The Impact of the Great War

Question 1

J.G. Fuller; Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies

Answer 1

• The soldiers of the British and Dominion mass effectively resisted the complete militarization of their values, outlook and behaviour. Therefor they were able to keep going despite adversity.
• The fact that 3/5ths of infantrymen’s service abroad spent in billets and rest camps helped them to sustain the idea of temporary soldiering.
• Helped them to bear army routine, the superiority of public-school officers, the machinations of politicians and profiteers at home, the rotten organization and unfairness of military life.

Question 2

J. Winters: Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning

Answer 2

• 2 different ways of imagining war;
o Modern Memory: creation of a new language of truth-telling about the war in poetry, prose, visual arts. Modernism, move away from the ‘lies’ and ‘Big words’ of older generation. Non-combatant writers such as Eliot and Pound follow this.
o Traditional memory: through propaganda, ‘lies’, sentimentalism and euphemisms about battle ‘glory’, the ‘hallowed dead’ etc.
• There are continuations between avant-guard and mainstream styles.
• Questions the distinction between ‘modern’ as positive abstraction and traditional with negative, ‘illusionist’.
• There is no teleology in the arts.
• Fundamental argument is that the enduring of many traditional motifs – classical, romantic and religious images – is directly related to the universality of bereavement. Traditional modes of remembering help people to deal with their losses.
• After WW2 people found it harder to do this - more extreme nuclear bombs etc.

Question 3

P. Fussell; the Great War and Modern Memory

Answer 3

• The Great war, primarily manifested in the trench warfare experience of France and Belgium, has had a very significant literary and cultural impact (e.g. Wilfred Owen poet). This is because of the unprecedented scale of slaughter during the war.
- Experience of trench warfare left indelible impressions on the imaginations of the participants. E.g. dawn and dust become associated with the fear of battle.
- Gross dichotomising between ‘we’ and ‘they’ exaggerated by experience of two enemies facing each other across no man’s land.
• There is a connection between the actual experience of the Great War and the collective imagination with which we conceive it; it is a reciprocal process; life feeds the literature and in return the literature feeds the life/memory.
• Many aspects of the rhetoric, imagery and myth associated with the Great War have permeated out culture
• There is continuity between pre-and inter-war expression in the arts.

Question 4

D. Todmann; The First World war: Myth and Memory

Answer 4

• While the forlorn character of the Front particularly struck men from agricultural or rural backgrounds, those who were miners or factory workers were less likely to have noticed the desolation, given their normal environment.
• While there was death on a horrendous scale, even among British combat troops the death rate was at most 13 percent, because armies were so enormous, and large numbers of troops were not even at risk.

Question 5

C.M. Tylee; The Great War and Women’s Consciousness: Images of Militarism and Feminism in Women’s Writings.

Answer 5

• Fussell’s study is skewed because it concentrates on the literary contributions of men.
• By examining the writings of 22 English women authors, Tylee demonstrates that women wrote extensively about the impact of WW1.
• Pre-war suffragists wrote about how the experience of the great war enhanced their understanding of feminism.
• Pain expressed when husbands/brothers etc. lost
• Themes from the Great War continued to resonate in the novels, autobiographies, and memoirs of British women through to the 1960s.