or missing, intact or dispersed, had not been returned” to his home town (11).Physical war memorials were also a place where women could forge new identities over time. Women accepted, or claimed their status as war widows, grieving mothers or bereft fiancés, while at the same time coming to terms with their loss. As Joy Damousi writes: “mourning of wartime loss involved a process of sustaining both a continuity with, and a detachment from, a lost soldier” (1). Thus, physical war memorials were transitional, liminal spaces.Jay Winter (Sites 85) believes that physical war memorials were places to both honour and mourn the dead, wounded, missing and shell-shocked. These dual functions of both esteeming and grieving those who served was reinforced at ceremonies, such as Anzac or Remembrance Day.As Joy Damousi (156) and Ken Inglis (457, 463) point out, war memorials in Australia are rarely sites of protest, either for war widows or veterans campaigning for a better pension, or peace activists who opposed militarism. When they are used in this way, it makes headlines in the news (Legge). They are seldom used to highlight the tragedy, inhumanity or futility of war. The exception to this, were the protests against the Vietnam War.The physical war memorials which mushroomed in Australian country towns and cities after the First World War captured and claimed those cataclysmic four years for the families and communities who were devastated by the war. They provided a place to both honour and mourn those who served, not just once, but for as long as the memorial remained. They were also a place of pilgrimage, particularly for families who did not have a grave to visit and a focal point for the annual rituals of remembrance.However, over the past 100 years, some unmaintained physical war memorials are beginning to look like untended graves. They have become obstacles rather than sentinels in the landscape. Laurence Aberhart’s haunting photographs show that memorials in places like Dorrigo in rural New South Wales “go largely unnoticed year-round, encroached on by street signage and suburbia” (Lakin 49). Have physical war memorials largely fulfilled their purpose and are they becoming obsolete? Perhaps they have been supplanted by the gathering space of the 21st century: the Internet.Digital War MemorialsThe centenary of the Great War heralded a mushrooming of virtual war memorials. Online First World War memorials focus on collecting and amassing information that commemorates individuals. They are able to include far more information than will fit on a physical war memorial. They encourage users to search the digitised records that are available on the site and create profiles of people who served. While they deal in records from the past, they are very much about the present: the user experience and their connection to their ancestors who served.The Imperial War Museum’s website Lives of the First World War asks users to “help us build the permanent digital memorial to all who contributed during the First World War”. This request deserves scrutiny. Firstly, “permanent” – is this possible in the digital age? When the head of Google, Vint Cerf, disclosed in 2015 that software programming wizards were still grappling with how to create digital formats that can be accessed in 10, 100 or a 1000 years’ time; and recommended that we print out our precious digital data and store it in hard copy or risk losing it forever; then it appears that online permanency is a mirage.Secondly, “all who contributed” – the website administrators informed me that “all” currently includes people who served with Canada and Britain but the intention is to include other Commonwealth nations. It seems that the former British Empire “owns” the First World War – non-allied, non-Commonwealth nations that contributed to the First World War will not be included. One hundred years on, have we really made peace with Germany and Turkey? The armistice has not yet spread to the digital war memorial. The Lives of the First world War website missed an opportunity to be leaders in online trans-national memorialisation.Discovering Anzacs, a website built by the National Archives of Australia and Archives New Zealand, is a little more subdued and honest, as visitors are invited to “enhance a profile dedicated to the wartime journey of someone who served”.Physical and online war memorials can work in tandem. In 2015, the Supreme Court of Victoria created a website that provides background information on the military service of the 159 members of the legal profession who are named on their Memorial board. This is an excellent example of a digital medium expanding on and reinvigorating a physical memorial.It is noteworthy that all of these online memorial websites commemorate those who served in the First World War, and sometimes the Boer or South African War. There is no space for remembering those who served or died in more recent wars like Afghanistan or Iraq. James Brown and others discuss how the cult of Anzac is overshadowing the service and sacrifices of the men and women who have been to more recent wars. The proximity of their service mitigates against its recognition – it is too close for comfortable, detached remembrance.Complementary But Not ExclusiveA comparison of their functions indicates that online memorials which focus on the First World War complement, but will never replace the role of physical war memorials. As discussed, physical war memorials were sites for grieving, pilgrimage and collectively honouring the men and women who served and died. Online websites which allow users to upload scanned documents and photographs; transcribe diary entries or letters; post tribute poems, songs or video clips; and provide links to other relevant records online are neither places of pilgrimage nor sites for grieving. They are about remembrance, not memory (Scates, “Finding” 221).Ken Inglis describes physical war memorials as “bearers of collective memory” (7). In a sense, online war memorials are keepers of individual, user-enhanced archival records. It can be argued that online memorials to the First World War tap into the desire for hero-worship, the boom in family history re

Reviewed by: The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I by Lynn Dumenil Anita Anthony Vanorsdal (bio) The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I. By Lynn Dumenil. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. xi, 340. $39.95 cloth; $38.99 ebook) [End Page 272] As Americans observe the centennial of the Great War, historians are exposing more about the lives of various actors in wartime mobilization and participation. Lynn Dumenil's history of American women's experiences during World War I provides both field experts and an interested general public an engaging narrative that encapsulates the political and cultural contexts, working lives, and national service opportunities that shaped women's abilities to contribute to the war effort. Dumenil weaves a carefully crafted synthesis of secondary sources on women's progressivism, wartime opportunities, political motivations, and personal desires to underscore her new avenues of research on what the war meant for American women in particular. While her focus is on "the way in which diverse women used the war for their own agendas of expanding their opportunities, sometimes economic ones, sometimes political, sometimes personal," she arranges her chapters to expose how women sought opportunities while encountering challenges from employers and unions, military and government policies, and cultural components that hindered their activism (p. 4). Dumenil does an exemplary job at weaving her new research and theories with a wide variety of secondary sources and reveals the nuances in women's lives that both helped and hindered their wartime participation. She employs a variety of contemporaneous accounts from newspapers, magazines, personal correspondence, films, photographs, and wartime posters alongside official government documents and war committees' reports to reveal that women's hopes for substantial long-term changes in politics, military service, professional advancement, and work opportunities would not last long after the armistice in November 1918. Dumenil does emphasize, however, that although long-term advancement in women's opportunities was not accomplished, the war did help to accelerate changes for women that would impact later generations during the New Deal and in the women's movement of the 1970s. While Dumenil's epilogue does provide an excellent explanation of the First World War's short-term impact on American women, [End Page 273] she does not offer much information on the state and local laws passed during the war, such as mothers' pensions, food benefits, state-supported health care for women and children, which shaped many women's daily lives into the 1920s and 1930s. She does a careful job of delineating the differences among women by class and race (concentrating on white and black women's different experiences), but leaves this reader desiring more information on how age, regional location, access to technological improvements, and club membership may have also segregated women and altered their wartime opportunities. Dumenil does underscore, however, that class and race shaped women's wartime experiences and activism, and she presents a careful analysis of the different ways gender dynamics complicated class and race. While focusing her analysis on racial and class divisions during the war, she also explores some of the subcategories that splintered politically active women in the 1920s and uses these experiences to highlight the lack of long-term change. Dumenil does an excellent job of providing a nuanced understanding of women's wartime experiences, including the political divisions among women, traditional gender role issues that were under siege during the war, economic concerns and the expansion of women's work opportunities, women who served overseas as nurses and aid workers for Allied soldiers, and the depictions of wartime women in popular culture. Rather than focusing on a single aspect of wartime experiences of American women, Dumenil offers a more complete, and more complex, view of women's war experiences that also offers potential for further research by scholars who seek to understand the Great War's impact on Americans, especially American women. [End Page 274] Anita Anthony Vanorsdal ANITA ANTHONY VANORSDAL recently completed her PhD at Michigan State University. Her current research focuses on the Woman's Committee for the Council of National Defense and women's social welfare activism during the Great War...

This article demonstrates the resilience of religious traditions and practices among Australian soldiers, and the need for caution about presuming connections between the experience of modern war and secularisation. A core argument is that the Bible should be understood as a central text and cultural artefact of Australian soldiers' experience of the First World War. The pocket New Testament was the most widely possessed book among Australian soldiers, and probably the most read and valued. For many it offered profound religious, moral, and emotional consolation. For others it possessed talismanic qualities, conjured home associations, or became an “object of memory.” Communal reading practices made Testaments prominent in the aural experience of war, but such practices could also elicit antipathy towards religion. Taken together, these findings inform scholarship on the mentalités and material culture of Australian war experience, challenging the longstanding scholarly and popular myth of the secular Australian soldier. Additionally, the article breaks new ground in situating Australian experience within a substantial international scholarship on the crucial role of religion (both official and popular) among soldiers of all combatant nations. Partly due to its majority Protestant population, Australian soldiers' Bible possession and usage resembled that of Anglo‐Saxon and German Protestants.

In 1918, Aussie: the Australian Soldiers’ Magazine, a trench newspaper produced on the Western Front, commented that concert parties were ‘something more than a luxury—they are a necessity’ (Aussie 8 March 1918: 4). For soldiers of the British, American, and Dominion armies, live entertainment, most typically concert parties, was an integral part of their experiences of the First World War. Yet we know very little about what these experiences were, or what entertainment meant to soldiers. This article examines the experience of live entertainment for Australian soldiers in the First World War. Firstly, it explores entertainment organized for the first AIF, focusing on the soldier concert party. Secondly, it attempts to ascertain some of the responses of soldier-audiences to this entertainment by looking at evidence left by members of those audiences such as that recorded in letters and diaries. It also examines soldier-entertainment and audience experiences in order to reveal something about soldiers’ interaction with popular culture, as well as the trench culture shared by soldiers.

David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet, by Thomas Dilworth, David Jones: A Christian Modernist?, ed. by Jamie Callison, Paul S. Fiddes, Anna Johnson, and Erik Tonning

During World War I, the Australian Imperial Force (AIF), for all its apparent effectiveness in combat situations, developed a reputation as being an ill-disciplined and generally poorlyled group of 'colonial' soldiers. British commanders blamed this on 'failures of Australian leadership' and 'insufficient training'. During the early stages of the war the official Australian historian, Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean, attributed blame to the small group of veterans of the Boer War and their strong influence over young recruits (partially, no doubt, in order to maintain a favourable public image of the 'average' Australian soldier). However, in the nine and a half decades since the end of World War I the disciplinary problems of the AIF have been either ignored in favour of more combat-oriented histories, or hidden away in favour of more popularly attractive studies of the Anzac Legend. The result is that we have a scant body of literature addressing the cause, nature and effect of the disciplinary problems within the AIF. This paper seeks to rectify this absence, in part by addressing one aspect of these 'disciplinary problems', that being the use of industrial relations techniques by the rank and file within the military. In doing so, this paper will seek to expand further our understanding of the experiences of Australian soldiers in the AIF by highlighting their agency in shaping the working culture and 'digger identity' that many valued throughout World War I. Far from being those who merely 'do and die', the men of the AIF actively 'reasoned why' and, on occasion, successfully challenged their officers through practice-proven industrial activities.

ABSTRACTSarah Macnaughtan, a wealthy novelist, used volunteer care work to claim the legitimacy of her wartime experience in the South African and First World Wars and to assert women's rights in the early twentieth‐century British empire. Macnaughtan framed her caregiving experiences in both inherently domestic terms – ‘from a kitchen window’ – and as a justification for women's suffrage and participation in public life. Her example loosens a persistent binary between trained nurses and untrained wartime volunteers and highlights the importance of precedents set in the British empire to the feminist politics and caring practices of the First World War.

Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is used for identification of Australian military personnel whose remains are recovered from historical conflicts. A mtDNA sample database does not exist for Australian soldiers that served in World War I (WWI), World War II (WWII) and the Korean War, meaning it is unknown what common haplotypes may have existed among these soldiers, risking identification errors. Haplotype diversity (position 16,024 to 548) was examined in a sample of 254 unrelated WWII-era European-Australians. Of these, 220 different haplotypes were observed, and it is estimated that between 18% and 29% of Australian soldiers who served in historical conflicts have common haplotypes (95% CI). This research demonstrates that mtDNA control region analysis of historical military remains will provide a lower than expected power of discrimination given the population structure of the time, and enlistment policies targeting Australians of European decent. The point estimates for 52% of the common haplotypes obtained in the historical European-Australian sample were not represented in the confidence intervals for European and Western-European EMPOP data. Creation of targeted sample data reflecting correct ancestry of the WWI and II soldiers and additional mtDNA and Y-STR analysis are essential to avoid misidentification of Australian soldiers from historical conflicts.

To SAY THAT THE SECOND WORLD WAR WAS IMPORTANT is to make last uncontroversial statement in African Studies. These words opened a volume on Africa and Second World War several years ago. The editors went on to suggest that such accord arose because Everyone knows that it was either end of beginning or beginning of end of European colonialism in Africa. Indeed, by end of World War II, European colonial powers were exhausted by second maelstrom to hit their continent in twentieth century and soon determined that direct rule over African territories could not be sustained. Within fifteen years, most of African continent was on road to independent political rule. Historians and other scholars, however, have not looked very closely at wartime experiences that brought about such momentous change. According to editors of Africa and Second World War, most historians refer to conflict as an almost incantatory invocation, a sort of empty historical marker, assuming immense significance of event but not examining it as a period in history or paying any attention to its complexities.1 While historians agree that there must be a relationship between war and subsequent African independence, our understanding of such a connection remains paradoxically both emphatic and amorphous. More recently, Frederick Cooper has addressed this lacuna in analysis, drawing our attention to fundamental importance of war in shaking old structures of power and habits of discourse and causing British and French colonial authorities to change their entire approach to the labor in their African colonies. During and after war, officials pondered the reshaping of a political framework in which a social question is debated. The political framework was colonialism. The social question was labor control over African colonial subjects. As Cooper demonstrates, political framework was shaken by African laborers who challenged outright and brutal repression exercised by their colonial employers. Massive labor strikes during and immediately after war threatened to bring production to a standstill throughout both British and French colonies. As war drew to a close, colonial policies gradually changed in hopes of turning unruly workers into a stabilized work force. Colonial administrators throughout Africa began to accept their subjects as urban dwellers and industrial workers, incorporating them into local political structures instead of treating them as minors without rights, and they allowed union representation and

Mandatory military service was a hallmark for most males during the twentieth century. In the United States, for example, various selective service acts registered some 73 million men in the two world wars and conscripted 13 million. Millions more were drafted into the armed forces between the Korean Conflict and the US withdrawal from Vietnam, which coincided with the end of conscription in 1973. For American males, especially those who came of age during and after World War II, military service was a rite of passage.Many men—and increasingly women in the years since the 1970s—did not willingly accept their personal subordination in a male-dominated hierarchal military. In Different Drummers: Military Culture and Its Discontents, Tad Tuleja, a folklorist and coeditor with Eric A. Eliason of Warrior Ways: Explorations in Modern Military Folklore, examines the “disjunction between organizational solidarity and individual pushback” in the military by looking at “people who dissent from military culture, but do so as members of a loyal opposition” (pp. ix–x).Resistance to military service—conscientious objection, absenteeism or desertion, and even active insubordination, which are all hallmarks of the American military experience throughout the centuries, especially during the Vietnam Conflict—is not the main theme of Different Drummers. Rather, this anthology uses a “variety of case studies to analyze creative dissent by individuals whose military identity is ambivalent or conflicted . . . who, for a variety of reasons, resist the myth of the robot soldier to embrace their humanity” (p. 12).The book is divided into four main sections and, in turn, has 12 articles covering wartime experiences from the Great War to modern conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Tuleja pulls together the articles with an introduction and a conclusion.In chapter 1, “On the Griping of Grunts,” Angus Kress Gillespie, Professor of American Studies at Rutgers University, explores the age-old way of life in the Army—griping in contrast to complaining or whining—as a means to make sense of the daily indignations of military service. Drawing upon Bill Mauldin's foxhole buddies, Willie and Joe, Gillespie looks at how soldiers reacted to the wartime cartoons compared to the Army brass, namely, Gen. George S. Patton and his boss, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower. Unlike Patton's indignant response, Eisenhower “understood that in a military context griping can serve a real purpose—a military purpose. It can act as a social safety valve to ventilate frustrations, and it can create solidarity among those in harm's way more effectively than peeling potatoes or shining buttons” (pp. 29–30).In chapter 2, “Back Chat: Subversion and Conformity in Dominion Cartoons of the World Wars,” Christina M. Knopf, Professor of Cultural Sociology and Political Communications at SUNY Cortland, examines how British, Australian, Canadian, and other enlisted men employed humor during both world wars—often at the expense of their commanding officers—to resist conformity, maintain a sense of normalcy in an abnormal environment, and, interestingly, build esprit de corps. Knopf examines a number of cartoons (she provides a list of her primary sources) that “allowed the citizen-soldiers of England and the Dominions to maintain their humanity and to endure the horrors of war by embracing an identity that was simultaneously oppositional and respectful of order” (p. 44).In chapter 3, “Warriors’ Bodies as Sites of Microresistance in the American Military,” John Paul Wallis, a lawyer and Marine Corps veteran, and Jay Mechling, Professor Emeritus at University of California, Davis, focus on how male Marines counter efforts of the Corps to suborn the individual body. Starting in basic training, the “military institution must socialize the individual's body severely to make it conform to the demands of the organization” (p. 52). The authors take the reader through the various levels of the military's conformity, including oral, anal, genital, skin, and attire. Acknowledging that women in the military face even greater bodily challenges than males, Wallis and Mechling conclude that “the memoirs and reportage on women in the military provide scant evidence of the sort of microresistance. . . . We have to wait for more evidence to flesh out how women warriors use their bodies to resist the control of the total institution” (p. 63).In chapter 4, “Jumping the Chain: A Military Psychologist's Story,” Mark C. Russell, a retired US Navy clinical psychologist, set up the neuropsychiatric department at Field Hospital 8 at the US Naval Air Station in Rota, Spain, during Operations Desert Shield/Desert Storm in 2003. Russell recounts that the Navy and the Marine Corps were poorly prepared to treat casualties suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. In fact, Russell's superior, not knowing what to do with his section, placed the mental health professionals under the hospital's urgent care department. With the expectation that as many as 60 percent of the hospital casualties would suffer from psychiatric symptoms, Russell prepared a study and approached his commanding officer to highlight his section's critical role. While successful in “jumping the chain” at Rota, Russell struggled for the remainder of his career to get the military to recognize the importance of mental health.In chapter 5, “A Captain's First Duty: Managing Command Disconnect in a Combat Zone,” Ronald Fry faced a life-or-death situation while commanding a Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha in Afghanistan in late 2003. One of Fry's two Humvees was destroyed by an Improvised Explosive Device during a supply run, injuring a crewmember. Fry requested helicopter support to destroy the damaged Humvee in order to prevent leaving it to be stripped by the enemy. At the same time, Fry wanted to withdraw his exposed force to the safety of the unit's main camp because of the threat of a night attack. Fry's commanding officer, however, denied these requests. On his own volition, Fry destroyed the vehicle and pulled back to safety. For his actions, Fry's commander considered charging him with disobedience of orders, a decision that the Army quietly dropped when it became the subject of a media inquiry. This wartime case reflects the age-old disconnect between soldiers in the field and the commanders and staff in the relative safety of the rear. Fry's actions in Afghanistan also highlight the tension between an officer's duty to safeguard the lives of their soldiers and the sworn oath to obey superior orders.In chapter 6, “(De)composing the ‘Machine of Decomposition’: Creative Insubordination in E. E. Cummings’ The Enormous Room,” Matthew David Perry, the chair of the English Department at Del Mar College in Texas, looks at the impact of E. E. Cummings’ service as a volunteer ambulance driver in France during World War I and his subsequent imprisonment for sedition in his first major work. Following his release from the Depot de Triage, a French prison for various perceived wartime criminals, Cummings returned to the United States and was drafted in the US Army. Decrying the Federal Government's efforts to repress its citizens during the war, Cummings wrote The Enormous Room “by abandoning usual associations in language and replacing them with unusual referents . . . to offer covert as well as overt criticism of the suppressive government of his era” (p. 96).In chapter 7, “Café Colonels and Whizz-Bangs,” Tuleja, the editor of Different Drummers, examines the lesser-known music of World War I that reflected “a critical rather than positive attitude towards the war” (p. 104). In contrast to uplifting or sentimental songs such as “Over There” or “It's a Long Way to Tipperary,” songs such as “If You Want to Know Where the Privates Are,” “Mademoiselle from Armentieres,” or “What Do the Colonels and Generals Do” were immensely popular in the ranks. These songs, with their many and various verses, highlight class distinctions that separated those who did the leading from those who did the killing. Yet, despite the sarcastic lyrics of these songs, Tuleja notes that the British Army fought the entire war with no mutinies and few disciplinary problems throughout the four years of mass death.In chapter 8, “The Wild Deserters of No Man's Land: A Ghoulish Legend of the Great War,” James I. Deutsch, a curator and editor at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and Adjunct Professor of American Studies at The George Washington University, explores the fantastic tales that hundreds of men from all armies—except the US Army—had deserted during the war and taken up shelter in a variety of refuges in no man's land. Deutsch looks at the origins of these stories and how the accounts blossomed in the decades after the war. The accounts “all portray a thoroughly dehumanized environment that serves as a horrific home for men who have been thoroughly dehumanized and marginalized themselves” (p. 131). At the same time, these isolated shelters could have served as a “type of wish fulfillment” for the men in the trenches sick of death, dirt, and despair (p. 131). The recent news of the discovery of a massive German bunker in France destroyed in 1917, resulting in the entombment of nearly 300 German soldiers, certainly lends credence to the legends of men desperately seeking to escape the war by any means.In chapter 9, “Breaking Ranks: Initiative and Heroism in a Vietnam Firefight,” Richard Allen Burns, Professor of Folklore and Anthropology at Arkansas State University and a Vietnam era Marine Corps veteran, details a combat incident when unit discipline and individual courage diverge. Burns cites the case of 19-year-old Bruce Wayne Carter, a Marine private first class, killed in action in South Vietnam in 1969. Carter was subsequently awarded the Medal of Honor for “conspicuous gallantry” when he fired at North Vietnamese regular troops and threw himself on a grenade in order to save members of his unit. Burns’ own research, interviews with Carter's comrades, and a battlefield journal, however, differ from the official account of Carter's heroism. Despite the divergent memories, the surviving veterans all agree that Carter deserved his commendation for his heroic actions.In chapter 10, “Challenging the Male Hierarchy: Women Warriors in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Catherine Calloway, Professor of English at Arkansas State University, focuses on the role of women in the US military, especially in combat. Calloway cites the service of two females, Kayla Williams, who served as an interpreter with the Army in Iraq, and Mary Jennings Hegar, a helicopter pilot with the Air National Guard who served three tours in Afghanistan and was wounded there. Both women joined the military for their own personal reasons, but they found themselves often isolated, objectified, and exposed to ridicule, humiliation, and even assault by male commanders, peers, and subordinates. Upon returning home, the two women found their military service denigrated by male veterans as well as the general public. Their military and post-military experiences have motivated both women—and many others—to tackle discrimination in the military and challenge a “military culture that has privileged male dominance—and excused sexual assault—for thousands of years” (p. 162).In chapter 11, “A Good Coffin: The Iraq War Poetry of Gerardo Mena,” Ron Ben-Tovim, a lecturer at the Department of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University, explores the poetry of Gerardo Mena, a Marine Corps veteran of Iraq War and the author of The Shape of Our Faces No Longer Matters. Ben-Tovim explains that “Mena uses poetry to resist the objectification of contemporary soldier-weapons and to create a new object, the poem itself, which performs the moral function of commemorating those lost in war” (p. 167). Ben-Tovim analyzes several of Mena's poems, including “Rocket Man,” “Dream of Brass,” and “So I Was a Coffin,” to mourn his fallen comrades and to keep their memory alive.In chapter 12, “Telling Stories in War,” Carol Burke, Professor of English at University of California, Irvine, draws upon her experiences as an observer embedded with American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq to analyze how military conflicts influence storytelling and personal narratives. She notes that “in the real world of today's US deployments, some storytellers have little to say about their wartime experiences, while others, in a hunger for recognition, say far too much” (p. 178). Burke finds that civilian contractors—who often outnumber soldiers in both wars—are among the leading braggarts. But soldiers themselves are not above inflating their own personal backgrounds and supposed service. Likewise, as military service has been more recognized and honored since 9/11, the country has witnessed a wave of impostors claiming personal gallantry in wars dating to Korea and Vietnam. President George W. Bush's own dramatic Mission Accomplished landing on an aircraft carrier in 2003 is a form of creative manipulation, Burke contends.The strength of this interdisciplinary anthology of essays lies in the diversity and breadth of the topics explored by the individual authors. At the same time, it is a challenge for the editor to pull the various articles together and link them to the book's central theme. While the 12 articles in Different Drummers cover different wars, different militaries, and different personal experiences, Tuleja has curated a fascinating book that delves into the “disjunction between organizational solidarity and individual pushback, seeking to examine the ways in which members of the armed forces express ambivalent or conflicted attitudes about the organizations that they serve, for the most part, with enthusiasm and pride” (p. ix). Different Drummers casts a wide net and will attract a wide audience, including folklorists, sociologists, military historians, and general readers interested in the responses of men and women to military service.

Reviewed by: Saints, Sinners, and Soldiers: Canada’s Second World War P. Whitney Lackenbauer Saints, Sinners, and Soldiers: Canada’s Second World War. By Jeffrey A. Keshen. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004. ISBN 0-7748-0923-X. Photographs. Tables. Figures. Notes. Index. Pp. x, 389. Can. $45.00. If Canadian military historians still tend to depict the Second World War as "the good war," a selfless moral crusade against tyranny, Jeffrey Keshen's social history of the war years exposes the more sordid side of wartime life. The author charts an able course through the realities, perceptions, and exaggerations of the country at war. Using a national lens he is able to discern and contextualize broad social and cultural trends in a revealing and compelling fashion. "In many ways, the war was a social accelerator," Keshen explains, "quickly thrusting people into situations that boldly challenged their moral and social conventions" (p. 11). In these pages we see a country recoiling in the face of rapidly changing social values, and the range of topics is impressive: from voluntary services like the Red Cross and Air Raid Protection program, to economic strains and labour disputes, to rationing, a flourishing black market, and the selling of bodily pleasures. These challenges precipitated the increasing regulation of Canadian life and concomitant reforms to recreation, education, and justice systems. His important chapters on women and youth, with their rigorous attention to context and demographic realities, critically re-evaluate assumptions in the historiography and challenge misconceptions. His chapter on Canadians serving overseas, although probably the weakest, still reveals some interesting statistics on venereal disease and Canadians' proclivities for carnal pleasures. Veterans who returned to "civvie street" benefited from a comprehensive re-establishment program, carefully designed to ensure social stability. Many women, pushed back into the domestic sphere at war's end, shared concerns about traditional values and structures. Their wartime experiences, however, had "expanded horizons and ambitions" and "contributed to greater self-reliance and confidence and helped to build a legacy of broadened opportunities" (p. 145). [End Page 1281] More broadly, the author reveals fundamental changes in Canadian society and culture that had far-reaching repercussions. The title bears striking resemblance to Lieut.(S) William Pugsley's Saints, Devils, and Ordinary Seamen (1945)—suggesting that perhaps not all the literature is as monolithic in its depiction of the "good war" as the author suggests—but Keshen's book is a wonderful and refreshing contribution to our knowledge of war and society in Canada. It is that rare gem that is as rich in detail as it is broad in its historiographical implications. Impressive in its critical use of the available secondary literature, archival holdings, newspapers, and oral interviews, the book's assertions are generally supported with solid evidence, and particularly rich aggregate statistics. The ample endnotes hold a wealth of interesting and useful information, although a bibliography would still have been helpful. Keshen's clear, accessible style and vigorous prose, unencumbered by jargon, make this an important source for students, scholars, and an interested general readership. Saints, Sinners, and Soldiers bridges the artificial divide which all too often stifles meaningful dialogue between social and military historians, and deserves a wide audience. P. Whitney Lackenbauer St. Jerome’s University Waterloo, Ontario, Canada Copyright © 2004 Society for Military History

This chapter focuses on German and British children's daily lives during the First World War, particularly emphasizing their wartime experiences. It also focuses on individual toys and games produced during the war, in addition to printed sources, such as toy industry publications, as well as children's books and juvenile literature from both countries. British toy producers also faced many problems at the start of the conflict. Many toys were imported from Germany before the war, but, as stocks of German toys were mostly sold by the end of 1915, British manufacturers had to act quickly to fill the gap in the market, building a new wartime toy industry to compensate for the loss of German imports. One important characteristic of war games produced in Britain during the First World War was their tendency to concentrate on one particular enemy, namely the German Emperor. Badges with war-related rhymes were popular. Keywords: Britain; First World War; games; Germany; juvenile literature; toys

The image of the First World War soldier as a cowed victim, caught in the grip of a meaningless, industrialized war, is one that has become entrenched in the British popular imagination. It was not, however, the image that dominated public discussion of the soldier between 1914 and 1918. This article seeks to examine how the portrayal of the soldier changed during and after the First World War and proposes that the victimized soldier motif has been reinforced today by the coalescence of three trends. The first is the growth of the family history industry that encourages an individualized and empathetic approach to the First World War. The second trend is concerned with an increasing public interest in psychological reactions to war. Since the Vietnam War, there has been a growing expectation that soldiers will be psychologically damaged by wartime experience. This has influenced the public perception of the First World War soldier, affecting, in particular, the discussion surrounding those executed for military crimes during the conflict. Finally, the article argues that long-term changes in British attitudes to the use of force, coupled with the experience of recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, have also coloured the way in which the First World War is portrayed. A range of interest groups have cast the contemporary British soldier as a victim in recent years and the article argues that the explicit linking of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq with the First World War has reinforced this victim image for each conflict.

Reviewed by: Hemingway, the Red Cross, and the Great War by Steven Florczyk Alex Vernon Hemingway, the Red Cross, and the Great War. By Steven Florczyk . Kent, OH : Kent State UP , 2014 . 142 pp. Cloth $49.00 On a rainy Wednesday, 25 June 2014, participants in the sixteenth biennial international Hemingway conference visited the bend in the Piave River, at [End Page 106] the northeastern edge of Fossalta, where Ernest Hemingway received his severe wounding. According to our host, Gianni Moriani from the Università di Venezia Ca’ Foscari, Hemingway had begun his temporary assignment to run the local rolling canteen ninety-six years ago to the day of our visit. However, Red Cross records indicate his actual posting was not to Fossalta but to Fornaci, some seven kilometers back from the Piave. Such research precision is at the heart of Steven Florczyk’s Hemingway, the Red Cross, and the Great War. The book’s ambition is modest. It uses “previously unexamined materials” to “offer even more helpful details about Hemingway’s Red Cross service” and “clarify aspects of Hemingway’s involvement that have been unclear or not entirely accurate in previous scholarship” (xv – xvi). Florczyk draws on the mainstays—Baker’s Life Story, Reynolds’s Hemingway’s First War and The Young Hemingway, Villard and Nagel’s Hemingway in Love and War, Lewis’s A Farewell to Arms: The War of the Words—takes full advantage of Steve Paul’s work on the Kansas City Star’s reportage about the war as well as the first volume of the Letters project. It also conducts significant original research, including “the diary of the commanding officer, Captain Robert W. Bates; official reports documenting the ambulance and canteen services; section newspapers published by volunteers; as well as additional contemporaneous accounts” (xvi). The result is a compact yet thorough recounting of Hemingway’s wartime experience in five chapters, from the Red Cross ambulance service’s decision to support the Italian front and Hemingway’s decision to volunteer (“Esprit de Corps” and “Journey to War”), to his service and wounding (“Active Duty” and “Hero of the Piave”), and wrapping up with a survey of the war’s treatment in Hemingway’s writing (“Dopo la Guerra”). If you are looking for a final answer about whether Hemingway ignored his own injuries and carried a wounded Italian soldier to safety, you will be disappointed. Florczyk compares all the accounts he presumably could find—wisely disregarding the fiction—but can only finally state that Hemingway “apparently” performed this heroic feat (70). More intriguingly, Florczyk provides evidence that suggests another Italian soldier might have given his own life to save Hemingway’s, this from Captain Robert W. Bates’s “Ambulance Report No. 9” (Bates commanded the Red Cross ambulances in Italy): During such a trip, E.M. Hemingway of Section 4 was wounded by the explosion of a shell which landed about three feet from him, killing a soldier who stood between him and the point of [End Page 107] explosion, and wounding others. Due to the soldier who lost his life and who protected Hemingway somewhat from the explosion, and due also to the fact that the eclats [shell-casing fragments] had not yet obtained their full range, Hemingway was only wounded in the legs. (79) In Hemingway in Love and War, James Nagel quotes a nearly identical sentence to this first one, from Guy Lowell’s Red Cross Report of the Department of Military Affairs, though Nagel does not quote the second sentence (if indeed Lowell repeated it) and does not draw the same potential inference (216). We should not at all be surprised that military reports reproduce the same language—indeed alterations to the most immediate official account would be the more suspect scenario. Other biographers have quoted Ted Brumback’s description, which includes the soldier killed between Hemingway and the blast but does not carry the same implication (Florczyk 78). Hemingway, the Red Cross, and the Great War achieves a great deal in the way of context. In the opening pages, for example, Florczyk tracks the issues within the Red Cross that created the delay between Hemingway’s application and acceptance. He singles out Section...

This article examines some aspects of the social history of cinema in wartime. Only limited attention has been paid thus far to the ways in which First World War soldiers experienced the ‘picture shows’. It focuses on reconstructing the cinema experiences of Australian soldiers during the First World War, considering some of their responses to, and interactions with, what they saw. It places this history within the broader story of entertainment and recreation for service personnel and seeks to elucidate the role of cinema in the lives and experiences of soldiers and veterans.