Great War Experience Research Articles

Katharine Tighe Fessenden: Midwife of Paradise

Abstract In July 1919, F. Scott Fitzgerald famously quit a low-level advertising job in New York City to return home to St. Paul, Minnesota. It was his last-ditch effort to rewrite a manuscript that had been rejected twice by Charles Scribner’s Sons. He hoped a publishing contract might finally convince Zelda Sayre to marry him. That novel, This Side of Paradise, established him as the voice of his generation and ushered in the Jazz Age. Although scholars are well-aware of the major changes Fitzgerald made to the manuscript that summer, they largely ignore the role that a childhood friend played in the revision that became Paradise. This article explores the author’s relationship with St. Paul native Katharine Tighe, who worked closely with Fitzgerald on this third revision before its final submission to Maxwell Perkins. Although James L. W. West III catalogues her input in the 1995 Cambridge edition of the novel, little biographical information about Tighe has surfaced. This article demonstrates why she was the right person to serve as a “midwife” to the manuscript. Tighe understood the St. Paul, Eastern prep-school, and college milieux of the story. She had her own Great War experience, treating the wounded after completing Vassar College’s training camp for nurses. Like Fitzgerald, the Great Influenza epidemic claimed the life of one of her friends. Although it is doubtful Tighe and Fitzgerald saw each other after 1922, the pair corresponded as late as 1940, just months before Fitzgerald’s death. Although biographers Henry Dan Piper and Andrew Turnbull interviewed her during their research, Katharine Tighe Fessenden represents a rare unexplored aspect of Fitzgerald’s otherwise closely examined life.

The Missing and the Missed of Lanark County, Ontario

In 1923, The Volunteer monument in Almonte, Ontario was erected and dedicated to the district’s soldiers who fell in the Great War. It was designed by renowned sculptor and professor, R. Tait McKenzie, and modelled after the late Lt. Alexander George Rosamond, heir to Almonte’s esteemed Rosamond family paper mills. The seemingly simple design of a pensive bronze soldier perched atop a stone plinth, flanked by the names of his fallen comrades, is anything but simplistic in its symbolism. This article details the background, conception and realization of The Volunteer, considering the ways in which it reflects the history of the peoples who settled the region, and the collective Great War experience of Almonte and greater Lanark County. Further, in as much as the monument was specifically raised to honour the lost men of Almonte and the Township of Ramsay, this article questions whether, and in what ways, it succeeds or falters in its purpose.

Archives and the Australian Great War centenary: retrospect and prospect

ABSTRACT Based on a keynote address to the 2018 International Society for First World War Studies conference, the author’s survey of a centenary of archival endeavour comprises four time periods and two themes. It highlights the unique role of the Australian War Memorial and its initial documentation priorities favouring Dr C.E.W. Bean’s official war history, the battlefront and the war dead. A post-centenary open-ended aftermath is also discussed covering processing backlogs, the prospective idea of ‘digital breakthrough’ and the archival implications of ever-widening understandings of the war and its endless aftermaths. The paper ends with an appeal for new voices in researching the documentation of Australia’s Great War experience.

A Priest at the Front. Jozef Tiso Changing Social Identities in the First World War

This paper investigates the Great War experience and social identities of the young Catholic priest from Austria-Hungary, Dr. Jozef Tiso. Born in 1887, Tiso became President of the Nazi-Germany-allied Slovakia in 1939-1945, and was executed by the Czechoslovak justice in 1947. This study mainly uses (and compares) Tiso’s diary, written during his service in the Habsburg army at the Austro-Russian front in 1914, and his 1946 affidavit to the Czechoslovak investigators. Exploring his manyfolder identity, we challenge the two dominant views that, before 1918, Tiso felt himself either a Slovak nationalist or a Magyar nationalist. We conclude that the social identity of Jozef Tiso in WWI consisted of two main categories: Catholic priest and Austro-Hungarian patriot. These categories coexisted and intertwined with those of Slovak sympathizer and Hungarian citizen.

Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire. By Joshua A. Sanborn. The Greater War. Edited by Robert Gerwarth.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xii+288. $49.95.

<i>Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire</i>. By Joshua A. Sanborn. The Greater War. Edited by Robert Gerwarth.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xii+288. $49.95.

“Die Russen in Ostpreussen“: Images of Russia and Russians in the memoirs on the Great War in East Prussia, published in Germany from

“Die Russen in Ostpreussen“: Images of Russia and Russians in the memoirs on the Great War in East Prussia, published in Germany from

Resisting the Hero’s Tale: The Trope of the Cowardly Soldier in the Literature of the Great War

Among the experiences of otherness that unsettled the imperial trope of the warrior hero, this paper focuses on the representation of the coward in three autobiographical responses to the Great War. By following the traces of the malingerer, the deserter and the psychologically injured soldier in Herbert’s The Secret Battle (1919), Aldington’s Death of a Hero (1929) and Manning’s Her Privates We (1930), the hero-other distinction induced by Victorian standards will be explored as a popular theme that becomes problematic on the Western front, as the figure of the (heroic) self and of the (antiheroic) other start to move away from the rigidity of the binary system. While Herbert, Aldington and Manning keep a strong component of their own class and patriotic identity both in their novels and in their lives, the Great War experience suggests the possibility of removing the association traditionally maintained between heroism and the Victorian notions of manliness. Such openness not only challenges the norm, but paves the way for the elaboration of a new sense of heroic selfhood. Particular attention is given to the representation of the shell-shocked soldier as a site of struggle and negotiation between the trope of cowardice and its reality.

To be truly British we must be anti-German New Zealand, Enemy Aliens and the Great War experience, 1914-1919

'To be truly British we must be Anti-German' was a statement voiced by Mrs Ida Boeufve to the Women's Anti-German League at a 1916 rally in Napier. The attitudes and social forces backing that declaration form the subject of Andrew Francis's recent book on the treatment of New Zealand's German-speaking settlers during the First World War. Adapted from his PhD research, 'To Be Truly British We Must Be Anti-German' approaches the period not simply to catalogue wartime anti-Germanism in its own right, but to consider the extent to which larger developments - immigration patterns, conceptions of collective identity and citizenship - set the tone for wartime reaction. This effort tocontextualize anti-alienism in New Zealand's war effort and larger history is taken one step further by considering the subject within a comparative context.

Prologue: Making Men, Destroying Bodies: Sport, Masculinity and the Great War Experience

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. It is enough to mention the recently published Sport and the Military by Tony Mason and Elizabeth Riedl and the fact that the main topic of the biennial French congress of sports history for 2010 was ‘Sport and War’. 2. Prost and Winter, Penser la Grande Guerre. 3. Bourke, Dismembering the Male; Capdevila et al., Hommes et femmes dans la France en guerre. 4. Good examples of historical approaches on sport and the military experience can be found for the USA in Wakefield, Playing to Win; Pope, ‘An Army of Athletes’; Pope, Patriotic Games; analyses of sports events with explicit connections to the Great War are, for instance, Lennartz, Die VI Olympische Spiele Berlin 1916; Terret, Les Jeux interalliés de 1919; Renson, La VIIème olympiade; Dietschy, ‘1918–1920, des tranchées aux stades’. 5. Lewis, ‘World War I and the Emergence of Sport for the Masses’. 6. On the links between gymnastics and war preparation in Continental Europe in the early twentieth century, see for instance, for Switzerland: Bussard, L'éducation physique suisse en quête d'identité; for France: Arnaud, Les Athlètes de la République; for Belgium: Delheye, ‘Happel in Antwerp and Euler in Brussels'; for Germany: Krüger, Körperkultur und Nationsbildung. 7. For the USA, see Menell, ‘The Service Football Program of World War I’; for the UK, see for instance Fuller, Troop Morale and Popular Culture, 1914–1918; Simkins, Kitchener's Army; Roberts, ‘The Best Football Team, The Best Platoon’. 8. For instance, Osborne, ‘“To Keep the Life of the Nation on the Old Lines”’; Veitch, ‘Sport and War in the British Literature of the First World War'; Veitch, ‘Play Up! Play Up! And Win the War!’. 9. Phillips, ‘The Unsporting German and the Athletic Anzac’. 10. Campbell, ‘Training for Sport is Training for War’; Vincent and Terret, ‘Le rugby et la France pendant la Première Guerre mondiale’; Dietschy, ‘La guerre ou le “grand match”’; Dietschy, ‘Le sport et la Première Guerre mondiale’; Dietschy, ‘Sport dans la guerre’. 11. Waquet and Terret, ‘Ballons ronds, Tommies et tranchées’; Waquet, ‘Le football des Poilus'; Terret, ‘Le rôle des Young Men’s Christian Associations (YMCA)'; Chavinier, ‘Histoire du basket-ball français catholique’; Mémorial de Verdun, Les sportifs français dans la Grande Guerre. 12. Hall, ‘“The Greater Game”'; McDaniels, ‘Remembering the Bearcats’; Collins, ‘English Union and the First World War’. 13. Tauber, Vom Schützengraben auf den grünen Rasen. 14. Rauch, L'identité masculine à l'ombre des femmes. 15. Phillips, ‘Sport, War and Gender Images’; Melling, ‘Wartime Opportunities’; Mangan, ‘“Golden Boys” of Playing Field and Battlefield’; Wilson, ‘Skating to Armageddon’. It is worth noting that Wakefield and Pope's larger synthesis includes excellent sections on the relations between the Great War and masculinity.

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: Whose War Was It Anyway? Some Australian Historians and the Great War

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: Whose War Was It Anyway? Some Australian Historians and the Great War

We Lead, Others Follow: First Canadian Division, 1914–1918 (review)

Reviewed by: We Lead, Others Follow: First Canadian Division, 1914-1918 Mark Humphries We Lead, Others Follow: First Canadian Division, 1914–1918. Kenneth Radley. St Catharines: Vanwell, 2006. Pp. 415, illus., b&w, $49.95 cloth In the preface to We Lead, Others Follow, Kenneth Radley promises that his adapted PhD dissertation will be the first history of a Canadian division from either world war. While the subject holds much promise, the book falls short of its potential. [End Page 340] We Lead, Others Follow is not a history of the First Canadian Division, but rather a study of staff work, training, and leadership within the division. The book takes an anecdotal approach to explaining how battles are planned, how soldiers are created, and how people are led. While the book is thematically divided into studies of each of these three areas, Radley often deals with all three subjects at once, which would not normally be a significant problem if the book had an underlying narrative backbone that held the analysis together. Instead, the major events in the history of the division are accorded little space, making it difficult for all but the most experienced readers to connect the content of the book to the bigger picture of Canada's Great War experience. In all fairness, Radley's interest is not the forest: it is the trees, shrubs, and individual blades of grass that he wants to examine. The author lays out for the reader the fruits of his exhaustive archival research in 415 pages. Radley combed through endless boxes of administrative files, containing the millions of pages generated during the daily functioning of a division at war, and managed to extract the historically significant documents from the accounts of company messes and inventories of shirt buttons. While the book's evidentiary basis is impeccable, the author's analysis fails to penetrate its surface. 'The central idea of this book,' writes Radley, 'is that 1st Canadian Division became a good division. What made it a good one, that is to say what took it from raw militia to a good, professional fighting formation, was competent command and control, thorough staff work and sound training' (21). Aside from the fact that no historian has ever argued that First Canadian Division became a 'bad' division, and that it is difficult to make such an assessment without taking a comparative approach, such a simplistic argument devalues the very research that is the book's source of strength. Perhaps if the author had focused his study of one of the book's three themes (which, given the density of the book's content, would have been possible), a more complex, nuanced argument could have been constructed. Instead, the author is seemingly so concerned with squeezing every last bit of his research into the book, that interpretation takes a back seat to uncontextualized detail. This is not to say that the book is devoid of insightful analysis. Radley's discussions of the personalities of First Canadian Division, the place of the Canadian Corps within the British Expeditionary Force and the like between training and tactics are useful and at times revealing. That said, the author's observations remain largely [End Page 341] unconnected to one another, leaving the overall message unclear. The clarity of the author's interpretation is also, at times, impeded by his style of writing. Prose such as 'In July 1918 of the 28 Staff Officers in HQ 1st Division, only the AA & QMG (a Canadian) was p.s.c. In September 1916 two were p.s.c. (both British), and in December 1917 the AA & QMG (Canadian) and the GS01 (British) were staff trained' (185) does not help bring clarity to a complex subject. His book is, however, clearly aimed at the military specialist male reader and he makes no attempt to disguise this: 'For real excitement, combat must surely take precedence over everything else in a man's life . . . Only a man with experience can appreciate these sensations' (xiii). Despite its flaws, the book will prove useful to specialists of Canada's First World War and military aficionados alike. As a source of facts on the inner workings of the...

Quill and Canon: Writing the Great War in Canada

History never repeats itself, but historians always repeat each other. (1) That uncharitable view of profession may be true in cases, but scholarship by a new generation of historians is searching deep into the archives of the nation find meaning in the past, asking new questions and employing new methodologies. Historians are no longer content simply mimic previous interpretations. Despite this new research, however, most historians are guided by their predecessors, and are certainly affected by past historical interpretations. This article explores the first generation of Canadian historians capture the Great War experience in print. The aim is not compile an annotated bibliography, but instead delve into the writing of these period histories, exploring the authors and their attempt navigate the pressures and constituencies they faced in shaping the historical memory of that conflict. (2) This article, then, is less about the final historical products than the interplay of historians within the societies that spawned them and shaped their work. The canon of first-generation history was written by veterans, journalists, and amateur historians trying find meaning within Canada's Great War experience. The field was dominated by Colonel Archer Fortescue Duguid, the official historian of the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF). Duguid's control of the archival war records also allowed him exclude or marginalize other writers who hoped construct the historical memory of the conflict. The interplay of Duguid with other war writers supported the burgeoning field of academic military history, but still had a prominent goal of protecting, buttressing, or shaping reputations, either for a small pantheon of heroes or the Canadian Corps as a whole. The Great War was a watershed in Canada's development as a nation. One need not fully embrace the belief that Canadians gained their identity on the slopes of Vimy Ridge and still acknowledge that Canada as a country was never the same after partaking in that four-year-long awful bloodletting. With a population of not yet eight million, over 60,000 Canadians were killed in service; put this into perspective, Canada's proportional loses today would be a quarter million dead, and another 500,000 maimed. The Great War was Canada's coming-of-age event. Sir Max Aitken, later Lord Beaverbrook, was the first chronicler of Canada's Great War experience. Beenacrook, the little Canadian adventurer on the make, as one British socialite called him, devoted his considerable energies during the Great War publicize and propagate the deeds of his Canadian brethren. Beaverbrook had made his millions in Canada before the war by buying up companies, amalgamating them, and selling the over-issued stock at a higher price. Although he left Canada under a cloud of accusations that he had cheated a number of rich business partners out of their money, he remained close friends with the Minister of Militia and Defence, Sir Sam Hughes, and the prime minister, Sir Robert Borden. In England, Aitken began buy up newspapers, mingled in the highest social circles, was elected the House of Commons, and knighted. As the guns of August unleashed in 1914, Aitken watched helplessly as friends like Winston Churchill found influential appointments. There would be nothing for him in the Asquith wartime government. After some soul-searching, and more than a little wrangling, he convinced Hughes appoint him Canadian Eye Witness at the front. He sent reports back Hughes and Borden in this capacity, often appraising them of political or military issues in London. Moreover, he supplied journalistic accounts that were published throughout Canada, further highlighting the role of the Canadian forces. But he wished go further. Aitken described his vision Borden: to follow the fortunes of the First Division in France, share its experiences, give the public of Canada an account of the performances of its regiments, and finally enshrine in a contemporary history those exploits which will make the First Division immortal. …

Between the Mother of the Wounded and the Virgin of Jiu: Romanian Women and the Gender of Heroism during the Great War

This article adds new depth to understanding the gendered dimension of the Great War experience on the eastern front by focusing on one of the smaller participants in the conflict and a latecomer to the experience of total war: Romania. Bucur examines how the image of two famous women, Queen Marie and Ecaterina Teodoroiu, functioned to construct normative gender roles and definitions of heroism, at the expense of making invisible the actions of most other women. In this process, notions of patriotism, heroism, and virtue came to reinforce and encode gender divisions in a more well-defined public debate than ever before, as both policy makers and publicists sought to construct agency as a male prerogative. By making this aspect of the war visible, Bucur's analysis also engages the wider question of how Romanian politicians, publicists, and civilians understood the meaning of this total war and sought to mobilize for it.

Womanist propaganda, African-American Great War experience, and cultural strategies of the Harlem Renaissance: Plays by Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Mary P. Burrill

Abstract Despite the continued prominence of First World War studies, and the current debate about the importance of the Great War to the development of Modernism, there has been scant recognition of Black literary responses to World War I. Yet it is acknowledged that the Great War was crucial to the emergence of “the New Negro” and the Harlem Renaissance. This article examines two Great War plays by African American women which foreground the political issues raised by African American conscription to fight in France during World War I. It argues that there was a distinct womanist response to atrocities (in Europe and USA) and that these propaganda plays, by early Harlem Renaissance writers — Dunbar-Nelson and Burrill — were part of an important womanist cultural strategy to lead changes in American society via education and women's networks.