Western Front Research Articles

Along strike variations on inverted Tarapacá Basin and its influence in buried western Andean mountain front building

Recent studies focus in the forearc tectonic and structural evolution evidencing the strong control of the pre-orogenic structures in the accommodation of the Andean shortening and deformation. Lateral variations in the structures of mountain fronts can generate relevant changes in the crustal shortening magnitudes and lead to variations in tectonic models. The Western Andean Mountain Front at 21°S represents a unique opportunity to understand the interplay between inherited extensional fabric and thrust belt front structures related to orogenic processes. To assess the structural style, along strike variations and tectonic evolution, we combined regional field observations, 2D seismic interpretation calibrated by well data and rock outcrops, balanced structural cross-sections, aero-magnetic data, structural interpretation and 3D structural modelling. The main results validated and latitudinally extended the structural style characterized by partially inverted graben and half-graben arrays formed by Jurassic to Early Cretaceous extension and subsequently underwent contraction which led to the basin inversion at least since the Upper Cretaceous. This contribution also shows for the first time a complete 3D structural framework showing lateral continuation of main structures and the relationship between orogen-parallel (N–S and NNE-SSW trends) and orogen-oblique structures (ENE-WSW, NW-SE and WNW-ESE orientations), being plausible to propose tip points, polarity changes and accommodation zones. Partially inverted graben and half-graben arrays, accommodation zones, its evolution and along strike variations must be consider in tectonic and generative exploration models to better understand the main Andean structures and mineral deposits distribution, respectively.

Impact of the extremely warm Gulf Stream on heavy precipitation induced by Hurricane Sandy (2012) during its extratropical transition

This study investigated the role of the extremely warm sea surface temperature (EWSST) over the Gulf Stream (GS) in heavy precipitation induced by Hurricane Sandy in October 2012 during its extratropical transition (ET). A control (CTL) run with observed SST and a climate (CLM) run with climatological SST over the GS were performed using a high-resolution regional atmospheric model. Sandy-induced precipitation over the Mid-Atlantic coastal region was larger by approximately 40% in the CTL run than in the CLM run during its ET phase. The western sector of Sandy in the CTL run exhibited the westward-tilting lower-to-middle tropospheric front and the pronounced convectively unstable layer created by large surface fluxes of sensible and latent heat from the EWSST region. The intensified convective instability was released by the frontal deep updrafts, enhancing frontal precipitation in the western part of Sandy. A backward trajectory analysis demonstrated that the abundant moisture evaporated from the GS was imported into the western frontal rainbands by the low-level easterlies passing the northern sector of Sandy. The EWSST facilitated the moistening process of air parcels transported by the easterlies due to the active heat and moisture supply from the underlying current, contributing to the increase in moisture influx toward the western front. Another trajectory analysis indicated that the formation of low-level easterlies north of Sandy originated from the combination of Sandy and high-latitude synoptic-scale systems such as an anomalous high over the Labrador Sea and an extratropical cyclone east of Sandy. These results corroborate the importance of the extremely warm midlatitude ocean and complex high-latitude weather systems to the enhancement of Sandy-induced heavy precipitation.

The First World War diary of Noël Drury, 6th Royal Dublin Fusiliers: Gallipoli, Salonika, the Middle East and the Western Front. Edited by Richard S. Grayson. Pp 348. Martlesham: Army Record Society/Boydell Press. 2022. £75.

The First World War diary of Noël Drury, 6th Royal Dublin Fusiliers: Gallipoli, Salonika, the Middle East and the Western Front. Edited by Richard S. Grayson. Pp 348. Martlesham: Army Record Society/Boydell Press. 2022. £75. - Volume 47 Issue 171

The Representation of War in Literature A Comparative Study of 'All Quiet on the Western Front' and 'For Whom the Bell Tolls'

This article presents a comparative study of the representation of war in literature through a analysis of two novels: "All Quiet on the Western Front" by Erich Maria Remarque and "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway. The article explores the ways in which the authors depict the experiences of soldiers and civilians in the context of war, examining the themes of trauma, disillusionment, and the human cost of conflict. Through a close analysis of the literary techniques used in each novel, the article demonstrates how these two works offer distinct but complementary perspectives on the impact of war on individuals and societies. Ultimately, this comparative study highlights the power of literature to convey complex ideas about war and its effects on humanity. War has been a recurring theme in literature, and writers have used it to depict the horrors, tragedies, and human emotions associated with it. This comparative study analyzes two renowned works of literature that represent war- "All Quiet on the Western Front" by Erich Maria Remarque and "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway. The analysis focuses on the similarities and differences in the representation of war in these works, the authors' perspectives on war, and their use of literary techniques. This article argues that while both authors portray war as a brutal and devastating experience, Hemingway emphasizes the political and ideological reasons behind the war, while Remarque emphasizes the human toll it takes on the soldiers. The literary techniques used by both authors, such as symbolism and irony, further highlight their differing perspectives on war.

From “The Kumkum” to Erich Maria Remarque: a year in the life of Avigdor Hameiri

ABSTRACT Only two weeks separated between the publication of the Hebrew translation of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, the great First World War novel, written by a veteran soldier – and the publication of Avigdor Hameiri’s own war memoir, The Great Madness, the first best-seller of the Hebrew literature in Palestine. The publication of Hameiri’s magnum opus came at the end of 1929, the year in which the Jewish author, poet and former soldier closed the curtains on the Kumkum, the first ever Hebrew satirical theatre in Palestine.

Production of German Picture Postcards at the Western Front 1915–1916 as Exemplified by the Imagery of the Church Bell of Marquillies (Département du Nord, France)

During World War I the soldiers’ life at and behind the frontline was captured by personal photography. While heavily regulated and censored on the allied side, conditions were more relaxed for German soldiers, and for German officers, in particular. Drawing on a large sample set of images of the same subject matter, a French church bell with a patriotic, anti-German inscription, this paper surveys the private production of picture postcards by German soldiers. Initially photographed by a range of individuals, some images were eventually produced as printed lithographed postcards by regional German publishers. The processes and limitations of the personal versus commercial production of picture postcards are discussed.

The Argonauts of the Western Front – Poets as Ethnographers of the Culture de Guerre in the First World War

For over a century, historians and literary critics appear to have been at odds regarding the poetry of the First World War. This schism owes itself to processes of canonization which restrict (in Britain) or completely ignore (in France) the full extent and diversity of wartime poetic practices. Investigating a new corpus of French poets of the First World War, and considering poetry as a social and cultural category and as a wartime practice whose functions go beyond literary value, this article argues that war poets can be read as ethnographers of wartime culture. In proposing this analogy, it aims to present the ethnographic conventions as a common ground where History and Poetics can establish a dialogue. For scholars aiming to investigate how cultural production shapes experiences of armed conflict, this ensures poets are seen as the producers of interpretive knowledge of war and poems as more than either transparent documents or hermetic lyrical creations.

ANALYZING ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT AND TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD: LITERATURE PROPAGATING PEACE AND HUMAN RIGHTS

The discipline of literature is a productive way of bringing transformation in the society for building peace and achieving human rights. Cockrill, Hall (2018) in Understanding Human Rights through Literature, argues that literature can cultivate a better understanding of Human Rights through critical evaluation of characters, analysis of scenarios, and examination of diverse historical voices. The present study analyzes two novels; Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. The former novel reveals characters’ physical and mental trauma during the war as well as the detachment from civilian life whereas the latter propagates human dignity. Through both novels, the study manifests that the aim of literature is turning blood into ink, as says T.S Eliot, for building peace among people and dissenting to war and anti-human practices. This qualitative study implies Fry’s (2007) Beyond War as theoretical framework which argues that human being has no inherited inclination for war and this is a politico-cultural creation. The study demonstrates the role of literature in promoting human rights and peace against war and racism. Keywords: Literature, Human Rights, Peace, Transformation, War, Racism.

Of Loss, Belonging and Remembrance: Indian Poetic Responses to World War I

This article undertakes a critical exploration of the Indian poetic responses to World War I. The most striking feature of this poetry was its uniquely diverse nature, which reflected in full the multicultural character of the Indian army at the Western Front and elsewhere in the world. The immense diversity of Indian soldiers triggered a wide range of emotions and ideas from combatants and civilians alike. While we have established writers like Rabindranath Tagore and Sarojini Naidu on the one hand, we have a poetic miscellany of lesser known creative voices on the other, some even documenting their first-hand experiences of the War. Poems, lyrical propaganda, folk-songs, epistolary verse, elegies and even verses accompanying posters make up the various modes of literary circulation during this time of unprecedented global turmoil. Making use of both original compositions and various other works in translation, this article argues that most of this poetic evidence often serves as crucial testimonies, chronicling not only the major historical events of the War years, but also assiduously recording the wide gamut of feelings and emotions associated with the conflict.

Energizing Munitions for the Body: The French Army’s Alcohol Policy on the Western Front during the Great War

Energizing Munitions for the Body: The French Army’s Alcohol Policy on the Western Front during the Great War

The battle on the river Somme and the historical politics in Britain

The article focuses on the commemorative experience of Britain in the context of a systematic study of the policy of memory at the present stage of the country's development. The main purpose of the study is to analyse the forms and ways of representing the Battle of the Somme in modern Britain as a historical reality, highlighting the main features of the British experience of preserving the memory of this event and transmitting it for a mass audience. The author proposes an attempt to trace the development of ideas in scientific and popular science materials concerning the event as a collective trauma, the memory of which has been reflected in British historiography since its formation in 1916. The collective memory of the events of the First World War in Britain is often ambiguous and debatable, especially the Battle of the Somme, which changed people's perception of armed conflicts. As part of the study of the British politics of memory, it was revealed that the "historical narrative" of the battle is to glorify the exploits of the expeditionary forces on the Western Front and at the same time criticise the commanders of the armed forces responsible for massive combat losses.

Scale‐Dependent Temperature‐Salinity Compensation in Frontal Regions of the Taiwan Strait

AbstractBased on high‐resolution, cross‐frontal towed measurements, this study investigates temperature‐salinity (T‐S) compensation and its scale dependence in the Taiwan Strait. In winter and spring when the northeasterly monsoon is prevailing, colder and fresher waters flow southward along the coast of the Chinese mainland, which encounter the northward‐flowing, warmer and saltier waters in the Taiwan Strait. Two slanted density fronts are generated across the interfacing zone forming a cone‐shaped isopycnal distribution in the cross‐frontal direction. Analyses based on the density ratio and Turner angle suggest the expected S‐dominated and T‐dominated types of density variations at the western and eastern density fronts, respectively. Exact T‐S compensation is observed within the interfacing zone. Analysis of the scale dependence indicates that temperature and salinity get more (less) compensated from O(10 km) to O(1 km) scale in the S‐dominated (T‐dominated) frontal zone. Although contrasting density compensating features are observed on the two flanks of the transition zone, they can both be interpreted by the restratification‐cooling mechanism. Specifically, the overturning cells due to submesoscale instabilities in the upper mixed layer slump isopycnals in the frontal zone, inducing shoaling of the mixed layer at both ends of the sampled sections. Surface cooling results in larger temperature drops in the shallower mixed layers, and thus increases (decreases) the degree of T‐S compensation in the S‐dominated (T‐dominated) frontal zone at the scale for submesoscale instabilities to develop.

Improvising Language Capability: The British Army's Corps of Interpreters, 1914–1915

This article examines the British army's short-lived Corps of Interpreters on the Western Front during the early stages of the First World War. It begins by establishing a benchmark for the regular army's French language capability in 1914. It then explores the interpreters’ recruitment process, employment, and the corps’ subsequent dissolution. Further insight into their motivation and suitability is then determined through a prosopographical analysis of their backgrounds and accounts of their employment. Overall, the article provides an important case study of the pitfalls of improvising military language capability during a crisis.

Visualising emptiness: the landscape of the Western Front and Australian and English children’s picture books

ABSTRACT Although the Great War made extraordinarily complex demands on the nations involved, it is the landscape of the battlefield which has continued to dominate contemporary perceptions of the conflict. Australian and English children’s picture book authors and illustrators have adopted a similar focus, particularly regarding the Western Front. It is the illustrators, however, who have the more complex task, for they have inherited an aesthetic issue that has challenged artists since 1914. Like the British, Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand official war artists of the time, they are confronted, at every turn, by the challenge of depicting a surreally empty landscape. It was not so much a landscape as the artists understood it before the war, but rather an anti-landscape, as though the war had annihilated Nature. What was left was a dystopian wilderness that bore witness to the destructive power of industrialised warfare. This article will explore how a selection of Australian and English children’s picture book illustrators respond to the emptiness of the battlefield landscape, or as Becca Weir so evocatively characterises it, the paradox of measurable nothingness.

Global War and Anti-Radical Legislation: Japan and the Peace Preservation Law of 1925

ABSTRACT Japan’s military participation in the First World War was relatively brief but the war and the ideas it unlocked exerted an impact up to and after the Second World War. Japan experienced an economic boom during the war resulting in an exponential increase in the cost of rice. This sparked a serious challenge to the Japanese state. The ensuing rice riots of 1918 saw the government forced to deploy more troops to suppress them than it had sent to intervene on behalf of White Russian forces in Siberia in the same year. Further, the ‘Wilsonian Moment’ emboldened the Korean independence movement in 1919. When the war ended on the Western Front in 1918, Japan was involved in military intervention in Eastern Russia, was quelling domestic unrest, and facing a major threat to the stability of its empire. Although enacted in 1925, the Peace Preservation Law grew directly from the events beginning in the final year of the First World War. The law was the instrumental platform for the construction of Japan’s infamous thought control apparatus of the 1930s and the policing of Japan’s formal and informal empires. This paper traces the wartime origins of the Peace Preservation Law in the context of the state of exception and how the First World War and the Russian Revolution forced Japan to rethink its conception of sovereignty.

Post-Pandemic War Narratives: Case studies of Quo Vadis Aida? (2020), All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) and Top Gun: Maverick (2022)

ABSTRACT: War tends to polarise national and global conflicts as encapsulated by the phrase, 'you are either with us or against us'. There is further danger of knee jerk reactions at such times, including the present, towards unconditionally funding long-term military security hardware and dedicating scarce resources that are badly needed for more benevolent projects, including equitable redistribution of resources, not to mention the challenge to move away from fossil fuels in our climate crisis. These tensions are evident on recognising European dependence on Russian oil and gas, which unfortunately is helping to fund the ongoing Ukrainian war. This paper will explore how a sample of more contemporary wars and national conflicts have been dramatised on film since the pandemic. Focusing specifically on three contrasting approaches to the tragedy of war and its effects on citizens and soldiers: from an insider's personal response to the massacre in the Balkans during the 1990s in Quo Vadis, Aida? (2020), to the reworked conventional World War One classic All Quiet on the Western Front (2022), before finally coming full circle with the big budget Hollywood celebration of aerial war heroics in the sequel Top Gun: Maverick (2022). Sample textual and contextual analysis will be used to explore how such war narratives have become repurposed, both from an insider soldier's perspective and also through a rejuvenated cinematic war framework, as contemporary audiences strive to cope with ever-increasing crises and conflicts facing the planet, having recently endured a global pandemic.

All’s Not Quiet on the Western Front? The Stigma against Mental Health Treatment for World Leaders

All’s Not Quiet on the Western Front? The Stigma against Mental Health Treatment for World Leaders

Activities of the national intelligentsia to organize assistance to the Kazakhs mobilized for rear work during the First World War

The article examines the role of figures of the Alash movement and the Kazakh intelligentsia in organizing assistance to Kazakhs mobilized for rear work during the First World War. With the beginning of the requisition, the activities of public committees for the organization of assistance to mobilized Kazakhs intensified. The article examines the activities and his direct participation of Alikhan Bukeikhan and his associates in the creation of a foreign department under the Committee of the Union on the Western Front, which monitored the living and working conditions of the rear guards, dealt with their nutrition and treatment. The authors come to the conclusion that numerous appeals of «Alash» figures demanding the immediate return of Kazakh workers mobilized for rear duty and the cessation of further mobilization lead to the fact that the Provisional Government was forced to issue a special decree suspending the mobilization of Kazakhs for rear work. In general, the analysis of archival materials showed that the involvement of educated Kazakh youth in the work of the Foreign Department to assist compatriots mobilized for rear work allowed them to go through a serious political school, and they fully managed to prove themselves during the subsequent revolutions.

НОВЫЕ СТРАНИЦЫ ИЗ БИОГРАФИИ И ДЕЯТЕЛЬНОСТИ ГЕНЕРАЛ-МАЙОРА МЕДИЦИНСКОЙ СЛУЖБЫ НЕВСКОГО Н.М. (к 130-летию со дня рождения)

The article is devoted to the life path, service and professional activities of a participant in three wars of the first half of the XX century, an extraordinary personality and public figure – Honored Doctor of the RSFSR, Major General of the medical service of Nevsky Nikolay Mikhailovich. His talent as an organizer of military healthcare was especially evident in the theater of the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945 during his leadership of the frontline evacuation point No. 77 of the Western and 2nd Belorussian Fronts for 5 years, as well as in the post-war period – during his 20-year leadership of the collectives of two of the largest military hospitals in the country – the Central Military Clinical Hospital named after P.V. Mandryk and the Main Military Clinical Hospital named after N.N. Burdenko.

Съезды военного духовенства Румынского фронта в Яссах в 1917 году

The article studies the practice of congresses of the Orthodox military clergy in 1917. To discuss their work in new social and political conditions, the priests gathered at the level of divisions, corps, and armies. Adoption of general decisions required more representative meetings: in the spring and summer of 1917, congresses of the military clergy of the South-Western, Romanian, Western, and Northern fronts were held, and in July 1917, the Second All-Russian Congress of the Military and Naval Clergy was held in Mogilev. Studying minutes of the front-line congresses identifies issues that bothered priests serving in military units and institutions of various fronts of the Russian army and proposed solutions for urgent problems. The study is to consider the work of the congresses of the military clergy of the Romanian Front and to determine their place among congresses of the military clergy in 1917. To that end, the main decisions have been analyzed and compared with the decisions of other meetings. The article also discusses an attempt to increase the number of representatives of the front in Mogilev, explaining the reasons for its failure. The participants in the military clergy congresses of the Romanian front expressed interests of a fairly large number of priests: as of May 1917, approximately 410 pastors served in the military units and institutions of the young front. At the first congress (May 15–16, 1917) of the clergy of the Romanian front, most important (according to delegates) issues were discussed: state of the army, measures of its improvement, delegation of front priests to the All-Russian Congress of the Military and Naval Clergy, support for the dismissed clergy, representation in the Synod, etc. The second congress (June 25, 1917) convened to elect delegates to Mogilev. The source base of the study is documents from the fonds of the Russian State Historical Archive: minutes of the congresses of clergy of the Romanian, Western, South-Western, Northern fronts, minutes of the Second All-Russian Congress of the Military and Naval Clergy, telegrams, reports, and other documents concerning the protopresbyter’s office. Data on the work of the congresses of clergy of the Romanian front is being introduced into scientific use for the first time.