Angela K. Smith On The First World War

Angela K. Smith, The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism and the First World War

(Manchester: Manchester University Press; 2000), pp. 2, 3.

ʻMuch has been written about [the First World War] in the last years of the twentieth century, suggesting that there are still many unanswered questions.

We have trouble coming to terms with the nightmare images of trench warfare perpetuated down the generations by the anguish of Wilfred Owen, the bitterness of Siegfried Sassoon and the detachment of Robert Graves. . . .

Arguments persist concerning the cause of the war, the motives of the nations involved, even the need to fight at all. . . .

Of course there have been other wars that have promoted social and political debate and inspired literary creativity.

The Napoleonic Wars, the Crimea, the American Civil War, the Boer War the nineteenth century is littered with battlefields. In the final decades, military strategists were able to employ a range of technological weaponry that began to change the face of modern warfare.

But the ironclad battleships and trenches of the American conflict were safely located thousands of miles away from the British people, secure in their homeland, the bedrock of empire.

Similarly, the imperial war in South Africa, as the century closed, left the civilian population at home relatively untouched.

However, the First World War could not be so distanced.

The guns of the Western Front could be heard across the English Channel. Zeppelins carried out bombing raids along the east coast of Britain. Men were conscripted into combatant or non-combatant service. Women were encouraged to take the places of men in the workforce, in industry, on the land. Of the 5,215,162 men who served in the British army, 44.4 per cent were killed or wounded. Very few families escaped unscathed. . . .

ʻHistorically the war has been defined as an arena of male dominance, perhaps because many of the most haunting representations of war experience that have survived the intervening decades are built around images of trench warfare. . . . But in reality the trench experience was one encountered by less than half the total population; consequently these texts provide an unrepresentative record of the impact of the war.ʼ

******************************

↑ Return top of page ↑