The Edinburgh Companion to First World War Periodicals 9781474494724

Table of contents :
Contents
Figures and Tables
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I: Critical Approaches
1 Materiality
2 Networks
3 (Digital) Archives
4 Affect and Emotion
5 Memory
6 Popular Culture
Part II: Contributors
7 Authors
8 Artists
9 Editors
10 Journalists
11 War Correspondents
12 Photographers
Part III: Events
13 Beginnings
14 Battles
15 Alliances
16 The Armenian Genocide
17 Revolutions
18 The Influenza Pandemic
Part IV: Types of Periodicals
19 Trench Journals
20 Prisoner-of-War Camp Journals
21 Hospital Journals
22 Pacifist Journals
23 Women’s Suffrage and Labour Journals
24 Avant-garde Journals
Part V: Global Perspectives
25 German Colonial Africa
26 India
27 Australia and New Zealand
28 China
29 Canada
30 The Ottoman Empire
Notes on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

The Edinburgh Companion to First World War Periodicals

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Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities Recent volumes in the series The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies Lynn Turner, Undine Sellbach and Ron Broglio

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The Edinburgh Companion to W. B. Yeats and the Arts Tom Walker, Adrian Paterson and Charles Armstrong

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The Edinburgh Companion to Jane Austen and the Arts Joe Bray and Hannah Moss The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism in Contemporary Theatre Adrian Curtin, Nicholas Johnson, Naomi Paxton and Claire Warden The Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing, 1900–2000 Nicola Wilson, Elizabeth Gordon Willson, Alice Staveley, Helen Southworth, Daniela La Penna, Sophie Heywood and Claire Battershill The Edinburgh Companion to British Colonial Periodicals Caroline Davis, David Finkelstein and David Johnson The Edinburgh Companion to Don DeLillo and the Arts Catherine Gander The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Sound Studies Helen Groth and Julian Murphet The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion Suzanne Hobson and Andrew D. Radford The Edinburgh Companion to the Eighteenth-Century British Novel and the Arts Jakub Lipski and M.-C. Newbould The Edinburgh Companion to Curatorial Futures Bridget Crone and Bassam El Baroni Please see our website for a complete list of titles in the series https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/ecl

The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology Alex Goody and Ian Whittington The Edinburgh Companion to Romanticism and the Arts Maureen McCue and Sophie Thomas The Edinburgh Companion to First World War Periodicals Marysa Demoor, Cedric Van Dijck and Birgit Van Puymbroeck Forthcoming The Edinburgh Companion to Charles Dickens and the Arts Juliet John and Claire Wood The Edinburgh Companion to the Brontës and the Arts Amber Regis and Deborah Wynne

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The Edinburgh Companion to First World War Periodicals

Edited by Marysa Demoor, Cedric Van Dijck and Birgit Van Puymbroeck

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation, Marysa Demoor, Cedric Van Dijck and Birgit Van Puymbroeck 2023 © the chapters their several authors 2023 Cover image: The Suffragette Movement During the First World War. Catalogue number Q 107103 © Imperial War Museums Cover design: Jordan Shaw Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10 / 12 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 9471 7 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 9472 4 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 9473 1 (epub) The rights of Marysa Demoor, Cedric Van Dijck and Birgit Van Puymbroeck to be identified as Editors of this work have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

List of Figures and Tables viii Acknowledgementsxi Introduction1 Marysa Demoor, Cedric Van Dijck, Birgit Van Puymbroeck Part I: Critical Approaches  1. Materiality Jane Potter

17

  2. Networks Edmund G. C. King

32

  3. (Digital) Archives Jeffrey Drouin

51

  4. Affect and Emotion Fionnuala Dillane

66

 5. Memory Hanna Teichler

81

  6. Popular Culture Maaheen Ahmed

95

Part II: Contributors  7. Authors Argha Kumar Banerjee

115

 8. Artists Selena Daly

130

 9. Editors Christophe Declercq

146

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vi contents 10. Journalists Sara Prieto

161

11. War Correspondents Andrew Griffiths

175

12. Photographers Jan Baetens

190

Part III: Events 13. Beginnings Samuel Foster

211

14. Battles Vincent Trott

227

15. Alliances Mauro Forno

244

16. The Armenian Genocide Claire Mouradian

258

17. Revolutions Irina Zhdanova 

273

18. The Influenza Pandemic Jane Fisher

286

Part IV: Types of Periodicals 19. Trench Journals Robert L. Nelson

305

20. Prisoner-of-War Camp Journals Anne Schwan

319

21. Hospital Journals Jessica Meyer

338

22. Pacifist Journals Grace Brockington, Sarah Hellawell, Daniel Laqua

352

23. Women’s Suffrage and Labour Journals Maria DiCenzo 

368

24. Avant-garde Journals Andrew Thacker

384

Part V: Global Perspectives 25. German Colonial Africa Daniel Steinbach

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401

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contents

vii

26. India Santanu Das

415

27. Australia and New Zealand Patricia Thomas

433

28. China Elisabeth Forster

449

29. Canada Tim Cook

461

30. The Ottoman Empire Mustafa Aksakal, M. Talha Çiçek, Aimee Genell, Dimitris Kamouzis, Janet Klein, Armen Manuk-Khaloyan, Devi Mays

474

Notes on Contributors

501

Index509

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Figures and Tables

Figures Figure 0.1 The many-headed serpent on the cover of the Hydra, designed by Adrian Berrington (1887–1923), November 1917. Wilfred Owen Archive, University of Oxford. 2 Figure 1.1 The inaugural issue of the conjoined titles, Nash’s and Pall Mall Magazine, October 1914. 24 Figure 1.2 ‘A Compelling Contrast’, War Illustrated, March 1916. 27 Figure 6.1 ‘Concours de l’envoi aux soldats’, La Semaine de Suzette, 18 February 1915. 101 Figure 6.2 ‘Bécassine écrit ses mémoires’ (from the album Bécassine pendant la guerre).102 Figure 6.3 Closing panel for the story ‘La proposition du chemineau’ from the album Bécassine mobilisée.104 Figure 6.4 ‘L’Espiègle Lili’, Fillette, 9 January 1916. 106 Figure 6.5 Double-page spread from the story ‘Les enfants de l’otage’, Fillette, 9 January 1916. 107 Figure 8.1 Giacomo Balla, ‘Il pugno italiano di Umberto Boccioni’, L’Italia Futurista, 25 August 1916, courtesy of Archivio del ’900, Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Fondo Mino Somenzi. 134 Figure 8.2 Francis Picabia, ‘Ici, c’est ici Stieglitz, foi et amour’, 291, nos. 5–6, July–August 1915. Collection of International Dada Archive, Special Collections and Archives, University of Iowa Libraries. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2021. 137 Figure 8.3 R. Mutt [Marcel Duchamp], ‘Fountain’, Blind Man, May 1917, 3. Collection of International Dada Archive, Special Collections and Archives, University of Iowa Libraries. © Association Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2021. 139 Figure 10.1 Irvin S. Cobb and Mary Roberts Rinehart, courtesy of Patrick Vanleene. 168 Figure 12.1 Le Miroir, 21 November 1915. Gallica/BnF. 195 Figure 12.2 Le Miroir, 14 March 1915. Gallica/BnF. 198 Figure 12.3 Le Miroir, 4 April 1915. Gallica/BnF. 198 Figure 12.4 Le Miroir, 16 May 1915. Gallica/BnF. 199 Figure 12.5 Le Miroir, 2 May 1915. Gallica/BnF. 200

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figures and tables

ix

Figure 12.6 Le Miroir, 18 July 1915. Gallica/BnF. 202 Figure 14.1 The front page of New York’s Evening World on 8 August 1918, the first day of the Battle of Amiens. 233 Figure 14.2 Arthur Moreland’s depiction of the Battle of Amiens in Punch, 21 August 1918. 238 Figure 16.1 ‘The Apostles of “Gott”’ (Les Apôtres du ‘Gott’). Front cover of Le Rire rouge, Paris, 23 October 1915. The image is by Charles Lucien Léandre. 265 Figure 16.2 ‘The Events of Turkey. A Massacre of Armenians by Kurds’ (Les événements de Turquie. Un Massacre d’Arméniens par les Kurdes). Front page of an illustrated supplement to Le Petit Parisien, Paris, 17 November 1895. 265 Figure 16.3 ‘Massacres of Christians in Turkey’ (Massacres de chrétiens en Turquie). Front page of an illustrated supplement to Le Petit Journal, Paris, 2 May 1909. The image is by Eugène Damblans. 266 Figure 16.4 ‘The Massacres in Armenia’ (Les massacres d’Arménie). Back cover of an illustrated supplement to Le Petit Journal, Paris, 12 December 1915. 266 Figure 18.1 ‘The Disease Germ is More Dangerous Than the Mad Dog’, Ladies Home Journal, September 1919, 177. 293 Figure 18.2 ‘Infection Can’t Dent the Lysol Line!’, Ladies Home Journal, May 1919, 135. 294 Figure 18.3 ‘Do You Live in a Haunted House?’, Ladies Home Journal, April 1918, 110. 294 Figure 18.4 ‘It Almost Stopped the Works in 1918!’, Time, 30 November 1942, 107. 296 Figure 20.1 Echo du Camp de Rennbahn Münster (1916). Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Signatur Krieg 1914/14736. 321 Figure 20.2 Cover page of Stobsiade’s second issue, produced by civilian editors, 19 September 1915. Available from stobsiade.org. 323 Figure 20.3 Original design for a poster for the camp paper, Stobs detention camp, Scotland, 1 February 1916, by E. Behrens. P.O.W. HAKMG 16.0615. From the Collections of Scottish Borders Council, administered by Live Borders, Hawick Museum.324 Figure 21.1 ‘Our Celebrities. No. 4: The Youngest Lance-Corporal’, Gazette of the 3rd London General Hospital (Territorial Force), Wandsworth, December 1915, 55. Wellcome Library, RAMC/1313/1. 343 Figure 21.2 C. Rhodes Harrison, ‘Labour-Saving Devices (continued)’, Gazette of the 3rd London General Hospital (Territorial Force), Wandsworth, April 1916, 186. Wellcome Library, RAMC/1313/1. 344 Figure 21.3 Stephen Baghot de la Bere, ‘Things We May Hope to See – If the War Lasts till Next Christmas’, Gazette of the 3rd London General Hospital (Territorial Force), Wandsworth, December 1915, 62. Wellcome Library, RAMC/1313/1. 345

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x

figures and tables

Figure 22.1 ‘Fighting with the Right People’, Cambridge Magazine 6, 36th vacation number, 24 March 1917, 445. Classmark Cam.b.31.25.6. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. 355 Figure 23.1 Cover, Votes for Women, 7 August 1914. Courtesy of the Women’s Library (digital collection), London School of Economics.372 Figure 23.2 Advertisements, Woman Worker, September 1916. Courtesy of the Women’s Library (digital collection), London School of Economics. 377 Figure 24.1 L’élan, 15 April 1915. 387 Figure 26.1 Cover of All About the War: The Indian Review War Book.422 Figure 26.2 Detailed contents page from All About the War.422 Figure 26.3 Prominent men in All About the War.423 Figure 26.4 Cover of Indian Ink: Splashes from Various Pens in Aid of the Imperial Indian War Fund.425 Figure 27.1 Australian advertisements for PD Corsets showing examples of textual congruence and graphic difference. 438 Figure 27.2 Advertisement for PD Corsets in Nelson Evening Mail, 17 March 1915, 2. 439 Figure 27.3 Advertisements selling the PD corset through space and graphic marks, and appeals to empathy and patriotism. 440 Figure 27.4 Two of six pictorial advertisements that ran 164 times in all from 17 January until 5 September 1916. 443 Figure 30.1 Caricature of the directors of the Greek newspapers Nea Patris, Ap’Ola, Embros, Proodos, Chronos, Tachydromos, Neologos, Ekklisiastiki Alitheia and Ano Kato published in Istanbul. The title reads: ‘Our journalists.’ Ap’Ola, 1 January 1915. 487

Tables Table 9.1 Belgian exile press, published from France. Table 9.2 Belgian exile press, published from the Netherlands. Table 9.3 Belgian exile press, published from the United Kingdom. Table 9.4 De Standaard precursor periodicals, and the location of their editorial base.

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148 148 149 152

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Acknowledgements

F

or this book we have drawn on the help of a great many people. We are indebted to the staff at Edinburgh University Press, and especially Jackie Jones, for their faith in us and continued support of this project. We thank the two anonymous reviewers for their expert suggestions. Diana Witt bravely compiled the index. Patrick Vanleene, who knows the First World War inside out, provided insightful advice from the early stages onwards. Along the way we relied on a great many archives, libraries and collections, both paper and digital, which are systematically referred to in the notes to the individual chapters in this book. Every effort has been made to identify copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. Notification of any additions or corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book would be greatly appreciated. We also posthumously want to thank those contemporaneous readers of First World War periodicals for their foresight and thoughtfulness in keeping their copies for future generations. Naturally, there would not have been an Edinburgh Companion to First World War Periodicals without our expert contributors – they were always generous with their time and tireless in their efforts, despite often challenging circumstances. A few withdrew or were delayed because of the Covid-19 pandemic, but eventually we ended up with this remarkable group of scholars. We are and will remain obliged to them all. Ghent, Belgium January 2022

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For the guardians of the free press then and now

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Introduction Marysa Demoor, Cedric Van Dijck, Birgit Van Puymbroeck

O

n 28 April 1917, at the height of the conflict, patients and staff members of an Edinburgh military hospital opened the first issue of their new magazine to the following words: ‘No apology is needed from us for bringing into being a journal of the Craiglockhart War Hospital.’1 Printed at a local company and sold at sixpence, the Hydra’s (1917–18) inaugural number had appeared despite great difficulties: the first editorial mentions the need for copy, financial support and material assistance, as well as the quick turnover of staff and paper shortages as hurdles to overcome.2 Despite these and other challenges, the Hydra became something of a modest success, read by patients, physicians, nurses, visitors, family members and Edinburgh locals. This achievement was not in the least due to the ‘arduous toil’ of two of its editors, both patients at Craiglockhart: the war poet Wilfred Owen (1893–1918), whose poems would appear in the Hydra, the Bookman (1891–1934) and the Nation (1907–21), and the reporter J. B. Salmond (1891–1958), who had worked for the Daily Mail (1896–) after a stint in university journalism and ended his career as long-time editor of the Scots Magazine (1793–).3 During the few months of their tenure as editors, Owen and Salmond were on the constant lookout for contributors among hospital patients and staff. ‘Take pen, then, all you budding poets and novelists and do your worst’, they announced in the 21 July 1917 issue, ‘[w]rite about anything, from APM’s to Chinese politics, but do it now’.4 The First World War produced and sustained a dazzling number of periodical publications. Although the editors of the Hydra saw in the title of the magazine a metaphor for the ‘many headed – many sided’ aspects of a war journal, the mythical monster with its many heads can also be taken to stand for the press as a whole (Figure 0.1).5 If some of its branches or heads were cut off, many others emerged in their place. The war provided the motivation for the launch of numerous trench, hospital and camp journals. At the same time, it led to the demise of many established periodicals and newspapers. Some periodicals, such as the Strand Magazine (1891–1950), raised their price, while others, such as the Athenaeum (1828–1921), reduced their frequency, from a weekly to a monthly, in order to survive.6 Others, still, such as the Nouvelle Revue Française (1909–14; 1919–), temporarily ceased publication, only to reappear after the war. Neither the growing awareness of periodicals as cultural artefacts and unique sources for the daily life of the war nor the abundance of scholarly publications prompted by the 2014–18 centennial has hitherto resulted in a large-scale, in-depth discussion of the press during the First World War. Still, the specificity of the wartime press, its richness and long-lasting impact justify a volume of this size, which aims to shed new light on

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marysa demoor, cedric van dijck, birgit van puymbroeck

Figure 0.1  The many-headed serpent on the cover of the Hydra, designed by Adrian Berrington (1887–1923), November 1917. Wilfred Owen Archive, University of Oxford.

the significance and development of the press during the Great War, as well as analyse some of its most striking examples. Previous studies of First World War newspapers and magazines often focus on a particular segment of the press. The tradition of trench journalism, for instance, has been particularly popular among French historians, with the first overview already appearing in 1915.7 Studies of trench journals associated with other contexts such as Robert L. Nelson’s German Soldier Newspapers of the First World War and Graham Seal’s The Soldiers’ Press: Trench Journals in the First World War, which draws on examples from the Anglophone press, are less numerous but equally revealing.8 Avantgarde periodicals are mapped in Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker’s majestic threevolume Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Faith Binckes and Carey Snyder’s Women, Periodicals, and Print Culture in Britain, 1890s–1920s: The Modernist Period analyses women’s periodicals and contributions of the period. Several monographs, such as Paul Jackson’s Great War Modernisms and ‘The New Age’ Magazine, treat specific journals in the context of the war.9 The above titles represent but a selection of studies highlighting particular branches of the press. The present volume, by contrast, offers a wider cross-section. It bridges the gap between the front and the home front, and covers the so-called ‘Greater War’ (the period between 1912 and 1923). As such, it offers a useful addition to the aforementioned publications, as well as to literary and cultural histories of the First World War.

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introduction

3

The Edinburgh Companion to First World War Periodicals is divided into five parts: critical approaches, contributors, events, types of periodicals and global perspectives. It studies the press from different angles, focusing on its textual and visual content, its materiality, networks, contributors and readers. This variety of approaches is prompted by the material itself, which combines art, literature, history and politics to name but a few. Periodicals, as Margaret Beetham reminds us, are characterised by their ‘open’ and ‘closed’ form, functioning both as standalone units and as part of a larger series. They are meant to appeal to readers in the ‘now’, yet also leave them wanting more.10 How were periodicals produced, distributed and read during the war? How did they capture the monotony of daily life, interspersed with sudden bursts of action? Did the rhythm of the press provide continuity and therefore reassurance, or on the contrary, did it create anxiety and fear? How did propaganda and the early use of fake news function in the war press? The Companion aims to answer these questions by drawing on a wide range of examples, going from the front line to the home front and covering various parts of Europe, North America, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Australasia. The volume analyses material from paper and digital archives. In recent years, periodical research has been significantly impacted by digitisation. Digital archives and databases allow us to access numerous periodicals remotely, to perform keyword searches, and trace and analyse patterns in a fraction of the time it would take to locate, read and examine paper copies. This also applies to First World War periodicals, many of which have been digitised in light of the 2014–18 commemorations. At the same time, digitised sources pose a number of challenges such as paywalls and a loss of materiality. To feel the brittleness of the paper, to smell the sour smell of cigarettes and damp air, to discover the stains of coffee or tea, the blackened or yellowed fingerprint smudges and the comments or doodles of the readers adds a human and material dimension to the research that is revealing in its own way and cannot always be reproduced online. Moreover, not all periodicals are digitised – far from it. Paper collections are also rarely complete. While every effort has been made to provide a broad overview of the wartime press, it is important to realise that much may have been lost. Nevertheless, the Companion offers a wide overview of the fascinating material that has been preserved and is available for research.

Developments and Transformations One of the questions to emerge from this volume is how the war should be viewed in the broader development of the press. Whereas some contributors regard the war as an interruption, others focus on how it announced new developments or intensified earlier trends. The nineteenth century witnessed the global expansion of the press: advances in printing, communication and transport, increases in literacy rates and changes in legislation led to a global network of news production, circulation and consumption.11 Despite vast national and regional differences – the degree of centralisation and freedom of the press varied, as did the intended readership – the power of the press was undeniable. When viewed from this perspective, it is hardly surprising that governments turned to the press during the First World War to mobilise the public and control the spread of information. When the war broke out in 1914, the owner of the Daily Mail, Daily Mirror (1903–) and The Times (1785–), Lord Northcliffe,

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for instance, immediately offered his services to the British government to assist in the recruitment effort. Similarly, the press played a major role in Italy’s decision to join the war, as Mauro Forno explains in his chapter on ‘Alliances’. That many countries were quick to install a form of censorship further speaks to the influence of the press. France established the Press Bureau on 3 August 1914 and quickly passed a series of laws regulating war reporting. According to Joëlle Beurier, the French were anxious to avoid a military catastrophe by accidently giving away strategic information, as when in July 1870 the German Kaiser had encircled the French army on the basis of information that had been reported in Le Temps (1861–1942).12 Britain quickly followed suit. It set up its Press Bureau on 6 August 1914 and passed the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) a day later, granting the government extensive power to take all necessary precautions to lead Britain and its allies to victory. This included press censorship, even if British newspapers regularly sidestepped the censors by quoting from the American press.13 The situation was somewhat different in Germany and Austria-Hungary. In Germany, censorship originally fell under the responsibility of the many different military districts. It initially targeted all information about the war, including positive reports, which could have raised civilian support. Indeed, it was not until 14 October 1915 that Germany established a War Press Office.14 Austria-Hungary maintained a hostile relationship to the press: many newspapers and magazines closed down, foreign journals were banned, and those remaining were subject to a very strict form of censorship. At one point, Petronilla Ehrenpreis notes, the Viennese newspapers complained to the Foreign Affairs Minister, Leopold Graf Berchtold (1863–1942), that censorship was taking on ridiculous proportions: the censors, for instance, cut maps ‘showing the southern theatres of war, which could be found in any atlas, or information about the surface area and population of Serbia’.15 Censorship was less strict in the Hungarian part of the empire, which had always maintained a degree of autonomy, thus showing national and regional differences. Although the war imposed severe restrictions on the press (for example, censorship, paper shortages, staff mobilisation), it also provided new opportunities. The war, for instance, resulted in the foundation of a wide range of periodicals: the already mentioned trench, hospital and camp journals, as well as avant-garde periodicals such as L’élan (1915–16), SIC (1916–19), Nord-Sud (1917–18), 291 (1915–16), 391 (1917–24), De Stijl (1917–32), Cabaret Voltaire (1916) and Dada (1917–19). Although these journals were often short-lived, they challenged prevailing artistic norms, leading to a renewal of art and literature that resonated throughout the twentieth century. Moreover, the propaganda machine of the First World War gave rise to new organisations such as the Syndicat des journalistes (now Syndicat national des journalistes), founded in March 1918 in France, which aimed to restore confidence in the press by upholding the highest possible professional standards. Another sideeffect of the war was the emergence of satirical magazines that used humour to mock the overall climate of falsehoods. The best-known example is Le canard enchaîné (1915, 1916–), whose title refers to both propaganda and censorship: ‘un canard’ stands for an invented story or even newspaper in popular French, while ‘enchaîné’ (chained) hints at L’homme enchaîné (originally L’homme libre, 1913–39), the newspaper edited by Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) during the war. Many changes in the wartime press were dictated by necessity. Newspapers were forced to condense articles on only a few pages due to paper rationing. Similarly,

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introduction

5

journals had to renew their staff. An article by Elizabeth Armstrong in the Gentlewoman (1890–1926) of 26 June 1915 points to the demand for journalists, including women: ‘With millions of men under the flag and prevented from writing professionally, opportunities for lady free-lance journalists are more numerous than ever.’16 Although the term ‘lady free-lance journalists’ now sounds condescending, the war provided new opportunities for women, even if these were often short-lived and at times also unpaid. Organisations such as the Women’s Land Army and the Voluntary Aid Detachment called on mainly middle-class women to contribute to the war effort. The Women’s Land Army, moreover, had its own journal: the Landswoman: The Journal of the Land Army and the Women’s Institutes (1918–20; from April 1919 the Landswoman continued without the Women’s Institutes), which provided a platform for interaction among these women and aimed to make agricultural labour by middle-class women more socially and culturally acceptable.17 In addition, the war accelerated particular developments already under way. Take photography, for example. Although the technology was used in press coverage of the Crimean War (1853–56), it was still a niche phenomenon. The First World War changed this. As the conflict continued and the thirst for news and evidence grew larger, more and more journals started to publish war photographs. ‘War photography as a genre came of age during the First World War’, writes photography scholar and curator at the Imperial War Museum Hilary Roberts: ‘Although infrastructures for the exploitation and management of photography were dismantled at the end of the war, precedents (such as the need to manage rather than prohibit frontline access for photographers) had been set.’18 In his chapter on photography, Jan Baetens shows how drawings and paintings appeared alongside photographs in the illustrated French press, and how photographers increasingly took risks, especially in the context of photo contests. Despite the proliferation of letters, posters, pamphlets and books during the war, the periodical press was still the dominant medium. As Shafquat Towheed and Edmund G. C. King put it in Reading and the First World War: Readers, Texts, Archives: ‘By far the largest constituents of printed wartime textual traffic were newspapers and magazines.’19 At the same time, the war announced new developments in the broader media environment, including the rise of film and newsreel, which would take on an increasingly important role in wars to come. Although the main focus of the Companion is on the periodical press, individual chapters refer to the broader media environment. Maaheen Ahmed, for example, notes how comics were part of an ever-expanding consumer culture. Claire Mouradian discusses posters of the child actor Jackie Coogan (1914–84), known for his role in Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid (1921), whose image was used in war relief campaigns, organised in response to the Armenian genocide.20

Forms and Functions Periodicals and newspapers came in different shapes and forms. They fulfilled the most diverse, necessary functions during the war. Periodicals were primarily meant to distract and entertain. Both on the war and on the home front, they helped pass the time in meaningful ways. Their shape facilitated this particular function, as the sudden need to fill time was not always to be anticipated. Towheed and King refer

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to these publications’ format and adaptability to the war context: ‘Well suited to the specific reading conditions of the war, which often did not allow for sustained periods of concentration, [magazines] could be flicked through when time permitted or rolled up and stuffed into a pocket for later consumption.’21 These uses are still visible in the particular folds and conditions of those trench journals that were also sent home for preservation. Apart from providing a good time at a suitable moment, periodicals also created communities of readers: readers sharing the same interests or commenting in letters on the same topics, as well as readers who experienced feelings of belonging to a specific group such as particular regiments and units (for example, Die Sappe, 1915–18). The staff constituting the core mechanism behind each periodical became, in turn, a small network of colleagues and collaborators who would remain in touch – circumstances permitting – during the war and, in some cases, for many years afterwards.22 Some of these communities were continuations of groups that had existed before as, for instance, students attending the same school or college (for example, Ons Leven–Hoogstudent op den Yzer, 1916), religious people attending the same church (for example, Quaker magazines) and artists associated with the same movement (for example, the Futurists in Lacerba, 1913–15; the Vorticists in Blast, 1914–15; the Dadaists in Cabaret Voltaire, 1916). Periodicals also served as a platform for the dissemination of new voices and ideas. War (and flu) caused a high number of casualties among established writers and journalists, but the period also witnessed the spontaneous emergence of new voices. Argha Banerjee’s chapter gives a splendid overview of men, such as Ivor Gurney (1890–1937), and women, such as Vera Brittain (1893–1970) and Eva Dobell (1876–1963), whose careers began in the magazines and resulted from their experiences as soldiers, physicians and nurses. In addition, the press helped familiarise readers with an avalanche of innovations and inventions in fields as diverse as medicine (especially plastic surgery), transport and media.23 Shell shock is a good example of the different ways periodicals discussed new developments. While the Hydra, referenced above, focused on personal experiences, for example by publishing literary accounts of nightmares, Charles S. Myers’s early contributions to the specialist publication the Lancet (1823–) studied the science behind the phenomenon.24 Major newspapers, in turn, sought to print the more spectacular or newsworthy cases of shell shock. The Daily News (1846–1930), for instance, reported on a court case in which shell shock was used to defend a man who had run over a couple by car.25 Taken together, these three very different publications acquainted a British readership with the emerging discourse on shell shock. With death literally looming around every corner, life became a precious commodity and one that needed to be celebrated as well as remembered. The pages of periodicals became a popular venue for prose as well as poetry remembering a life well lived. John McCrae’s (1872–1918) ‘In Flanders’ Fields’ was such a poem, published in the unlikely pages of Punch (1842–1992; 1996–2002); Katherine Mansfield’s (1888–1923) ‘The Fly’, written in commemoration of her brother, was first published in the Nation and Athenaeum (1921–31, later merging with the New Statesman until 1964).26 Stories of personal loss were supplemented by reports of battles won and lost described in great detail by professional writers turned correspondents. A good example is Arthur Conan Doyle’s (1859–1930) report on the campaign in France for the Strand or Edith Wharton’s (1862– 1937) ‘Writing a War Story’ published in the Woman’s Home Companion (1873–1957).

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The former is illustrated by the professional battle scene painter Richard Caton Woodville (1856–1927). The latter is a mise en abîme of the author-cum-war correspondent: it tells the story of a woman writing a story to be published in the Man at Arms, making Wharton – who had visited the front herself – a First World War witness par excellence. The primordial function of the printed press was, however, the conveying of information about the war and the army’s exploits. Given the scrupulous censorship during the war, precise information was scarce. Those at home were anxiously craving news, as described by T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) in a well-known letter to his brother Henry. Mixing the aural with the visual, Eliot describes the frenzy of the evening news: The noise hereabouts is like hell turned upside down. Hot weather, all windows open, many babies, pianos, street piano accordions, singers, hummers, whistlers. Every house has a gong: they all go off at seven o’clock, and other hours. Ten o’clock in the evening, quiet for a few minutes, then a couple of men with late editions burst into the street, roaring: GREAT GERMAN DISASTER! Everybody rushes to windows and doors, in every costume from evening clothes to pajamas; violent talking – English, American, French, Flemish, Russian, Spanish, Japanese; the papers are all sold in five minutes; then we settle down for another hour till the next extra appears: LIST OF ENGLISH DEAD AND WOUNDED.27 News too assumed many different guises according to the country or region in which it was divulged. Not only did the coverage differ depending on the supposed nationality of its readers, or its government’s allegiance in the tug of war, but there was also a huge investment in new ways of reporting in the mainstream press. In 1916, the last year of Vernon Rendall’s (1869–1960) editorship of the Athenaeum, the journal announced that it intended to publish small supplements on specific topics: it is necessary to clear our minds respecting the actual changes wrought by the war, and the precise manner in which it has modified our pre-war standards, prejudices, habits, and outlook. It is hoped that these papers will be useful as a basis of discussion upon these questions.28 Subsequently, one finds included in the bound volumes of the ‘marked file’ – the editors’ copy revealing the names of the anonymous contributors – a series of small booklets with interesting subjects such as ‘The War and Education’, ‘The War and Women’ and ‘The War and Wages’.29 This was an ingenious way of increasing the journal’s popularity, with the war, as Glenn R. Wilkinson has argued in another context, being used as an opportunity to make more money.30 However, the news in the available mainstream newspapers was not always to be trusted. The stakes were high and with censorship actively at work on the one hand and propaganda on the other, so-called ‘fake news’ started to circulate. Readers could not always tell what was true to fact and what was a lie: fact and fiction merged. Fictitious tales appeared in the history of the war effort, sometimes even during the war, such as the legend of the Angels of Mons helping and defending the British Expeditionary Force.31 Sometimes the truth was covered up after it had been labelled as exaggerated and sheer propaganda, as with the news of unconscionable German cruelty towards the Belgian civilian population during the first days of the war.32 The obfuscation of

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these actions in the decades after the war was only revealed as the truth after rigorous research in more recent scholarship and interviews with surviving local witnesses for documentaries in the context of the centennial commemoration.33 Martin Farrar makes a similar point about the trustworthiness of the news when he observes: ‘This was a time when newspapers were the main source of information with up to three daily editions. The only other forms of communication available to the Home Front were the telegram and word of mouth, which often led to the spreading of rumours and lies.’34 Reliable war news became a precious commodity and newspapers the vehicle for its swift dispersion. The key position of the printed press was soon clear to all contemporaries. Even the monarchy realised that this was the best way to reach its citizens. On 30 October 1915 King George had this letter published in the pages of the Athenaeum asking his people to take heart and to join in the fight since the end was not yet in sight: I ask you men of all classes, to come forward voluntarily and take your share in the fight. In freely responding to my appeal, you will be giving your support to our brothers who, for long months, have nobly upheld Britain’s past traditions, and the glory of her Arms.35 This too was a function of the press: it served as a possibly deceptively honest instrument of information and contact between the population and the government or reigning monarchy. Nowhere was the importance of the press clearer than in the occupied territories, where warring nations competed for civilian support. Aeroplanes and balloons were used to drop newspapers in occupied areas to boost morale and fuel resistance. For example, to counteract the German propaganda of the Gazette des Ardennes (1914–18), Britain and France created newspapers that resembled the Gazette and dropped them from aeroplanes to reach the civilian population.36 Periodicals were also used as psychological weapons, meant to influence public opinion. Literary authors were also active in this respect. In Britain, Arthur Conan Doyle, Arnold Bennett (1867–1931), Ford Madox Ford (then Hueffer) (1873–1939), Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) and H. G. Wells (1866– 1946) all worked for the War Propaganda Bureau, better known as Wellington House. In Austria-Hungary, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), Robert Musil (1880–1942), Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929) and Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) worked for the k.u.k. Kriegspressequartier, the War Propaganda Bureau founded in Vienna on 27 July 1914. Every day from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. these modernist writers turned incoming field files into effective heroic stories for the press.37 At a time when the outcome of the war was extremely uncertain, it was vital to have public opinion on your side. Newspapers and magazines served not only to inform or entertain readers, but also to convince the public that their cause was the righteous one and that God was on their side.

Cultural and Geographical Contexts The impact of the First World War was not only registered on Europe’s periodical landscape. Newspapers and magazines covered the globe. By the early twentieth century, the world had become ‘girt about with cables’, as Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) famously put it.38 Electric signals pulsated along wires on the seabed and in the air, and were

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transcribed into telegrams and news messages that were published in periodical publications. If the world had become increasingly interconnected since at least the nineteenth century, then these publications had figured prominently in this development: they were both the product of new transport and communication networks and themselves, in turn, facilitated new connections.39 As scholars such as Benedict Anderson and Eric Bulson have argued, periodicals not only materialised across the globe (often appearing in the wake of trading companies and colonial armies); light, cheap and supple, the print medium was made to travel far and wide, moving with increasing speed beyond the European metropolis, into rural areas and the far reaches of empires.40 In keeping with the recent global turn in both First World War and periodical scholarship, this Companion aims to examine a wide range of contexts in which newspapers and magazines were produced, printed, bought, shared and read in the years around 1914–18: not only in Europe’s trenches, hospitals, POW camps or on board ships, but in all four corners of the world.41 In many ways, the outbreak of hostilities disrupted the transnational connections that were already well in place before 1914. In German colonial Togo, the telegraph tower was destroyed in the first few weeks of the war; five years later, rioters in the Egyptian countryside likewise cut telegraph cables, thus severing connections with Cairo, the seat of British colonial power, and heralding the onset of the Egyptian Revolution (1919–22). In wartime, cables became congested, repairs were delayed, and press rates were suspended. Paradoxically, at a time when there was so much to report, the news moved only haltingly. The same was true of magazines: ‘Malhe[u] reusement, there can be no importation in bulk into England until after the war’, Ezra Pound (1885–1972) wrote to the editor of the Chicago-based Little Review (1914–29) from London: ‘If the thing is GOOD ENOUGH we can dispose of bound vols. post bellum.’42 Because of tariffs and import regulations, only six copies of the little magazine could travel to Britain at any given time – too few, that is, to make an impression. Papers across the world were similarly struggling with an increase in costs and many had to cut back on expensive cable news, particularly affecting the information flows between the European metropolis and the colonies.43 To avoid congestion and high tariffs, as Simon Potter has argued, the British government centralised information by using Reuters – a British news agency trying to shed its German origins and name – to distribute official war news throughout the empire, at an annual cost of £120,000.44 Similar examples of the increasing hold of national or colonial governments over private news agencies, which weakened the latter’s reputation as impartial providers of the news, help explain why the post-war moment witnessed the emergence of more locally oriented news agencies, especially in new nations such as Czechoslovakia.45 Curiously, the case of Canada, as Tim Cook points out in his chapter, was the reverse: the Canadian Press Association was founded in 1917 because the government worried that American news services did not contain enough pro-Empire news. The war not only disrupted and politicised connections, networks and infrastructures, it also offered opportunities for encounters between different cultures and peoples. These encounters, too, can be traced in the periodical medium – especially through collaborations and translations. For instance, Indian Ink (1914–18), a Calcutta magazine that Santanu Das explores in his chapter, counted both Englishmen and Indians among its contributors. While some copies made it as far as Britain, more traffic went in the opposite direction. Stationed in Europe, one Indian surgeon sent home ‘a bundle of

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newspapers’, including The Times, for his friend in Peshawar to marvel at, claiming somewhat unfairly: ‘These papers here do not quail-fight as do the papers in the Punjab.’46 If the Cambridge Magazine (1912–23), originally a university publication, could boast of reaching readers and contributors across the world, it was because it published an impartial review of the foreign (and enemy) press in a weekly supplement. Compiled, translated and edited under the direction of Dorothy Buxton (1881–1963), the supplement increased the readership of the magazine tremendously and was often referenced in parliament.47 Yan Yangchu (1893–1990), a translator in the Chinese Labour Corps, was engaged in a similar (though more modest) transcultural enterprise: after spending countless evenings narrating and translating news gathered from the French and English press for Chinese labourers stationed in Belgium and France, he founded Huagong Zhoubao, the Chinese Labourers’ Weekly (1919–?). Edited from Paris yet printed in colloquial Chinese to facilitate understanding (and even to teach some labourers how to read), the Weekly’s pages – with regular columns such as ‘China Stories’, printed alongside ‘News from Europe and America’ – give a sense of the transcultural work of these ventures: to facilitate cross-cultural understanding in the most peculiar of circumstances.48 Taken together, the handful of publications mentioned above illustrate that wartime encounters – between, among others, an Indian surgeon, a British civilian, a Chinese labourer and a French officer – throw national and cultural differences into sharp relief. As is clear from the Companion as a whole, nowhere was the conflict lived, thought about and reported on in exactly the same way. Reading widely in the periodical press makes this abundantly clear. Robert Nelson’s chapter, for instance, argues that German trench journals obsessively rehearsed stereotypical ideals of masculinity, which are conspicuously absent from similar Allied publications or from many hospital journals targeting wounded and troubled readers. Equally compelling perhaps are those instances where one encounters a well-known historical event from different ideological perspectives. The Armenian genocide is a telling example that is addressed from various standpoints throughout the Companion, including the periodical publications of its victims (Armenian), perpetrators (Ottoman) and bystanders (French, American). Cultural differences and national perspectives are also felt in the way the war was, and continues to be, remembered. Part of the aim of the global turn in First World War studies is to redirect the scholarly focus beyond the familiar Western Front and into areas where the war left fewer, or long-overlooked, traces. As Elisabeth Forster’s chapter points out, scholarship on the war in the Chinese press is sparse, in part because there was much less reporting on events taking place in Europe and in part because watershed moments that came in the war’s wake, such as the May Fourth protests in 1919, have typically loomed larger in scholarship. Fewer combatants, many of them illiterate, also meant that fewer eyewitness accounts and memoirs were published in the 1920s and 1930s. In intriguing ways, the periodical press partly fills this gap. It provides a paradoxical tool in the work of remembrance: it is at the same time an open, democratic space that presented less of a hurdle to publication and an ephemeral format that was not necessarily kept or archived. J. G. Mullen’s memoir, ‘My Experience in Cameroons during the War’, may offer a fresh subaltern perspective on the war period – that of an African clerk fleeing his remote British trading post in the German Cameroons – but it first had to be excavated

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from extant copies of the Gold Coast Leader (1902–34), where it appeared in instalments between October 1916 and December 1917.49 In his chapter, Santanu Das points to similar unknown voices emerging from Bengali magazines such as Bharati (1877–1926) and Bharatbarsha (1913–53). These magazines open up the history of the Indian war experience, and especially of the Mesopotamia campaign, of which so few eyewitness accounts exist. Part of the motivation to turn to periodical sources is that they offer new insights on familiar and long-overlooked experiences and voices. *** The Edinburgh Companion to First World War Periodicals consists of five parts: critical approaches, contributors, events, types of periodicals and global perspectives. The first section offers readers a number of theoretical insights and tools for understanding First World War journals and newspapers. It focuses on the materiality of periodicals, their networks, archives, affective and emotional meanings, as well as the way periodicals can be approached from cultural memory studies and popular culture studies. The second section highlights the different roles assumed by contributors, at times in combination: that of literary author, artist, editor, journalist, war correspondent and photographer. As is well-known, periodicals are collaborative media, combining a wide range of materials and voices. In the third section, chapters are devoted to particular events, highlighting the periodical as a temporal medium. Events such as the beginnings of the war, battles, alliances, the Armenian genocide, the Russian Revolution and the 1918 influenza pandemic are treated from various perspectives. The fourth section elucidates particular types of periodicals: trench, POW and hospital journals, as well as pacifist journals, suffrage and labour journals, and little magazines produced by avant-garde movements. While many chapters refer to a wide range of examples, the final section zeroes in on the global contexts of the war, with chapters on German Colonial Africa, India, Australia and New Zealand, China, Canada and the Ottoman Empire. Together, these chapters and sections highlight the specificity of the wartime press from various perspectives. Much has been written about the distinction between newspapers and periodicals, journals and magazines. In this volume, we use ‘periodical’ as a wide umbrella term encompassing all print publications marked by periodicity, including dailies, weeklies, monthlies, bimonthlies, quarterlies, etc. The reasons for this are twofold. First, we are interested in periodicals as specific print forms, governed by their own rhythms of publication. Second, it is not always easy to distinguish between newspapers and periodicals in practice, especially in the context of the war. The Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition notes that newspapers focus on ‘a very delimited notion of the present’, whereas periodicals provide an ‘apparatus that is oriented to its continuing relevance in the future’.50 Given the unpredictability of the war, the notion of the ‘present’ became fraught and that of the ‘future’ nearly impossible. Rather than using a priori categories, the Companion explores how periodicals, broadly defined, navigated the pressures of war. Similarly, the distinction between ‘journals’ and ‘magazines’ as types of periodicals is far from clear-cut. While contributors in general use the term ‘journal’ for more or less serious and homogeneous titles and ‘magazine’ for popular and heterogeneous publications, it is hard to tell which is which in practice. The confusion of the war and the passage of time have quite often obliterated the starting and folding dates of some

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(obscure) periodical publications during wartime. When known, however, those dates follow upon the first mention of a periodical title in each chapter. In order to reflect the linguistic diversity of the periodical press during the war, we have chosen to include both the original language and the translation in English for quotations. Short quotations are rendered in the text in both languages, while longer ones are included in English in the text and in the original language in the notes for reasons of readability. This allows the reader to judge translations for themselves and gives an impression of the war as a profound moment of international and cultural encounter. This encounter in many ways is also part of the Companion itself, which brings together emerging and established researchers with complementary cultural, linguistic and disciplinary expertise from a wide range of countries and backgrounds. Together, they represent an international community of periodical and First World War experts. The three editors, all from Flanders in Belgium – a place directly associated with the Western Front – collaborated intensely to shape the structure and contents of the volume and with their complementary expertise and networks they evenly divided the work among themselves. The volume was largely compiled during the Covid-19 crisis, when libraries and archives were closed for a long time and scholars were advised to work from home. As a result, many contributors had to rely on digital archives, as well as their own personal collections and notes. These circumstances rendered the idea of crisis tangible, connecting our own moment in unexpected ways to the (post-)war years.

Notes   1. ‘Our Policy’, Hydra, 28 April 1917, 5. Digitised copies of the Hydra can be found in the First World War Poetry Digital Archive, University of Oxford.   2. ‘Our Policy’, Hydra, 28 April 1917, 5.  3. ‘Editorial’, Hydra, 21 July 1917, 7.  4. ‘Editorial’, Hydra, 21 July 1917, 7. APM, or Assistant Provost Marshal, was a kind of military policeman.  5. In addition, the name refers to the patients’ nickname for the hospital – dubbed ‘The Hydro’, after the hydropathic sanatorium it had housed before the war.   6. Marysa Demoor, ‘The Last Years of a Victorian Monument: The Athenaeum after Maccoll’, Essays and Studies 66 (2013): 195–212.  7. Collectif and Pierre Albin, Tous les journaux du front, préface de Pierre Albin (Paris: Librairie Militaire Berger Levrault, 1915). For another early compendium by a trench journalist, see André Charpentier, Feuilles bleu horizon, 1914–1918 (Paris: Imprimerie de Vaugirard, 1935). Among the more recent publications we can mention Jean-Pierre Turbergue, 1914–1918: Les journaux de tranchées. La Grande Guerre écrite par les Poilus (Triel-sur-Seine: Editions Italiques, 1999, 2007); and Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, 14–18, les combattants des tranchées: à travers leurs journaux (Paris: Armand Colin, 1986).   8. Robert L. Nelson, German Soldier Newspapers of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Graham Seal, The Soldiers’ Press: Trench Journals in the First World War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). For an analysis of the trench journal as a phenomenon, see Cedric Van Dijck, Marysa Demoor and Sarah Posman, ‘Between the Shells: The Production of Belgian, British and French Trench Journals in the First World War’, Publishing History 77 (2017): 63–85.

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  9. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, eds, Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009–13); Faith Binckes and Carey Snyder, eds, Women, Periodicals, and Print Culture in Britain, 1890s–1920s: The Modernist Period (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019); Paul Jackson, Great War Modernisms and ‘The New Age’ Magazine (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 10. Margaret Beetham, ‘Open and Closed: The Periodical as a Publishing Genre’, Victorian Periodicals Review 22, no. 3 (1989): 96–100. 11. Andrew King, Alexis Easley and John S. Morton, ‘Introduction’, in The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-century British Periodicals and Newspapers, ed. Andrew King, Alexis Easley and John S. Morton (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019). 12. Joëlle Beurier, ‘Press/Journalism: France’, in 1914–1918 online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer and Bill Nasson (Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin, 2014), , accessed 24 April 2022. 13. See Florian Keisinger, ‘Press/Journalism’, in 1914–1918 online, , accessed 24 April 2022. 14. See Florian Altenhöner, ‘Press/Journalism: Germany’, in 1914–1918 online, , accessed 24 April 2022. 15. Petronilla Ehrenpreis, ‘Press/Journalism: Austria-Hungary’, in 1914–1918 online, , accessed 24 April 2022. 16. Elisabeth Armstrong, ‘Journalism for Women in War Time’, The Gentlewoman, 26 June 1915, 2. 17. For more on the Landswoman, see Birgit Van Puymbroeck, ‘Becoming a Land Girl: Reprinting Alice Meynell’s “The Shepherdess” in the Landswoman’, Victorian Periodicals Review 50, no. 2 (2017): 398–417. 18. Hilary Roberts, ‘Photography’, in 1914–1918 online, , accessed 24 April 2022. 19. Shafquat Towheed and Edmund G. C. King, ‘Introduction’, in Reading and the First World War: Readers, Texts, Archives, ed. Shafquat Towheed and Edmund G. C. King (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 10. 20. For a more extensive discussion of the broader media environment, see Ann-Marie Einhaus and Katherine Isobel Baxter, eds, The Edinburgh Companion to the First World War and the Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017). 21. Towheed and King, ‘Introduction’, 10. 22. Charpentier, Feuilles bleu horizon, 29ff. 23. On innovations in plastic surgery, see Sabine Kienitz, Beschädigte Helden: Kriegsinvalidität und Körperbilder 1914–1923 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), and Sophie Delaporte, Gueules cassées: Les blessés de la face de la Grande Guerre (Paris: A. Viénot, 2004). 24. C. S. Myers, ‘A Contribution to the Study of Shell Shock: Being an Account of Three Cases of Loss of Memory, Vision, Smell, and Taste, Admitted into the Duchess of Westminster’s War Hospital, Le Touquet’, The Lancet 185, no. 4772 (13 February 1915): 316–20. 25. ‘Drunk or Shell Shock?’, Daily News, 15 January 1921, 5. 26. John McCrae, ‘In Flanders Fields’, Punch, 8 December 1915, 468; Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Fly’, Nation and Athenaeum, 18 March 1922, 896–7. 27. The Letters of T.S. Eliot, vol. 1, 1898–1922, ed. Valerie Eliot (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 55. 28. ‘Foreword’, Athenaeum, September 1916. See also Marysa Demoor, ‘John Middleton Murry’s Editorial Apprenticeships’, ELT 1880–1920, vol. 52, no. 2, 2009: 123–43.

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29. See the Athenaeum: ‘The War and Education’, September 1916, n.p.; Mrs Pember Reeves, ‘The War and Women’, October 1916, n.p.; ‘The War and Wages’, November 1916, n.p.. The ‘marked file’ is kept in the library of the City University in London. 30. Glenn R. Wilkinson, Depictions and Images of War in Edwardian Newspapers, 1899–1914 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 11. 31. Arthur Machen, the author of the tale, had allegedly read about this supernatural interference in the Weekly Dispatch. See Marysa Demoor, A Cross-Cultural History of Britain and Belgium, 1815–1918: Mudscapes and Cultural Entanglements (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2022). 32. See Demoor, A Cross-Cultural History of Britain and Belgium, 1815–1918. 33. John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). 34. Martin J. Farrar, News from the Front: War Correspondents on the Western Front 1914–18 (Phoenix Mill: Sutton Publishing, 1998), x. 35. Open letter published in the Athenaeum, 30 October 1915, 317. 36. Also see Bernard Wilkin, Aerial Propaganda and the Wartime Occupation of France, 1914–1918 (New York: Routledge, 2017). 37. On Rilke’s work at the Kriegsarchiv, see, for instance, Ralph Freedman, Rainer Maria Rilke: Der Meister 1906 bis 1926, trans. Curdin Ebneter (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1996), 254. 38. Joseph Conrad, Last Essays (London: J. M. Dent, 1926), 128. 39. At the end of the nineteenth century, for instance, regular steamship services had been set up to cater for the English-speaking communities across the globe, with newspapers being expressly produced in Liverpool and London for those overseas markets. See Peter Putnis, ‘Steamship Newspapers’, DNCJ, ed. Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (Ghent and London: Academia Press and British Library, 2009), 598. 40. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983), and Eric Bulson, Little Magazine, World Form (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 41. On the global turn, see Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela, eds, Empires at War, 1911–23 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), and the forthcoming volumes on global contexts in the Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, edited by Andrew Thacker and Eric Bulson. 42. In a letter dated 29 March 1917. See Pound/The Little Review: The Letters of Ezra Pound to Margaret Anderson, ed. Thomas Scott and Melvin Friedman (New York: New Directions, 1988), 21–2. 43. Simon J. Potter, News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System, 1876–1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), ch. 8. 44. Potter, News and the British World, 194–5. 45. See Michael B. Palmer, International News Agencies: A History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), chs 4 and 5. The same is true of the Second World War. 46. David Omissi, ed., Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914–18 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 33. 47. ‘Congratulations on Mrs. Buxton’s Notes’, Cambridge Magazine 5, no. 6 (20 November 1915): 144. For a theoretical approach to the periodical supplement, see Koenraad Claes, ‘Supplements and Paratext: The Rhetoric of Space’, Victorian Periodicals Review 43, no. 2 (2010): 196–210. 48. Guoqi Xi, Strangers on the Western Front: Chinese Workers in the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 49. Stephanie Newell, ‘Newspapers, New Spaces, New Writers: The First World War and Print Culture in Colonial Ghana’, Research in African Literatures 40, no. 2 (2009): 1–15. 50. ‘Serials, Periodicals and Newspapers’, Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition, , quoted in King, Easley and Morton, ‘Introduction’, 4.

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Part I: Critical Approaches

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1 Materiality Jane Potter

T

he material culture of the Great War has been given increasing academic scrutiny and critical discussion in recent years. Scholars have drawn our attention to the importance of trench art, war memorials, battlefield artefacts/detritus and other objects created in wartime and in its aftermath. These objects continue to have resonance long after the living memory of the conflict has gone. Nicholas J. Saunders, in particular, has highlighted the ways in which ‘as first-hand memory disappears, our views are inevitably shaped by the physical remains themselves, and by the interpretation of those who had no part in their design, production or original purpose’.1 The study of materiality, therefore, constitutes ‘the ways in which we view and think about the things we make, and their complex and elusive meanings’.2 Saunders classifies the material culture of the Great War as small (a bullet or a machine-gun), intermediate (a tank or aeroplane), and large (a battlefield or battlefield landscape). All sharing one defining feature – they are artefacts, the product of human activity rather than natural processes [. . .] warrelated materialities that create and perpetuate different engagements with conflict and its aftermath.3 We can therefore ‘construct a biography of the object – to explore its “social life” through changing values and attitudes attached to it over time’.4 This chapter seeks to write the biography of a particular kind of First World War object, the periodical, through an examination of its form. The form a periodical takes is central to its brand, and brand is central to its success. Even more so than newspapers, whose brands are defined largely by their political leanings, the popular periodical or magazine relies on its unique appeal to its readers, who recognise in its form, in its very materiality as an artefact, a personal connection. In time the periodical becomes a ‘memory bridge’ spanning ‘the physical and symbolic space of a postwar world [and] shaping people’s everyday lives, their perceptions of the past and their hopes for the future’.5 In his typology of the memory bridge, Saunders classifies magazines (along with books and films) as ‘more subtle’ ‘background noise’ rather than bridges themselves, presumably prioritising what Jerome McGann terms ‘linguistic codes’ or text over any material ‘bibliographic codes’, such as paper, binding, typeface, page layout and other physical aspects that create the ‘multi-sensorial dimensions’ associated with other Great War artefacts such as trench art.6 Yet as McGann argues, ‘Meaning is transmitted through both.’7 Scholars such as George Bornstein and J. Matthew Huculak have argued for the closer integration of the physical – and its production – with the textual in the construction

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of meaning, what Don McKenzie called ‘the sociology of texts’.8 Moreover, as Patrick Collier demonstrates, the material instantiation of the text – its production and reproduction in formations of paper and ink – is the place where the text’s commodity status is most evident: the raw materials of print artefacts cost money; one exchanges money for print artefacts; the commodity value of any print object is legible, with varying degrees of clarity, in any number of ways.9 Cover, layout, advertisements, distribution of articles, illustrations/images, whether in colour or black and white (or a combination of both), ratio of text to image (per page and throughout), paper quality, format size, price, frequency of publication (monthly or weekly) all constitute the material aspects – or bibliographic codes – of a periodical. These stand out before any content is ever read, for the materiality of a magazine signals whether its intended reader is male or female, youth or adult, working-, middle- or upper-class. All such demographics had a role to play during the war, and their particular roles and behaviour were defined and reinforced in large part by the periodicals they purchased and consumed. Two popular Great War titles, the War Illustrated (1914–19) and Nash’s and Pall Mall Magazine (1914–27), serve as useful examples of the material effects of wartime exigencies such as paper shortages, censorship and business anxieties, and also of the role that periodicals can play as memory bridges.10 Elizabeth Edwards’s consideration of the Great War photograph as ‘conduit of memory’ can equally be applied to the periodical, for its ‘function as a socially salient object’ too is ‘refracted through’ its materiality: form and content exist ‘in dialogue’.11 Such a dialogue continued to take place in the early twentieth century, although, as James Mussell argues, the encounter with such print objects is often ‘uncanny’, ‘because they belong to the dead’ and this chapter will conclude with a consideration of contemporary access and ephemerality.12

Periodical Materiality Magazines and periodicals, in contrast to books, are viewed as ephemeral objects. Since their advent in the eighteenth century, they have been designed for portability and intermittent reading. Their content – be it literature, politics, fashion or literary criticism – is deeply rooted in a particular time and place and directed at particular audiences: the commuter, the ‘housewife’, ‘the man of letters’, the working or middle classes, the elite, boys and girls, the political activist, to name but a few. Published weekly or monthly or at other periodic intervals, and sold at newsagents and railway bookstalls or acquired by subscription, these (initially) soft-bound, paper products were made, variably depending on their time period, from rags, pulp and organic material. As such, they appear less permanent, less stable than other material objects. Yet magazines in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were, unlike magazines today, not throwaway objects. Annuals collected weekly or monthly issues in order that the information and content might be consulted again and again, both for readers at the time and in the future. Bound copies of the Gentlemen’s Magazine (1731–1907), for instance, remain an invaluable resource for historians of politics, culture and the book trade, while the annuals of the Boy’s Own Paper (1879–1967)

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and the Girl’s Own Paper (1880–1956), among other periodicals aimed at the young reader of the day, continue to provide scholars of childhood with insights into topics such as the construction of gender roles, class strictures and imperial aims. Such annuals were given as reward books in schools or as gifts, while others, such as those of the War Illustrated, discussed below, were sold as more permanent records of the conflict, as a war souvenir. Literary ‘little magazines’, often issued in small print runs, shared readers with the more commercial and popular magazines that were printed in their hundreds and thousands. The staggering increase in the number of periodicals published between the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth was the result of a number of key factors. Increased literacy levels necessitated by the move from the country to the city were facilitated by better access to education. Improved paper-making, printing and distribution methods lowered the cost of production, while advances in the reproduction of illustrations such as lithography, half-tone printing and the rotogravure process made print artefacts more attractive and eyecatching than ever before. Periodicals ‘were becoming increasingly visual texts, changing the reading experience in hard-to-fathom ways’.13 By 1900 some 50,000 periodicals were published in Britain, and by 1914 the number of weekly and monthly periodical publishers was around 200.14 Moreover, publishers used their magazines ‘as forcing houses for new literary talent and showcases for their lists’ as well as a ‘test’ of ‘an author’s selling power’, with ‘the vast amount of fiction’ appearing first as ‘serialised episodes in a periodical, before being published separately’.15 Millions of readers were catered for by hundreds of titles on every conceivable subject from politics to fashion, belles-lettres to popular fiction, poetry to sport. This was a ‘radically transforming print ecology’.16 And as Christine Stam reminds us, ‘the potential of a new mass audience began to be suspected and capitalised upon’, both by publishers and advertisers.17 Women, especially, were courted as consumers by magazines that featured practical tips for the home, child-rearing advice, news of the latest fashion, beauty tips, and a plethora of ads for goods and services. By 1910, ‘cheap, domestic women’s weeklies, established in the 1890s, dominated the market’, so that by the outbreak of the First World War, ‘there were about fifty women’s magazines on the newsstands in Britain’.18 Each periodical’s materiality defined its social currency, its status as personal accoutrement. What would it mean to be seen reading – or carrying – the Bookman (1891–1934) versus Woman at Home (1893–1918) for instance? Is the magazine your ‘friend’, as asserted by many domestic and children’s magazines, or your intellectual companion, as signalled by titles such as the Athenaeum (1828–1921) or the New Statesman (1913–)? A text-heavy periodical would attract a different kind of reader from a highly illustrated magazine that compartmentalised features into bite-sized segments. Glossy images and thick paper would come at a price, while black-and-white illustrations on lower-grade paper could be purchased for a penny. All periodicals are windows on to the social and cultural dimensions of any particular time and place, including wartime, when their physical forms bear witness to the materiality of the conflict. A magazine’s landscape, constituted by its cover, design and layout, does not just declare a brand identity and order content, but provides a defined and reassuring space for the reader in a world that is constantly shifting, as was especially the case during wartime.

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The Materiality of First World War Periodicals Periodicals can be seen both as part of the material culture of the war and as materiel: they are both material objects/artefacts and, at the time of their publication, materiel for the continuation of the war via their role as propaganda. Propaganda and censorship go hand-in-hand: information was controlled, and a narrative of the war designed to reinforce patriotic values and ongoing support, including enlistment, for the war effort was disseminated. Both the Defence of the Realm Act (or DORA) and the Press Bureau provided the strictures by which print culture was to operate, based largely around the need to ensure that what was circulated was not ‘of such a nature as is calculated to be or might be directly or indirectly useful to the enemy’.19 The Press Bureau offered guidance to editors about what could and could not be published. Fiction periodicals, with their ‘romances, thrilling stories and sentimental plots’ and their ‘relentlessly cheerful visual messages given by advertisements for foodstuffs and equipment marketed to servicemen and their families’, were better placed to navigate the bewildering array of some 700 instructions than factual and news-focused publications.20 Nevertheless, even though newspapers did not publish photographs of the war zone, other periodicals did. The War Illustrated was published in London by William Berry (1879–1954), later owner of the Daily Telegraph (1855–), and edited by John Hammerton (1871–1949), who was also joint editor with Herbert Wrigley Wilson (1866–1940) of the periodical The Great War: The Standard History of the All-Europe Conflict (1914–19, also from the Amalgamated Press). Its first issue was published on 22 August 1914, eighteen days after Britain declared war on Germany, and its final issue was published nearly four months after the Armistice on 8 February 1919. Sensationalist and patriotic, with an advertised aim to ‘bring the war close’, it reached a peak circulation of 750,000 copies. An advertorial of April 1915 claimed that ‘our remarkable little publication’ is ‘filled with the most remarkable collection of photographs of the most tumultuous period in the world’s history’ and that ‘the camera has made it possible to record these great events while they are still in progress and yet to give the record permanent form’. The War Illustrated was clearly able to navigate DORA’s rules, even as it publicised the guise of ‘bringing the war close’ in all its global context. While the upbeat and sanitised images would have jarred with the reality of serving soldiers and medical personnel, the magazine gave a visual sense that one was engaged in the events taking place. However sanitised they may have been, such magazines as the War Illustrated, one of a host of inexpensive, mass-produced pictorials published between 1914 and 1919, gave the public ‘some impression of what the battlefields were like’ and demonstrates that ‘battlefield tourism has been there from the start’.21 The War Illustrated in particular maximised its brand and its profits by selling ‘registered binding cases’ – touted regularly by J. A. Hammerton in his editor’s notes which featured at the end of each issue – so that readers might collect their weekly issues. This was memoryin-the-making, an incremental building of the ‘memory bridge’. Not all periodicals thrived in wartime as did the War Illustrated. Concerns that affected the book trade also hit the periodical press – and sometimes these were one and the same. In addition to book publishers who had their own stable of magazines, the dedicated periodical publishers who had emerged in the atmosphere of the New Journalism of the late nineteenth century, George Newnes (1851–1910), Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe (1865–1922), C. Arthur Pearson (1866–1921) and

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D. C. Thomson (1861–1954), were faced with the rationing not only of the metals required for typecasting and printing plates by demand elsewhere, but also of the very material foundation of their products: paper.22 As Iain Stevenson outlines, Paper quickly became in short supply as imports from Canada and Scandinavia were blockaded and freighters were sunk by German submarines. Certain special high-quality papers, made from esparto grass imported from North Africa, became virtually unobtainable. The government exercised priority over access to paper stocks – and increasingly printing – for the enormous quantity of documents war administration demanded, and publishers found that their manufacturing orders were delayed or cancelled at short notice. After three decades of economic stability, prices of raw materials began to increase dramatically.23 Such rising costs, restrictions on supply and declining quality had become acute by 1916 and were topics of discussion in both the trade and general press. In a 1916 article for Scientific American (1845–), entitled ‘How Waste Paper is Treated to Make New Paper’, Thomas Keenan addressed the ‘recent extraordinary rise in the price of paper’ caused by ‘the existence of war in the great pulp and paper manufacturing centers of Europe, with the consequent interruption of supplies of both raw and finished materials that has caused scarcity and increased demand here as well as abroad’.24 S. Charles Phillips meanwhile contemplated the irony that ‘this country was embroiled in the present terrific war through what Germany termed a “scrap of paper”’ in his article for the Journal of the Royal Society of Arts (1852–), ‘Paper Supplies as Affected by the War’. He noted that ‘the raw materials upon which the paper trade depends, are international in extent’ and their curtailment ‘by forces of circumstance’ would only become ‘more acute as the war progressed’.25 Thus as Huculak argues, ‘pulped wood provided more than a material that one could transform into paper; it was also considered a strategic military resource’.26 The need to reduce imports and ringfence shipping tonnage for military use led to the creation in Britain of the Royal Commission on Paper in March 1916, which issued increasingly strict decrees on the use of paper. Paper and the materials used to produce it were reduced to one-third of pre-war levels, waste paper was collected for recycling and ‘the manufacture of paper from home-produced materials’ was encouraged.27 In February 1917 the importation of unbound books and magazines (‘in sheets’) was prohibited altogether. In March the Publishers’ Circular (1837–1959) outlined the latest set of controls under the DORA Paper Restriction Order no. 203 (1917), which included the suspension of newspaper contents bills; the curtailment of paper posters announcing goods for sale; and restrictions on distribution of catalogues and price lists, unless asked for. According to the accompanying article – as well as a number of letters to the editor in this and other issues – ‘this new Order spells ruin to nearly every antiquarian bookseller’.28 The Special Committee of the London Chamber of Commerce, led by A. E. Canney of Bovril Ltd, went even further in its condemnation of the Commission’s decrees, in the pamphlet Paralysing the Book Trade: The Paper Restriction Consolidation Order, 1917: An Order which in effect allows unrestricted use of Paper for any and every purpose except that of Business. Calling the Order ‘one of the greatest blows ever aimed at Advertising and the productive trades of the country’, the pamphlet outlines the division of uses for paper:

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the government, the press, commercial and miscellaneous. It singles out the Press for particular censure: This Section (including daily and weekly newspapers, periodicals, magazines, publications of the so-called ‘comic’ variety, gossip papers, cheap novels, etc., etc., – not to mention ‘evening’ newspapers, with their many editions) undoubtedly consumes the bulk of our paper tonnage. The greater part of this consumption is unnecessary under present conditions, and much of it is in fact actively injurious, encouraging, as it does, expenditure upon literature which can quite well be done without.29 It further attacks what it calls the ‘Press monopoly’ of newspapers and periodicals that have used their position as favoured holders of paper to drive up their advertising rates to the detriment of both large, but especially small traders. How, the pamphlet argues, could it be sensible to ban an advertiser from placing ‘two posters on a single hoarding’ but allow him to ‘take a page Advertisement in a paper with 2,750,000 circulation, thus using 1,375,000 sheets of paper, or approximately nineteen tons of paper in one day’?30 The effects on periodical publishers were mixed: some publishers or titles thrived, others did not. Those publishers that had a ‘stable of publications’ such as Cassell (founded 1848), the Amalgamated Press (owned by Northcliffe) and Thomson were able to use their ‘agglomerated print-buying and other overheads [to] keep production costs down’.31 But all ‘were obliged to print on continually coarsening paper and, as time went on, to reduce the size of their type and ration the number of pages for each issue’.32 While popular and successful magazines such as Pearson’s Weekly (1890–1939) and the Strand (1891–1950) were able to maintain the quality of their paper into 1917, both were forced to reduce the number of pages on ever-increasingly poor-quality paper. By 1918 Pearson’s had just twelve pages per issue, and the 11 May issue was ‘further squeezed down to eight pages until mid-July’.33 The Strand began to use a smaller typeface, reduced its number of illustrations, ceased printing in colour and kept its circulation to 500,000.34 Another way in which periodicals survived was by raising their cover price. The War Illustrated’s weekly issues cost 2d. until 16 February 1918, when the price was raised to 3d. Hammerton assured readers that despite this ‘No diminution will be made in the size or substance of the publication’, and that ‘Contrasted with the penny and twopenny pictorial journals its value is greater, quite apart from the fact that our contributors are writers of the highest distinction, whose services can be retained only at an expenditure quite unusual in popular weekly journalism.’35 A price hike could be a hazardous strategy for all but the more specialised periodicals. Bibby’s Annual (1906–36), founded by Joseph Bibby (1851–1940), founder of J. Bibby and Sons Ltd, soap manufacturers, is an interesting example. Its ‘war number’ of 1916 was made up of sixty-four pages (40 x 29 cm), and in addition to its articles that firmly situate the origins of the magazine, including ‘What Theosophy Stands For’, ‘The New Socialism’, ‘St Helena The Last Phase’, and ‘A Woman’s Views on War’ by Lady Margaret Sackville (1881–1963), it contained sixty-eight plate illustrations from artists such as J. A. Whistler (1834–1903), G. F. Watts (1873–1960) and J. E. Millais (1829–96). Twenty-five of these were in colour, four full-page, with others in monochrome. Its pictorial sewn card wrap covers were doubled-sided and in colour.

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Its increase in price reflects the ever-increasing costs of materials and production. It retained its pre-war price of one shilling in 1914, 1915 and 1916, but in 1917 the price rose to one shilling and three pence (by post, one shilling and eight pence). Its 1918 issue was priced at 1/9 at newsagents and 2/3 by post. A reader’s investment in the magazine, even an annual one, was high indeed by the final year of the war. It nevertheless survived until 1936. But not all were as fortunate. The Illustrated War News ‘stopped publication before the end of the war due to paper shortages. Some journals, like the Athenaeum, survived by publishing monthly rather than weekly.’36 If established periodicals such as Blackwood’s (1817–1980) and the Strand (both of which had a substantial following among the troops) were able to survive, others struggled: ‘Odhams Press, founded in 1890, produced a large number of special interest magazines, but many foundered during the war as paper shortages played havoc with periodical schedules.’37 The Girls’ Reader ceased publication in 1915, having been founded in 1908. The Lady’s Realm founded in 1896 and its sister paper for younger readers, the Girl’s Realm founded in 1898, also survived until 1915, when the Girl’s Realm was incorporated with Woman at Home, also known as Annie S. Swan’s Paper. Newnes and Hodder and Stoughton thus became joint proprietors of the title Woman at Home and Girl’s Realm from December 1915 to March 1918: ‘The combination of these two favourite journals has proved a decided success’, noted H. Simonis in The Street of Ink (1917).38 Simonis also highlighted the extent to which a periodical’s materiality was defined by its advertising: Before the war [. . .] the number [of pages] was frequently increased [. . .] in order to accommodate advertisers [. . .] but [to] make general advertisements part of the ordinary issue [. . .] the editorial matter will have to be very good, or the public will say what an old lady once remarked petulantly of a popular magazine, ‘This paper seems to contain nothing but advertisements.’ A City magnate, who ought to have known better, remarked to me some time ago that he would cheerfully pay sixpence daily for his paper if it did not contain any advertisements, as they were a positive eyesore to him [. . .] Quite apart from the important trade announcements which are made regularly [. . .] advertisements [. . .] are of the utmost value not only to the public but also to business men. Experience has taught the newspaper proprietor that the reader does want advertisements, and [. . .] advertising gives variety to the news sheets.39 Advertising was (and remains) the financial ‘life-blood’ of any periodical, and the placement of adverts in a periodical’s physical landscape is the bibliographic code that underscores the central role of commodity culture. Advertisements in periodicals from the Great War highlight both the business-as-usual environment for goods and services and the commodification of the conflict, whereby everything from soap and medical supplies to pens and toffee exploited wartime references. These were the forerunners of the ‘commercially made domestic artefacts and utensils’, the souvenirs, commemorative objects and memorabilia produced after the Armistice that constituted the post-war memory bridge.40 A decline in advertising revenue was a cause for major concern, since ‘just as in the present day, the sales price did not cover the final costs of production. Advertising subsidised each issue.’41 Joseph McAleer provides the example of Newnes,

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Figure 1.1  The inaugural issue of the conjoined titles, Nash’s and Pall Mall Magazine, October 1914.

who despite robust sales of their books and magazines, ‘announced reduced profits due to a fall in revenues, higher costs of paper and printing, and restricted cash flow’ in 1916.42 It was a situation that was to dog other publishers and their periodicals.

Nash’s and Pall Mall Magazine Nash’s and Pall Mall Magazine, an amalgamation of two popular British periodicals, is perhaps one of the more salient examples of the exigencies of wartime periodical publishing. Undertaken to combine reserves of raw material, such as paper, its wartime issues demonstrate its changing materiality. The joint venture was announced by each of the magazines in their August issues via a similarly worded three-page spread which highlighted the history of the titles and the galaxy of famous writers featured in each. Readers were assured that ‘All that is best in both magazines will be retained, but strengthened in interest.’43 The editorial in the first joint issue published in October 1914 expanded on the decision, perhaps to quell the dissent of readers of the Pall Mall Magazine who voiced their displeasure at the merger. Paper is put front and centre: One of the insuperable difficulties imposed by the present world war is the scarcity of fine printing paper such as is used in this magazine. Magazine publishers for the first time in British history are faced with a paper famine. Already ten London periodicals have ceased publication, these failures being due in the main to the publishers’ inability to secure, at any price, a quantity and quality of paper needed for the printing of delicate half-tone blocks. This condition of things on the mechanical side of magazine production has made it imperative to amalgamate

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temporarily ‘The Pall Mall Magazine’ with ‘Nash’s Magazine’ beginning with the present number. As previously announced it was the intention of the proprietors of the two magazines, in deference to the demands of the majority of ‘The Pall Mall Magazine’ readers, to continue it as a separate and distinct publication, but the amazing conditions brought about by the war have compelled us to merge the two magazines into one. When the present universal disturbance has subsided and the shock and strangle of armed conflict and its direful effects have ceased, we shall proceed to separate and continue ‘Nash’s’ and ‘Pall Mall’ as individual magazines. Until then we can only express the wish that ‘Pall Mall’ readers will find here in the pages of the amalgamated periodical as much or more to win their admiration and support than was formerly to be found in its pages.44 In noting that ‘[t]he September number of Nash’s Magazine has gone completely out of print’, the editor, Perriton Maxwell (1868–1947), ensures the magazine’s alignment with patriotic values (as materiel) but not without underlining the complementary commercial value: It is near to the nation’s heart, it is in harmony with the thought and emotions of the British people, and the British people are buying this magazine more eagerly than ever before. Surely there is a lesson of genuine patriotism and common sense in all this which even the most timid amongst advertisers may take heart and act upon, forthwith.45 Profit as well as literary kudos is what drove the creation of individual titles in this wartime amalgamation. The Pall Mall Magazine was founded in May 1893 by the American financier William Waldorf Astor (1848–1919) as a literary equivalent to the Pall Mall Gazette (1865–1923). This shilling monthly aimed at the gentleman reader sat alongside its less expensive sister publication, the Pall Mall Budget (1868–1920), and published a staggering array of popular writers. But as it celebrated its quarter century in 1914, with grand plans to enlarge its volume of fiction, one week after the May 1914 issue reached the newsstands the Pall Mall Magazine was sold to the National Magazine Company, owned by the American press baron William Randolph Hearst (1863–1951), and publisher of Eveleigh Nash’s eponymous periodical, founded in 1909. Although Hearst wanted to retain the separate Pall Mall title, the threat of War [and] the likelihood of paper rationing would make running the two magazines difficult. Just five days after the sale, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand propelled the world into the Great War. That would change the face of publishing forever, and Pall Mall was one of the first casualties.46 Some of the most famous artists of the day, including Charles Dana Gibson (1867– 1944), Howard Chandler Christy (1872–1952) and Fortunino Matania (1881–1963), provided the illustrations that accompanied the features and stories in Nash’s and Pall Mall Magazine. Harrison Fisher (1875–1934) provided the covers, which ‘were so popular that they became collectable in their own right, with Nash’s offering reproductions on art paper’.47 The covers remain the magazine’s most striking material feature: even more than one hundred years on, they remain vibrant, even if the internal pages

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of the later wartime issues have faded and yellowed. Its front and back covers act as a book dustjacket, containing the fiction within, although with the addition of a wealth of advertisements. Both front and back covers and their corresponding internal sides remained in colour throughout the war, whatever changes may have occurred to the content pages within. The full-colour cover is complemented by two-colour back and internal covers. The images are usually of attractive young women, but sometimes, as Macdonald notes, couples in romantic embrace are featured.48 To whom do these covers appeal, or are they meant to appeal? Women would be attracted to fashionable icons; men to the tempting feminine forms (all the women featured have a ‘come-hither gaze’). Nash’s clearly understood what would later be termed in 1920 the ‘halo effect’: ‘we pay more attention to a message if the source happens to be aesthetically beautiful; in other words, if the receiver associates the source of a message with his/her ideal ego model, with the way he/she would like to be or would like others to see him/her, the words being spoken will also gain credibility’.49 If the illustrated, high-quality covers masked wartime economies as the war progressed, one element on the cover signals the effects: price. Between October 1914 and January 1917, the cover price held at 6d. But from February 1917 the price rose steadily and sometimes rapidly, with no more than a couple of months in between rises. In February 1917 the price went up to 7d., in May to 8d. It rose again in February 1918 to 10d., and by June it cost 1 shilling. In February 1917 a ‘Notice to Our Readers’ explained the necessity of the increase to 7d.: ‘the great advance in the cost of paper and all other magazine-making commodities leaves us no alternative. We sincerely hope that our readers will appreciate our position in this matter.’ It stressed that ‘This extra penny is no war-profiteering trick. The increase is made so that, despite unfortunate conditions, we may be able to maintain the present high standard of quality.’50 Nash’s used its robust sales to reinforce its position as a magazine attractive to advertisers, frequently referring to its circulation and sales; it declared on the cover of the July 1916 issue, for instance, that it was ‘The Magazine with the largest Nett Sales’, and in the issue for August it showcased in a three-quarter-page advert a ‘Certificate of Nash’s Nett Sales during 1915’, which showed a steady rise from 121,919 in January to 156,666 by December. Readers are consistently instructed to mention Nash’s and Pall Mall Magazine ‘when replying to advertisers’. Nash’s prided itself on being ‘The Business Builder’ and featured adverts for both large and small companies. The front page adverts were for major retailers and producers, while the back page adverts or ‘Nash’s Little Ads’ featured calls for freelance writers, journalism courses and beauty products among other goods and services. But while Nash’s and Pall Mall Magazine attests to the fact that despite shortages, a number of high-production-value magazines continued to be published, they were still forced to cut corners and pass rising costs on to the consumer. As might be expected, the quality of paper declined significantly. The thick glossy paper of the early war years was gradually replaced by cheaper, coarser varieties that have yellowed with age. The average number of advertising pages over fifty-four issues was twelve, roughly 10 per cent in 1914. Generally, the first fifteen to sixteen pages of each issue, which include a table of contents, were populated by full-, half- and quarter-page adverts, while between three and four pages at the end of each issue also featured adverts. Adverts also appeared on the inside front cover and the inner and outer back cover. The main contents pages numbered on average 128 pages per issue, but this gradually dropped

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beginning in 1916, from 125 pages in February to 109 pages by the following February. The decline continued with some fluctuation to reach a low of 77 pages by the June 1918 issue. Indeed, for six months (June–November) not only were there fewer content pages, but there were also no significant advertisement pages. The only exceptions were a two-sided page advertising Pelmanism (a memory-training system) in the August issue; a one-page advert for Nash’s print department in the October issue; and a quarter-page box for placing an order for the next issue of the magazine in November. This is surprising given the centrality of advertising to the periodical’s coffers. But acute paper shortages and further government restrictions on imports led to the onepage notice entitled ‘Ships or Advertisements’ in April 1918 which declared: the amount of space devoted by newspapers and magazines to advertisements should be greatly curtailed. We have, therefore, been obliged to omit a larger number of advertisers’ announcements from the present issue. It is a question of advertisements or ships. There can be only one answer.51 Circulation had peaked earlier in the year at 240,000, declined over the next months as a result of the printing restrictions, but bounced back after 1918. Nash’s and Pall Mall Magazine continued as a joint periodical until 1927.52

Conclusion In March 1916 J. A. Hammerton again made a pitch for the usefulness of the ‘registered binding cases’ made to hold the weekly issues of the War Illustrated. It was accompanied by an image captioned ‘A Compelling Contrast’. As Hammerton explained,

Figure 1.2  ‘A Compelling Contrast’, War Illustrated, March 1916.

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jane potter The illustrations on this page of the first two volumes of THE WAR ILLUSTRATED bound in the publishers’ registered binding cases, affords a strong contrast to the loose parts of the third volume, some of which are torn, soiled and even lost. It were a great pity if you allowed this splendid record of the war to become soiled and incomplete, when, for only one shilling and six-pence, you can secure a handsome, strong and lasting binding case, which will keep all your twenty-six parts of each volume intact and unsoiled for years to come.53

The solidity of the bound format ensured that this war souvenir would last. Yet, interestingly, the weekly issues when bound in this way were stripped of both the newsstand covers that featured the familiar red-coloured masthead and the weekly editorials by Hammerton that constituted the back cover. Thus the sections that most closely aligned the weekly issues with their particular time – the cover that showed the price and the editorial page that highlighted day-to-day concerns, addressed reader feedback or encouraged sales of binders – were removed. What remained was a chronological record in the manner of a history book, albeit one created as events unfolded. The War Illustrated bound volume is thus a different material object from the weekly issue in more than just its binding. The branded 1/6 board covers were also not readers’ only option for a ‘permanent form’. The War Illustrated Album-de-Luxe was launched in October 1915 as a ‘sumptuous record of the Great War’, designed to appeal to the ‘many subscribers’ who wanted to ‘have the volumes printed on expensive art paper and bound in the very best cloth and leather’. Given that this was ‘impracticable with the ordinary issues’ and despite ongoing paper shortages and restrictions, [t]he publishers, with a keen desire to meet the request expressed by so many readers are producing a set of volumes under the title of ‘The War Illustrated Album-de-Luxe.’ These volumes are naturally superior on the mechanical side to the weekly numbers. As a lasting history and permanent record of the Great War, they are unequalled by any war publication now available.54 The content of the weekly issues was again re-curated in that ‘the various articles and pages have been carefully revised in light of later information’ and their subjects arranged into sections to ‘constitute an illuminating and brilliantly narrated complete history of the conflict’. Printed on ‘thick, glossy, superior paper’ with ‘a wealth of colour plates, artistic reproductions of photographs and war-artists’ drawings’, the volumes were even offered in a choice of two bindings: ‘a strong, blue buckram cloth, specially designed and made so as to last for a generation and more’ costing, by subscription, 3s. 6d. monthly, and a ‘superior binding’ of ‘rich, red half-leather with gilt ornamentation’ for 4s. 6d. per month. Thus the materiality of the War Illustrated was changed not just by external forces but also by the publisher’s diversification of the product, which changed one kind of printed ephemera into another with ever-increasing degrees of status. A cheap weekly illustrated news magazine thus developed into a war relic, ‘a beautiful treasure’ designed ‘to last for a generation and more’. In other words, it became a ‘memory bridge’. Such an example bears out James Mussell’s observation that

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When we encounter printed ephemera, whether it survives by chance or design, we have a rare opportunity to engage with a component of the information economy that should have been lost. To play its part, ephemera should pass with the moment and so when it survives, it does so despite itself. Such encounters are always uncanny because ephemera belongs to the dead.55 When considered in the context of periodical ephemera from the Great War, Mussell’s words have even greater resonance and poignancy, since the dead haunt every aspect of the history and legacy of 1914–18. The sense of the uncanny can vary according to how we encounter the material periodical object. First World War periodicals have been preserved in a host of ways: by their original publishers at the very moment of their creation, by succeeding generations of librarians, and, not least, by their readers. One is surely tempted to ask who exactly was the person who scribbled the note ‘WANTED / Rudyard Kipling’ on his/ her copy of the inaugural issue of Nash’s and Pall Mall Magazine (Figure 1.1), found decades later in an antiquarian bookshop in Bath. Both the reading experience and the tactile encounter are altered by the physical form; a single issue of a periodical elicits a different response than that of a heavy, cloth-bound collection, regardless of whether or not certain features are lost in the process of binding, as is the case with the War Illustrated. Similarly, a digitised periodical, while capable of being visually enhanced or searched for content, will lack the subtle nuances of paper colour, quality and texture that only touch can detect, not to mention the olfactory sensations afforded by the material object. The magazines highlighted in this chapter and those considered elsewhere in this volume (as well as the hundreds of others that have gone unmentioned) can be found in libraries, archives and second-hand bookshops, and, increasingly, online, either in digital library repositories waiting to be borrowed or in the digital marketplace ready to be bought as physical copies once more, or as PDF scans of originals, giving them yet another kind of materiality. Thus the periodical memory bridge is most comprehensively constructed by paying attention to both its physical and its digital manifestations. More than simply background noise, First World War periodicals represent the conjuncture between material and materiel in the wartime landscape of memory and commodity culture. They are the memory bridges that link the current reader with her counterpart who first read them more than one hundred years ago.

Notes   1. Nicholas J. Saunders, ed., Matters of Conflict: Material Culture, Memory and the First World War (London: Routledge, 2004), 5.  2. Saunders, Matters of Conflict, 5.  3. Saunders, Matters of Conflict, 5.  4. Saunders, Matters of Conflict, 5.  5. Saunders, Matters of Conflict, 15.   6. Nicholas J. Saunders, ‘Apprehending Memory: Material Culture and War, 1919–1930’, in The Great World War 1914–45, vol. 2. Who Won? Who Lost?, ed. John Bourne, Peter Liddle and Ian Whitehead (London: HarperCollins, 2001), 476–88, here 480.

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  7. Jerome J. McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 57.   8. George Bornstein, Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). See also George Bornstein and Theresa Lynn Tinkle, The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998); Matthew Huculak, ‘Reading Forensically: Modernist Paper, Newfoundland, and Transatlantic Materiality’, Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 6, no. 2 (2015): 161–90. Huculak provides not just an articulate overview of key theories in material print culture scholarship but also an important analysis of the ‘hidden histories’ of the ‘material trade networks of production’ (167), and in particular the human labour that ‘contributed to the circulation of goods in modernity’ (183). See also D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).   9. Patrick Collier, Modern Print Artefacts: Textual Materiality and Literary Value in British Print Culture, 1890–1930s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 7. 10. The chapter focuses on UK magazines, but it aims to set out concepts of materiality that can be applied to the range of international and subject-specific periodicals explored elsewhere in this volume. 11. Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Photographs as Objects of Memory’, in Material Memories: Design and Evocation, ed. Marius Kwint, Christopher Breward and Jeremy Aynsley (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 222–36, here 221, 222. 12. James Mussell, ‘The Passing of Print: Digitising Ephemera and the Ephemerality of the Digital’, Media History 18, no. 1 (2012): 77–92, here 78. 13. Ann L. Ardis and Patrick Collier, Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 2. 14. Joseph McAleer, Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain, 1914–1950 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 25. 15. Iain Stevenson, Book Makers: British Publishing in the Twentieth Century (London: British Library, 2010), 40; Kate Macdonald, ‘Popular Periodicals: Wartime Newspapers, Magazines and Journals’, in The Edinburgh Companion to the First World War and the Arts, ed. Ann-Marie Einhaus and Katherine Isobel Baxter (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 245–60, here 248. 16. Ardis and Collier, Transatlantic Print Culture, 1. 17. Christine Stam, ‘A Short History of the British Magazine’, in Inside Magazine Publishing, ed. David Stam and Andrew Scott (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 9–38, here 17. 18. Stam, ‘Short History’, 18, 19. 19. Quoted in Cate Haste, Keep the Home Fires Burning: Propaganda in the First World War (London: Allan Lane, 1977), 30. 20. Macdonald, ‘Popular Periodicals’, 256. 21. John Schofield, ‘Aftermath: Materiality on the Home Front, 1914–2001’, in Matters of Conflict, 192–206, here 193. 22. Sarah Bromage and Helen Williams, ‘Material Technologies and the Printing Industry’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, ed. A. Nash, C. Squires and I. Willison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 41–60, here 53. For a discussion of paper supply in America, see C. J. La Casse, ‘“Scrappy and Unselective”: Rising Wartime Paper Costs and the Little Review’, American Periodicals 26, no. 2 (2016): 208–21. An analysis of the paper situation in post-war Germany is provided by Heidi J. S. Tworek, ‘The Death of News? The Problem of Paper in the Weimar Republic’, Central European History 50, no. 3 (2017): 328–46. 23. Stevenson, Book Makers, 38. 24. Thomas Keenan, ‘How Waste Paper is Treated to Make New Paper’, Scientific American 115, no. 26 (23 December 1916): 574–9, here 574.

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25. S. Charles Phillips, ‘Paper Supplies as Affected by the War’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 64, no. 3300 (18 February 1916): 271–87, here 271. 26. Huculak, ‘Reading Forensically’, 168. 27. McAleer, Popular Reading and Publishing, 52. ‘The Commission was dissolved in 1918, but paper rationing was not lifted until May 1919’ (53). 28. Publishers’ Circular, 10 March 1917, 235. 29. Special Committee of the London Chamber of Commerce, Paralysing the Book Trade: The Paper Restriction Consolidation Order, 1917: An Order which in effect allows unrestricted use of Paper for any and every purpose except that of Business (London: London Chamber of Commerce, 1917), 4. 30. Special Committee, Paralysing the Book Trade, 9–12. 31. Macdonald, ‘Popular Periodicals’, 251. 32. Macdonald, ‘Popular Periodicals’, 249. 33. Macdonald, ‘Popular Periodicals’, 249. 34. Macdonald, ‘Popular Periodicals’, 249. 35. War Illustrated, 9 February 1916, 15. The ‘Editor’s Outlook’ was renamed ‘Through the Red Box’ beginning with the 16 February issue. Coinciding with the price rise, this ‘new corner of the paper’ boasted a colour illustration of a red post box and was touted as a space in which ‘editor and reader can get into friendly correspondence’ (15). 36. Macdonald, ‘Popular Periodicals’, 249. See also Marysa Demoor, ‘The Athenaeum after Maccoll’, Essays and Studies 66 (2013): 195–212. 37. Stevenson, Book Makers, 40. 38. H. Simonis, The Street of Ink: An Intimate History of Journalism (London: Cassell, 1917), 290. 39. Simonis, Street of Ink, 20–1. 40. Saunders, ed., Matters of Conflict, 16. 41. Stam, ‘Short History’, 18. 42. McAleer, Popular Reading and Publishing, 53. 43. Pall Mall Magazine, August 1914, 1012. 44. Nash’s and Pall Mall Magazine, October 1915, 1. The same notice appeared in the final issue of the Pall Mall in September. 45. Nash’s and Pall Mall Magazine, October 1914, x. Italics in original. 46. Mike Ashley, The Age of the Storytellers: British Popular Fiction Magazines 1880–1950 (London: British Library, 2006), 153. 47. Ashley, Age of the Storytellers, 131: ‘During the Great War some 500,000 copies of Fisher’s pictures were sold separately.’ 48. Macdonald, ‘Popular Periodicals’, 251. 49. Pier Paolo Pedrini, Propaganda, Persuasion and the Great War: Heredity in the Modern Sale of Products and Political Ideas (New York: Routledge, 2018), 44. 50. Nash’s and Pall Mall Magazine, February 1917, 435. 51. Nash’s and Pall Mall Magazine, April 1918, n.p. 52. Ashley, Age of the Storytellers, 134. 53. War Illustrated, 4 March 1916, xii. 54. War Illustrated, 16 October 1915, xxxvi. 55. Mussell, ‘The Passing of Print’, 78.

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2 Networks Edmund G. C. King

T

he First World War was a conflict underpinned by vast global supply chains and communication networks. Placing the individual soldier’s perspective into its wider context in J’ai tué (I have killed) in 1918, Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961) catalogued the material and logistical components of the ‘huge war machine’ that the combatant nations had assembled to fight the conflict. Supply networks stretched over ‘the whole length and breadth of the earth’, conveying the products of farms, mines and factories to the Western Front. ‘Steamships cross the high seas [. . .] Trains run. Whole caravans of trucks hit the roads’, while the civilian population was pacified, entertained and informed by cinema and mass-circulation newspapers.1 The battles and theatres of the First World War depended on technical network infrastructure – roads, railways and shipping routes – for movement and supply. Running alongside this was the communications network infrastructure that the fighting forces relied upon for information, consisting of overground and submarine telegraph cables, telephone lines and postal services.2 In the decades before 1914, it had become commonplace to observe the shrinkage of time and space brought about by railways and telegraph systems, which were often represented as a network of nerves or sinews binding nations and continents together into markets and empires.3 Cendrars, in J’ai tué, indicates his awareness of how this unprecedentedly networked state of affairs – the sinews of global commerce and communication – provided the conditions of possibility for global war. Beyond these networks lay a range of other obligations, ties and affiliations – less tangible, but no less instrumental in generating consent, labour and fighting manpower. Imperial political and economic networks enabled combatant powers to recruit – or conscript – labour forces from their colonies, while the affective ties of ‘imperial belonging’ encouraged, for instance, metropolitan-born settlers in colonies and dominions to enlist, at least initially, in greater proportions than their locally born compatriots.4 Social network theorists Stephen P. Borgatti and Daniel S. Halgin define a network as ‘a set of actors or nodes along with a set of ties of a specified type [. . .] that link them’.5 However, the complexity of networked relationships during the First World War – with their interlinked ties between human agents and non-human materiel, infrastructure, landscape and conceptual elements – could also be understood in terms of actor-network theory, which similarly defines a network as a set of relationships but conceptualises ‘actors’ in a broader way.6 Interpreted in this way, the events of the First World War appear as what Dave Elder-Vass calls ‘assemblages’; that is, ‘contingent bundle[s] of interactions between elements [. . .] specific to a particular time and place’, reliant for their existence on their ‘many ties’.7 Viewed in actor-network terms, every artillery shell and bullet fired during the conflict not only travelled along its own ballistic trajectory but

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simultaneously represented an intersection point between miners, metallurgists and munitions workers, shipping routes, soldiers and their commanders, army staff strategists, and the curves and contours of the battlefield landscape itself. Each element resolves upon closer inspection into a bundle of ties and associations, the interactions between human and non-human participants in the network densely interwoven.8 Whether conceived of as products of what Friedrich Kittler terms ‘discourse networks’ or what Robert Darnton describes as a ‘communication circuit’, the periodicals that appeared during the First World War were governed by similarly networked logics of production, distribution, contingency and association. Defining the stages of the ‘discourse networks’ that written texts rely on for their existence, Kittler draws attention to the media conditions under which texts are produced, stored and received.9 Darnton’s ‘communication circuit’ produces a similarly networked understanding of the agents involved in textual production, dissemination and reception.10 Described as a communication circuit, the periodical industry connects authors, editors and readers via the intermediary technologies and supply chains of the printing trade. In peacetime, journals are typically issued by publishers, who liaise with printers to do the manufacturing, distributors to warehouse and transport printed copies, and subscription agents and booksellers to handle the retail side of the business.11 Due to the circumstances of wartime, however, the networks that produced First World War periodicals functioned very differently. Paper shortages, censorship and sudden deaths all influenced the workings of the press. At the same time, new ties were formed, resulting in alternative ‘discourse networks’. Trench journals provide an especially striking case study for understanding how printing, distribution and reading networks operated during the First World War. These kinds of publications were particularly susceptible to the contingencies of supply chain constraints and disruptions, as well as the more directly existential threats posed by wartime violence. Their editors often had to radically simplify the ‘communication circuit’ by improvising different production and distribution strategies, sometimes from one issue to the next. Interactions between human agencies and the non-human (in the form, for instance, of shellfire that might obliterate type and printing equipment before an issue could be published) posed especially immediate and existential threats to this kind of publication. Yet at the same time, these periodicals could also be foci for collective identity, particularly on the small scale of the individual unit or camp. This chapter focuses its attention largely on trench and unit periodicals, though it also draws on examples from hospital magazines, soldier newspapers, nursing journals, and prisonerof-war and internee publications. It examines how editors established and maintained print networks to bring wartime journals into existence. It maps the variety of distribution and sales strategies they employed to place their publications in the hands of readers. Finally, it describes how wartime journals acted as information and social networks for their contributors and readers across the home and fighting fronts.

Printing Networks In October 1917 Gunner Alan Dilnot (1891–1946) of the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Battery, Royal Field Artillery, wrote a rueful account of his attempts to edit a journal while on active service in France.12 Buoyed by the success of the first issues of the Anti-Aircraft Spasm (1916), which he assembled copy for and sent to Britain to be typed up, Dilnot’s

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plans became more ambitious. Knowing that there were two experienced compositors in his section, he ordered a second-hand printing press from Britain and attempted to have it freighted to France. Subscribers were found among the battery’s personnel to underwrite the cost. However, the press failed to arrive and Dilnot was eventually informed that it had been delivered to the docks in boxes too heavy to be shipped further under army regulations. The press was returned to Britain and repackaged in different boxes. Meanwhile, Dilnot’s subscribers had started to ask for their money back. One of the compositors left the unit. Finally, in April 1917, the first trays of type arrived, and Dilnot and the remaining compositor began the work of typesetting the next issue. The concussion from nearby exploding shells soon pied the type. Finally, before the remaining equipment arrived, Dilnot’s billet came under German shellfire, much of the type was ‘obliterated’, and Dilnot and his colleagues ‘abandoned [their] ambitious project’.13 Dilnot may have been unusual in describing how his periodical came to an end (many simply ceased publication without explanation), but the difficulties he outlines in his article must have been shared by other trench periodicals. The publishing career of the Wipers Times (August 1916–December 1918) follows a similar trajectory, albeit one with more longevity. Editor F. J. Roberts (1882–1964) and his colleagues discovered an abandoned printing press in a partially collapsed print-shop in Ypres, with its associated type ‘all over the country-side’.14 The editorial team subsequently carried their press with them wherever they moved until the Wipers Times suffered a similar fate as the Anti-Aircraft Spasm.15 In a passage that mirrors his account of the ‘discovery’ of the original printing press in 1915, Roberts describes its eventual destruction by German shellfire in 1917, ‘press and type broken up and sheets scattered in all directions’.16 Both Dilnot’s and Roberts’s accounts depict trench journalism as a fight against increasingly overwhelming odds. Read against the grain, however, they also reveal information about the underlying logistical and social networks on which trench periodicals relied. The printing press and type used to produce the Wipers Times and its successor titles weighed three tons. Moving it required the logistical support of transport units – truck drivers, for instance, who could be informally ‘persuaded’ to carry printing equipment to new postings.17 These origin stories also indicate the importance of social networks to the formation of First World War periodicals – the happenstance, often temporary proximity of service personnel with the skills, opportunity and shared motivation to establish and operate a trench journal. Reviewing the trench press in 1918, H. R. Macdonald speculated that the large-scale diaspora of journalists into temporary military service explained why so many soldiers’ journals existed: ‘Wherever the pressman goes – or is taken’, he wrote, ‘his first thought on settling down is to start a paper.’18 While this theory certainly does not apply in every case, it does for Dilnot, a freelance journalist in civilian life who wrote regularly for the Daily Mirror (1903–).19 It is unlikely, on the other hand, that more than a small minority of printing industry employees who joined the services ever had the opportunity to participate in trench journalism.20 However, as the Spasm and the Wipers Times show, under the right conditions, the presence of former compositors in units could occasionally be a spur to the creation of journals, a networking effect that could also apply to literary authors, as the case of Apollinaire (considered below) indicates. Trench journal staff and printing equipment could also be slotted into more formal military networks as

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occasion required. The Brazier (February 1916–April 1917, 16th Battalion, Canadian Scottish Regiment) was typeset and printed by trained personnel drawn from the battalion ranks. According to their former managing editor, these experienced printers were ‘given a considerable amount of job work’ by the Canadian Expeditionary Force, primarily printing army forms, while in the lines.21 A less materially risky form of publication involved sending copy written in the field to printers on the home front or in back areas. The journal of the 6th Battalion Durham Light Infantry, the Whizz-Bang (January–July 1916), for instance, which was subtitled ‘A Monthly Journal from the Front, Written and Edited in the Trenches’, was printed in Darlington by the North of England Newspaper Company (which also owned the Northern Echo).22 The Direct Hit (September 1916–July 1917, journal of the 58th London Division) and the Dud (November 1916–January 1918, 14th Battalion, Princess Louise’s, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders) were printed in London by W. H. Smith.23 The firm, in turn, supported the Direct Hit by placing advertising in its pages.24 Copy for the Buzzer (November 1915–December 1917, Signals Section, 49th [West Riding] Division) was written in France, the journal was printed in England, and copies were mailed to the editors in sevenpound parcels for distribution in France.25 Troopship journals might be professionally printed when ships were in port or otherwise produced on the small, jobbing printing presses that passenger vessels carried during the pre-war period for printing menus and leaflets.26 Other unit journals forged improvised print networks closer to the areas in which the units were stationed. Both the 63rd (Royal Naval) Division’s Mudhook (September 1917–January 1919) and the West Lancashire Division magazine Sub Rosa (June 1917–June 1918) were published by the printing firm Imprimeries Réunies in Boulogne-sur-Mer, whose equipment and expertise enabled Sub Rosa to include several sophisticated, sexually provocative illustrations in its June 1917 issue.27 The 5th East Surrey Magazine (April–September 1915) was printed in the battalion’s wartime station of Kanpur in India by the locally based Job Press. As with the Direct Hit, the financial relationship between the journal and its printer was reflected in advertising, with the Job Press placing advertisements for fountain pens in its pages under the heading ‘Job Press (Printers to the Magazine), Printers & Stationers’.28 Liaising with local print networks involved negotiations across linguistic as well as cultural boundaries. Writing in the Camp Magazine (April 1915–November 1918), which served members of the First Royal Naval Brigade interned in the Netherlands, the journal’s Dutch printer, H. N. Werkman, alluded to the ‘difficulties which are attached to the printing of an English Magazine in a Dutch printing works’, apologising for any typographical errors that arose from transcribing English copy.29 Nevertheless, he wrote, setting type in English enabled him to feel a kinship with the camp’s linguistic community, claiming that he absorbed something of their ‘cheerfulness’ and ‘calm confidence’ along with the language itself.30 Military authorities could also act as intermediaries between the local printing industry and trench journals, particularly those located near base depots or other well-connected areas.31 The March 1918 issue of Aussie (January 1918–April 1919) was printed on paper salvaged from a ruined French printworks, purchased for the journal via the ‘French Mission’ attached to the Australian Corps.32 In other cases, however, relationships between editors and local printers were more fraught or difficult to establish. The editors of the Mudhook wrote

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that their first attempt to do business with a French imprimerie failed utterly and they ‘retired crestfallen’.33 The editorial to the first issue of Barrak (July–September 1917), the Egypt-printed journal of the Imperial Camel Corps, then operating in the Sinai Desert, suggested that the paper had only appeared after ‘sundry troubles’ with ‘native compositors, and other aids to modern journalism’, although the deliberate vagueness of this phrasing makes it difficult to parse for any specific information other than its note of racial condescension.34

Distribution and Sales Strategies Trench and hospital journals printed on the home front could take advantage of local print networks for retail sales and distribution. A select number of journals – usually the more polished and professional productions – were sold via mainstream retail outlets. The Canadian Expeditionary Force magazine, the Maple Leaf (June 1916–December 1918), advertised itself as ‘on sale at all W. H. Smith’s & Sons Bookstalls’ in Britain, as did the 17th (Service) Battalion, Highland Light Infantry’s paper, the Outpost (February 1915–May 1919).35 Others had commercial arrangements with particular retail outlets or specialist shops (such as military tailors or outfitters) or were stocked by bookshops near their home bases.36 The revived Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers magazine, the Sprig of Shillelagh (November 1914–June 1968), could be purchased at several shops in Londonderry, as well as from the bookstall of Londonderry’s Great Northern Railway station.37 With the Wounded, published between November 1915 and March 1918 at the Brondesbury Park Military Hospital in north-west London, was stocked in the nearby Finchley Road branch of W. H. Smiths.38 The Manchester Regiment’s Periscope (October 1916–January 1919) could be purchased in Manchester from regimental institutes and Territorial Force depots, as well as ‘Local Newsagents and Railway Bookstalls’.39 The more formally printed soldiers’ magazines and newspapers could usually be acquired via subscription, although the bulk of copies were probably shipped directly to their editorial staff for distribution within units.40 Individual soldier subscriptions were especially important for German soldier newspapers, accounting for the vast majority of revenue, although copies were also sold in military bookshops.41 Some soldiers’ newspapers and unit journals could be purchased in canteens and refreshment huts behind the lines. In 1916, for instance, the journal of the 7th Canadian Infantry Battalion (1st British Columbia Regiment), the Listening Post (August 1915–December 1918), recorded that it was stocked in battalion canteens, as well as in YMCA and church huts in the Canadian Corps area.42 For less sophisticated operations, distribution and sales pathways were more difficult. At its most basic, a trench or troopship publication might consist of a handwritten sheet of paper (or perhaps a single drawing or cartoon) passed from hand to hand or pinned up in a communal area for shared reading.43 Cyclostyle or Roneo machines, commonly used by French army unit publications, enabled soldier-editors to produce slightly more sophisticated unit journals relatively easily. Typically using handwritten or typewriter-produced sheets as their base copy, these duplicators could (under ideal conditions) produce upwards of 1,000 copies at a time.44 The colophon to the November 1915 issue of the single-sheet L’Echo du Ravin of the 41st Battalion of Chasseurs, French Army (April 1915–June 1916) indicated that it had been printed ‘au Cyclostyle – et à l’huile de coude’ (‘via Cyclostyle – and elbow grease’).45 The cyclostyle-produced

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Fag-Ends (published by the Signal Company, Royal Naval Division Engineers, between June 1915 and April 1916) sardonically claimed to be ‘on sale at all Smith’s bookstalls on the [Gallipoli] Peninsula’.46 Subsequent editorials indicate how difficult it was to successfully produce and distribute a trench journal under the conditions in which the Gallipoli campaign was fought. Distributed informally within the Signal Company and bypassing the monetary economy entirely, Fag-Ends was initially produced in only four copies. Noting that some of these had been absent-mindedly discarded in dugouts by their first readers, the editorial to the second issue made ‘an appeal to readers to circulate the paper as much as possible [. . .] When one has read it if he will pass it on to someone else we hope to reach all members of the Signal Company.’47 This editorial also thanked two members of the unit for ‘gifts of paper’ on which to print the second number.48 Later in the campaign, after its profile had increased by word of mouth, FagEnds was given an order for 100 copies but found it impossible to supply it ‘owing to our limited printing facilities’.49 The first issues of Tranchman’ Echo (1915), the trench journal edited by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) for his battery of the 38th Artillery Regiment, French Army, existed only in manuscript or in a few, imperfectly polycopied sheets. To increase its circulation, however, it was ‘read aloud, shared, and handed down, first to the officers, then to those in rank and operating the battery, and finally to the drivers’.50 Some soldier newspapers and unit journals ultimately achieved high circulation figures. The newspaper of the German Third Army, the Champagne-Kamerad (December 1915–October 1918), was printing between 20,000 and 50,000 copies of each issue by August 1916. ‘In 1916–17’, according to Robert L. Nelson, ‘at least 1.1 million’ German soldier newspapers were being distributed each month on the Western Front, with a further 2 million on the Eastern Front.51 Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau estimates that between 75,000 and 132,000 French trench journals were printed each month by mid-1916.52 The French army’s 108th Infantry Regiment paper, Le Poilu (December 1914–July 1920), produced forty-eight issues and was ‘read across France’, reaching a peak circulation of 30,000 copies per issue.53 Elsewhere in the fighting areas, the Canadian army’s Listening Post was selling upwards of 15,000 copies twice monthly by mid-1916. Its editors ultimately decided to invest in their own printing plant to meet an estimated demand of 20,000 copies per issue.54 By its second number, the Switchboard (August 1916–January 1917, 32nd Division, British Expeditionary Force) was already anticipating sales of 5,000 copies.55 Barrak (the Imperial Camel Corps magazine), meanwhile, claimed to have sold more than 3,000 copies of its first issue, which it guessed might be ‘the record for any magazine produced in enemy country this War’.56 For many unit journals, however, casual sales and subscriptions did not cover the costs of production. These financial challenges were compounded by the rising price of paper over the course of the war, as warring states sought to limit imports and enemy action disrupted trade.57 Journals responded by increasing cover prices, reducing issue sizes, or (in some cases) ceasing publication altogether.58 By mid-1918 the Kent Fencible, the magazine of the Volunteer Units in the County of Kent (July 1915–March 1919), had been forced to double its price and cancel its August issue due to the ‘difficulties of securing paper and a firm of printers to undertake its publication’.59 Justifying the higher cost and imploring readers to take out a two-shilling annual subscription, the editor noted that ‘printing and paper, and publication generally, is three times greater [in cost] than it was two years ago’.60 Some unit publications could fall back on the

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patronage of their officers. In January 1918 the Highland Light Infantry Chronicle (January 1893–December 1958) was selling single copies at four pence and annual subscriptions at one shilling and sixpence. Officers, however, were charged five shillings for their annual subscriptions, and the paper noted that this higher rate had partially offset ‘the heavy increase in printing and postage’.61 ‘It is only the Officers’ subscription’, the editors wrote, that made the Chronicle ‘financially possible’.62 Many editors, however, must have ended up subsidising their magazines out of their own pockets.63 By February 1917 the Fifth Glo’ster Gazette (April 1915–January 1919) was running at a loss of between £4 and £5 per issue. Such was the discrepancy between income and outgoings that the editor jokingly referred to subscriptions to the Gazette as ‘donations’.64 The idea that trench journals could be clearing houses for information and rumour was widespread in the First World War, with many publications establishing regular columns under generic headings such as ‘Things We Want to Know’.65 For the editors of the Royal Leicestershire Regiment’s Green Tiger (November 1917–October 1918), the purpose of the magazine was to create an information network. With the regiment ‘scattered in many parts’, the Green Tiger was to be ‘the means of keeping the many battalions in touch with one another regularly and systematically’.66 Widespread readership would also, they hoped, encourage unit members to submit their own material, thus renewing in reciprocal fashion the textual content on which the network relied.67 Professionally focused periodicals, such as nursing journals, could become venues both for reporting news and sharing advice and best practice. The letters column of Kai Tiaki: The Journal of the Nurses of New Zealand (1908–) carried updates on the overseas hospitals and hospital ships to which New Zealand nurses were attached. It also reported on wartime nursing practice, such as ward management, as well as nurses’ first-hand experiences treating dysentery and influenza among evacuated troops.68 Other journals reserved space in their issues for the renewal of wartime social networks. Aussie, for instance, established a missed connections-style ‘Information Section’, the ‘Aid Post’, to ‘enable cobbers [friends], who have become separated, to get news of each other’.69 Soldiers’ families could also make use of the information networking function of the wartime journal. In January 1918, for instance, the mother of a soldier missing since the Battle of Arras in April 1917 wrote to the magazine of his former regiment, the Highland Light Infantry Chronicle, for any information about his fate that readers might have.70 Circulation – both within units and further afield – was the raison d’être behind the existence of the First World War trench and unit journals. Papers, therefore, adopted a range of strategies to increase sales and overcome distribution problems. Copies of a new issue might be taken around unit sections and sold directly. The editors of On Service, the journal of the Troop Supply Company, Army Service Corps, British Army (March–August 1916), claimed to have ‘disposed of’ 150 copies of its first issue ‘in 45 minutes’ by offering them for sale to a neighbouring repair unit.71 The Northern Mudguard (September 1915–January 1918, Northern Cyclist Battalion, British Army) looked to its NCOs to encourage sales, suggesting that ‘a sergeant might go round the ranks distributing the “Mudguard”’ on payday.72 On the Macedonian front, the Englishlanguage Balkan News (November 1915–February 1919) was sold directly to the military public by newspaper vendors. Describing a visit to Salonika (now Thessaloniki) in 1916, the British traveller Ethelwyn Duckworth wrote that the main streets of the city were ‘crowded with officers and men of all the Allied armies, seeking whichever side

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is in the shade [. . .] Shrill voices of small boys and girls, carrying newspapers, bellow L’Indépendant, L’Opinion, Makedonía in your ear, or thrust the Balkan News under your nose, if they see that you are English.’73 The Pavilion ‘Blues’, the magazine of the Royal Pavilion Military Hospital, Brighton (June 1916–February 1920), could be bought from the hospital canteen, but the bulk of copies were sold inside and outside the hospital by a team of female volunteers.74 Other home-front hospital journals attracted similarly hybrid readerships. Alice Brumby notes that the Huddersfield War Hospital Magazine (July–October 1916) had a circulation of around 4,000 copies per issue, while the hospital itself generally housed only around 600 military patients. Clearly, she suggests, the bulk of the magazine’s readers must have been drawn from the ‘local civilian public’.75 It is possible, however, that former patients also maintained subscriptions. A number of wartime magazines made an explicit plea to purchasers not to share their copies with other soldiers when they finished reading. The Ghain Tuffieha and Garrison Gazette, published at Ghain Tuffieha Hospital Camp, Malta between November 1916 and April 1917, printed the tagline ‘Your Pal can afford to buy his own copy!’ prominently on its front page. Explaining their reasoning in a subsequent issue, the editors wrote: In a camp like this where there are sixteen or more men living under one canvas roof, it is evident that if one man in a marquee buys a copy, and then having read it [. . .] passes it along to the next fellow for him to do likewise, our sales are likely to suffer pretty badly. The Gazette is being run on more or less self-supporting lines and unless we can pay our way, we shall naturally have to close dawn [sic].76 These admonitions contrasted with the usual norms governing First World War military reading practices, which encouraged soldiers to treat any books, magazines or newspapers that came to hand as common property that could be freely circulated within units or left behind in living spaces for others to read.77 As Fag-Ends and Tranchman’ Echo show, this continued to be the norm for free unit publications. Editors of paid journals justified the exception by appealing to the wider interests of unit cohesion and by encouraging soldiers to circulate their copies in ways that would not hinder immediate sales. The Sphinx (March 1915–July 1916, 6th Battalion, Manchester Regiment) printed a paragraph in each issue reminding readers that the paper was ‘entirely dependent for support on the number of copies sold, and that for one man in a billet to purchase a copy and hand it round is not calculated to carry on the good work’.78 Instead, it recommended that purchasers ‘send it home’ as a souvenir that could be revisited ‘after the war is over’.79 Kia Ora (December 1915–October 1917, HMS New Zealand, Royal Navy) instructed sailors on board not to ‘wait till one of your messmates passes you on a copy’, but instead to ‘buy one yourself and send it to your people at home, or to the trenches when you have read it’.80 When the United States entered the war in 1917, its officially produced troop journals issued similar (though evidently more coordinated) instructions, suggesting that soldiers take out subscriptions for their families so that they could be kept informed when letters from the front ‘would be necessarily short’.81 Trench and unit journals were, then, conscious of addressing multiple reading audiences – personnel within units and a second audience on the home front, made up of family members and a wider public. Wartime periodicals were simultaneously ephemeral

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expressions of the present moment, souvenirs or keepsakes for a life after the war, and tokens of ‘authentic’ military experience that could, as Graham Seal puts it, convey the soldier’s ‘voice’ in a compelling way to the home front.82 The imprint of these multiple reading audiences can be discerned in the commercial networks visible in unit journal advertising. Justifying the presence of advertising in the magazine, the Seventh Manchester Sentry (January 1915–July 1916, 7th [Territorial] Battalion, Manchester Regiment) wrote that ‘[e]very copy of the Sentry is avidly read by a large spending community and it would be no exaggeration to say that its circulation at home is 6 times greater’.83 The Periscope (Manchester Regiment) employed an advertising manager and implored its readers to ‘do their shopping, &c., amongst those who advertise in our magazine’.84 The Periscope carried a diverse range of advertisements, clearly aimed at different categories of readers. Adverts for Manchester picture theatres and cafés addressed Manchester-based readers or soldiers from overseas-based elements of the Regiment who would be visiting Manchester on leave. Adverts for perfume, cameras, chocolates, fountain pens or ‘Evans’ Pastiles [. . .] for preventing the unpleasant effects resulting from trench odours’, are harder to categorise.85 They might have been aimed at regimental members shopping for gifts (or for themselves), but might have equally targeted family members looking to send luxuries or apparently helpful consumer items to soldiers on active service.86 Wartime advertisements for pens, diaries and notebooks – ostensibly targeted at soldiers – were a transnational phenomenon. Examples in the French press offered pocket notebook and pen sets to soldiers at discounted prices, while both the German and British stationery industries produced specially tailored soldiers’ diaries. Each of these marketing efforts represented the act of recording ‘the incidents of daily life’ on active service as a natural and desirable response to war experience.87 Advertisements for non-standard-issue equipment such as the ‘Chemico Body Shield’, however, were more likely to target anxious family members than soldiers themselves.88 Previous accounts of advertising in trench journals have analysed spoof advertisements, or focused on what Paul Fussell calls the ‘absurdity’ of ‘traditional civilian comforts’ when transferred into the ‘odd circumstances’ of trench warfare.89 Considered on its own terms, however, trench journal advertising shows how closely linked soldiers could be to the wider networks of the commercial economy and how home-front manufacturers and retailers sought to capitalise on the novel consumer market represented by wartime personnel and their families.90

Information and Social Networks The image of the trench journal quickly gained prominence in the mainstream press.91 Press association articles on the phenomenon were reprinted in a range of civilian newspapers. One, an unsigned Press Association feature headlined ‘Trench Journalism’ and picked up widely in the international press in early August 1916, claimed that Canadian forces were the most ‘prolific of trench journalists’ and that British trench journals were ‘like nothing so much as a public school or University magazine’.92 Name-checking several titles, including the British Whizz-Bang and Iodine Chronicle (May 1916–December 1917) and the Canadian Vic’s Patrol (June–December 1916) and Listening Post, this article focused propagandistically on the humorous side of the phenomenon, representing it as evidence of the ‘sound [morale] and high spirits’ of the Allied armies ‘in the field’.93 A feature of many of these wartime review articles is their

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international and comparative dimension. Writing in the Times Literary Supplement in October 1916, E. B. Osborn (1867–1938) suggested that there was ‘a family likeness between all trench journals, whether they be of British or French origin’.94 However, he continued, deep-rooted differences in national temperament were still evident. The British soldier resented being identified with a type, ‘Tommy’, and maintained his individuality in print. The French poilu journalists, however, Osborn wrote, revelled in role-playing, adopting a self-consciously unified national voice that reflected the French literary heritage of Rabelais and Voltaire.95 Reviewing a ‘bundle’ of ‘war journals of the French poilu’, the British journalist William Maas similarly commented on their divergence from British practice. As they were often ‘printed and published in the tranquillity of an uninvaded countryside’, British unit periodicals, he wrote, could not hope to match the emotional intensity of French soldiers’ journals, which were ‘intimately connected with the stark actuality of warfare’ on their home soil.96 Trench journals reviewed in the mainstream press responded enthusiastically to the attention. The Direct Hit (London Division) printed excerpts from the positive press it received from the London Evening News (1881–1980), the Tatler (1901–) and the Field (1853–).97 The Duke of Cambridge’s Own Middlesex Regiment magazine, Fall In (December 1915–May 1917), likewise informed readers that it had been excerpted in The Times (1785–), the Daily Telegraph (1855–) and the Daily Mirror.98 Other journals recorded their pride at being asked to send home issues for inclusion in the developing trench periodical collections of national and university libraries and war museums.99 These expressions of gratitude provide a further indication of the trench press’s multiple audiences – its ability to reach (and influence) a home-front and cultural-institutional readership as well as a military or unit-based one, demonstrating the reach and scope of communication circuits and networks during the war.100 Nevertheless, the trench press was conscious of possessing its own distinct perspective, encompassing both the trench journal phenomenon itself and the mainstream press. Reflecting their editors’ sense of being part of a collective print genre, trench journals both reviewed, and reprinted content from, one another. The Direct Hit, for instance, approvingly reviewed the Fifth Glo’ster Gazette in its third issue, reprinting (with credit) a poem by F. W. Harvey (1888–1957) that had appeared in the Gazette’s pages.101 The Vic’s Patrol (published between June and December 1916 by the Victoria Rifles, Canada) republished (also with attribution) a poem that had previously appeared in an issue of the Snapper (August 1914–November 1919; East Yorkshire Regiment).102 Beyond these instances of internal print networking, the trench press was also aware of itself as a historical phenomenon, producing its own review articles devoted to tracing the development of the genre. Unlike civilian journalists, the authors of these pieces were able to draw on their own ‘insider’ knowledge, deploying personal anecdotes to imbue their accounts with authenticity.103 In a self-mythologising piece entitled ‘ANZAC Journalese’, ‘Auckland’, a contributor to Si Eda (the magazine of the ANZAC detachment at Bostall Heath Camp, Abbey Wood, London, published between November 1915 and June 1916), looked back on the improvised trench newsletters produced by ANZAC units at Gallipoli in 1915. ‘The get-up was often weird’, he wrote, ‘and the sole materials used a copying or lead pencil and the backs of a few field forms.’104 ‘Auckland’ reproduced excerpts from several unidentified newsletters he had evidently collected at Gallipoli, implying that they represented a distinctively Australasian spirit and sense of humour under adversity. The ephemeral ‘effusions’ quoted in accounts such as this functioned as sites of memory. Australian and New Zealand soldiers at

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Bostall Heath were invited to memorialise the ANZAC experience at Gallipoli by reading (and perhaps putting back into social circulation) the jokes set down in the act of reprinting. Despite instances of gratitude when individual unit journals received mainstream recognition, the reception of home-front journalism in the trench press was, to a significant extent, critical. Unit publications in a number of armies and theatres employed similar reprinting, excerpting and satirical practices to critique or ridicule the wartime civilian press, further illustrating the wartime print communication circuit at work. One mode was parody. In October 1916 the French trench journal Le 120 Court (120th Battalion of Chasseurs, printed between June 1915 and December 1918) published an excoriating pastiche of the kind of propagandistic war reporting, or ‘eye-wash’, carried by mainstream newspapers. In it, French soldiers are ‘full of joy at the approaching onslaught’, spring ‘forward with smiles on their lips’ as they attack, and finally refuse to be relieved after reaching their objectives.105 Aussie printed a spoof of Pelmanism memory-retention advertisements that gestured in a stark (though ostensibly humorous) way towards the psychological problems associated with war experience. Their imaginary product, ‘Foolmanism’, was a system of memory ‘restraint’ which would enable purchasers to ‘forget the war’, ‘forget those Whizz-Bangs’ and ‘forget that WireCutting patrol’.106 Another technique lay in reprinting news stories accompanied by critical commentary. Le 120 Court reprinted a report claiming that the French trenches were so well protected that no one was ‘the least afraid’ when shells burst nearby, with the dismissive remark, ‘Let them spend just twenty-four hours in a corner of the real front where we currently have the honour to be operating.’107 Critical acts of reprinting in unit publications could also be highly focused, aimed at combating misinformation about particular units and incidents. In 1915 the 5th East Surrey Magazine published excerpts from a letter sent home by a private in the regiment which had been subsequently printed in the local South London newspaper, the Streatham News (1891–). Clearly feeding an appetite for orientalising narratives about India on the home front, the letter-writer claimed that he had shot a local man found stealing property from the camp and described how a regimental colleague had been eaten by a crocodile. Addressing both regimental readers and any civilians who might have read the letter in the Streatham News, the magazine wrote that the shooting incident was purely ‘imaginary’ and that there had been no crocodile involved in the other soldier’s death, which was due to accidental drowning. ‘We would advise the writer of the letter in question’, the magazine wrote, ‘to refrain from writing home nonsense like this and to stick to the naked truth. He will not get thanked for making a laughing stock of the regiment.’108 ‘Bricks from the Editor’s Pack’, the Fifth Glo’ster Gazette’s regular column excerpting and commenting on the home-front press, contained occasional commentary on the absurdities of British war reporting. Reprinting a suggestion in the Daily Express (1900–) that frontline British soldiers were ‘straining at the leash’ to attack the opposing trenches, it commented drily that ‘[t]here have been, we understand, several cases of riot and open mutiny amongst units ordered back to rest’.109 Not all of the material it reprinted from the mainstream press was treated critically, however. In a column on Prussian militarism and the treatment of prisoners of war that pieced together excerpts from The Times, TLS (1902–) and Blackwood’s Magazine (1817–1980), among other sources, it directly endorsed anti-German war propaganda. After reprinting a series of increasingly propagandistic press excerpts, culminating in ‘[t]he German is [. . .] the

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wild beast of Europe. He embodies in his thick and portly form the very spirit of evil’, it concluded, ‘[c]ome along, boys, after that, and lets [sic] get on towards Berlin’.110 The Gazette’s willingness to approvingly reprint home-front propaganda may have been somewhat unusual, considering the comparative lack of ‘hateful depictions of the enemy’ elsewhere in the soldiers’ press.111 Moreover, the regular excerpting and commentary carried out by the Gazette would have been highly labour intensive for its editorial staff. Extensively reprinting the civilian press would, in any case, have been a redundant function for many unit journals, which could assume readers had their own independent supplies of home-front newspapers and magazines to read. By 1915 it is likely that there were at least 150,000–200,000 copies of civilian newspapers reaching the German trenches every week.112 Nicholas Hiley calculates that there was roughly ‘one copy of the Continental Daily Mail for every fourteen British or Dominion soldiers’ in France by the end of 1916, and that the Mail probably had greater market saturation in the fighting areas in France than it did in London.113 In addition to the Mail, British soldiers would have been able to purchase other London newspapers at shops and canteens behind the lines. Many soldiers serving in France would also have had subscriptions to local or provincial newspapers or have been sent copies of them in parcels from home.114 These patterns of textual availability could also operate in other theatres of war, depending on relative proximity to railheads and postal depots.115 Writing home to family, Lieutenant William Sorley Brown (1889–1942) recorded that the officers and men of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers stationed in Egypt in March 1916 had access via various subscriptions to John Bull (1820–1964), the Illustrated London News (1842–), the Bystander (1903–40), Sketch (1893–1959), Graphic (1869–), Truth (1877–1957) and Sphere (1900–64), as well as The Scotsman (1817–), Daily Sketch (1909–71), Daily Mirror, Land and Water (1866–1920) and ‘all the Scots Border papers’, although he does not mention how long they took to arrive from Britain.116 For more isolated military populations, or those at the end of particularly long supply lines, however, having access to a trench periodical that reprinted other news sources would have played an important social function. Excerpting material from the civilian press was, for example, a feature of unit journals associated with Dominion and imperial expeditionary forces. Publications such as the Anzac Bulletin (January 1917–June 1919), Canadian Daily Record (January 1917–July 1919) and the Rising Sun (December 1916–March 1917) included regular digests of ‘home’ news – in practice, often a mixture of rural and political reporting, murders and criminal cases, and sporting and racing results.117 The first issue of the Balkan News, established in 1915 in Salonika for English-speaking soldiers and civilians stationed there, attributed its creation explicitly to the scarcity of European home-front newspapers in the city: As newspapers from Western Europe are generally somewhat late in arriving here, and as many of our English guests are unfamiliar with foreign languages, we have thought that it would be useful to meet their demands for the latest news by publishing [. . .] a brief summary of the freshest information as to the progress of military operations on the different fronts, as well as articles on all the most important questions of the day.118 References to trench publications are scarce in soldiers’ memoirs and diaries. Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau concludes from this that trench journals were a ‘significant phenomenon;

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but probably no more than that’ and that most soldiers ‘must never had held one in their hands’.119 There are exceptions to this rule, however, and they tend to occur in the context of military populations in geographically and linguistically isolated areas. Here, information networks were limited, and a single newspaper or journal could play an outsized ‘nodal’ role in keeping a community informed and providing a sense of collective cohesion. The establishment of a new journal could, for example, be a significant event in the information-starved environments of prisoner-of-war camps. When the English-language camp magazine Queue commenced publication at Mainz officers’ prisoner-of-war camp in July 1918, it was advertised by inmates parading in the camp square dressed as sandwich men, an event notable enough for Captain Ernest Ambler and Second Lieutenant H. T. Ringham to record it independently in their diaries. Ambler wrote that the sandwich men created ‘quite a diversion’, while Ringham observed that the paper had ‘rather a good name, considering the number of queues we have here’.120 The Balkan News was similarly able to exploit the presence of a ‘densely clustered’ community of linguistically isolated and information-hungry English readers around Salonika, converting them into a sizeable and loyal readership. The paper became, as Shafquat Towheed writes, ‘a ubiquitous presence in the accounts of those who served on the Macedonian front and its impact cannot be overestimated’.121 There were more than twenty newspapers operating in Salonika during the war, publishing in Greek, French, Turkish, Italian and Ladino. However, as Balkan News editor Harry Collinson Owen (1882–1956) wrote in 1919, the Balkan News was the only one printed in English. Its role lay in both relaying ‘fresh’ war news and translating the rich information culture of this linguistically diverse location into terms an English reader could understand. The centrality of the position it occupied could be measured, Owen suggested, from the lengths that readers went to to obtain it. ‘There are people who used to ride twenty miles a day to get it. It was their only link with the outside world.’122 On 17 September 1916 Second Lieutenant Douglas Harfield (1890–1970), Hampshire Regiment, recorded reading news of British territorial gains at the Battle of Flers–Courcelette (which had commenced two days earlier) in a copy of the Balkan News brought to him at Summerhill Camp ‘by an aged and malarial driver’ in the Army Service Corps. ‘We’ve broken the line’, Harfield wrote; ‘I wonder, can this be the beginning of the end at last?’123 V. J. Seligman estimated that around one in three British soldiers stationed in Salonika were regular readers of the paper. ‘Those who read it’, he claimed, ‘glance casually through its columns and remark, “Nothing in the Balkan News – never is.” Occasionally we are aroused to greater interest by a humorous article in its columns, and there will be a rush to buy a copy.’124

Conclusion Any publishing venture entails risk, and the risks were especially immediate and material for the editors, contributors to, and initial readers of First World War periodicals. Due to market pressures and supply problems, publishing generally was a commercially fraught activity during the First World War. The impact of these pressures can be measured in, for instance, declines in the numbers of periodical titles published in civilian markets over the course of the conflict.125 However, the war also gave rise to new periodical phenomena prompted by changing circumstances and newly formed concentrations and networks of readers and contributors – in hospitals, troopships,

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training camps and prisoner-of-war compounds, as well as fighting areas. A networkbased approach can help bring these phenomena into focus. The production, distribution and reception of First World War periodicals involved the interactions of a large array of human agents – authors, editors, printers and publishers, along with the postal and logistics workers who conveyed them from place to place. Their appearance in print involved complex associations with non-human agents – supply chains, technical infrastructure, as well as the material embodiment of wartime violence itself, in the form of shrapnel or shellfire. Their reading audiences were not only military, but also extended to a range of home-front readers – families, journalists, casual bookstall browsers and the archivists and librarians who acquired wartime periodicals for national collections. The pages of these journals were also sites of network formation, providing a focus for unit and national identity, a site of information and social exchange, an affective and material link with family and reading audiences on the home front, and a way of immortalising the military experience in personal memory. For those who, as instructed by the journals themselves, sent copies home or kept them as souvenirs after the war, their pages became a means of revisiting past events (and, perhaps, a remembered wartime self).126 These acts of archiving in turn have prolonged both the memory and material form of the journals themselves, making them accessible to new generations of readers.

Notes   1. Blaise Cendrars, ‘I’ve Killed’, trans. Bertrand Mathieu, Chicago Review 25, no. 3 (1973): 32–6, here 35–6.   2. See Lynne Hamill, ‘The Social Shaping of British Communications Networks Prior to the First World War’, Historical Social Research 35, no. 1 (2010): 260–86, here 263–4; Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 29; Aimée Fox, ‘“Thomas Cook’s Tourists”: The Challenges and Benefits of Inter-Theatre Service in the British Army of the First World War’, Journal of Historical Geography 58 (2017): 82–91, here 83; and Clem Maginniss, An Unappreciated Field of Endeavour: Logistics and the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front 1914–1918 (Warwick: Helion, 2018).   3. D. K. Lahiri Choudhury, ‘Sinews of Panic and the Nerves of Empire: The Imagined State’s Entanglement with Information Panic, India c. 1880–1912’, Modern Asian Studies 38, no. 4 (2004): 965–1002, here 969–70; Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 84–7; James Smithies, ‘The Trans-Tasman Cable, the Australasian Bridgehead and Imperial History’, History Compass 6, no. 3 (2008): 691–711, here 691–2.   4. On imperial labour recruitment and conscription in Africa and Asia, see David Killingray, ‘Labour Exploitation for Military Campaigns in British Colonial Africa 1870–1945’, Journal of Contemporary History 24, no. 3 (1989): 483–501; and Santanu Das, ‘Introduction’, in Race, Empire and First World War Writing, ed. Santanu Das (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 1–25, here 4–5. On the proportion of British-born troops in Dominion armies and expeditionary forces, see J. G. Fuller, Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies, 1914–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 171–2; Dale Blair, Dinkum Diggers: An Australian Battalion at War (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2001), 33–5; and Jeffrey Grey, ‘War and the British World in the Twentieth Century’, in Rediscovering the British World, ed. Phillip Buckner and R. Douglas Francis (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005), 233–50, here 239.

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  5. Stephen P. Borgatti and Daniel S. Halgin, ‘On Network Theory’, Organization Science 22, no. 5 (2011): 1168–81, here 1169.   6. For a discussion of the relationship between human and non-human participants in actornetwork theory, see Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to ActorNetwork-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 70–2.   7. Dave Elder-Vass, ‘Disassembling Actor-network Theory’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences 45, no. 1 (2015): 100–21, here 106.   8. For a lucid summary and application of actor-network theory to literary studies, see Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 163–6.   9. Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). 10. Robert Darnton, ‘What Is the History of Books?’, Daedalus 111, no. 3 (1982): 65–83. 11. See John Feather, ‘Book Trade Networks and Community Contexts’, in Historical Networks in the Book Trade, ed. John Hinks and Catherine Feely (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 14–28, here 16. 12. For the identity and unit affiliation of Dilnot, see H. R. McDonald, ‘Service Journalism’, A.A.C.: The Journal of the R.N. Anti-Aircraft Corps, February 1918, 201–2, here 202. A copy of one of the earlier, typed and duplicated editions of the Anti-Aircraft Spasm, dated August 1916 and identified as ‘No. 2. New Series’, is in the collections of the Imperial War Museum, London, shelf number LBY E.J. 1813. 13. A.D. [Alan Dilnot], ‘A Trench Magazine’, A.A.C.: The Journal of the R.N. Anti-Aircraft Corps, 1 October 1917, 127. 14. F. J. Roberts, ‘How It Happened’, in The Wipers Times: A Facsimile Reprint (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1918), v–vii, here v. 15. For more details about the Wipers Times, its history and its printing equipment, see Cedric Van Dijck, Marysa Demoor and Sarah Posman, ‘Between the Shells: The Production of Belgian, British and French Trench Journals in the First World War’, Publishing History 77 (2017): 67–89, here 70–3. 16. F.J.R. [F. J. Roberts], ‘For Future Historians of the War’, B.E.F. Times, August 1917, xi–xxviii, here xxvii. 17. Roberts, ‘For Future Historians of the War’, xv–xvi. 18. McDonald, ‘Service Journalism’, 201. 19. According to figures collected by Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, 13 of the 60 French trench journal editors whose occupations are known (or just under 22 per cent) were journalists before the war. See Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Men at War, 1914–1918: National Sentiment and Trench Journalism in France during the First World War, trans. Helen McPhail (Oxford: Berg, 1992), 10. For Dilnot’s byline, see, for instance, Alan Dilnot, ‘The Old Soldier and the New’, Daily Mirror, 27 July 1917, 5. 20. Writing in 1916 to With the Colours, the wartime staff magazine of the Buckinghamshirebased printing firm of Hazell, Watson and Viney Ltd, Bugler T. Collings described how he and four other employees from the firm were posted together as guards at Feltham prisoner-of-war camp and ‘sometimes fancy we could make a fair show at print’, although such a venture was not apparently feasible at Feltham. See ‘From the Buckinghamshire Boys’, With the Colours: A Record of Service for King and Country at Home and Abroad by Employees of Hazell, Watson and Viney Ltd., December 1916, 104. None of the thumbnail profiles of other staff on active service included in the December 1916 issue of With the Colours suggests that any were involved in trench journalism. 21. P.F.G. [Captain Percy Francis Godenrath], ‘C.E.F. Journals Published on Active Service’, Breath o’ the Heather, April 1917, 9. 22. See Whizz-Bang: A Monthly Journal from the Front, Written and Edited in the Trenches, March 1916, 16.

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23. Direct Hit: The Journal of the 58th London Division, October 1916, 40; Dud, July 1916, 16. 24. See ‘Books for Your Battalion’ (display advert), Direct Hit, December 1916, 43. 25. ‘The Best-Known Trench Journal’, Yorkshire Evening Post, 6 October 1930, 4. 26. Peter Hoare, ‘A Qualitative Content Analysis of the New Zealand Troopship Publications, 1914–1920’, unpublished MLIS thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 2001, 9–10. 27. Graham Seal, The Soldiers’ Press: Trench Journals in the First World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 204. For details of production, see Mudhook, May 1918, 16, and Sub Rosa, June 1918, 3. 28. Advertisement: ‘Waterman’s Ideal Safety Pen’, 5th East Surrey Magazine, July 1915, 17. 29. H. N. Werkman, ‘Trial by Printer’, Camp Magazine: First Royal Naval Brigade, Interned in Holland, October 1915, 14. 30. Werkman, ‘Trial by Printer’, 14. 31. Seal, Soldiers’ Press, 31. 32. ‘“Aussie” Advances’, Aussie: The Australian Soldiers’ Magazine, March 1918, 1. 33. ‘Sub Editorial’, Mudhook, November 1917, 3. 34. ‘Editorial’, Barrak, The Camel Corps Review, July 1917, 1. On the history and make-up of the Imperial Camel Corps, see Jean Bou and Peter Dennis, The Australian Imperial Force (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2016), 42–3. 35. Maple Leaf: The Magazine of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 3 June 1916, 15; Outpost, July 1915, 184. 36. John Pegum, ‘British Army Trench Journals and a Geography of Identity’, in Publishing in the First World War: Essays in Book History, ed. Mary Hammond and Shafquat Towheed (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 129–47, here 130. 37. Sprig of Shillelagh: The Journal of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, January 1916, 9. 38. With the Wounded: Official Organ of Brondesbury Park Military Hospital, July 1916, 1. 39. ‘Notice’, Periscope, August 1916, 171. 40. Pegum, ‘British Army Trench Journals’, 130. 41. Robert L. Nelson, German Soldier Newspapers of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 33. 42. Listening Post, 10 August 1916, 118. 43. See Blair, Dinkum Diggers, 45; Seal, Soldiers’ Press, 23; and Nathan Wise, Anzac Labour: Workplace Cultures in the Australian Imperial Force during the First World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 81. 44. Audoin-Rouzeau, Men at War, 25. 45. L‘Echo du Ravin, November 1915, 2. For further details, see Van Dijck, Demoor and Posman, ‘Between the Shells’, 75. 46. ‘Editorial’, Fag-Ends, 4 August 1915, 1. 47. ‘Editorial’, Fag-Ends, 7 July 1915, 1. 48. ‘Editorial’, Fag-Ends, 7 July 1915, 1. 49. ‘Editorial’, Fag-Ends, 29 September 1915, 1. 50. Birgit Van Puymbroeck and Cedric Van Dijck, ‘Apollinaire’s Trench Journalism and the Affective Public Sphere’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 60, no. 3 (2018): 269–92, here 278. 51. Nelson, German Soldier Newspapers, 34–5. 52. Audoin-Rouzeau, Men at War, 25. 53. Van Dijck, Demoor and Posman, ‘Between the Shells’, 74. 54. ‘Editorial’, Listening Post, 10 August 1916, 118. 55. ‘Forging Ahead’, Switchboard, August 1916, 2. 56. ‘Editorial’, Barrak, The Camel Corps Review, September 1917, 1.

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57. On the impact of wartime paper shortages on the British periodical publishing industry, see Kate Macdonald, ‘Popular Periodicals: Wartime Newspapers, Magazines and Journals’, in The Edinburgh Companion to the First World War and the Arts, ed. Ann-Marie Einhaus and Katherine Isobel Baxter (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 245–60, here 249. 58. See, for example, ‘Odds and Ends: The Price of “Fall In”’, Fall In, 12 February 1916, 89; ‘Our Little Review’, Switchboard, January 1917, 4; and ‘Editorial’, 1st C.B. Royal Fusiliers Chronicle, October 1917, 3. 59. ‘Editorial Notes’, Kent Fencible, September 1918, 1. 60. ‘Editorial Notes’, Kent Fencible, September 1918, 1. 61. ‘“HLI Chronicle” Accounts’, Highland Light Infantry Chronicle, January 1918, 13. 62. ‘“HLI Chronicle” Accounts’, 13. 63. Audoin-Rouzeau, Men at War, 27. 64. ‘The Gazette’, Fifth Glo’ster Gazette, February 1917, 10. 65. Seal, Soldiers’ Press, 82–5. 66. ‘Editorial’, Green Tiger, December 1917, 21. For a similar statement of intent, see Lieutenant Gerald E. Mills, ‘Foreword’, A.A.C.: The Journal of the R.N. Anti-Aircraft Corps, April 1917, 2. 67. Mills, ‘Foreword’, 2. 68. ‘Letters from Our Nurses Abroad’, Kai Tiaki: The Journal of the Nurses of New Zealand, July 1916, 139–48, here 140–1, 144, 146–7. 69. ‘“Aussie”—The Present and the Future’, Aussie: The Australian Soldiers’ Magazine, 4 April, 1918, 1. See ‘The Aid Post’, Aussie: The Australian Soldiers’ Magazine, 1 June 1918, 5, for the form the column took. Although there were some ‘missed connection’ queries from soldiers, the bulk of the first column was occupied by notices from the AIF Records Section and the Australian Red Cross, soliciting death and burial information for Australian soldiers who had been posted ‘missing’. 70. Highland Light Infantry Chronicle, January 1918, 13. 71. ‘Thank You!’, On Service, April 1916, 2. 72. ‘Editorial Chatter’, Northern Mudguard, 27 November 1915, 33. 73. Ethelwyn Duckworth, ‘An Englishwoman in Salonika, 1916’, Contemporary Review, January 1917, 234–41, here 237. 74. Pavilion ‘Blues’, July 1916, 28; ‘Things We Should All Know’, Pavilion ‘Blues’, September 1917, 53–4, here 54. 75. Alice Brumby, ‘Tommy Talk: War Hospital Magazines and the Literature of Resilience and Healing’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Artistic and Cultural Responses to War since 1914: The British Isles, the United States and Australasia, ed. Martin Kerby, Margaret Baguley and Janet McDonald (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 63–79, here 67–8. 76. ‘Editorial’, Ghain Tuffieha and Garrison Gazette, 9 December 1916, 3. 77. See Shafquat Towheed and Edmund G. C. King, ‘Introduction’, in Reading and the First World War: Readers, Texts, Archives, ed. Shafquat Towheed and Edmund G. C. King (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 1–25, here 12; and Francesca Benatti, Shafquat Towheed and Edmund G. C. King, ‘Readers and Reading in the First World War’, Yearbook of English Studies 45 (2015): 239–61, here 247–8. 78. ‘Editorial Notes’, Sphinx, May 1915, 1–2, here 2. 79. ‘Editorial Notes’, Sphinx, May 1915, 2. 80. ‘Editorial’, Kia-Ora: Organ of H.M.S. New Zealand, December 1915, 3–4, here 3. 81. See, for instance, ‘Arrange to Have Men Send Magazine Home’, Trench and Camp: Edition for Camp Logan, 13 February 1918, 2. 82. Seal, Soldiers’ Press, 29, 219–20.

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 83. Major J. H. Staveacre, ‘The Uses of Advertisements’, Seventh Manchester Sentry, 23 February 1915, 3.   84. ‘Editor’s Notes’, Periscope, 16 December 1916, 26–7, here 27.   85. For examples, see Periscope, 16 December 1916, 49, 50.   86. For an analysis of fountain pen advertising in wartime civilian magazines and newspapers in Britain, see Alice Kelly, ‘Words from Home: Wartime Correspondences’, in Einhaus and Baxter, eds, The Edinburgh Companion to the First World War and the Arts, 77–94, here 81–4.   87. Nicolas Beaupré, ‘Soldier-writers and Poets’, in The Cambridge History of the First World War, Volume 3: Civil Society, ed. Jay Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 445–74, here 453–4.   88. See, for instance, ‘Protection of the Right Sort’ (display advert), Direct Hit, October 1916, 40. On the Chemico Body Shield (‘used [. . .] to a very limited degree in the British Army’), see Bashford Dean, Helmets and Body Armor in Modern Warfare (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1920), 111–12.  89. Seal, Soldiers’ Press, 126; Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory [1975] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 64–7.   90. Cf. James Aulich, ‘Advertising and the Public in Britain during the First World War’, in Justifying War: Propaganda, Politics and the Modern Age, ed. Jo Fox and David Welch (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 109–28, here 115–19.   91. See Seal, Soldiers’ Press, 21–3.   92. ‘Trench Journalism: The Whizz Bang and The Iodine Chronicle’, Newcastle Daily Journal, 10 August 1916, 7. For a transnational analysis of the resemblances between trench journals and school magazines, see Van Dijck, Demoor and Posman, ‘Between the Shells’, 83–4, 87–8.  93. Similar articles were published elsewhere and were widely reprinted as far away as New Zealand. See, for instance, ‘Journalism in the Trenches’, Otautau Standard and Wallace County Chronicle, 26 September 1916, 2 (reprinting a Weekly Dispatch article).   94. E. B. Osborn, ‘Trench Journals’, Times Literary Supplement, 12 October 1916, 481–2.   95. Osborn, ‘Trench Journals’, 481–2.  96. William Maas, ‘Trench Journals: Newspapers Published in the Firing Line’, Liverpool Post and Mercury, 31 August 1916, 7.   97. ‘Comments on Us’, Direct Hit, July 1917, 25.   98. ‘“Fall In” Is Booming’, Fall In, 8 April 1916, 174.   99. See, for instance, ‘Editorial’, Oily Wad, 26 May 1917, 2; ‘Editorial’, A.A.C.: The Journal of the R.N. Anti-Aircraft Corps, June 1917, n.p.; and ‘Editorial’, Barrak: The Camel Corps Review, September 1917, 2. For a comparative account of institutional collecting practices, see Pegum, ‘British Army Trench Journals’, 130–4. 100. Seal, Soldiers’ Press, 129. 101. ‘Fifth Glo’ster Gazette’, Direct Hit, December 1916, 13. 102. ‘Poetic Don’ts’, Vic’s Patrol: The Active Service Journal of the Victoria Rifles of Canada, 15 July 1916, 16. 103. See, for example, P.F.G., ‘C.E.F. Journals Published on Active Service’, 9; and ‘Soldiers’ Magazines’, Kia Ora Coo-ee: The Official Magazine of the Australian and New Zealand Forces in Egypt, Palestine, Salonica & Mesopotamia, 15 July 1918, 1. 104. ‘Auckland’, ‘Anzac Journalese’, Si-Eda: Annals of the Men of Anzac, June 1916, 20–1, here 20. 105. Quoted in Audoin-Rouzeau, Men at War, 93. 106. ‘Foolmanism’, Aussie: The Australian Soldiers’ Magazine, August 1918, 18. 107. Quoted in Audoin-Rouzeau, Men at War, 94. 108. 5th East Surrey Magazine, May 1915, 2.

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109. ‘Bricks from the Editor’s Pack’, Fifth Glo’ster Gazette, September 1916, 11–12, here 11. 110. ‘Bricks from the Editor’s Pack’, Fifth Glo’ster Gazette, December 1916, 16–19. The final quote is attributed in the Gazette to Blackwood’s Magazine. It appears in Blackwood’s in Charles Whibley’s unsigned ‘Musings without Method’ column for November 1916, 695 in the American edition. 111. Robert L. Nelson, ‘German Soldier Newspapers and Their Allied Counterparts’, in Reading and the First World War: Readers, Texts, Archives, ed. Shafquat Towheed and Edmund G. C. King (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 209–26, here 222. 112. Nelson, German Soldier Newspapers, 29. 113. Nicholas Hiley, ‘“You Can’t Believe a Word You Read”: Newspaper-Reading in the British Expeditionary Force, 1914–1918’, Studies in Newspaper and Periodical History 2, nos. 1–2 (1994): 89–102, here 96. 114. Lisa Peters, ‘The Role of the Local Newspaper during World War One: An Important Link between the Home Front and the Battle Front’, Publishing History 79 (2019): 7–31, here 13. 115. On the vagaries of the British military postal system in Egypt and Palestine, see Justin Fantauzzo, ‘“Buried Alive”: Experience, Memory, and the Interwar Publishing of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force in Postwar Britain, 1915–1939’, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 23, no. 2 (2012): 212–50, here 224–7. 116. William Sorley Brown, My War Diary (1914–1919): Recollections of Gallipoli, Lemnos, Egypt and Palestine (Galashiels: John McQueen, 1941), 99. 117. See, for instance, the regular ‘General Australian News’ column in each issue of the Anzac Bulletin; ‘What Canada Is Saying’, Canadian Daily Record, 12 August 1918, 2; and ‘Sporting News’, Rising Sun, 19 February 1917, 3. 118. ‘To Our Readers’, Balkan News, 1 November 1915, 1. 119. Audoin-Rouzeau, Men at War, 25–6. 120. Captain Ernest Ambler (West Yorkshire Regiment), Diary, National Army Museum, London, 2003-01-169:19–48, 25 June 1918; Second Lieutenant H. T. Ringham (Manchester Regiment), Diary, Manchester Regiment Archives, Tameside Local Studies and Archives Centre, Ashton-under-Lyne, MR4/3/2/42, 26 June 1918. 121. Benatti, Towheed, and King, ‘Readers and Reading’, 257–8. 122. H. Collinson Owen, Salonica and After: The Sideshow That Ended the War (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1919), 50. 123. Douglas Harfield, A Diary of the Balkan Front, World War 1: 22nd November 1915 to 16th October 1919 (London: Tessa Harfield, 2003), 69. 124. V. J. Seligman, The Salonica Side-Show (London: Allen and Unwin, 1919), 75. 125. See Macdonald’s analysis of declines in the numbers of periodical titles in Britain during the war in ‘Popular Periodicals’, 255, 252. 126. On the post-war retention of souvenir copies of the Balkan News by British Macedonian campaign veterans, see ‘“Balkan News”’, Lancashire Evening Post, 24 August 1940, 3, and ‘“Balkan News” Preserved’, Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, 6 November 1940, 2.

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3 (Digital) Archives Jeffrey Drouin

T

his volume attests to the broad variety of periodicals that were created during, alongside and in response to the First World War. Most periodicals were intended to be ephemeral or at best partially suited for historical documentation, yet their enduring importance belies the transience of their moment. The fact that so many different periodical types from around the world are able to be collected, described and interpreted here means that archives and cataloguing practices are fundamental to servicing scholarly projects such as this one. Without digital archives, it might have been impossible to produce a volume with this kind of scope due to the rarity of the paper materials, which are often located in obscure collections around the world. Without paper archives, it would be impossible to understand the material aesthetic of the work in its historical context. When it comes to interpreting the cultural memory of the First World War, then, we must ask: what is the role of the archive in its various forms? What do its gaps and imperfections tell us about the nature of periodicals in relation to the war? How does it influence the narratives we are able to develop from the material it safeguards? This chapter will focus on the various kinds of archives that present the periodical landscape to scholars and teachers of the First World War, examining how they position us towards the past through its print culture and digital manifestations. The archive has changed profoundly since the rise of the digital medium. Not only does the paper archive tend to provide digital objects in its finding aids or as surrogates for study, but in many cases its social role has shifted to include an active outreach that interprets its own collections for public engagement in both online and physical spaces. The factors that drive this new role could not be more pertinent to the study of periodicals and, in this memorial centenary moment, of First World War periodicals in particular. The archive’s perennial effort to be of the moment, ever expanding its catalogue of collective memory and connecting us to its traces in the present, shares a valence with what Fionnuala Dillane describes as the ‘ongoingness’ of the print periodical as a living document of its time and place (see Chapter 4, ‘Affect and Emotion’, in the present volume). The ongoingness of the archive occurs in its paper aspect, of course, due to the continual acquisition of new material and revision of its catalogue, but also in its digital aspect to a greater degree and in different ways owing to the constant changes in its computational architecture and the unforeseen practices they afford. This is especially clear in digital thematic research collections and databases of digitised periodicals, which synthesise digital surrogates from multiple paper collections into coherent digital corpora that could never exist in a building due to logistical and financial constraints. So, what characterises and what motivates the relation

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between the physical and virtual architectures that preserve the living documents of the war? The archive derives its name from the Greek word for the home of an archon, a magistrate of a city who kept primary documents for the functioning of the state and wielded the power to interpret them for the creation of laws. Over time the location of the archive shifted to a building owned by the public to preserve its collective memory. In this way, its Greek root arkhē, meaning government with a sense of origin and authority, actuates the archive’s politics of legitimisation, which exists in productive friction with a democratic ethic that places power in the polis while always being in mutual justification with the state. The archive is the institutional backbone that conditions our very sense of what is important enough to preserve, to remember for the sake of the public. It is a vector of cultural memory that preconditions us to experience its holdings in particular ways and to act accordingly; it is not a neutral physical space. Simply put, traditional archival practices such as selecting acquisitions, imposing order on them through cataloguing, preserving them in secure spaces and constructing finding aids imbue collections with a politics that influences how we know what cultural documents are available, how we access them and how we interpret their meaning. At the end of the twentieth century, the advent of the digital medium initiated a conceptual transformation of the archive towards what Werner and Voss describe as ‘an ex-static archive [. . .] not assembled behind stone walls’ that ‘becomes a virtual repository of knowledge without visible limits [. . .] in which the material now becomes immaterial’.1 Since that time, digitised texts have been the key to all of the archive’s transformations in ways that transcend its state- and building-bound origins. Digitised texts are nearly limitless; they can be synthesised into virtual collections that would be impossible otherwise due to the heterogeneity of artefacts and gaps in the holdings at their physical institutions. Digitisation also transforms texts into data that support an array of computational possibilities from transformation to quantitative analysis. Thus the manipulability of the digital requires us to reimagine the archive’s paper dimensions in ways that call attention to its incompleteness and expand our understanding of materiality. In addition, the digital cultivates a more democratic ethic that seeks to decentre the archive’s traditional exclusivity, which Voss and Werner describe as being protected by the ‘sentinels who control access to its interior’, suggesting that ‘the conservation and transmission of knowledge has been, at least historically, the prerogative of a few chosen agents, of a coterie of privileged insiders’.2 That last statement implies the existence of disadvantaged outsiders who are in the vast majority despite the notion that the archive is ‘for’ their welfare; thus the archive’s social boundaries are constructed. However, with some maturation of the digital medium nearly a quarter of the way into the twenty-first century, newer emphases on exhibit curation and public outreach have become so prominent that institutional practices have further shifted the archive’s ontology to become an agent of active interpretation for public audiences, well beyond ‘the less-clearly bounded realm of conjecture’ that characterised the early digital archive.3 Thus the archive is a ‘conceptual space [. . .] a political space, a gendered space, a memorial space’.4 So, why is it important to remember those spaces while examining the archives we use to understand the First World War? While all the terms in Voss and Werner’s list are relevant, memorial is key because of the numerous ways that the war blasted cultural memory and grafted it on to commemoration.

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The First World War shattered the archive of cultural memory, a legacy that comes to us even today as we draw upon it to remember the materials that bore witness to it in real time. Literature from the war very often expresses a need for commemoration that draws upon the archive of collective memory to ask questions about healing, moving forward or even justice. This is true of the periodicals produced by participants in the war in camps, trenches and hospitals, in literary and news periodicals in civilian spaces, and in literature published in book form. For instance, Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ memorialises a comrade’s dehumanising agony from a gas attack, famously quoting Horace to blame the politics of cultural memory for sending his generation on a misguided quest: ‘you would not tell with such high zest / To children ardent for some desperate glory, / The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori’.5 Such literary memorial pilgrimages – Owen’s comrades who ‘towards [their] distant rest began to trudge’,6 Eliot’s Holy Grail quester who navigates Western cultural memory to ask the right questions about direction and forgiveness, and the Ramsays in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse whose voyage ends at a beacon7 – speak not only to the needs of those for whom the war existed in living memory, but also for those, like us, who came after it had passed into historical distance and are responsible for communicating its lessons from the archive of cultural memory. In a very real way, archives and the practices that take place within and around them are still working from the same commemorative needs that drove modernist responses to the war. The following section will look at the ways in which archives cultivate memory and remembrance through their various institutional aspects. Since the present chapter concerns itself with the relation between paper and the digital, it will focus on a handful of archives that best represent the different states of paper periodicals, digital artefacts and discovery systems, and the institutional outreach behaviours that definitively shift conceptions of the archive in new ways. Archives will be the objects of close observation here, since the other contributions to the present volume pay exquisite attention to the periodicals themselves. The concluding section will make specific recommendations regarding how digitisation practices can help to actuate the digital in support of the scholarship and teaching of First World War periodicals for the coming century. Periodical studies is crucial for remembering the lessons of the war, especially concerning free expression, democracy and public health; a robust digital thematic research collection of First World War periodicals would go a long way in serving the informational needs of the twenty-first century.

Survey of First World War Archives Many of the prominent First World War collections and even some major state archives began during the conflict as memorials and continue that purpose today. The Australian War Memorial (Canberra) became that country’s primary military archive during the First World War, initially through a crowdsourced collection drive during 1917 among soldiers serving in the conflict.8 The Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte (Library of Contemporary History) (BfZ) was founded in Berlin in 1915 by businessman Richard Frank, as a private collection of print ephemera from the First World War.9 The Austro-Hungarian War Archive or Kriegsarchiv (Vienna) began in 1711 and, after undergoing several reorganisations, became that empire’s primary repository for records from the front lines and of propaganda during the First World War.10 Britain’s Imperial War Museum (IWM) was

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founded on 5 March 1917, when the War Cabinet approved Sir Alfred Mond’s proposal for a national museum to record the ongoing events of the conflict.11 In the United States, the National World War I Museum and Memorial (Kansas City, Missouri), commissioned in 1919, houses an archive beneath its commemorative architecture.12 In France, La Contemporaine: Bibliothèque, Archives, Musée des Mondes Contemporaines (The Contemporary: Library, Archives, Museum of Contemporary Worlds) (Nanterre) began in 1914 as a private collection of wartime records by the Leblanc family but had always been intended as a state archive; trench magazines such as Tacatacteufteuf (1917–18) encouraged active-duty soldiers to visit the collection when on leave.13 These archives perform a role similar to memorials and to literary expression in that they heal – or critique – by connecting beloved individuals or collective affect with the cultural memory of the polity, with something larger than ourselves. Not all archives with First World War collections have this mission, of course, yet all that collect from the war occupy a secondary space, at a remove from the site and the moment of commemoration, where the exchange of memory (broadly conceived) can take place. The digital medium is increasingly the space in which that exchange of memory occurs. First World War periodicals are the perfect format in which to discover discourses as they emerged, yet digital editions of them are not easily accessible. In the early twenty-first century, the varying availability and quality of electronic surrogates shape the emerging roles of archives, nearly all of which are now a hybrid of print and digital material with at least some degree of public-facing communications that interpret the collections. Since the present volume focuses on periodicals, the most appropriate lens through which to examine the archives is the nature and extent of their digitisation, how these relate to the paper collections on which they are based, and the ways in which they provide access to digitised objects. Some archives do not offer any digital representation beyond a descriptive textual entry in a catalogue search engine or finding aid; some offer a simple representative image in the same location; some offer images of all the pages in a given periodical but do not coalesce them into a self-contained electronic edition; some offer fully digitised surrogates – a corrected textual transcript layered together with high-quality images (typically combined in a PDF file), including text and metadata encoded in XML to make their bibliographic and semantic features searchable and filterable – but most are somewhere in between all of these. Along with various textual embodiments, the makeup and integrity of the collection is another crucial factor, as both paper and digital archives may have anywhere from a single number of one title to large runs of multiple titles within which individual magazine issues might be missing, damaged or castrated.14 The fullest expression of the digital periodical archive is the online thematic research collection; these artificially construct complete runs of digitised magazines around a particular period or area of scholarly inquiry from originals that come from incomplete paper collections all over the world, in ways that no brick-and-mortar archive could possibly achieve due to physical and budgetary constraints. Nearly all First World War archives feature selected images from periodicals in their educational and commemorative outreach efforts despite their uneven digital presentation of electronic editions. Thus, it is essential to develop high-quality digital editions that include computable data for the future of First World War periodical studies and the archives’ commemorative missions. Many First World War archives feature minimal digital representation of periodicals. For instance, the Kriegsarchiv catalogue provides a well-organised plan

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for browsing the collection by structure, as well as a fully fledged search and sort apparatus.15 While this archive presents detailed catalogue descriptions of objects from the war, it is essentially a paper archive that does not present digitised objects, nor does it provide thematic collections that educate the public based on interest categories in the war. The Australian War Memorial archive contains a large number of camp, trench, troopship and hospital periodicals from participant nations all over the globe. Sample titles include All Abaht It (1916–19), the organ of the 10th Australian Ambulance Field Service stationed in England and France, and a sporadic run of La Libre Belgique (1884–) from 1915–18, among others. Most of these periodicals do not appear to have been digitised. Some digital surrogates from the Memorial are available in the Trove database (see below), but in general they must be studied in the reading room at Canberra. The BfZ remains consistent with its original purpose by collecting German military and domestic history, foreign affairs and peace and conflict studies.16 Its online collection titled Zeit der Weltkriege (Time of World Wars) (1914–49) features digital images of posters, photographs, personal papers such as diaries and letters, pamphlets, ration stamps, maps and periodicals.17 Selected digital images of these materials are used in online articles such as ‘1918: Zwischen Weltkrieg und Revolution’ (1918: Between World War and Revolution), a highly visual exhibit on the last year of the war and the revolution that dethroned the monarchy.18 Although the media link to finding aids in the catalogue, the availability of digitised material is highly selective and minimal. The IWM contains a vast amount of materiel, equipment, private papers, photographs, film reels and other documents, much of which are presented as digital images, video and sound. Its periodical collection includes original and facsimile editions of sporadic numbers from titles such as the Wipers Times (1916–18) and its offshoot B.E.F. Times (1917–18), Chronicles of the White Horse (1917) (the trench journal of the West Kent Yeomanry on the border of Palestine) and the Whizz-Bang (1916) (6th Battalion, Durham Light Infantry), as well as several French and German titles. There is only one digital facsimile of a periodical from the First World War, the July 1916 issue of the Wiggle Waggle (1916), the journal of the 112th Company of the Royal Engineers, consisting of two photographs depicting its front and back covers; its editorial content is not available digitally. Like the periodical collections described above, the IWM is primarily useful as a paper archive whose digital objects form an enhanced finding aid that indexes the physical collection. The US National World War I Museum and Memorial combines the typical purposes of the contemporary archive: to maintain the Memorial ‘as a beacon of freedom and a symbol of the courage, patriotism, sacrifice and honor of all who served in World War I’, to interpret ‘the history of World War I’ and ‘encourage public involvement and informed decision-making’, to provide ‘exhibitions and educational programs that engage diverse audiences’, and to collect and preserve historical materials ‘with the highest professional standards’.19 Its collection of more than 350,000 items from participant nations features many periodicals, which are unevenly represented in digital form; at best, the record for a periodical issue such as Le Pays de France (1914–19) will present images of all the pages, including the covers, but does not provide bibliographic metadata, an electronic transcript, a digital edition or data files.20 Like many other national archives, the digital side of the US WWI Memorial and Museum is primarily an illustrated catalogue and exhibit resource rather than a research collection.

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Other archives offer a more systematic and thorough presentation of images from First World War periodicals but not electronic transcripts. These images are useful in the same way that paper pages can be studied visually, excluding the tactile and olfactory dimensions of textual scholarship. La Contemporaine provides, in addition to online catalogues of its collections, more than 130,000 digitised artefacts in l’Argonnaute that includes print materials, drawings, paintings, photographs, posters and other objects.21 L’Argonnaute, a subsection of La Contemporaine, takes its moniker from the so-named trench journal22 and offers a list of trench periodicals that may be browsed using the right-side navigation links.23 It also presents exhibits about the materials, including a scholarly collaboration between La Contemporaine and students at Université Paris-Nanterre on various aspects of trench periodicals, titled Écrire et publier dans les tranchées (Writing and Publishing in the Trenches).24 When searching the collection for magazines, the results offer representative digital images that lead the user to the bibliographic record of a journal. The list of issues within a title appears in a box at the top right of the screen. The user must then click on the desired issue in that box, which leads to a viewer that displays image files of all its pages. L’Argonnaute does not provide electronic transcripts, file downloads or shareable data of the magazines or other objects, but it does offer the ability to view higher-quality images when the user clicks on a button at the top right (the interface is not intuitive). Not all of these links actually lead to higher-quality images; some remain as thumbnails which, though helpful, are not suitable for close-up study as could be performed with the paper object or a high-resolution scan. Some archives provide digital images of periodicals along with an electronic text; these are better for sustained scholarship than images alone but the landscape is very uneven. The Trove project at the National Library of Australia contains a number of digitised objects from libraries and archives all over that country.25 It features many First World War photographs from the Australian War Memorial, and a large number of digitised periodicals from the conflict, including the 7th F.A.B. Yandoo (1916–19) among others. It is difficult to find a way to view magazine pages, however; this typically requires surfing around between the catalogues of the various source institutions, such as the Library of New South Wales or the Australian War Memorial. In Trove, as in other online archive interfaces featured here, there is apparently no finding aid or filter widget that facilitates the discovery of First World War periodicals as such; researchers will need already to have a strong sense of what they are looking for, especially titles. When a magazine appears in search results, clicking on the ‘Browse this collection’ button brings you to a landing page for the title with thumbnail links to individual issues. Clicking on a magazine issue reveals the page thumbnails, which may then be clicked on to view one page at a time with an apparently uncorrected OCR text alongside it.26 This arrangement is better for scholarship than images alone; however, thematic research collections (see below) provide better, purpose-driven modes of discovery and access. In France, the Gallica online digital library of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (National Library of France) (BnF) (Paris) at present comprises nearly 8.5 million documents that are accessible through a robust search engine and browsable in thematic content groupings.27 The online collections from the First World War are grouped by topic and material type, including trench journals, illustrated reviews and sheet music, among many others.28 It contains too many periodicals to list here – among them Bellica (1915–18), Le Petit Journal (1863–1944) and La Baïonnette (1915–20).

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However, Gallica, unlike Trove and the digital arms of most other national archives, provides high-quality scans and electronic transcripts of complete periodical issues, as well as the option to download a PDF or EPUB file, allowing patrons to perform thorough scholarship with digital surrogates. Gallica’s interface is not as functional for studying periodicals as purpose-built thematic research collections such as the Modernist Journals Project or the Blue Mountain Project – after all, Gallica draws upon the bibliographic features of a huge variety of materials – but it does offer a clear advantage over archives that provide mitigated digital samples.29 Online databases are the next step up in terms of digitisation and collection integrity. Whereas the digital wings of location-based archives are compromised by the limits of their paper collections, online databases transcend the walls of physical institutions to assemble multiply-sourced digital surrogates into massive, searchable corpora. Access can be an issue, of course, because some are sold by subscription to university libraries and similar institutions and are therefore not easily available to the public. Their distributed nature also means that there is not a team of librarians who can engage the public with digital exhibits and articles in the ways that location-based archives can. For instance, the HathiTrust offers member institutions search access to digitised versions of the many millions of books and periodicals that were scanned by the Google Books project.30 Objects in Hathi feature decent-quality page images and accompanying electronic text that is often poorly corrected because of the lack of human editing. It is also difficult to discover subject-specific collections because of the vast, unstructured nature of the interface and lack of metadata encoding in the electronic editions, meaning that researchers would already need to know a good deal about magazine titles and other features in order to discover the First World War. A more organised database can be seen in Europeana, which is a kind of digital repository that offers a robust search engine and thematic browsing, but also accepts uploads from users, who may also create their own galleries, not unlike the Citizen Archivist programme at the US National Archives (see below).31 The digital objects in Europeana come from a variety of institutions such as the Wellcome Collection and the Hamburg State Library. Its interface allows researchers to search for objects related to the First World War and to filter the results by newspaper.32 A search for First World War periodicals nets more than 960,000 hits, which can be filtered by start and end dates to show only wartime publications, so that the researcher may then drill down into the results and discover camp, trench and hospital periodicals. The most thematically organised database for readers of the present volume is the ProQuest Trench Journals and Unit Magazines of the First World War.33 It offers more than 1,500 titles from a variety of libraries and research collections and is behind a paywall. Databases such as these offer better digital assets for performing scholarship, but with varying degrees of discoverability and access. The fullest expression of the digital archive for periodicals is what Carol Palmer calls a thematic research collection. Palmer notes that in libraries (and by implication in large archives such as the ones examined above), it is ‘rare to find the necessary materials for a research project amassed in one place, as they are in a laboratory setting’.34 The lack of coherence and scope in a large paper archive can be addressed electronically by means of thorough, well-executed digitisation, which facilitates the creation of aggregated resources of primary research materials. Digital thematic research collections are extensive – drawing materials from multiple paper archives like their database cousins – yet thematically coherent, include heterogeneous data

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types, are structured but open-ended, are specifically designed to support research, and serve interdisciplinary scholarship and pedagogy.35 Within thematic or historical limits it is possible to approach a completeness that is not feasible in a large library or sprawling archive. Aside from the ProQuest database there does not seem to be a comprehensive thematic research collection for First World War periodicals. The Belgian War Press is one thematic research collection that provides a searchable database as well as a browsing navigation organised by conflict.36 The First World War section allows researchers to navigate by the censored and clandestine presses, by title and by means of an interactive calendar timeline. Primary materials are provided by decent-quality PDF files with searchable text that makes them suitable for sustained scholarly application.37 However, digital thematic research collections are currently best embodied in resources oriented towards literary periodical studies. Some of these, such as the Modernist Journals Project (MJP), the Blue Mountain Project and the International Dada Archive, intersect with the First World War historically and provide titles that respond to the war and feature material from participants as well as from civilians on the home front. Yet even among these, the quality of digitisation is inconsistent. For instance, the International Dada Archive offers readable, scanned page images from dozens of Dada magazines, which of course respond to the war, in many different languages, but does not present them as visually coherent issues or provide electronic transcripts that make their content searchable or filterable.38 The MJP offers complete runs of fully digitised literary magazines from the early twentieth century that are currently in the public domain in the United States. A full-text and advanced search function allows researchers to find content and filter it by bibliographic categories such as author, genre, magazine title and date.39 The website interface presents the issues through a flexible viewer that allows them to be read with pages side-by-side as they are in print, as single images, or as a thumbnail browser with a single page image in focus, while a high-quality and fully searchable PDF or XML transcript and metadata file may be downloaded from there.40 The Lab area allows researchers to download the XML transcripts and metadata files of the complete runs of each title.41 The Blue Mountain Project, a spinoff of MJP, likewise offers primarily non-English-language titles from the same period (many of which are also in the International Dada Archive), electronic transcript, metadata and PDF downloads, and a flexible viewing interface that allows multiple options for performing scholarship.42 These thematic research collections allow researchers to devise a full and coherent picture of how various literary communities responded to the war precisely because the primary material has been completely digitised according to the standards of electronic editing and information systems, which will be covered in the Conclusion section below. A thematic research collection of First World War periodicals would make an excellent addition to the landscape of research and teaching resources of the early twentieth century.

Digitisation and Public Engagement While the landscape of digitised periodicals is uneven, digitised objects in general are nonetheless a driving factor in the newer conceptions of the archive as a productive space of interpretation and public engagement. The language of philanthro-capitalism often underwrites them whether they are private non-profits or public institutions. The

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bureaucratic embodiment and policy documents are worthy of a study that exceeds the scope of the present chapter; however, a glance at the mission and organisational statements of two key archives, the Wellcome Collection and the US National Archives, provides a vivid sense of how they affect the archive collection itself. The Wellcome Collection of London, founded in 2007, is one of the newest archives and as such represents a major strand of contemporary thought on the present and future of cultural memory institutions.43 Its First World War holdings are not rich in periodicals, so the interest to readers of the present volume lies in its archival and institutional characteristics. The Wellcome Collection is a research library and museum with robust interactive exhibits both in its physical location and online, embodied by policies that directly articulate the kinds of twenty-first-century values with which similar organisations now engage the public. Its activist mission as a free museum and library is to challenge ‘the ways people think and feel about health by connecting science, medicine, life and art’.44 It achieves this mission by means of public outreach through programming, touring, broadcasting and interactive digital engagement, among other activities. The legacy of medical and psychological treatment from the First World War clearly intersects with the Wellcome Foundation’s purpose, although the collection’s website does not provide a rationale for its substantial holdings from the war. In that regard, items of interest to scholars of the First World War include a scrapbook and photograph album from the Anglo-Russian Hospital in Petrograd (1915–17); New Moon, or the Crichton Royal Literary Register (1844–1937), a hospital periodical of the Crichton Royal Institution; and the Buckle (1922–68), a magazine published at Craiglockhart College, a shell shock hospital during the First World War.45 The paper collection contains runs of the two periodicals. For the Buckle, the only digitised object available is a historical review issue published in 1968. Wellcome might not be a major First World War periodical collection but it does serve as a kind of barometer for the currents driving many of the archives described above. Its About page links to a 2017 document, ‘Wellcome Collection: Who we are and what we do’, which conveys a strong sense of obligation to its Board and to the public. It provides a self-assessment and strategic plan addressing its adaptability to the kinds of institutional pressures that are now driving universities, schools, museums, libraries and non-profit organisations, complete with an impact analysis of its in-person and online usage statistics and financial viability. Its goals for the strategic cycle ending in 2021–22 present an archival politics that is both perennial and of the current moment, a ‘bold and surprising’ institution that preserves ‘different perspectives through our collections and research’, providing interdisciplinary ‘opportunities for people to think deeply about the connections between science, medicine, life and art’, while ‘[m]aking thought-provoking content that encourages everyone to reflect on what it means to be healthy and human’.46 The stated objectives for reaching those goals include developing ‘innovative spaces and experiences’; strengthening connections across the institution with a focus on the Science and Innovation Teams; ‘[e]ncouraging diversity by including a wider range of voices in our collections and programmes’; improving accessibility to these, extending their impact through ‘usercentric experiences’ (just as universities are now told to be ‘student-centric’, as if that were new) in the realms of ‘digital, broadcast, publishing, lending, and touring’; and to be a ‘great place to work’ marked by values such as creativity, inclusivity and collaboration that foster risk-taking and innovation (also hallmarks of the US National

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Archives, below).47 The rest of the document explains the institutional organisation in detail, with departments arrayed so that a holistic and interdisciplinary conception of the materials and staff roles makes clear that its self-conception as an archive is meant to break down old categories and interpret its collection in new ways for a diverse public. These include a Digital Engagement team and the Hub, a physical space designed to foster innovative collaboration among staff, members of the public and even paid research fellows so as to create the most impact from the collection. In other words, whereas the archive previously was considered to consist of the collection and the cataloguing system, the arrival of the digital medium and contemporary socio-economic pressures mean that the archive as such is no longer conceived independently from the search, display and engagement aspects of the institution. In a similar manner, the mission of the US National Archives reflects the contemporary, active ethic of so many archives: to ‘drive openness, cultivate public participation, and strengthen our nation’s democracy through public access to high-value government records’.48 Towards that end, it preserves the 1–3 per cent of documents that are of important legal and historical significance, such as the nation’s founding documents; presidential, legislative and judicial documents; diplomatic materials; and military documents including service records. The National Archives website provides thematic engagements with its paper collection through moderately digitised media on a broad variety of historical and national topics. The First World War section is a thorough resource presenting scanned documents, photographs and moving images in topical areas such as diversity, biographies, technology and innovation, the home front, and more; these tend to be international in coverage, primarily in the American, British and German contexts.49 It is not clear whether the collection contains any periodicals from the war. When performing an online search, the catalogue offers a vast number of objects with a robust results page that allows readers to refine by data sources (including archival descriptions with digital objects attached to them), the level of description (item, file unit, series), material type (textual records, engineering drawing, maps and charts, photographs and other graphic materials, moving images, etc.), file format (.jpg, .gif, .pdf, etc.), archive location (there are National Archive branches in many cities, universities and military bases), record group or collection and date range. While the search results page is a model that other archives could follow, the records it returns consist mainly of archival descriptions that point users to the objects’ location in the paper collection with digital images of all the pages. The page images are of a sufficient quality to be read and studied on-screen, though each in isolation. There is also an option to export the record with options of brief or full archival description; whether or not to include thumbnails of the attached images; whether or not to include ‘Citizen Archivist’ transcriptions, tags or comments; and the ability to select a file format: CSV, JSON, PDF, TXT or XML. A PDF download containing the full set of options provides the full archival description and low-quality thumbnail images of all the object’s pages. Like the more fully digitised archives today, users are able to control aspects of the digital objects they receive in order to best support their research. So overall, the online catalogue is a finding aid for the paper archive, enhanced with downloadable data files and images that are helpful but do not constitute a fully fledged digital surrogate for sustained scholarship like the ones available in thematic research collections. The main interest in the US National Archives is that it demonstrates how digitisation interacts with the shifting roles and conception of the archive. Its first strategic

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goal articulates the connection between these values, the digital medium and the active, interpretative practice that is changing our conception of the archive: ‘We are reaching beyond the traditional role of making records available for others to discover and we are instead making access happen by delivering increasing volumes of electronic records to the American public online, using flexible tools and accessible resources that promote public participation.’50 The values driving its mission include ‘an open, inclusive work environment’ built on ‘collaborative teamwork’, ‘innovation to build our future’ and pursuing ‘excellence through continuous learning’.51 It even runs a ‘Citizen Archivist’ programme that invites the public to help with electronic transcription and tagging.52 Like Britain’s Wellcome Collection, the National Archives and Records Administration publishes its current and past strategic plans, written with the frisson of a marketing department. The current plan, which is largely reflected on the website’s Mission page, emphasises the newer spirit marked by unity (‘[w]e will work as one NARA’), digital innovation and engagement (‘[w]e will embrace the primacy of electronic information in all facets of our work’), leadership, being ‘a great place to work’, being a ‘customerfocused organization’, and having open ‘organizational boundaries to learn from others’.53 The remaining strategic goals elaborate upon the values listed above to lay plans for ‘connecting with customers’, ‘maximizing value to the nation’ and ‘building a future based on people’. In this regard, the catalogue search engine features a warning about the presence of outdated, biased and possibly violent content that might be racist, sexist, ableist or xenophobic, with a reparative description of how the institution is working to undo these harms while maintaining an accurate and honest archive about historical realities.54 It features an engaging description of how the ethical role of archivists relates to this material and has shifted over time. So, for this archive, like the Wellcome, the purpose is not just to provide access to historical materials, but actively to digitise and interpret its collections – and adjust its institutional structure – in order to engage the public and achieve reparative justice.

Conclusion: Digitising Our Way Past the ‘Sentinels’ It is clear that the landscape of First World War periodical archives is rich but uneven, requiring that most scholars travel to paper collections to perform the serious work of memorial exchange that continually refreshes its lessons for succeeding generations. This is understandable: a full appreciation of those who experienced the war must be made through the material textuality – the textures, smells, colours – of their living documents. That will always be the case. However, the importance of periodicals for understanding multiple aspects of the war and its aftermath bespeaks the need for a comprehensive, fully realised, freely available digital thematic research collection of the kind described by Palmer. A digital resource that brings together all of the First World War periodicals into a single collection would allow scholars to study periodicals that do not coexist in any paper archives, which would otherwise necessitate travel to multiple places, not to mention the ability to cross-search the collection, discover new patterns and ask questions that were not conceivable before. In today’s geopolitical climate, with authoritarianism on the rise worldwide, we risk losing the hard-won lessons of the war’s aftermath in the middle of the last century. A digital thematic research collection of First World War periodicals, embodying newer conceptions of the archive with an active outreach programme such as those described above, would

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help educators and members of the public to activate our collective memory and shore up democratic principles. While the scholarly need alone is sufficient justification, the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and the uncertainty of travel restrictions are additional reasons for making high-quality digital surrogates available online so that more scholars and teachers can pursue the myriad questions raised in the present volume. What would such a collection look like, and how would it work? Paper and digital collections both offer advantages and disadvantages that need to be considered in the design of a thematic research collection. Paper magazines provide a sensory connection with their affective and temporal origins that is erased during digitisation, though traces remain that must be harnessed. Definitive aspects of print such as physical size and thickness, colour gradients, the mild embossing of letterpress or crispness of the rotary press, and exquisite detail of pictures cannot be conveyed through low-quality digital images. To understand the perspectives and experiences of those who lived through the war and suffered its living memory, we must at least have a sense of the material embodiment of those things, however incomplete. Highquality digital scans cannot convey the tactile or olfactory aspects of paper, but they are very good at suggesting them through the visual dimension and even offer a level of detail magnification that we cannot obtain with print and an optical aid. While the digital might lack some of the sensory aspects of textuality, it nonetheless offers scale and manipulability that could never be achieved with print. We have already seen how databases and thematic research collections offer corpora of a completeness and coherence that cannot be achieved in a single physical archive. It is eminently desirable to construct a thematic research collection that brings all of the First World War periodicals into a single database, making them simultaneously cross-searchable and filterable, eliciting patterns that could not otherwise be perceived, prompting questions that could not otherwise have been asked. If the digitisation process produces clean data files of all the periodicals, then the possibilities for computational analysis can open doors to digital humanities applications and the creation of interdisciplinary knowledge that combines history, art history, literary studies, textual studies, disability studies, cartography, medicine, library and information science, computer science, and so on. If real digital surrogates were freely accessible in a purpose-built location, then active archival outreach practices such as the exhibits, articles and events described above would link readers much more closely to the realm of primary material, rather than mere illustrations, creating a more authentic ‘Citizen Archivist’. But all of this would depend on the ways in which digitisation is performed and the database is constructed. Digitisation is the process of transforming print materials into electronic files that are both human- and machine-readable. The process begins with the acquisition of intact paper originals that are scanned or photographed to create images of the pages, though incomplete originals may be artificially ‘repaired’ with scanned pages from other paper archives. The print originals are scanned with cameras in a digitisation rig at high resolution, usually at 600 pixels per inch (ppi), and saved as uncompressed TIFF or large JPEG image files. The high-resolution TIFF or JPEG images are then aligned, cropped, colour-corrected and saved with a naming convention that communicates the title, publishing date and image sequence number to keep them in correct order. The optimised images lead to multiple outputs that have both combined and separate uses. The high-resolution corrected TIFFs are used for creating electronic transcripts of the

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magazines as well as for long-term archival storage. They are also saved as mediumquality JPEGs (150–300ppi) for inclusion in a PDF file and at 72ppi for display on the World Wide Web. The electronic transcript is created when the high-resolution TIFFs are run through software that performs optical character recognition (OCR) to generate a stand-off text; human editors or automated software (or a combination of both) then correct the transcript by fixing spelling errors, typographical anomalies and other glitches produced by the OCR process. The corrected transcript is then saved in multiple ways: together with the medium-resolution images to create high-quality searchable PDF surrogates for sustained study, as text files encoded in XML, and as plain text files (the electronic text itself with no encoding). The XML-encoded text files are created by human editors or automated software to make the magazines’ bibliographic properties (title, publication date, editor, location, documental divisions, page numbers, content genre, etc.) readable both by humans and machines, usually in accordance with the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). By a similar process, an XML-encoded metadata index file is created for each magazine issue to catalogue every content item according to its bibliographic information (title, author, genre, page numbers, etc.), typically aligned with the standards of a Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS).55 The XML transcripts and metadata files together are ingested into the digital repository to make the magazines and their content items visible to the search engine so that advanced searches (for example, by author, date, title) can be performed and results can be filtered by these categories. The XML transcript and metadata files, as well as the plain text files, are also typically provided as downloads to support computational analysis such as natural language processing, topic modelling, named entity extraction, geolocation extraction and network analysis. Contemporary archives such as the Wellcome Collection and US National Archives actuate the digital medium to reach the public and even allow it to participate in the cataloguing of material that constitutes its collective memory. In doing so, they transform the archive from being the destination of a commemorative pilgrimage – like those dramatised by Owen, Eliot and Woolf – to being the starting point of a journey whose resting place is the polis. A digital archive of First World War periodicals that embodies the technical features of freely available thematic research collections, such as the Modernist Journals and Blue Mountain projects, would be capable of weaving the full corpus together with the kinds of interpretative outreach and collaboration that neutralises the ‘sentinels’ of exclusion. Building such an archive would require an international collaborative effort among scholars, librarians and systems administrators to establish the design criteria and digitisation specifications. But after all, such cooperation would be a sweet and fitting way to lay a wreath for those whose untimely deaths require us to ask new questions and forge new relationships that honour their memory.

Notes   1. Paul J. Voss and Marta L. Werner, ‘Toward a Poetics of the Archive: Introduction’, Studies in the Literary Imagination 32, no. 1 (1999): i-vii, here ii.   2. Voss and Werner, ‘Toward a Poetics of the Archive’, i.   3. Voss and Werner, ‘Toward a Poetics of the Archive’, ii.   4. Voss and Werner, ‘Toward a Poetics of the Archive’, i.

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  5. Wilfred Owen, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, in The Longman Anthology of British Literature, 4th edn, ed. David Damrosch and Kevin J. H. Dettmar (New York: Longman, 2010), 2160, ll. 25–8. Owen quotes a Latin motto which translates as ‘How sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country.’ The motto was often used to motivate youth into military service. Owen’s poem also critiques the ephemeral print culture of its day for carrying that message: the repetition of an accusatory ‘you’ throughout the final stanza points the finger at recruitment posters singling out young men (‘YOU!’) to serve in the military.   6. ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, l. 4.   7. See T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (New York: Norton, 2001), l. 134; Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, 1927).   8. See , accessed 24 April 2022.  9. See , accessed 24 April 2022. 10. See , accessed 24 April 2022. 11. See , accessed 24 April 2022. 12. See , accessed 24 April 2022. 13. J. M. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 81. The website address of La Contemporaine (previously BDIC) is , accessed 24 April 2022. 14. Castration is the process by which libraries remove magazine covers and advertising pages so as to preserve only the editorial content and organise it into bound volumes. It is one of the major injuries that led to the digital preservation movement, since fully intact magazine issues in library archives tend to be very rare. 15. See (English), accessed 24 April 2022. 16. See , accessed 24 April 2022. 17. See , accessed 24 April 2022. 18. See , accessed 24 April 2022. 19. See , accessed 24 April 2022. 20. See , accessed 24 April 2022. 21. See and , accessed 24 April 2022. 22. See , accessed 24 April 2022. 23. See , accessed 24 April 2022. 24. See , accessed 24 April 2022. 25. See , accessed 24 April 2022. 26. See , accessed 24 April 2022. 27. See , and the following catalogue of trench journals: , accessed 24 April 2022. 28. See , accessed 24 April 2022. 29. See and , accessed 24 April 2022.

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30. See and , accessed 24 April 2022. 31. See , accessed 24 April 2022. 32. See , accessed 24 April 2022. 33. See , accessed 24 April 2022. 34. Carol B. Palmer, ‘Thematic Research Collections’, in A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens and John Unsworth (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), , accessed 14 October 2021. 35. Palmer, ‘Thematic Research Collections’, n.p. 36. See , accessed 24 April 2022. 37. See , accessed 24 April 2022. 38. See , accessed 24 April 2022. 39. See , accessed 24 April 2022. 40. See, for instance, the June 1918 ‘Soldiers Number’ of the Crisis (1909–), the organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in the United States, , accessed 24 April 2022. 41. See , accessed 24 April 2022. 42. See , accessed 24 April 2022. 43. See , accessed 24 April 2022. 44. Donne Robertson et al. ‘Wellcome Collection: Who we are and what we do’, 5, October 2017, , accessed 22 November 2021. See also , accessed 24 April 2022. 45. See , and , accessed 24 April 2022. 46. Robertson et al. ‘Who we are and what we do’, 5. 47. Robertson et al. ‘Who we are and what we do’, 5. 48. See , accessed 24 April 2022. 49. See , accessed 24 April 2022. 50. National Archives and Records Administration, 2018–2022 Strategic Plan (Washington, DC, 2018), 5. 51. National Archives and Records Administration, 2018–2022 Strategic Plan, 3. 52. National Archives and Records Administration, 2018–2022 Strategic Plan, 4. For the Citizen Archivist program, see , accessed 24 April 2022. 53. A very similar spirit, with nearly identical language, is currently driving the ‘reimagination of the university’ in the United States. 54. See , accessed 24 April 2022. 55. Metadata describe other data or textual objects. Bibliographic information categories such as publication date, title, location, author and editor are familiar examples of metadata.

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4 Affect and Emotion Fionnuala Dillane

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his chapter considers journals produced by units or regiments during the First World War as affective objects. My approach is shaped by histories of human emotions that have informed a range of disciplinary fields and by theories of the periodical as a distinct material form and publication format.1 The transdisciplinary lens provided by histories of emotion is particularly appropriate for the study of the multi-genre, polyvocal thing that is the periodical. The war journal circulates as part of a record of both everyday and exceptional emotional experiences of combatants and support units. It most typically takes the form of a miscellany and as a result of this design and genre mix, it is encoded with the potential to house a wide range of affective registers. In these terms, the periodical as affective object offers a thick description of the dense and varied emotional textures of war in ways that are unique among other textual and visual forms.2 Historiographies of emotion and the senses have illuminated how the experience of war creates an intensification of affects across a broad spectrum of contexts. Pioneering work on the First World War by Joanna Bourke and subsequent studies such as those by Sarah Cole on male friendship and Santanu Das on touch, for instance, focused on new intimacies and bodily affects produced by trench warfare and new body vulnerabilities in the face of early twentieth-century war technologies. It is well documented that the body, overwhelmingly the male body, was exposed to more penetrating bullets, to experimental poisonous gas, and to shell bombardment, submarine and air warfare on a scale never previously experienced.3 Further, as Cole among others has argued, the construction of emotional regimes was a fundamental feature of war training and media propaganda targeted at volunteers, conscripts and civilians on national scales and with an imperial reach around the globe. ‘An emphasis on comradeship’, as she puts it, ‘seems nearly axiomatic in the European and American imaginary about war, and has been registered in many media – painting, sculpture, fiction, poetry, film – in the context of the twentieth century’s major conflicts.’4 Cole describes attempts to structure and fix male friendships in writing from this period as ‘the organisation of intimacy’.5 This chapter argues that the editorial curation of the content of war journals presents a form of structuring the chaotic intimacies of war. There is an unresolvable contradiction inherent in this approach, that is, a demonstrable tension between the structuring genres and material affordances of the journal as a serial form with identifiable limits (page space, number of pages, column and header borders and divisions) and the affective intensities that circulate uncontrollably on the pages of these magazines.

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The Periodical as Affective Object War journals emerge from a longer history of periodical print media’s distinctive materiality. The periodical’s affective capacities can never be contained fully because the format is defined by ongoingness. As periodical scholars such as Margaret Beetham and James Mussell have theorised in Anglophone contexts, the periodical operates in a dynamic spatial and temporal matrix with the date and issue number delimiting an individual object yet implying a seriality, which is open-ended, potentially unlimited.6 The friction between ongoingness and instalment is indicative of that ambient play between affect and emotion, between the moments of interaction and reaction. The periodical or magazine takes its definition as a discrete if diverse publication format from this rhythm of publication schedules. Its relationship with readers is built on anticipation, on the promise of ongoing relation, and in this way the periodical encodes the possibility for affective interaction, always in process, never satiated, though each serial part or individual issue brings more immediate compensations such as new information, entertainment, provocation and so on. The war journal’s emotional traction is deeply embedded in the longer history of the periodical as media product of the nineteenth century. In the market context in which nineteenth-century periodicals were predominantly produced, there was an economic imperative to create and sustain desires and other feelings in the reader-consumer. Periodicals sought to spark ambient affects such as curiosity (used to particular effect in the cliff-hanger chapter endings for novels serialised in parts in magazines) or loyalty and reassurance, an imagined community of belonging, or – to use Lauren Berlant’s more suggestive and influential formulation, which captures that play on individual and collective identification and conscription – an ‘intimate public’.7 The accelerated growth in the production of and demand for specialist magazines in the second half of the nineteenth century in Britain for instance, temperance journals, trade journals, journals for boys, for girls, for various religious communities, for every kind of sport and amateur hobby from archery to zoology, is just one indication of the success of this imbricated community-building and cultivation and organisation of subjecthood. The readers and writers of war journals were readers of such specialised magazines. Many would have produced them. The use of editorials, correspondence pages and other periodical genre protocols in war journals indicate fluency in the periodical’s affective forms and deep familiarity with its emotional functions, its constructed intimate publics. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, another expression of the sensory underpinnings of the magazine emerged in the deliberate appeal to the eye. Efforts to arrest the gaze started with cover design and included innovations in page layout, typeface and the use of images, including photographs, all to compete for reader attention in an increasingly competitive print culture market. New reading environments, such as jostling commuter carriages of trains, provide just one context for developments in design and layout that influenced the look of magazines by the early decades of the twentieth century. These features expanded through the spread of the New Journalism’s performed intimacies on the page from the 1870s onwards: its cultivation of personalitybased items and personalised genres such as the interview, celebrity features, gossip columns, competitions and titbits sections as well as more reader-friendly layouts, such as the use of striking headers, mixed typeface and more graphic advertisements. I outline these developments in magazine culture by the late nineteenth century to emphasise that

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newspapers and magazines that were being read by combatants and non-combatants in the wider print market were strategically designed as affective objects, as a technology attentive to and producing the feeling of reading. First World War journals emerged from this culture. They were influenced by the soldier newspapers and military journals that had been part of the press economy since the late eighteenth century and, as we can see, developed their own innovative practices around this longer periodical tradition that were informed by the intense intimacies and self-protective deflections of the twentiethcentury war experience.8

War’s Intimate (Print) Cultures Personal accounts and creative writing have been fundamental to intimate histories of the First World War. Santanu Das moves between archival material from individuals (letters, diaries) to creative works to show how, as he puts it: imaginative writing of the period repeatedly dwells on moments of tactile contact and the ways in which these processes of touch – whether in a context of disgust, tenderness, pain – are gathered in to the creative energies of a text, conceptualised within a novel, a poem or a short story.9 Periodicals, as creative, imaginative, heterogeneous objects, do not feature prominently in accounts of the affects of war or the alignment of texts and the senses. In many ways, however, they are uniquely positioned to capture day-to-day intimacies: periodicals are print objects defined by temporal synchronicity, with their date stamped on each issue, like diaries or letters home, with the crucial difference that they are also published and circulated publicly. Some scholars have drawn out the particular affordances of the form in this regard, though with different emphases. James Berkey, for instance, details the ‘cultural work performed by soldier newspapers’ issued from navy ships during the late nineteenth-century SpanishAmerican war.10 He argues that advances in print technologies were harnessed to communicate close to simultaneously the daily realities of navy life, cultivating an imagined community of belonging that exceeded the steel hulls of the US navy ships, ‘expanding the boundaries of national sentiment through the peripatetic agency of print’.11 Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau pioneered the study of this relationship between periodicals and the cultivation of national sentiment in his account of French trench journals.12 Robert Nelson’s groundbreaking work on German soldier newspapers emphasises their role in reproducing shared sentiments of manly comradeship in the absence of a heroic narrative of national defence that was available to French combatants.13 Graham Seal, taking a different approach, insists that the trench journal in the English language stands as a point of resistance and negotiation for soldiers, a space where they navigated their own affective and emotional relationship with the unevenly distributed brute realities of war. In his reading, the periodical becomes the mediating object between the ‘underculture’ of trench life and the ‘overculture’ of ‘military brass, politicians, shirkers, and, most especially, the mainstream press and official communications of all kinds’.14 This characterisation of the periodical as contact zone, charged with the affective

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intensities of clashing emotional and physical bodies, informs Van Puymbroeck and Van Dijck’s account of Guillaume Apollinaire’s trench journalism. They draw on the work of Santanu Das to stress the importance of looking at periodicals as ‘“repositories of feeling” and “archives of touch and intimacy” in a dual sense: not only in the energies they articulate and transmit through text but also in the way they pass from hand to hand as physical artifacts’.15 I want to expand on how the design of the periodical as miscellany is integral to the ways the war journal operated as an emotional techne. In the context of the extreme sense disorientation, body vulnerability and body proximity produced by the First World War, the capacities of the periodical in this regard are both heightened and exposed. The somewhat anxious trace of queer or homoerotic affect and the overt racist commentary that runs through some of these journals are discussed elsewhere in this Companion (see Chapter 19). For this chapter, I will focus on affective intensities that circulate on the page produced by the chaotic organisation of war’s divergent intimacies: collective camaraderie and shared trauma. It is important to acknowledge that First World War journals are varied in type and range and thus produce different affective registers. These differences are related to the context in which they are produced and their primary or target audience. A prisoner-ofwar camp journal or a conscientious objector journal has a different intended readership and different production contexts from trench or hospital journals. This is unsurprising: the First World War, problematically singular in our common usage, was geographically dispersed, shaped by gender, class and race, and with hugely different exposure to risk and death. As Joanna Bourke puts it, the First World War produced different experiences that ‘fractured along lines of personality, age, ethnicity, class, military unit and branch of the services, as well as differentiating men according to the timing of their entry into the service’.16 This volume attests to the importance of maintaining a sense of the differentiated, distinct and varied types of journals produced throughout the war period. That said, I suggest that we can make some generalising comments about how the periodical as a material object communicates emotion and produces affect. My interest is not in arguing for some universal affective experience but in considering the specific contexts that produce particular affects and emotions. As Jonathan Flatley puts it, [i]f certain affects are basic, what are not at all basic are the ways our affects are educated as to which objects are right for which affects in which situations (i.e. one should be ashamed of this, but angry about that, disgusted by this other thing, but only if other people are present and so on). Thus, to claim that there are some basic affects does not mean that people’s experience of these affects is not variable [. . .] Consequently, an insistence on the irreducibility or universality of certain affects does not necessarily contradict anthropological or sociological emphasis on the constructedness and diversity of emotions and emotional expression.17

Affect and Emotion? Affect or Emotion? Flatley’s clarification is not only useful for this nuanced articulation of the inextricability of basic affects and socialised experiential feelings, it also draws attention to that messy territory shared by affect and emotion. As Flatley among others makes clear, there is no consensus on the difference between affect and emotion,

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and I use both terms in my readings of war periodicals. However, I follow Flatley’s general proposition that emotion ‘suggests something that happens inside and tends towards outward expression’ and that affect ‘indicates something relational and transformative’ or, to put it otherwise, ‘One has emotions; one is affected by people and things.’18 In these terms, I propose that periodicals contain emotions and produce affects. I use the term ‘contain’ in the sense of the expression of feelings (boredom, love, longing, fear, sorrow, regret) in a poem, an opinion piece or an illustration, as well as meaning the capturing of or putting boundaries on those feelings. The generation of affects between object and subject is unique to the individual reader’s encounter with the textured thing that is the periodical. These affects, forever untethered, live in the moment of felt encounter and remain unavailable to analysis. Haptic resonances, some affect theorists maintain, escape linguistic articulation or definition altogether. Affect theory, as a result, has been criticised for the obduracy of what could be read as its critical or intellectual culde-sac.19 However, though affect circulates in the liminal realms of the ineffable, it does not follow that we cannot attend to how it circulates. There are some resonances here with the familiar concept of combat gnosticism, even though the latter presumes collective rather than individual insight that is shared by combatants uniquely.20 As Sarah Cole puts it in another context, the emphasis on the overwhelming and indescribable depth of the experience of war ‘touches a primary creed in war literature, from rough diary notes to canonical poetry: the inexpressibility of the war experience, the impossibility, and at times also the undesirability, of conveying the exact quality of the war to non-combatants’.21 I want to focus on two affective dimensions to the war periodical that we can infer but not know. The first is that uncapturable haptic encounter between reader and text that is only felt in the individual body. The second is the sense of circulating affects that gather in the coded language of some of these journals, the in-jokes or the regiment-specific understandings that are no longer penetrable in the absence of the deciphering voice of the original target audience. These are relational affects that take their charge from the particular encounters of particular groups of readers with particular groups of texts, including periodicals. However, available for more immediate interpretation are patterns of affective play such as the regularity of certain features across different types of journals; discernible trends in the frequency of genres (such as poems or jokes or gossip columns) and the organisation of those genres in particular issues. What leads, for example? What forms dominate the middle? What closes an issue? And for the purposes of this analysis, what are the affects that circulate when different genre forms are placed alongside each other on the page. This curation of content provides a ‘structure of feeling’, emerging, but not fully formed or clearly formulated responses.22 I do not presume that each reader started on the first page and read through an issue in sequence. But we can draw conclusions from the privileging or otherwise of particular genre forms and consider their capacity to gesture towards the ineffable. The last page of a periodical is often very revealing in this regard. For example, the prosaically named The 23rd (1917–19), with its subtitle, The Voice of the Battalion, an infantry journal produced both from Gallipoli and at the Western Front by the Australian Imperial Forces, contains through its middle a typical trench journal

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mix of gossip, titbits, jokes and atmospheric accounts of the deprivations and camaraderie of trench life. The back page of the 31 January 1918 number, produced in France, fills the top two-thirds of the page with a short story spread out across two columns. ‘Redeemed’ recounts the history of ‘S--- ’, ‘the worst soldier in the line’, a ‘schemer, malingerer, an apparent coward [. . .] [a] pariah’. He is regularly locked up for ill-discipline, his way of avoiding duties, and he stops just short of that most ‘unforgivable’ military sin, desertion. ‘S’ is redeemed in the final paragraph of the story at ‘zero hour’ at a particular moment of crisis for the battalion. In this final reckoning, he charges over the top, ‘teeth clenched, fighting as man seldom fought before, heedless of the earthly hell blazing round him until – a blinding flash – and he lay still – a soldier – Redeemed’.23 The use of dashes to effect a sense of drama and pace and the final full stop (rather than the more triumphalist exclamation mark) play off each other to drive home the intensity of action in its registering of bodily exposure while also conveying a poignant moment of stillness, that this man’s death and the manner in which he died rescued his sorry, cowardly life. It is a standard message – the valour of death – in an atypical frame: it is not usual to see such references to cowardly behaviour or desertion in these journals, so the message, apparently simple, is quite mixed. How does this type of soldier relate to the group? Is it about someone in the regiment? Is it an effort to navigate the unspoken terror that permeates this bare life with its stark extremes: death or desertion with little hope of salvation in between? The circulating affects intensify because the last third of the page is left blank with a message to its soldier readers: ‘This space is your own. WRITE HOME ON IT.’ The knowing jokes, snippets of gossip and affective familiarities of the middle section of the journal clash with the open ambient affect of this back page. Perhaps this editorial decision was partly an encouragement to send home and recirculate the journal among family and friends. It is also plausible that the editors ran out of copy and were improvising. Either way, we can ask, what words are to be juxtaposed with the already clashing affects of the story with which the letter home shares space? This question remains unanswered, persists as affect and fails to ‘close’ to a definable or named emotion, then and now. Every journal has a last page until the next issue comes along. This palimpsestic layering of affect is lost to us unless we read serially. But given the gaps between issues, which were often unpredictable, often stretching to six or seven months, often entirely open-ended as runs of journals end abruptly, and given the high casualty rate, many soldiers did not get to read serially either. Neither did home audiences, given the irregularity of production and distribution processes for so many journals, especially those based in the trenches. What we are left to navigate then are patterns of gaps or issue endings across different journals. Despite the dominance of lampooning pieces, dark humour and irony that Seal has claimed constitute the keynote of trench journals in particular, genre selection at the end of an issue regularly produces quite a different affective charge.24 We see this again, for instance, in the final page of All Abaht It (1916–19), a mostly satirical journal published by the 10th Field Ambulance (Australian Army Medical Corps) that chose to end its 1 November 1916 issue, as it embarked for the Western Front, with Thomas Hardy’s ‘Men Who March Away’. The poem and its title are set in a grave and sombre frame resembling a memorial card. As is typical of Hardy, the poem is both pessimistic and inexorable in its momentum. Its nocturnal

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mood creeping in at the end prefigures death and its enjambments and repetitive lines sound death’s inevitability: Hence the faith and fire within us    Men who march away    Ere the barn cocks say    Night is growing grey, To hazards whence no tears can win us; Hence the faith and fire within us    Men who march away.25 The polyvocality of the periodical creates the potential for and accommodates such clashing or contradictory affects: the sombre remembering of war dead that features on one page, a slapstick cartoon on another. Reading ‘sideways’, to use Linda Hughes’s usefully directive phrase for navigating periodicals more generally, we inevitably pick up the affective resonances generated by the ways texts sit alongside each other on the page, face each other or follow each other.26 Such admixture is uniquely foregrounded in periodicals as miscellanies. In addition, the layout expresses and registers the extremities of emotion in the compressed spaces of columns and borders of pages, suggestively mirroring the bodily confinement and proximities of life at war, whether produced in the cockpit of a plane, in crowded cabins of ships and submarines or in the narrow spaces of the trenches.

The Organisation of Chaotic Intimacies The curated miscellaneity of affective genres is implicated in the shifting and precarious contexts from which these journals emerged and which they shaped. The overseeing eye of the censors and the policing emotional community of the regiment or unit find a graphic and visual echo in the fixed parameters of the page, the bounded limits of the issue, and the selection and arrangement of content. All signify desire for or even rage to order. This is especially evident in such codified genres as limericks, sonnets and other poetic forms; the hugely popular alphabet rhymes; and the definitional or list-like features such as the pervasive ‘Things we need to know’ column, a mix of gossip, puns and in-jokes. However, even these most apparently simplistic humour formats do not contain the contending frequencies of war life. The most obvious form of policing of content and thus of affect is evident in the repeated references to ‘red tape’ and the censor’s red pen. As other chapters in this volume show, overt censorship is often at play as part of the operation of the emotional regimes of war. Canadian periodicals appear to be under more overt official scrutiny than those produced by other national forces and regularly included a by-line under their masthead acknowledging the name of the censor who signed off on the journal’s content. More informal but nonetheless influential are the entrained emotional politics of regiment belonging, heroic masculinity and collective camaraderie, which mean that the overt expressions of fear or distress in first-person accounts is not common. These contexts, official censorship and unofficial policing of emotions that include both the destructive repression of natural emotions and, depending on the individual situation and politics, helpful morale boosting, combine to limit by choice, by design and by

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order what can be published, what can be said, what can be admitted on to the pages of a war periodical. The lexicon and structure of such journals, their genres, language, image selection, tonal registers and layout, are crucially determined by efforts to maintain a balance between containing and expressing emotion. The production context shapes these strategies and structures of containment. Journals from the permanent home base of a regiment such as the Sprig of Shillelagh (1914–68), the journal of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers based in Omagh in the north of Ireland, were most often targeted at an audience of supporters of combatants rather than at combatants alone as a primary audience. While sharing similar news features and opinion pieces, all turning on the war, these journals differ from journals at the front in the way such content is communicated through production values, form, tone and genres to produce, as a result, different kinds of emotional communities. The Sprig existed as a regiment journal before the war though publication had lapsed. It was revived in 1914 for the entire period of the war and beyond, as its editorial from the first number of the revived issue on 1 November explains. Three main expressed purposes motivated its return. These incorporate immediate present, future and retrospective temporalities: ‘to publish accounts of the doing of the famous Inniskillings at the front’ and to ‘make interesting reading for future generations, and a record of the part the regiment took in the war’.27 This is a message reinforced in the editorial three years later in November 1917 when the journal reaffirms its purpose as a record of the battalion’s ‘doings’ and its vital role in both maintaining the esprit de corps (that most uncapturable affect) of those involved in the war effort as well as keeping ‘old Inniskillings in touch with their comrades in various parts of the world’.28 The combination of intentions gives a clear indication of its home-facing audience, its efforts to maintain a community of feeling. There is stability in production values and regularity in issue numbers, which suggest consistent access to the means of production and a relatively constant editorial team. Issues included a range of advertisements from local shops in the Derry area, in Dublin, Belfast and even Inverness in Scotland. These promote military-related supplies for the most part but also ordinary goods, such as safety razors and luxury items, such as Scotch whisky and Eason’s books. The adverts, as well as providing financial support, combine to cultivate a counterbalancing feeling of regular life far from the ruptures of the front, which surface, nonetheless in each issue as ruptures. The journal prints the names of major subscribers, no doubt to encourage others. It is a tactic that appeals to sentiment and pride as selling points and these are affects that permeate the pages of the journal. For instance, the Sprig includes as a regular feature across numerous pages each month a roll call of battalion news for each division, the names of those who have enlisted and those who have been promoted. These elements imply through the consistency of their appearance a sense of permanence and continuity in what was a radically transforming environment as divisions were deployed, as conscriptions became more common and as losses accrued. Clashing affects disrupt the smooth sense of record even in this most apparently stable of journals. The 27 November 1915 issue breaks up the usual roll call of enlistments and names of those accepted to training courses with two stark photographs of devastated and bare landscapes in France, presented without commentary. The images circulate as ambient affect in the context of the affirming progress and expansion of the division rolling out underneath them.29 Categorical, authoritative opinion pieces on the progress of the war sit alongside speculative items that betray anxieties about

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an increasingly unstable world. For example, the third page of the 25 November 1916 issue announces the awarding of a Military Cross to Second Lieutenant H. St C. Row; the results of an inter-company football match (a 5–1 victory for Company 1 over Company 6); and an information piece explaining that the trenches now stretch for 750 miles across Europe so that you might walk underground from the North Sea to the Alps, if you had the leisure time and did not mind ‘dodging shells and bullets’.30 This semi-amused account sits opposite a column entitled ‘War and Insanity’ that strives to reassure those who might have thought ‘war has a tendency to increased lunacy’ that they need not fear. The opposite is in fact the case, for both men and women, the piece avers, according to the annual return from various asylum institutions. The conclusion is reached that ‘instead of causing intellectual breakdown [the war] generates new intellectual energies’ because of the seriousness of life in wartime.31 There is a growing anxiety in the undercurrent of this article about the effects and affects of war. By late 1916 more soldiers were returning from the war with shell shock. The final article in this very issue of the Sprig is a report detailing the Inniskillings’ retreat from Gallipoli in the early months of that year amid a wave of fierce explosions.32 On 1 November 1917 a note tucked away at the bottom of the front page states that owing to the large number of casualties that month, a supplement would have to be published.33 My point here is that despite the efforts at containment, repeatedly expressed as a performed constancy of tone and content in this most stable of journals, clashing affects unsettle the ordered columns and regimental roll calls. Such tonal and genre contradictions are more overtly evident and arguably embraced in trench journals that lack both the stability and consistency of presentation enabled by a permanent base and the buffering security of distance from the front lines. Journals originating at the front share some features with journals such as the Sprig, such as ‘Things we need to know’ columns. Those that are handwritten and duplicated with sheets of carbon paper, typed, or replicated by using stencils, however, as Van Puymbroeck and Van Dijck point out, with their ‘makeshift character – naïve drawings and seemingly improvised content [. . .] foreground their own materiality’ and their sensory quality as textured, tactile objects.34 We have to ask what is it in particular about the makeshift and improvised aspects of the trench journal that makes it distinct from other improvised journals, such as indie magazines? Van Puymbroeck and Van Dijck suggest that ‘the precarious conditions of soldiers at the front’ mean that these journals uniquely ‘serve as carriers for particular emotions and affects’ such as ‘boredom, fear and distress on or near the battlefield’.35 To this I add that the intimacies of trench life not just in its individual precariousness but also in its communal solidarity and its claustrophobia are determining contextual differences. The frequency of particular genre forms, such as the alphabet lists and ‘Things we need to know’ columns, are important information sources in this regard, carrying as they do that embedded incongruity between structural reinforcement through the repetition of familiar intimacies and insider knowledge, while also signalling in their haphazard, random and always shifting content the chaotic nature of those intimacies. Acute affective tensions vibrate on the pages of journals such as the evocatively titled Whizz-Bang (1916), the Dump (1915–17), the Mudhook (1917–19) and the Sling (1917), which carry even in their names situational registers that play on the body, evoking the sensory textures of the trench, its bombs, its mud, its bodily injuries. Stated feelings that circulate around the ongoing tedium of war are an affective fit with a serial

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mode that is defined by ongoingness. The recurrence of specific genre forms noted above leans into that cultivation of familiarity and provides reassurance through continuity, even if expressed as ugly feelings, to use Sianne Ngai’s concept, such as boredom, as is evident in the banality of many of these features.36 The 1 December 1917 issue of the Dump (the journal of the 23rd Division of the British army) includes among its miscellany of typical genres a piece entitled ‘A WONDERFUL DAY’. This comprises a numbered list of twelve trivial remarks, observations and activities, cumulatively capturing the proximities, familiarities and mockery of trench life.37 A list, as an organisational form, implies some type of purpose to its seriality, but as we can see, there is little organisational logic in the actual content of the list:   1 CLAIMS had to go back to his office after dinner.   2 TIBET moved the Mobile with the assistance of ‘Q.’   3 GEORGE HEALTH reported on a camp as thoroughly satisfactory.   4 DADOS said his lorries were not required for stores.   5 ‘B’ did not remain over the walnuts and wine after 9pm.   6 JACK had no staff work to do.   7 SOMEBODY read ‘Comic Cuts.’   8 THE CAMP COMMANDANT declared his intention of settling down in Belgium after the war.   9 ROOKIE bought a new pair of gaiters. 10 FLOSSIE didn’t wear his eyeglass. 11 A famous Brigadier did not go to Paris after coming out of the line. 12 ‘G’ STAFF sent out order without any serial numbers. It concludes ‘Truly a wonderful day, Shall we ever live to see it, I wonder?’38 The ‘list’ genre, like the pervasive ‘alphabet rhymes’ where each letter ‘stands’ for some fact or insight or joke about the company (‘A’ is for. . . and so on all the way to ‘Z’), a ‘favourite soldier genre of ritualized complaining since at least the nineteenth century’, in many instances serves as a means to express the communal and individual identity of their unit as much as to gripe.39 Here, we presume, is the encoding of familiar foibles of the unit. But is the piece ironic or poignant or both? Is it expressive of arch boredom or of longing for ordinariness, or dullness even in what is the overloaded sensory environment of the trenches? Despite the apparent simplicity of the form, the affective range is not fully yielded up to us. Similarly, limericks, popularised in the mid-nineteenth century, appear as naïve poetic forms that can act like affective depth charges. Jibing limericks mocking the enemy are common in most trench journals and work well in the predictable limerick format as the poem builds to its expected punchline. But that sense of anticipation can also be used to surprise and shock with its affective turns, as in this limerick, part of a series of ‘Boche Limericks’ in the Dump, 1 December 1917: There was once an old DEUTSCHER HELD Who perished at POLYGON VELD      But Old Sapper Jones,      As he dug up his bones, Was distressed at the way that he smelled.40

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Both the old Deutscher and the sapper are conjoined by affective scrambling produced through the ambiguous use of the personal pronoun ‘he’ and the passive or active interpretation of ‘smelled’. Like seriality, predictability is part of the relational promise. Here, amid a series of otherwise more typical limericks, the text emphasises the disorienting horror of the putrefying corpse and alludes to the unnatural but sanctioned and necessary encounters with the bodies of the dead that are a horrific part of the sapper’s job. In broader terms, seriality, that ongoing relation with the reader that historically has defined the emotional traction of periodicals, is an acutely bittersweet concept in the context of war on the front line especially. In February 1916, for instance, the editorial team of the Iodine Chronicle (1915–18), the publication of the 1st Canadian Field Ambulance unit, in their regular half-mocking ‘Congratulations’ section send good wishes to their fellow editor at the Listening Post (1915–19), the journal of the 7th Canadian Infantry battalion, on reaching its tenth number. But they add a wry observation in brackets: ‘(We hope that the war will be over before we can get to the 10th number of the “I.C.”).’41 This future-oriented serial logic of the periodical is double-edged in the context of war.42 And the proximity of death as an everyday reality is everywhere apparent even in the most humorous and morale-boosting journals. The contradiction produces clashing affects that we can see on the page: joking titbits and gossip cataloguing the idiosyncrasies of the division in terms that brim with familiar affection and knowingness sit alongside poems that encode the savage destruction of the body. That tenth issue of the Listening Post features the standard war journal genre, the gossipy, jocular ‘Things we want to know’ section (‘What became of the Christmas pudding lost in the Padre’s tent?’; ‘Who was the batman who boiled his officer’s Sam Browne belt? Now being served in the trenches: Boiled belts, Stewed socks, Pickled puttees’).43 This in-joke mocking with its knowing and, as in this last example, gross commentary on trench life constitutes an affective catalogue that is intimate and often ugly. That familiarity takes on a more ominous and wretched charge in the ‘Poet’s Corner’ section that immediately follows, occupying the bottom right corner of this page and spilling onto the next in a purposeful draw of the eye to keep us reading. The featured poem, ‘Reinforcements’, positions the jaded and damaged bodies and minds of an existing unit against the naïve, cocksure bravado of new ‘reinforcements’. The poem opens with a horrific litany of bodily impingement, disaffection and destruction. These two opening verses sit opposite the joke about the missing Christmas pudding: We’ve stood in the mud-filled trenches With water up to our hips, We’ve sickened at a hundred new stenches And shivered, froze blue to the lips We’ve sat through the shrieking silence That stretches between the shells Wet, woeful, weary waiting through An eternity of hells. Far beneath our sodden footboards the German miners mined, They blew us flying heavenwards Shattered, maimed and blind.

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They shelled us sometimes sudden And sometimes not a few, And we grovelled waiting praying As the casualty list grew.44 The unrelenting assault on the senses and the body (subsequent verses include gas attacks, crawling through mud, drinking wretched water) converge on the fear these experienced, beaten and damaged soldiers have that is greater than the terrors they have already endured. It is provoked by the nonchalance of the new arrivals, who ‘sit upon the parapet’ for a joke.45 That fear is knowing the casualty count that lies ahead, a certainty as yet unrecognised by the new recruits, even as they begin to die. The poem reinforces the point made repeatedly by Joanna Bourke in the pointedly titled Dismembering the Male: Between 1914 and 1918, more and more bodies of young, healthy men were at risk of frighteningly new ordeals of mutilation. All were forced to face their fears of physical destruction [. . .] the war magnified the experience of deformity [. . .] The most important point to be made about the male body during the Great War is that it was intended to be mutilated.46 The inevitability of death and bodily destruction pervades the poem in a register that is jarringly discordant with the material surrounding it on the page. This is the contradictory structure of feeling, the organisation of chaotic intimacies, which I have been suggesting defines the war journal as a distinct periodical mode because of the intensity and extremes of its affects. The recognition of the inescapability of wounds and death is given a bleak humorous rendition by the Whizz-Bang in one of the more effective versions of another war journal mode, ‘Sports of the Trenches’, a mock-serious response to the incompatible affects of trench life: boredom and heightened terror. The lead-in explains with arched eyebrow the wish to inform people at home about how soldiers ‘while away many a tedious hour’ when ‘all is quiet on the Western front’.47 What follows is an enumerated list – that mock ordering of chaos – that includes: (1). Dodging the Sausage This game is played between ourselves on one side and the Hun on the other. A loud explosion in your vicinity and you know the wily Bosche has kicked off. Everyone in the trench emerges from dugouts, and peers eagerly at the sky, where every now and then one or more long black missiles can be observed hurtling through the air. The object of the game is to prevent the aforesaid missile from hitting you. If it does hit you, you are immediately disqualified.48 And on it continues in edgy, ironic tones, accumulating examples that emphasise the constant threat to life, the discomfort of the environment with its saturated mud and devastated landscape rendering all as farce. The precise target of these acerbic ironies is not quite clear: the war machine that sent these men to the front? The gauche and simplistic understanding of trench life that is trickling through from the home front? The recent recruits to this regiment who might think it a lark or a sport to sit on

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the parapet? We cannot always know. Rachel Ablow has argued in another context that, just as texts serve as ‘sources of information or even objects of identification’, they can also be ‘barriers, windows, screens’, excluding or hiding as much as revealing.49 Expressed emotion on these pages persists as a vital source of information and a matter of record that undoubtedly offered a sense of consonance or community, consolation and release for some members of the units and battalions that took it upon themselves to produce war journals and to read them. But these journals are also screens, hiding much of the affective dissonances and disidentifications that inevitably circulate in any ‘record’. This chapter has argued for the methodological usefulness of considering affect and emotion as a way of parsing the chaotic intimacies that shape war periodicals, as they have shaped the war. Affect and emotion are central to the communicative capacity of periodicals in ways that are distinct from other print forms. In the context of the First World War, sense experience and intimate encounters were radically intensified. The organisation of war’s intimacies as well as the ruptures in such organisational attempts resonate on the pages of these journals. In them we witness the extremities of order and chaos that constituted the lived realities of the war. The defining features of the periodical as serial, its spatial layout, miscellaneity, compression, seriality-as-temporal-promise, all take on particular affective and emotional dimensions in the context of the life-and-death proximities of war. That the periodical contains, communicates and produces affect is a given. In this chapter, I have sought to parse the differentiated ways affect circulates through these distinctive periodical forms in ways we can sometimes understand, and in ways that will remain beyond our comprehension.

Notes   1. On histories of emotion, see, for example, Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Barbara Rosenwein, ‘Worrying About Emotions in History’, The American Historical Review 107 (2002): 821–45. On theories of the periodical, see Margaret Beetham, ‘Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre’, in Investigating Victorian Journalism, ed. Laurel Brake, Aled Jones and Lionel Madden (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), 9–32; Victorian Periodicals Review 48, no. 3 (2015), special issue on theory; Laurel Brake, ‘Markets, Genres, Iterations’, in Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, ed. Alexis Easley, Andrew King and John Morton (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 237–48; Patrick Collier, ‘What Is Modern Periodical Studies?’, Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 6, no. 2 (2015): 92–111; James Mussell, ‘Cohering Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century: Form, Genre and Periodical Studies’, Victorian Periodicals Review 42, no. 1 (2009): 93–103.   2. Periodicals are textured objects: their page quality, dimensions, graphic layout, genre juxtapositions and typeface all shape their affective traction. Paper quality and texture, ink colouring, journal dimensions and binding practices, though all informing and important aspects of the periodicals’ communicative power, are not consistently catalogued on digital databases and require hands-on experience that has not been possible as part of the research for this chapter because of Covid-related restrictions on travel and access to archives.  3. Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain, and the Great War (London: Reaktion, 1999); Sarah Cole, Modernism, Male Friendship and the First World

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War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Santanu Das, Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).  4. Cole, Modernism, Male Friendship, 138.  5. Cole, Modernism, Male Friendship, 4.   6. Margaret Beetham, ‘Open and Closed: The Periodical as a Publishing Genre’, Victorian Periodicals Review 22, no. 3 (1989): 96–100; James Mussell, ‘Repetition: Or “In Our Last”’, Victorian Periodicals Review 48, no. 3 (2015): 343–58.  7. Berlant, Female Complaint, ix.  8. See, for instance, the work of Beth Gaskell on the military press in the nineteenth century including ‘Bibliographic Issues: Titles, Numbers, Frequencies’, in Researching the NineteenthCentury Periodical Press: Case Studies, ed. Alexis Easley, Andrew King and John Morton (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), 46–59.  9. Das, Touch, 8. 10. James Berkey, ‘Splendid Little Papers from the “Splendid Little War”: Mapping Empire in the Soldier Newspapers of the Spanish-American War’, Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 3, no. 2 (2012): 158–74, here 160. 11. Berkey, ‘Splendid Little Papers’, 160. 12. Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Men at War 1914–1918: National Sentiment and Trench Journalism in France during the First World War, trans. Helen McPhail (Providence, RI: Berg, 1992). 13. Robert L. Nelson, German Soldier Newspapers of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 14. Graham Seal, The Soldiers’ Press: Trench Journals in the First World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), x. 15. Birgit Van Puymbroeck and Cedric Van Dijck, ‘Apollinaire’s Trench Journalism and the Affective Public Sphere’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 60, no. 3 (2018): 269–92, here 278. 16. Bourke, Dismembering the Male, 27. 17. Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 15. 18. Flatley, Affective Mapping, 12. Emphasis in the original. 19. See, for instance, Ruth Leys, ‘The Turn to Affect: A Critique’, Critical Inquiry 37 (spring 2011): 434–72. 20. On combat Gnosticism, see, for instance, James Campbell, ‘Combat Gnosticism: The Ideology of First World War Poetry Criticism’, New Literary History 30, no. 1 (1999): 203–15. 21. Cole, Modernism, Male Friendship, 143. 22. See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 128–35. 23. ‘Redeemed’, The 23rd: the Voice of the Battalion, 31 January 1918, 8. 24. Seal, Soldiers’ Press, 2. 25. Thomas Hardy, ‘Men Who March Away’, All Abaht It: with which is incorporated the ‘Furphy Times’, 1 November 1916, 31. The third last line is interpolated from the first verse of Hardy’s original and replaces Hardy’s ‘Leaving all that here can win us’. This may be a transcription error, an accident of memory or a purposeful repetition of the line that underscores the heightened sense of threat. 26. Linda Hughes, ‘SIDEWAYS! Navigating the Material(ity) of Print Culture’, Victorian Periodicals Review 47, no. 1 (2014): 1–30. 27. ‘Editorial Notes’, Sprig of Shillelagh, 1 November 1914, i. 28. ‘Editorial Notes’, Sprig of Shillelagh, 1 November 1917, i. 29. Sprig of Shillelagh, 27 November 1915, iv. 30. Sprig of Shillelagh, 25 November 1916, iii.

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31. ‘War and Insanity’, Sprig of Shillelagh, 25 November 1916, iv. 32. ‘With the 1st Battalion in Gallipoli and Elsewhere (continued)’, Sprig of Shillelagh, 25 November 1916, back matter, n.p. 33. Sprig of Shillelagh, 1 November 1917, i. 34. Van Puymbroeck and Van Dijck, ‘Apollinaire’s Trench Journalism’, 272. 35. Van Puymbroeck and Van Dijck, ‘Apollinaire’s Trench Journalism’, 270. 36. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 37. See also Guillaume Apollinaire and Cedric Van Dijck, ‘Curiosities from the Front’, PMLA 134, no. 3 (2019): 555–61. 38. ‘A Wonderful Day’, Dump, 1 December 1917, 34. 39. Seal, Soldiers’ Press, 35. 40. ‘Boche Limericks’, Dump, 1 December 1917, 17. 41. ‘Congratulations’, Iodine Chronicle, 6 February 1916, 1. Thirty-four issues of the Listening Post are available at ; six issues of the Iodine Chronicle are available at , accessed 30 June 2021. 42. The phrase ‘seriality’s orientation to the future’ is taken from Elizabeth M. Sheehan, ‘To Exist Serially: Black Radical Magazines and Beauty Culture’, Journal of Modernist Periodical Studies 9, no. 1 (2018): 30–52, here 33. 43. ‘Things we want to know’, Listening Post, 20 January 1916, 51. 44. Herbert Rae, ‘Reinforcements’, Listening Post, 20 January 1916, 51–2. 45. Rae, ‘Reinforcements’, 52. 46. Bourke, Dismembering the Male, 31. Emphasis in the original. 47. P.D.M, ‘Trench Sports’, ‘Whizz-Bang’: A Monthly Journal from the Front, Written and Edited in the Trenches, 1 July 1916, 13. 48. P.D.M, ‘Trench Sports’, 13. 49. Rachel Ablow, ‘Introduction: The Feeling of Reading’, in The Feeling of Reading: Affective Experience in Victorian Literature, ed. Rachel Ablow (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 9.

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5 Memory Hanna Teichler

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n 17 May 1915 John Buchan (1875–1940) reported the following in the London Daily News (1846–1930):

Just over the Diekebusch pond [Dikkebusvijver] there is a wooded slope with a skeleton house at the top of it. That was once the chateau of Hollebeke, and to the left of it is the hamlet of St. Eloi, which we held in November fighting, and again in March in the counter-attack after Neuve Chapelle. There begins the famous salient of Ypres, which is likely to be regarded by future generations as the classic battleground of the British Army. Every field and spur and farmstead is famous.1 With its impressionistic tone, this paragraph reads like the beginning of a fictional text, a novel perhaps, as the gaze of Buchan lingers over the scenery in front of him. As Buchan wrote these lines, the pastoral landscape had already become the site of enduring battles and was utterly transformed by them. There is, arguably, an epic quality to this rendition, as the scene described seems already anchored in the grand ‘messianic’ flux of time that is evoked by the feeling of witnessing a sublime event as it unfolds: ‘Every field and spur and farmstead is famous.’2 This is not a report of facts; it is a testimony to the power of war to transcend individual agency, and to the power of the newspaper medium, as it oscillates between the narrative modes of reporting and representing, to shape the memory of the First World War. Here, the ephemeral, transitory nature of newspaper reporting engages in a fruitful interplay with the desire to frame the war in transcendent, mytho-poetical terms: the Ypres salient is rendered a veritable ‘realm of memory’ – a place and space that is highly symbolic of British First World War cultural memory – as the war is raging on.3 What is particularly notable is the fact that Buchan’s romanticisation of the Ypres battlefields is far removed from the cliché of the Great War as that of ‘rats, gas, mud and blood’ that came to ‘fee[d] a public memory of the war in Britain that focuses on disillusion, trauma and suffering’.4 The Ypres salient, like other battlefield regions such as the Somme, later came to be known as a site of the crushing impact of trench warfare, of years of excessive and incessant shellfire. It came to symbolise the unfathomable number of casualties. In the introduction to Paul Fussell’s seminal study on the memory frameworks of the Great War, Jay Winter summarises this dimension of this particular war in the following manner: ‘War traps the soldier – no longer the hero – in a field of force of overwhelming violence, a place where his freedom of action is less than ours, where death is arbitrary and everywhere.’5 What Winter describes here is a veritable shift in representational paradigms, as this war is not simply and straightforwardly

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remembered as a testimony to the sublime, but caused very real individual harm and psychological damage.6 Glorifying as well as horrifying narratives emerged and existed alongside each other; the magnitude of trauma and loss of life complemented praises of the glory of war. As the war went on, soldiers ennobled by serving in the war were gradually also framed as brutalised individuals.7 A new vocabulary was necessary to make sense of the harmful dimension of this apparently ludicrous war. What is of particular interest to this contribution is how newspapers and periodicals contributed to this shift in paradigm, or more precisely, to the evocation and circulation of a different, un-celebratory perspective on the Great War; from ‘collective mediations on war’ towards ‘the victims of war’.8 Periodical publications with their distinct publication rhythm – whether daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly or annually – form an ideal medium for tracing such evolutions, as they give an insight into the day-to-day, week-to-week discourses of the war. Moreover, as collaborative media, they allow room for dialogue and conflicting discourses. This analysis is written on the basis of a selective reading of certain periodicals – first and foremost the Daily News and the Daily Mirror (1903–), but also smaller (and more rural) periodicals – and offers a glimpse into ‘untilled research lands’: the aim is to analyse and understand the periodical press as memory medium or ‘mnemonic network’ and to ask how these initially competing discourses contributed to the emergence of mnemonic metonyms such as ‘shell shock’.9 Shell shock provides one of the narrative frameworks to which Jay Winter and Paul Fussell have drawn attention. It became a signifier, a catchall to evoke a specific war memory, that of returning soldiers who were for various reasons unfit for duty and civil life. This ‘condition’ was initially met with ignorance, if not ridicule, yet not only was it gradually recognised as one of the most emblematic effects of the trench war, but it also developed a particular ‘afterlife’: shell shock can be understood as one of the formative memory discourses that paved the way to frame and understand (war) trauma as a cultural and mnemonic force. The emergence of shell shock as a psychological and medical condition could be set in relation to notions of trauma as it is constructed and represented in cultural productions, including periodicals, novels and plays – perhaps even as (cultural) trauma’s mnemonic predecessor.10 Shell shock, as a medical condition with a plethora of symptoms and individual cases, in a sense coagulated into a term which came to represent a collective condition – the traumatic dimension of modern trench warfare. Shell shock certainly lost its nuances in this process; only in the shape of a mnemonic metonym could it circulate across different mediums, ‘travel’ to the present, and still contain meaning. The study of wartime press coverage enables us to see these mnemonic metonyms, terms that become associated with a wide range of symptoms, emerging.11 Due to the rapid pace of news cycles and the limited attention span of a newspaper readership, war press coverage was invested in condensing and compressing complex narratives into mnemonic metonyms. A metonymy is a figure of speech that uses the name of one thing (Vimy, for example) for another with which it is associated (battle, the Western Front, trench warfare, etc.). Complex narratives are effectively encoded and translated into denotatively rich terms, and thus come to represent wide-ranging yet collectively negotiated meanings. Metonymies acquire a mnemonic dimension when they represent a specific brand of cultural memory or evoke a specific type of remembering by being associated with a particular condition, place, experience or trait, in this case

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the First World War. The process of encoding and negotiation of the meaning of such mnemonic metonyms can be traced through an analysis of the periodical press, and will be described here for the notion of shell shock. Before we embark on an analysis of a selective body of periodicals, we need a word on the primary sources.12 Two main primary sources form the basis of this chapter. The Daily Mirror is the ‘longest-running tabloid in the UK, with a varied and sometimes controversial history’.13 The paper was founded in 1903 and sold roughly one million copies a day in 1914.14 According to the British Newspaper Archive (BNA), the Daily Mirror originally targeted a middle-class readership, but shifted towards the working class after the First World War. The London Daily News is known for its famous founding editor, Charles Dickens.15 Although he was in office for only a few weeks, he continued to write columns for the paper. The BNA states that, ‘founded in 1846, [it] aim[ed] to provide a Liberal rival to the morning Conservative newspapers, most notably The Times’.16 In 1890 it is said to have sold more than 93,000 copies, and offered ‘exceptional coverage of overseas news’.17 The focus of the paper ‘remained the provision of serious news’ until it was eventually disbanded in 1930.18 Both newspapers qualify as sources for this analysis not only because they were widely read during the 1910s but also because they catered towards the working and middle classes and were thus able to reach and represent a significant part of British society. The working and middle class were central to assuring the acceptance of this increasingly detrimental war, and formed the social background from which most of the common soldiers came. The periodical press helped coin the metonym ‘shell shock’ and facilitated the public recognition of shell shock as one of the lasting and detrimental effects of the war. This shift of paradigms can thus be read as an exemplary case of the victimological turn in memory cultures and of the practices analysed by Winter. As Winter argues, ‘it is in the Great War that we can see some of the most powerful impulses and sources of the later memory boom, a set of concerns with which we still live’.19 To this, I would like to add that it is within the periodical press that we find the beginning of a significant shift of perspective that is characteristic of the emergence of this first ‘memory boom’: the victimological turn. Shell shock is just one example from a range of mnemonic metonyms that the war press, with its penchant for condensation and compression, helped to create.

The Periodical as Memory Medium How do we represent the past to ourselves and others and what kind of (selective) process governs the representation of the many pasts we remember, inhabit or forget? When, where, how and why do these representations shift, and how do they relate to individual and collective identities? Are we obliged to remember certain pasts, as they hold ‘lessons’ for the present and the future? These and other questions govern the field of memory studies and are also central to this analysis. The study of memory is as much about time, temporality and temporal regimes as it is about the meaning we attach to the past and its representations. At first glance, to understand the periodical as a memory medium appears to be a misguided premise, as perhaps the most prominent characteristic of a periodical is its ephemerality. An issue appears and almost instantaneously becomes ‘yesterday’s news’. As Margaret Beetham poignantly argues, the periodical genre is the most time-oriented

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print form.20 As such, periodicals create and function according to temporal regimes, as ‘every periodical marks and is marked by time’.21 They appear at regular intervals, reference a particular date and ‘claim to be of the moment’, as they purport to be ‘new’ or ‘news’ or ‘now’.22 Taken at face value, then, periodicals are ‘ephemeral’ and instantly become ‘obsolete’, as the day or the news they reference comes to pass.23 Still, periodical publications combine various timescales. They cater to the organisation of time and collectivity in many ways. The very act of producing an issue, for instance, is regulated by temporal constraints such as deadlines for authors and editors, the timetables of print and distribution, as well as the potentially limited time that readers invest in reading – the very form of the periodical ‘invites a selective form of reading’.24 The present act of reading – reports from the battlefields, for instance – is supplemented by the potential pastness of the actual account. The soldiers who are featured as protagonists in these reports, whose stories are reported back home as news, might already have perished, or the situation on the battlefield might have already shifted in ways that render the news item literally ‘yesterday’s news’. In this sense, the periodical invokes a present, a ‘nowness’ and a ‘newness’, to use Beetham’s terms, that is a fiction. The periodical’s present is ‘ever-receding’ and withholds itself from anyone’s grasp.25 In the process of production and reception, periodicals are, thus conceived, as much of the present as they are about a fictional, mediated past that is presented as present, new or ‘now’. Moreover, periodical publications point to another characteristic that is important for the analysis of periodicals as memory medium: each issue is by default part of a series, of a continuing and continued narrative that is shaped by the political agenda of the newspaper, by its editors, authors and lastly also by its readership.26 The inherent promise of the periodical that there will be an issue tomorrow, that there will be a next, also hints at a certain futurity that is embedded in the periodical form. In other words, periodicals are ‘of the moment’ as much as they are ‘of a series’.27 With a view to the emergence of a particular brand of First World War memory, a memory culture and practice that is for the first time centrally characterised by the figure of the victim, one can see how these discourses and tropes became ‘newsworthy’, to and in the periodical press, and how specific tropes were coined, popularised and circulated.

From the ‘Great War’ to ‘Shell Shock’ The Ypres salient in particular, and the Western Front more generally, have gained lasting fame as sites of carnage. Since 1927 the Menin Gate Memorial in central Ypres has borne witness to the unfathomable death toll that the Great War caused to the Commonwealth forces.28 Every evening at 8 p.m., a moving yet also peculiar ceremony takes place to commemorate the fallen. Traffic is stopped, the ‘Last Post’ bugle call resonates within the stone walls of the Menin Gate, and as wreaths are laid, the fourth verse of Laurence Binyon’s (1869–1943) poem ‘For the Fallen’ is recited: They shall not grow 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.29

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This poem was first published in The Times (1785–) on 21 September 1914. It glorifies a heroic death on the battlefield and establishes the ones who are ‘left to grow old’ to be the guardians of their memories. In connection to a ‘duty to remember’ paradigm that the poem hints at, of particular interest is the way in which, according to Jay Winter, the images, languages, and practices which appeared during and in the aftermath of the Great War shaped the ways in which future conflicts were imagined and remembered. It is in this sense that I refer to the survivors of the Great War as the first (though not the last) ‘generation of memory’ in the twentieth century.30 At a very early stage in the war, Binyon’s poem centres on the fallen as casualties, but they are framed as part of a grand scheme of heroic sacrifice that comes with the territory: to fight a morally just and justified war. The fact that this poem was first published in a widely read newspaper is crucial for an analysis of the periodical press as mnemonic medium: this artistic rendition of the war seeks to cover and ‘convey the emotional tenor of an experience’, in an attempt to add another perspective to reports from the front, editorials and other news items which were generally interested in recording and representing ‘the journalistic truth’ of war experience.31 Binyon’s poem provides a different kind of ‘truth’, one that is oriented towards providing solace and reassurance that the anonymous suffering and death of the individual soldier will be recognised and honoured by those who come after, by the guardians of memory. What we can see here is how the periodical press with its different forms of writing, reporting, representing and imagining is invested in weaving together myth and memory. The Great War is put in a symbolic and mythological framework that allows for the abstraction of a certain, arguably universal kind of war experience; a heroic death on the battlefield. Important for Binyon, and by extension for his readers, is not ‘whether mud, blood, and horror formed the everyday experience of the majority of soldiers’, but that this is the qualitative, durable and ultimately transcendental ‘truth’ about the war.32 This war was to be fought by men who were somewhat larger than life, by ‘a soldier in full control of himself, or strong power of will, [who] would be able to cope with the experience of battle’.33 War, in this vein, ‘was the supreme test of manliness’.34 The Call to Enlist below, published by the Weekly Dispatch (1801–1961) in 1915, echoes these aspirations: 5 Questions to men who have not enlisted 1 If you are physically fit and between 19 und 38 years of age, are you really satisfied with what you are doing to-day? 2 Do you feel happy as you walk along the streets and see other men wearing the King’s uniform? 3 What will you say in years to come when people ask you – ‘Where did you serve in the Great War?’ 4 What will you answer when your children grow up and say, ‘Father, why aren’t you a soldier, too?’ 5 What would happen to the Empire if every man stayed at home like you? Your King and Country Need You. ENLIST TO-DAY.35

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In a perfidious manner, this call draws on a moral impetus to join the British armed forces. What is most notable here is the gendered expectations that shine through, the way in which the call to arms is underpinned by the ideal of a man – a soldier, a father and a patriot. Soldiers are archetypically male, heroic, strong and heterosexual. With such characteristic traits, certain standards are supposed to be met. As George L. Mosse explains, [s]ince the beginning of the last century the images of manliness as an ideal had taken on firm contours – there was a consensus in western and central Europe about what it meant to be a ‘true man’ – and about the function he fulfilled as exemplar and guardian of the society’s values and coherence in an age of accelerated change. Such a true man was a man of action who controlled his passions, and who in his harmonious and well-proportioned bodily structure expressed his commitment to moderation and self-control.36 Such a reading chimes in with conventional war representations which were interested in conveying ‘news from the frontlines’ and a sense of what Tracey Loughran calls the ‘timeless truth’ of this particular war: ‘Men of action’ were sent into the trenches, heroes emerged.37 Or, more polemically speaking, ‘men of action’ were sent into the trenches, never to emerge again, but to stay on the battlefield as dead heroes. Yet there was an increasing tension between such mythological understandings of the role of the (death of the) soldier, and the realities of industrialised warfare. The press, it can be argued, was among the first venues where such tensions emerged and were made accessible to a wider public. See, for example, how on 22 August 1914 the Grantham Journal (1854–), a rural English newspaper, retells the story of the German failure to seize Liège by a coup de main. The fiasco cost the enemy 25,000 men, killed, wounded, and prisoners [. . .] But these losses, severe as they were, would have mattered little to the Germans had they only succeeded in their original design [. . .] Not only did the ‘great plan’ miscarry, but on the whole it is clear that the Germans have had much the worst of the various encounters which have so far taken place.38 The celebratory tone of this report is oddly punctuated by a reference to ‘various encounters which have taken place’, which can be considered a veiled allusion to the incessant shell barrage on the front lines, and its resulting in enormous loss of life on both sides. The framework of interpretation is nonetheless clear: scheming Germany was defeated, yet it would have sacrificed its last man to gain a victory, and this thus consolidates its status as a worthy enemy. There is no mention at all of British casualties, nor is information provided as to what the ‘fiasco’ eventually resulted in. What is exemplified and evident here is that the periodical press, with its mandate and desire to report back from the front lines, was also determining the default lines along which this war was understood. The press, which was also subjected to censorship, was invested in myth making as much as in reporting.

A New Perspective? Shell Shock as Mnemonic Metonym Yet as the war progressed, note how the Daily News introduces the fact that all fighting forces were in it for the long haul, and that this war came with a radically different

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set of experiences for the combatant. The ‘Great War’ had become, in the words of the London Daily News, the ‘Great Trench War’: Machinery for rifles and machine guns took eight or nine months to construct before a single one could be turned out. The Germans had undoubtedly anticipated the character of the war as no other Power had done. They realized it was going to be a great trench war, and they produced an adequate supply of machinery applicable to those conditions. The professional mind was very conservative, and there were competent soldiers even to-day who assumed that this phase was a purely temporary one. [Lloyd George] had no doubt how much time was lost owing to that obsession.39 In this passage, memory tropes that impact contemporary memory discourses and practices of the Great War are clearly visible. Among these is the dawning sense of ‘disillusionment’ – the war will not be swiftly won, the ‘great German plan’ does not seem to be such a catastrophe after all, and the British forces (especially the higherranking officers, it seems) have little to offer to counter German war prowess at this point. Despair and disappointment are almost palpable here. The mythologised version of this war – which was also in part created by the periodical press – was to a great extent irreconcilable with the realities of ‘mud, blood, and gas’: the trench war and its deadly tools (rifles, shells, machine guns) accompanied celebratory, ‘messianic’ representations of this modern war and emerged alongside them, yet gradually came to stand for ‘a new kind of war’ and war experience, as Jay Winter argues.40 The periodical press, it seems, was caught between its own poles: on the one hand, the press with its relation to a particular ‘nowness’ and seriality was interested in conveying information about the war. On the other hand, the press also offered different and at times competing interpretational and representational frameworks through its different textual forms (editorial, poetry and other forms of artistic writing, reports, etc.). The conventional interpretational structures were increasingly put under pressure and required adjustment as the particular nature of this war came to be recognised. Universalistic and ‘messianic’ narrative frameworks – although they never fully disappeared – were less and less suitable for writing about this war. Consider how the Boston Guardian and Lincolnshire Independent (1864–1958) picks up on this sense of disillusionment, which was already circulating in 1915, in a striking manner: [T]ake the reports of the Times correspondents in Brussels, where refugees and wounded soldiers have told part of the story of Liège. ‘Every now and then a shell would come screaming over the town and fall upon the roofs of the houses. It would explode with terrible force, shattering walls and floors, and leaving a heap of ruins. From these houses one heard the screams of the injured and dying, the shrill alarm of little children. Distraught women rushed into the street [. . .]’ There, in a line or two, we get the true story of the glory and greatness of war – a fitting business for fiends, but not for men.41 This opinion piece continues to argue for a considerable improvement of the dire economic situation in Britain itself: ‘Sound schemes of work will help preserve the health, dignity, and morale of the people, and will prove an additional defence at this time of

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crisis.’ The ever-growing demand of the war machine to (forcibly) enlist young men left a considerable impact on the employment market back home. As the war progressed, it became evident that a vast majority of the relatively young and ‘physically fit’ men that the Call to Enlist, quoted earlier in this chapter, addressed would be tied up in the theatres of war for the foreseeable future. What is most notable about both excerpts quoted here is how the experience and effects of shellfire have already become characteristic, if not emblematic of the war. The acoustics of this industrialised war are particular and unique, and thus gradually become a returning motif of war coverage. One can find many more reports from the front lines in which the nature of warfare (shell barrage) and the realities of trench warfare become important items to report on. These more sombre if not apocalyptic renditions appeared alongside efforts to situate this war in the grand scheme of a celebratory national history. John Buchan, the war reporter who gave us the pastoral rendition of the Ypres salient at the very beginning of this contribution, for instance, was far less poetic when he reported back from a ‘A VISIT TO YPRES. ONLY A SKELETON OF THE CITY LEFT’ only a few weeks after he published his epic rendition.42 Ernest Smith indirectly refers to the increasingly detrimental effect of trench warfare on the average soldier by publishing a letter from a German soldier in the Daily News & Reader (1912–28):43 The letter concludes with an admission that the shock tactics employed up to the present have led to heavy loss of life: ‘We advanced as if we were at the Imperial manouvres [sic], and not at war. That cost lives; it has already cost us many, and will still cost us an enormous number [. . .] You can hear the fire, you can hear the bullets whizzing, but you cannot see where the shots are coming from.’44 Represented as a ‘Letter Captured on the Battlefield’, the passage seemingly provides a view into the psyche and morale of the enemy. What is so striking is that, through the back door, a British readership is confronted (once again) with the nature of that ‘Great War’ as an annihilating force. What is more, the letter invokes the shellfire and the accompanying sound patterns as a characteristic experience of the war. This trench war, as gradually became clear to the readership at home, was not to be won on an open battlefield, where one soldier bravely fights against the enemy, but was an uncanny force that had become somewhat detached from the human agent, whose life it claimed nonetheless. It was a war of machines and artillery, and did not seem to care about the ‘ideal of a man’ or his balanced physique. A different figure thus came to emerge alongside the brave hero. Consider in this regard Geoffrey Young’s report, ‘The Exploding Shells’, published in the Daily News as early as 24 September 1914: This [battle] was [. . .] the second shock of reality in all the two months of warfare – Louvain was the first. The familiar sight of dead and shattered bodies passes unrealized. There is nothing of the man who lived, even if we have known him well, left in such broken remnants. What he meant or what he produced are no longer there. But to see a dead or an injured child [. . .] is to see the murder of men’s souls: the defacing of the ideal which men live and die to produce, to conceive, and to leave as their contribution to the eternal principles of beauty and continuance. What has produced this wanton, deliberate destruction? [. . .] On

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the spot there seemed to be no military excuse, of tactics or precaution. It looked like the irresponsible outrage of a tipsy child with a hammer.45 Again, and for propagandistic reasons, the nature of this war is attributed to German aggression and despicable tactics, but the carnage, the apocalyptic quality of ‘war reality’, is closely tied to the shell and its devastating power of destruction. The shell was such an integral if not characteristic element of this war that soldiers coined nicknames such as ‘Jack Johnsons’, ‘Black Marias’, ‘Portmanteaux’ and ‘Wolly Bear’ for the various types of ammunition.46 This increasing visibility and circulation of the shell and its characteristics in the periodical press were accompanied by the rise of a figure that was, as Winter and others have argued, not as prominent an agent in previous wars: the afflicted soldier with a wide range of different symptoms.47 A reporter with the initials F. J. H. wrote the following remarkable opinion piece for the Pall Mall Gazette (1865–1923) in January 1915: British courage has been proved in the fiercest fires of conflict, to a degree to which it has never been subjected before [. . .]. [F]ullblooded manhood has made light of the worst horrors of modern trench fighting. Many go through the most astonishing experiences from bullet, shot, and shell, from mud, rain and snow, without flinching and without hurt; others are made, in spite of themselves, to suffer acute agonies from the shock of the most violent warfare ever waged. Many a smart, well-set-up-soldier has come back from the firing-line with his nerve gone, shattered by the detonation of monstrous missiles bursting around him for hours at a time, with his ear drum burst, or his optic nerve numbed [. . .] It may be that such victims of the destructive effects of the modern artillery are not at a high proportion of the wounded, but they are numerous enough to present already a serious problem to the philanthropist and the social worker, for they are as little fit for work of any kind as they are for further soldiering.48 Here, the reader bears witness to the struggle of myth and reality: the ‘firm image of manliness’ as embodied by a soldier, who was cast as such through newspapers among other media, seems to deviate from the image of an ideal, transcendental figure that was part and parcel of the cultural memory of previous wars.49 This paragraph is one of the earlier mentions of a particular condition that is the result of this ‘most violent warfare ever waged’: shell shock.50 As George L. Mosse outlines, Shell-shock was one of the most widespread battlefield injuries during the first world war: it seemed unlike any of the other wounds contracted in the war, an injury without any bodily signs, a mass outbreak of a mental disorder [. . .] Shellshock, in reality, was not as vague a disease as it seemed at the time; rather, as we look upon the phenomenon from a historical perspective, it was an injury, which, while raising disturbing medical questions, was easily co-opted by traditional cultural prejudice which, so it was thought, could provide it with a readily understood context.51 An ever-increasing number of soldiers returned from the European theatres of war fundamentally changed and, as it came to be, mentally challenged. The periodical press,

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with its mandate to report from the trenches, was again the venue where different narrative modes and different ideologies came to intersect: on the one hand, the increasing number of severely damaged returnees from the front lines could not be ignored. On the other hand, newspaper coverage was also interested in striking a balance between reporting and framing, to integrate this war into a cultural identity and, ultimately, memory that was detached from the struggle in the trenches, and more focused on the bigger, celebratory, timeless idea of war. There are countless examples in which periodicals – from an established voice such as the Pall Mall Gazette to a local publication such as the Faringdon Advertiser (1862– 1942) – reported on individual stories of soldiers who came home as ‘Wrack of War’, with their ‘nerves gone’:52 [Six soldiers] were completely deaf and four of them were quite dumb, several having been in this condition from three to four months. The woebegone little party was quickly put under treatment, says the Daily News, and by eleven o’clock the soldiers were all cured and left for their military hospital, gaily chatting and congratulating each other; they are now undergoing a rest cure which will prevent relapse to their serious condition.53 One obviously needs to read the part about the miraculous and speedy recovery with a pinch of salt, but it is evident from this passage (and many such others) that the phenomenon of soldiers with a specific set of symptoms could no longer be ignored. What is evident here is the fact that this emerging discourse is not so much interested in the intricacies and nuanced representations of a medical condition, as one might expect, but in the emergent social condition of victimhood. Tracey Loughran explains: Once a set of symptoms began to be described as shell shock, they not only assumed new importance, but attained a quasi-autonomous existence. The act of naming was significant, not least because ‘shell shock’ posited a shell explosion as the central etiological event. [Charles S. Myers, who brought significant attention to the term ‘shell shock’ in 1915] was vague as to the details of the relationship between shock and shells, describing the symptoms as ‘functions’ and noting their similarity to hysteria, but declining to offer conclusions as to whether the symptoms originated in physical damage [. . .] In this use, the term ‘shell shock’ connected certain symptoms found in soldiers with the effects of the destructive technologies of modern warfare, but did not provide the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of this relation.54 To negotiate the ‘how’ and ‘why’ was left to the imagination (and sometimes knowledge) of newspaper editors. Consider how the Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette (1873–1962) attempts to grasp and frame shell shock: When a big shell explodes, it creates a sudden and very great pressure in the surrounding air. This pressure caused ‘shell shock’ from which thousands of soldiers have suffered during this war. Though there is not the slightest sign of a bruise or injury in any way, yet men have been completely incapacitated for months after

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a big shell has burst near them. Sometimes, indeed, the sudden air pressure has been so [. . .] that men have been killed outright from it [. . .] In nearly every case, indeed, the eyesight is affected, and does not become normal until months after.55 One can firmly grasp the struggle to make sense of a set of conditions that was undeniably brought about by the war, yet was also resistant to the usual popularmedical definitions of physical harm. Jay Winter argues that shell shock, as a term, ‘took on a notation which moved from the medical to the metaphysical. In one set of contexts, the term had a specific location, documented in medical files, in asylum records and by pension boards.’56 The arguably frugal attempts to frame shell shock as a purely medical condition is evidenced by countless small news items on individual soldiers who returned from the front only to be confined to a hospital, suffering from shell shock. The Daily Mirror, for example, provides us with an insight into Private William Young’s story. Under a blurry photograph of what seems to be a boy, the caption reads: ‘Private William Young, who is in hospital suffering from Shell Shock. He is only fifteen.’57 What we can discern here is a tendency to search for a new vocabulary, a new way of framing the war experience, as the effects of the ‘medical condition’ of war trauma could no longer be ignored. The emergence of shell shock as a catchall was thus more representative of the increasing visibility of ‘shell-shocked’ soldiers than a medical definition or discourse. Winter explains: Everyone knew that the war was traumatic; the question is, what was the appropriate language in which to express that fact? In Britain a political discourse was unavailable for the expression of the soldiers’ point of view about the damage the war had caused to many of the men in uniform, whether or not they were physically disabled. The term ‘shell-shock’ denoted a violent physical injury, albeit of a special kind. That injury was validated by the term, enabling many people and their families to bypass the stigma associated with terms like ‘hysteria’ or ‘neurasthenia’ connoting a condition arising out of a psychological vulnerability. ‘Shell-Shock’ was a vehicle at one and the same time of consolidation and legitimation.58 Here, Winter claims that the emergence of the notion of shell shock enabled the public to reconcile with a specific type of war experience and impact. Shell shock thus became a sociocultural reference much more than a medical one. As a result, its conceptual borders remained vague, yet the experience of physically and mentally injured soldiers and their visibility in the public sphere was given a name, and was condensed into a metonym. The periodical press as a publication form and a mnemonic medium contributed to the emergence, formation and circulation of the mnemonic metonym shell shock, as the periodical medium is invested in coining phrases and finding a language to express social phenomena and topoi that relate to the everyday experiences of its readers.

Conclusion In her seminal contribution on the development of the ‘historical disease’ of shell shock, Tracey Loughran succinctly asks:

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hanna teichler If it is accepted that war can cause suffering, and that psychological pain is one constant in the experience of suffering [. . .] why does it matter what we call the pain, or what other symptoms it involved or reactions it provoked? The simplest answer is, of course, that it is important to know not only that the war caused suffering, but what form this suffering took, how it was understood, and what its consequences were. It is impossible to approximate any kind of understanding about the experience or ‘meaning’ of the suffering without this knowledge.59

It is in this vein that this chapter has undertaken an analysis of the periodical press of 1914–18 as mnemonic medium. As has been argued elsewhere, the First World War with its hitherto unseen scale of destruction and victimisation introduced the figure of the war victim as one of the most formative agents of remembrance into public discourse and cultural memory. This alternative perspective on the concept of war and how it was supposed to be remembered came with the need to find forms, concepts and a language that expressed this shift. The periodical press was part and parcel of this process. The very generic make-up of the daily press provided the space to find this new vocabulary: daily reports were bound to the duty to inform the readership about the latest developments on the front lines, yet were also invested in placing the war within its mythological, even mytho-poetical, transcendental framework. However, once the growing number of impaired returnees from the front lines could no longer be downplayed or ignored, one can witness the emergence of a discourse on the effects of war on the soldier. In this sense, periodicals both reflect the parameters of a history of the Great War and its tropes, and help coin them: more complex narratives are condensed into catchwords that can, on the one hand, be easily related to specific experiences (shell shock, Vimy, Somme, etc.) and, on the other, allow the periodical as a serial medium to continue certain narrative threads.

Notes   1. John Buchan, ‘British Front in the West’, Daily News, 17 May 1915, 5.   2. On messianic time, see Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History [1942] (New York: Classic Books America, 2009).   3. Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).   4. Ross Wilson, ‘Framing the Great War in Britain: Modern Mediated Memories’, in Remembering the First World War, ed. Bart Ziino (New York: Routledge, 2015), 59–73, here 60. See also Daniel Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory (London: Hambledon, 2005).   5. Jay Winter, ‘Introduction’, in Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory [1975] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), xi.  6. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory.  7. Jay Winter, Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).  8. Winter, Remembering War, 1.  9. Cf. John Fagg et al., ‘Introduction: Networks and the Nineteenth Century Periodical’, American Periodicals 23, no. 2 (2013): 93–104, here 94. 10. On trauma and memory, see Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), and Lucy Bond and Stef Craps, Trauma (London: Taylor and Francis, 2020).

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11. On the idea of metonymies of the Great War, see also Wilson, ‘Framing the Great War’. 12. While this chapter was conceptualised and written the Covid-19 pandemic was in full spate, and my initial plan to travel to London and visit the British Library was thus hamstrung. The only proper access to a newspaper archive was granted by the British Newspaper Archive. This online archive is steadily growing, but not all periodicals are available. It is particularly regrettable that I was unable to access any soldier newspapers. In this vein, the selection of periodicals that form the primary body of this chapter is also to a great extent shaped by availability and accessibility. I am indebted to the Frankfurt Humanities Research Centre (FZHG) for providing funding for my research. 13. The British Newspaper Archive (BNA), ‘Daily Mirror’, , accessed 29 June 2021. 14. BNA, ‘Daily Mirror’. See also Florian Keisinger, ‘Press/Journalism’, 1914–1918 online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer and Bill Nasson (Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin, 2014), , accessed 21 September 2021. 15. The British Newspaper Archive, ‘London Daily News’, , accessed 29 June 2021. 16. BNA, ‘London Daily News’. 17. BNA, ‘London Daily News’. 18. BNA, ‘London Daily News’. 19. Cf. also Martin Hoondert et al., eds, Cultural Practices of Victimhood (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021). 20. Margaret Beetham, ‘Time: Periodicals and the Time of the Now’, Victorian Periodicals Review 48, no. 3 (2015): 323–42, here 324. 21. Beetham, ‘Time’, 325. 22. Beetham, ‘Time’, 325. 23. Margaret Beetham, ‘Open and Closed: The Periodical as Publishing Genre’, Victorian Periodicals Review 22, no. 3 (1989): 96–100, here 96. 24. Beetham, ‘Open and Closed’. 25. Beetham, ‘Time’, 327. 26. Beetham, ‘Time’, 327. 27. Beetham, ‘Time’, 327. 28. Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial, Commonwealth War Graves, , accessed 28 June 2021. 29. The Last Post Ceremony, Ieper-Ypres, Menin Gate, , accessed 28 June 2021. 30. Winter, Remembering War, 1. 31. Tracey Loughran, ‘Shell Shock, Trauma, and the First World War: The Making of a Diagnosis and its Histories’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 67, no. 1 (2010): 94–119, here 97. 32. Loughran, ‘Shell Shock’, 98. 33. George L. Mosse, ‘Shell-Shock as Social Disease’, Journal of Contemporary History 25, no. 1 (2000): 101–8, here 104. 34. Mosse, ‘Shell-Shock as Social Disease’, 104. 35. ‘Enlist Today’, Weekly Dispatch, 24 January 1915, 2. 36. Mosse, ‘Shell-Shock as Social Disease’, 101. 37. Loughran, ‘Shell Shock’, 100. 38. ‘The Great War’, Grantham Journal, 22 August 1914, 7. 39. ‘The Great Trench War’, London Daily News, 24 June 1915, 2.

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40. Jay Winter, ‘Shell-Shock and the Cultural History of the Great War’, Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 1 (2000): 7–11, here 7. See also Wilson, ‘Framing the Great War’, 71. 41. ‘Notes on the War’, Boston Guardian and Lincolnshire Independent, 2 January 1915, 5. 42. John Buchan, ‘Deserted Ypres’, London Daily News, 22 May 1915, 5. 43. The Daily News & Reader was the name of the London Daily News from 1912 to 1928. 44. Ernest Smith, ‘GERMAN OFFICER WRITES HOME. Letter Captured on the Battlefield’, Daily News & Reader, 17 August 1914, n.p. 45. Geoffrey Young, ‘Invader’s Wanton Display of Vandalism’, London Daily News, 24 September 1914, 5. 46. ‘Lessons in Shells and Shrapnel’, Nottingham Evening Post, 29 January 1915, 3. 47. See Charles S. Myers, Shell Shock in France, 1914–1918 [1940] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Peter Leese, Shell Shock: Traumatic Neurosis and the British Soldiers of the First World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); and Fiona Reid, Broken Men: Shell Shock, Treatment and Recovery in Britain 1914–1930 (London: Bloomsbury, 2021). 48. ‘Wrack of War’, Pall Mall Gazette, 30 January 1915, 5. 49. Mosse, ‘Shell-Shock as Social Disease’, 102. 50. The term shell shock was in all probability not coined by Charles Myers, but he was the first to use it prominently in an essay on this condition published in the medical journal The Lancet. From here, the notion took on several meanings and referred to a wide range of symptoms and afflictions. Charles Myers, ‘A Contribution to the Study of Shell Shock: Being an Account of Three Cases of Loss of Memory, Vision, Smell, and Taste, Admitted into the Duchess of Westminster’s War Hospital, Le Touquet’, Lancet, 1915, 1, 316–20. 51. Mosse, ‘Shell-Shock as Social Disease’, 101. 52. ‘Wrack of War’, Pall Mall Gazette, 12 June 1915, 5. 53. ‘Shell-Shock Sufferers’, Faringdon Advertiser, 17 June 1916, n.p. 54. Loughran, ‘Shell Shock’, 105. 55. ‘What Shell Shock Is’, Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette, 19 June 1916, 6. 56. Winter, ‘Shell-Shock’, 7. 57. ‘All Have Done Brave Deeds’, Daily Mirror, 18 September 1916, 7. 58. Winter, ‘Shell-Shock’, 9. 59. Loughran, ‘Shell Shock’, 114.

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6 Popular Culture Maaheen Ahmed

I

n addition to witnessing ruptures on several levels, from the cultural to the sociopolitical, the early decades of the twentieth century also coincided with an unprecedented rise in publishing for specific readerships, including children.1 This burgeoning offer of children’s magazines continued through the First World War. Turning to the French context as a particularly rich and varied source of children’s periodicals, this chapter contextualises the magazines’ relationship to popular children’s culture and the broader media context that was increasingly enraptured by images.2 Focusing on the girls’ magazines, La Semaine de Suzette (1905–60) and Fillette (1909–64) and their star protagonists, Bécassine and Lili, it delineates their contrasting mediation of the war: both magazines domesticated the war for child readers, offering a means for them to participate in, or escape from, the turbulence around them.3 Much has already been written about children’s magazines during the First World War and wartime childhood.4 Given their popularity, long lives and their catering to two very different classes of children, Semaine de Suzette and Fillette have also already been compared in the context of the Great War.5 Unsurprisingly, scholars focus on the transmission of propaganda and nationalism, omnipresent in the wartime publications. Unpacking the diverse forms of propaganda seeping through the magazines, this chapter adopts a two-pronged critical approach to paint a more holistic picture focusing on serialities within and beyond the magazine. In doing so, it highlights connections and ruptures with broader tendencies in children’s magazine publishing (protagonist types, gendered content). While childhood was recognised as a stage in forming the future adult, adolescence was still a blurry concept.6 Children’s publications during the First World War usually strove to cater to both child and youth readerships. In wartime these children were potential soldiers or women who would help their soldiers at home but also close to the front. During such moments of crisis, the children’s magazines rallied behind the nation, providing emotional support while maintaining a profitable commercial activity. Far from excluding the possibility of emotional and affective connections, commercial products such as magazines reinforce it through their timeliness, the openclosed nature of the periodical and the tessellation which extends beyond the magazine covers.7 Multiple serialities form the node of these aspects. Magazines exemplify the logics of ‘serial communication’. The war period was still part of the early days of a practice Matthieu Letourneux traces back to the nineteenth century, ‘when long serialized novels were adapted for the stage or provided motifs for wallpapers and decorated plates’.8 He adds: ‘our quotidian reality has inherited the long history of these practices and the layering of their imaginaries since there is a

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close connection between an increasingly prevalent media culture, consumerism and the development of serial practices’.9 In tracing the rise of a globalising visual culture as early as the 1910s, Letourneux establishes a triad of interlinked facets of popular culture: consumerist drives, industrialisation and standardisation of creative practices in popular media and serial dynamics. The children’s periodicals and their protagonists, which lead a multidimensional existence that continues beyond the magazines, are heavily informed by this triad and participate in an elaborate network of children’s entertainment, comfort, instruction and, with the outbreak of the war, propaganda and mobilisation. The republication of the magazine’s comics into the album format is one notable form of seriality that star characters such as Bécassine were involved in. Further, the paratexts surrounding the main stories and comics, including letters, games and advertisements, are a rich source of insight into the interaction between consumerism and affect, the latter heightened, the former persistent during wartime. In accompanying their young readers through the war, the long-running female comics characters Bécassine and Lili incarnate the balance – sometimes ignored, sometimes carefully maintained, depending on the press – between entertainment and education discernible in most material for children. The characters also embody one of the many conduits of affective attachments established by the magazines. Children’s magazines provided a kind of companionship that involves very different power relationships and affective labour than those of adult magazines.10 The imperative of unquestioning patriotism imposed by the war sheds a useful light on varying but also overlapping negotiations undertaken by each publication. Further, the total mobilisation that permeated most elements of the magazine is comparable to the developments in progressive education (éducation nouvelle), which in turn had a strong impact on the general conceptions of these magazines that predated the war: this is notable in the interweaving of practical, all-round educational elements into ludic activities. The booming industry of illustrated children’s magazines included, for girls, the bourgeois and enormously successful Semaine de Suzette with its iconic art nouveau masthead, launched by Henri Gautier. Its cheaper and chief competitor, Fillette, was launched by the much vilified and successful Offenstadt press, which would change its name to the less Germanic Societé Parisienne d’Édition (S.P.E.) in 1909. For boy readers, the Offenstadt press offered the garishly colourful L’Épatant (1908–39), officially branded as entertainment for the entire family, and L’Intrépide (1910–37), subtitled ‘adventures, travels, explorations’. This business venture into the world of children’s publishing was so profitable that Offenstadt soon discontinued its adult publications such as the salacious La Vie en culotte rouge (1902–12). Critics of the Offenstadt press, however, would never forget its licentious publishing past. The colourful beginnings of the press, its predilection for raw fun and frivolity even in its children’s and family publications, combined with the German-Jewish origins of the Offenstadt family (children of parents who had migrated to France from Bavaria around the mid-nineteenth century), were regularly stigmatised. During the First World War, children’s publications on the market included Mon Journal (1881–1925), published by Hachette for readers aged five to twelve, who would then go on to read Le Journal de la Jeunesse (1872–1919). Among the many children’s magazines that began in the early twentieth century, Fayard’s La Jeunesse illustrée (1903–35) and Les Belles Images (1904–35) exemplify a distinctive transformation of

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the French children’s press: the use of ‘picture stories’, initially on the very first page. These imitated the Épinal prints, the popular, colourful woodcuts used for playing cards, illustrated stories, pictures stories and religious imagery produced through the nineteenth century in the French town of Épinal.11 The periodicals reproduced the story grids of images accompanied by text under each image. Usually published in a large format (37 x 27 cm), the low prices of these magazines ensured that children could buy them with their pocket money.12 This format would define French comics for the first two decades of the twentieth century, only to be overhauled by the American form of comics with word balloons inside each picture. These magazines can be considered revolutionary because ‘entertainment and pleasure outweighed educational purpose’.13 This does not imply that entertainment was previously absent from children’s culture. What is noteworthy is the close connection between abundant images and the notion of entertainment and the increasing amount of space accorded to the image in the children’s magazines. The willingness to entertain children was reinforced by the incorporation of games and even the consumer items advertised (for children and their parents, especially mothers). The picture story formula was adopted with unprecedented success by the Offenstadt press.14 Other less aggressively commercial and more didactically inclined publications also succumbed to the charm of picture stories, in which images often took up more space than words. In these early decades, most children’s publications resisted according pictures and comics as much space as L’Épatant. Magazines published by other, more respectable presses espoused a neater, more sober style that contrasted with, to take one well-known example, Louis Forton’s (1879–1934) hectic, unflattering drawings. Forton’s Pieds Nickelés comics, one of L’Épatant’s main attractions, exemplify the irreverence of the Offenstadt periodicals that flirted with the limits of what was deemed suitable for children. Regardless of editorial ideology, comics had clearly entered the realm of the children’s press. They would continue to occupy an increasing amount of space, so much so that within decades, especially with the onset of the Disney entertainment industry, comics would become synonymous with children’s culture. Disney and the rise of the so-called funny animal comic – comics with anthropomorphic animal characters – also marked the gradual elimination of gendered publications in favour of generalised magazines for both boys and girls, which would tend towards boy characters and purportedly boyish themes, especially adventures. The proliferation of girl characters we encounter during and after the First World War remains quite exceptional in the history of comics (albeit less so in the history of children’s and young adult publishing).

Wartime in the Children’s Magazines While the First World War disrupted publishing rhythms, many magazines survived. Some new publications, such as the éditions Nilsson’s Les Trois Couleurs, emerged and existed only during wartime (1914–19), focusing exclusively on stories related to the ongoing war. Children’s wartime literature was not a new genre, but it attained unprecedentedly varied forms during the First World War: alongside novels and illustrated stories, the many periodicals also contributed to the war effort, mobilising children to contribute however they could. This is why it is important, and at the same time extremely complicated, to extensively contextualise magazines in light of

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the other publications (novels, collections, albums, supplements) coexisting with them on the kiosks. Katie Lanning has shown us the merits of a ‘tessellated reading’ or a reading that accounts for the different kinds of texts coexisting within a periodical.15 In the case of children’s magazines, such a tessellated reading needs to unfold on the broader scale of the offerings of successful publishers and comparable periodicals by contemporaneous publishers. Ideally then, an entire kiosk could have contributed to such a tessellation. While the focus here is essentially on two girls’ magazines, connections are drawn with the related publications (especially albums) and the general children’s press scene in France. The First World War broke out just days before the long summer holiday and France officially declared war on 3 August 1914. It resulted in an enhanced patriotism in the content of the magazines. This was not the first time that children’s publications had rallied to the war effort. During the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, for instance, the Imagerie Quantin, which produced broadsheets, had already contributed to visual war propaganda for children. However, the scale of nationalist propaganda during the First World War, in keeping with the burgeoning publishing industry (including children’s publishing), was unprecedented. One recurrent figure of wartime fiction was the heroic child. The First World War historian Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau has elaborated on how the figure of the heroic child was resuscitated during the war after occupying the limelight in war tales and novels about the Franco-Prussian war of 1870:16 even though child soldiers were no longer accepted into the French army after 1884, the heroic child came back stronger than ever during the Great War.17 Pignot identifies two functions of the heroic child: guilt-tripping young readers by showing all that a child could do in service of their nation, but also elevating the status of the child to a hero, an active participant in the war.18 The heroic child was therefore both a figure of wish-fulfilment and a chastisement, confirming that children could, and if possible should, do much more. Most importantly, the only factor distinguishing the heroic child from the ordinary one is the circumstances the children find themselves in, not their intentions, because all children are assumed to have the desires of the heroic child.19 While the propagandist content of the wartime magazines is inevitable, as is their commercial content, Semaine de Suzette and Fillette engaged with the war in very distinctive ways that reflect the ideological stances of their publishing houses and the target readerships. Preceding Fillette by four years, Semaine de Suzette was nothing short of a marketing success: 5,000 copies of the first issue (2 February 1905) were distributed for free. The model readers were girls aged eight to fourteen. A Bleuette doll, a fashionable Jumeau doll with a porcelain head, was promised to all subscribers.20 Already in 1905, at a time when American comics were yet to take over continental print culture, American tactics of aggressive commercialisation were far from taboo.21 These dolls concretise another factor that lies at the core of the girls’ magazines: the doll was not only to participate in the games of little girls but also in their upbringing. Bleuette would serve as a model for the girls to practise their sewing on. Every week, the magazine’s editor introduced new patterns for dresses and accessories. The magazine also offered its readers several opportunities to buy new clothes and accessories for their dolls. Bleuette hence captures the interweaving of commercialised education, which took advantage of the seriality and hybrid content of the magazines, appearing in advertisements for new dolls or wardrobe updates and in weekly sewing patterns

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that, before the war, changed predictably with each season.22 Fillette would likewise offer different kinds of dolls at affordable prices but would not connect its stitching and embroidery tips to them; it tended to include fashion spreads for the readers rather than their dolls. Legend has it that Bécassine, Suzette’s most iconic character, was a fluke: she was created at the last minute to fill an empty final page.23 The illustrator behind these picture stories or comics, a modernisation of the Épinal prints, was Joseph Porphyre Pinchon (1871–1953).24 The magazine’s editor Jacqueline Rivière (Jeanne Spallarossa, 1851– 1920) wrote the texts for Bécassine until around 1913, after which Maurice Languereau (1867–1941), nephew of the magazine’s publisher, took over under the pseudonym of Caumery. The first Bécassine album, L’Enfance de Bécassine (1913), collecting the stories published in Semaine de Suzette, was a Caumery–Pinchon production. After that, the Bécassine albums reissued the Semaine de Suzette stories regularly and sold well, ensuring and confirming the comic’s popularity. Albums enabled both the re-commercialisation and preservation of the ephemeral magazine stories. And the First World War does not seem to have had a major impact on the publication of Bécassine albums. The magazine itself survived after a few adjustments: priced at 10 cents for sixteen pages at the beginning of the war, it cost 20 cents for twelve pages towards its end. From the original sixteen pages, the Bécassine stories were the only comics and usually took up one or two pages. The rest of the magazine included sewing tips, some illustrated stories, diverse games and competitions, small info columns and poems and letters by Aunt Jacqueline, and a few advertisements (the biggest of which were for the Bécassine albums, holiday specials and books and other material by Aunt Jacqueline). Rivière wielded a strong presence throughout the magazine. Affective rapport with the reader was established directly through Rivière’s letters and ventriloquised through fictional characters such as Bécassine and the characters in the many other stories in the magazine, which mediated experiences that many of the child readers were struggling with. Wartime magazines strike a delicate balance between continuity and rupture. While the form of entertainment remains the same, the war trickles in, in illustrated stories, in the merchandise advertised and even in the games played and the competitions organised. For instance, the 7 January 1915 issue advertises a Bleuette doll that girls could buy with money received over the holidays, just like other first issues of the year. However, instead of the usual fashionable attire, Bleuette is dressed as a nurse. The same issue opens with the customary Epiphany story about the king for a day. This year it tells the story ‘Le “Roi” de Lucienne’, about a girl waiting impatiently for her father, an army captain. The story covers four colour pages (front, back and centre spread). A circular image at the centre of the cover page captures the moment Lucienne and her mother hug the captain. This visit is cut short by the war and Lucienne and her mother pass many months without news of him. At one point, around the middle of the story, his body cannot be found and he has simply disappeared. Instead of indulging in egotistic despair – ‘But their pain does not make them selfish’ (Leur douleur, pourtant, ne les rend pas égoïste) – the mother and daughter continue their charitable acts, helping the poor of the village and, later, injured soldiers.25 Their patience and goodness are rewarded at the end: the father comes back, pale, thin and seemingly aged because of his beard. Many young readers must have been all too familiar with such waiting. Repeatedly, the fictional stories, unfolding in familiar genres of adventure, moralising and fairy

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tales, channel the realities, fears and hopes of their readers. The story that followed the week after, ‘The smiles of the ketjes’ (Le sourire des ketjes), is about children (ketjes) in the occupied Marollen neighbourhood of Brussels. The cover story for the 26 November 1914 issue, ‘The taking of the aeroplane’ (La prise de l’aéroplane), tells of a German plane crash-landing in a village where the soldier is held prisoner by pitchfork-brandishing villagers, essentially women and children. These stories offer vicarious agency at a time of relative impotence for the members of the population who could not enlist in the army. National and regional unity is also asserted: all French citizens act as one body and the only people to fear are the Germans. The 13 January 1916 cover story of Suzette, ‘The Ladybird’ (La Coccinelle), also takes up the theme of waiting for news from the front. Once again we find a little girl desperately hoping to receive a letter from her father. Fascinated by the beauty of a ladybird, she captures it in a box laden with herbs, not heeding her mother’s and grandmother’s protests about imprisoning the creature. The next day the muchawaited letter arrives. Her father is well. Her mother then evokes the captured ladybird again. The final panel shows the girl freeing the insect in the hope that it will find her father and pass on her message of love. The narrator is hopeful: who knows, maybe the insect might fly as far as the trenches. To forestall any potential doubts in the reader, a semi-circular image in the bottom centre shows the iconic barbed wire and wooden stakes of the trenches with a ladybird flying over them. Indulging in wishful thinking, giving a modicum of hope, was also part of the magazine’s task almost two years into a war that was never supposed to last this long. The war also permeates the recreational columns and advertisements. Hence, even in a paper for girls, we see models for military vehicles, such as a horse-drawn omnibus for transporting food (14 January 1915) or an entire cavalry regiment, with silk cords for reins, or a word puzzle with ‘The Soldier’s Hut’ as theme (both in the issue of 4 February 1915). There was also the ‘Packages for Soldiers Competition’ (Concours de l’Envoi aux Soldats) in Semaine de Suzette, announced on 4 February 1915. It promises fun and many prizes. The advertisement candidly adds: ‘This is a bit late because our friend A. V. Voutroux V., who is bravely fulfilling his duty as a good Frenchman, made it in the trenches . . . it’s not a place that offers absolute tranquillity’ (Il est un peu en retard, parce que notre ami A. V. Voutroux V., qui fait bravement son devoir de bon français, l’a composé dans les tranchées . . . C’est un endroit où ne jouit pas d’une absolue tranquillité).26 The actual competition appeared two weeks later and takes up an entire page (Figure 6.1). The title appears in a medal, flanked by two cheerful soldiers saluting and smiling at the reader. The rest of the page is covered with images. Readers are expected to name each object and use the first letter of each word to identify items (clothes, weapons, accessories) that could alleviate the harshness of the soldiers’ lives. More intriguing than the game itself is the justification given for its creation: On all sides, as you know, my dear children, people are working for our brave soldiers. Everywhere mothers and girls are sewing and knitting for them. If you like, we too can work. It will, no doubt, be in a different way: we will not use needles, nor wool, nor hooks. Our tools will be a pen and a pencil: for the rest we will rely on your ingenuity alone. This is intriguing, isn’t it?

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Figure 6.1  ‘Concours de l’envoi aux soldats’, La Semaine de Suzette, 18 February 1915.

(De tous côtés, vous le savez, mes chères enfants, on travaille pour nos braves soldats. Partout les mamans et les fillettes cousent et tricotent pour eux. Si vous le voulez bien, nous aussi, nous travaillerons. Ce sera, sans doute, d’une manière différente : nous ne nous servirons ni d’aiguilles, ni de laine, ni de crochets. Une plume, un crayon seront nos outils : pour le reste nous ferons appel à votre seule ingéniosité. Ceci vous intrigue, n’est-ce pas ?)27 Playing this game, then, combined the possibility of enjoying oneself, indulging in some distraction while, in a longwinded way, participating in the war effort. Such games were far from a novelty in Semaine de Suzette: the ‘Competition of the Well Brought-up Young Girl’ (Concours de la petite fille bien élevée), to take one example, offered a set of situations, conveyed through images covering at least half a page, and encouraging readers to think what well-brought up girls would do.

Je ne vous oublie pas: More Affect in the Magazine Bécassine’s appearances were somewhat irregular during the first years of the war. Many of these appearances are not connected to a story. In the Christmas 1915 issue of Semaine de Suzette (23 December 1915), she appears on a page teaching child readers how to knit knee warmers for soldiers. We see her again three weeks later (13 January 1916) on a lampshade that readers can fabricate. These appearances confirm her dual status as a trademark of the magazine and an actual character. The first set of war stories appeared from 3 February to 24 August 1916. One has to wait another

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five months to hear Bécassine: ‘I have not forgotten you. You will see me again soon’ (Je ne vous oublie pas. Bientôt vous me reverrez).28 This fascinating panel advertising her return shows her looking inside a tent, at the viewer. A war landscape looms behind her: a plane in the air, other tents nearby, soldiers marching in one direction, civilians carting their belongings in the opposite direction. At the opening of the tent lie a bag, a small trunk and an umbrella – paraphernalia that could belong to Bécassine or to the soldiers. The panel places the young reader and viewer in a safe place, inside the tent, somewhat shielded from the realities of the war. But Bécassine comes in from the outside, implicated in the war front and too busy to appear in the magazine. The backstage reality was that Pinchon enlisted as soon as the war broke out and was working, like many artists, in the camouflage unit.29 This panel appears on a double page, opposite a war song, which appears under a recipe for a pain d’évêque (bishop’s bread). The second page is surrounded by elaborate knitting instructions for Bleuette’s wardrobe. The magazine business collided with the war context and Bécassine was one of the first victims: for a long period, there was simply no one to draw her. At a moment when things were quite literally falling apart, the periodicals, and characters such as Bécassine who came back week after week, offered a degree of reliability and familiarity. This is confirmed in the small advertisement panels indicating the return of Bécassine comics to Semaine de Suzette after several months of absence.

Figure 6.2  ‘Bécassine écrit ses mémoires’ from the album Bécassine pendant la guerre.

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The 14 January 1917 issue also announces the album, Bécassine pendant la guerre (1916) and the older, L’enfance de Bécassine (1913). Bécassine chez les alliés (1917, drawn by Édouard Zier, 1856–1924) is advertised as the latest album two issues later (28 January 1917). Bécassine herself reappears in another panel, still at the front but this time at a writing desk: ‘I am writing my memoirs and Mr Pinchon is drawing them . . . Ah!!! Lots has happened!!!’ (J’écris mes mémoires et M. Pinchon les dessine . . . Ah!!! Il m’en est arrivé des choses!!!).30 Indeed, in the stories that were republished as Bécassine pendant la guerre, Caumery and Pinchon had already taken great care to suggest that it was Bécassine who was writing, and occasionally also drawing (Figure 6.2).31 The episode, ‘Bécassine writes her memoirs (1)’ (Bécassine écrit ses mémoires (1)) is complemented by a condescending editor’s note at the bottom of the page: We believe we must respect the author’s style, correcting only the spelling, which is a little too frivolous. Similarly, our friend Pinchon has limited himself, in most of his drawings, to clarifying and completing the sketches with which Bécassine had illustrated her remarkable memoirs. (Nous croyons devoir respecter le style de l’auteur, corrigeant seulement l’orthographe un peu trop fantaisiste. De même notre ami Pinchon s’est borné, dans la plupart de ses dessins, à préciser et compléter les croquis dont Bécassine avait illustré ses remarquables mémoires.)32 Bécassine’s drawings, like her words, are untutored and childlike and match the humorous accounts of the war, reflecting a point of view ‘from below’, from the level of the domestic servant but also the child. Notably, only the panel imagining an encounter between Bécassine, General Joseph Joffre and the president Raymond Poincaré carries her signature, to reaffirm that the flattened, amateurish drawings and the delirious imaginings are all hers. A quick glance at the covers of the wartime Bécassine albums neatly summarises the different ways in which Bécassine was operationalised for the war effort. As the stories in Bécassine pendant la guerre indicate, Bécassine moves from the home front to disputed territory: she resolutely holds hands with traditionally clad Alsatian children. All three form a picture of France united despite regional differences. French children’s war literature regularly accorded the disputed Alsace-Lorraine region a prominent place. Publications in Semaine de Suzette are no exception: the Frenchness of the Alsatian children is affirmed and reaffirmed. Bécassine ventures further in the second album, hobnobbing with British and American allies. The servant’s status has changed – she wears a luxurious fur coat and will soon fly in a plane. The third cover shows how Bécassine, like many women in France, replaced the male workforce in everyday jobs. At the end of Bécassine mobilisée (1918), Bécassine once again turns to the reader (Figure 6.3). Such forms of direct contact are frequent in these war stories. They complement the more personalised contact that is implied by the writing of her memoirs, something which Bécassine only undertakes during the First World War.33 She promises the reader: ‘I would still have many stories and adventures to tell you about. We are going to be separated for some time, my good little dears; I will not say adieu but see you soon’ (j’aurais encore bien des histoires, bien des aventures à vous raconter. Nous allons nous séparer pour quelque temps, mes bonnes petites chéries, mais je ne vous dis pas adieu, je vous dis au revoir).34

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Figure 6.3  Closing panel for the story ‘La proposition du chemineau’ from the album Bécassine mobilisée. Finally, another instance of attachment between readers and their magazines is the desire to preserve them. Even during the war Semaine de Suzette offered its readers elaborate covers for a year’s worth of issues, decorated with coloured illustrations and with a cloth spine (as advertised in the 21 January 1915 issue). These could be handed to the local bookbinder who would then ensure that the magazines were beautifully preserved to be reread and even passed on to children and grandchildren.35 Although the republication of Bécassine stories into albums fulfilled a similar concern of preservation, the process of binding the magazines offered more opportunities for affective participation. Bécassine, as we will now see, also channelled affect in other ways.

Boches, Godmothers and Heroics in Fillette and La Semaine de Suzette Fillette would outlive Semaine de Suzette by four years, folding in 1964, when it was rebranded as Paul et Mic.36 The main protagonist Lili would have a long life but only Bécassine has persisted into our present, revived through republications of old albums and new albums of unpublished comics. Fillette’s sixteen pages were priced at 5 cents, half the price of Semaine de Suzette. The magazine maintained this price and size until 10 December 1916, when it was reduced to eight pages. In 1919 it returned to the original length of sixteen pages and increased its price to 15 cents. Like Bécassine, Les mille et un tours de l’espiègle Lili (The Thousand and One Tricks of Naughty Lili) was present since Fillette’s earliest days. At the end of the war, she even earned a magazine in her name, Lili (which did not, however, carry her comics stories). Published for a few years from 30 October 1919, Lili’s first (and free)

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issue confidently declared above its masthead: ‘Make someone happy by giving this magazine to a young girl or a young boy’ (Faites des heureux en remettant ce journal à une petite fille ou à un petit garçon).37 For a brief moment – this assurance of attracting boy and girl readers was even more short-lived than the magazine – Offenstadt/S.P.E. indulged in what even now is often unthinkable: offering material dominated by young female protagonists to both boys and girls. While Fillette was so obviously for girls, as suggested by its title, which can be translated as little girl, but also by the flowers surrounding the masthead and the decorative nature of the illustrated title page and centrefold stories, a surprising contradiction of assumptions is to be found in the ‘Sac à Malices’ (literally, Bag of Tricks) column. This column, which often covered two to three pages, offered a major occasion for editorial interaction and promised the following: ‘From this bag prepared especially for you, young girlfriends, will emerge answers to all the questions you send by post to your magazine’ (De ce sac préparé à votre intention, petites amies, il sortira les réponses à toutes les questions que vous enverrez par la poste à votre journal).38 While this sentence refers to girls, the sentences that follow in this issue, apologising for the brevity of the answers (too many requests!) and giving specific instructions for obtaining back issues, mention both girl and boy readers. Later columns for correspondence with other readers and horoscopes also continue to address boys and girls. The column addresses a mixed readership throughout the issues published during the war (during which the column’s size and publishing rhythm varied). Were boys potentially also writing to the magazine, requesting tips and missing issues? And this despite the flowery title, and stories and comics rampant with girl protagonists? Clearly the magazine hoped they would, even during wartime, when gender roles and definitions become more sacrosanct. Perhaps the editors preferred not to exclude any potential reader in the hope of selling more copies. Moreover, the female protagonists in Fillette were often implicated in adventures that were as fast-paced and riven with danger as those for boys. Prolific children’s author Jo (Joseph) Valle (1865–1949) and illustrator André Vallet’s (1869–1949) Naughty Lili was far from the first story with a heroic and rebellious girl protagonist.39 She is nonetheless one of the longest-living comics protagonists, in a world notoriously dominated by male figures and interests. Furthermore, in a rare bypassing of the laws governing long-lived popular characters, Lili initially grew with time. She would marry in the 1920s before becoming a schoolgirl again in the 1930s.40 Lili’s full name is Émilie d’Orbois. In complete contrast to Bécassine’s status as a Breton servant, Lili belongs to a wealthy, almost aristocratic family. She attends boarding schools in France and later England and is often accompanied on her adventures by her English governess. Compared to the beautifully drawn Bécassine stories, which had the added privilege of being coloured, the Naughty Lili stories published during the First World War and before are not very striking: the pictures are small, hastily drawn and never coloured, reflecting the priorities of a publisher inclined towards cheap and quick reproduction; a picture, even a poorly drawn one, remained fascinating and attractive in these relatively early years of the illustrated press (Figure 6.4). The layout is regular and the page is laden with four rows of three pictures alternating with text. This is a stark contrast to the decorative and experimental layouts adorning the title stories such as ‘Children of the Hostage’ (Les enfants de l’otage), which began in winter 1915 and ran through August 1916. This relatively long-running story has

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Figure 6.4  ‘L’Espiègle Lili’, Fillette, 9 January 1916.

two girl protagonists: the extremely brave Mariette and Odile, the granddaughter and niece (from Alsace) of a Belgian mayor placed under house arrest by the Germans. The full-colour centrefold story of the 9 January 1916 instalment presents a particularly harrowing picture of German brutality (Figure 6.5). The page that follows, however, provides a striking array of fashionable dresses and a recurring advertisement for a beauty cream among other wares. The page opposite, also sponsored by the CartierBresson company, gives instructions on how to embroider a frame for ‘the absent’. A page later we find ‘The Song of the Alsatian’ (La Chanson de l’Alsacienne), confirming the general trend of resurrecting a relatively fresh wound and asserting the Frenchness of Alsace. A crucial ideological difference between Semaine de Suzette and other children’s publications, including Fillette, is the absence of actively mobilising children for the war effort.41 A nuance is necessary here: children, mostly girls in the case of Semaine de Suzette, were encouraged to do what they could, within realistic limits: to knit and sew and otherwise support soldiers from the home front, even through taking part in competitions to familiarise readers with soldiers’ lives at the front, as we saw above. But they were not encouraged to fantasise about dangerous exploits such as those of Naughty Lili, who took great risks to sabotage the enemy. Bécassine offers a lighter take on the war similar to what we find in the many, brief gag strips in Fillette, such as ‘The overly zealous nurse’ (L’infirmière trop zélée). True to the respective genres of the two strips – humour and adventure – Bécassine tempers the situation without diminishing its gravity, and Lili dramatises it. Both are excessive in their own ways, thrust into situations that their real-life counterparts were unlikely to have experienced. Lili is the model girl that readers long to be. Bécassine, for all her goodwill, is essentially what her readers should not be. These different matrices of reader identification come with different kinds of lessons and different forms of

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Figure 6.5  Double-page spread from the story ‘Les enfants de l’otage’, Fillette, 9 January 1916.

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comfort, combining projection and wishful thinking on the one hand, and cautionary humour on the other. Their many differences aside, neither magazine avoided the pejorative ‘boche’, which indicates the widespread use of the word and by extension the extent to which the denigration of the enemy was cultivated, flouting the usual norms of decency, in children’s publications.42 When the Great War finally breaks out in Bécassine’s world on 2 February 1916, the Marquise de Grand-Air has retired to a country house in Dieppe with her granddaughter Yvonne and her nephew Bertrand. Bécassine joins them after her summer holiday on 1 August. She finds her mistress tired and worried: ‘One would have to not be French to avoid worrying these days’ (Il faudrait ne pas être Française pour ne pas se sentir inquiète en ce moment), declares the Marquise, La Gazette dangling from one hand.43 Bécassine, who, as the narrator informs us, is not a big reader of newspapers, is perplexed. She finds the rest of the household staff also engrossed in front of their newspapers. Her friend Zidore explains that there will be a war with ‘tous les Boches de la Bochie!’ This does not alleviate her confusion because she – and potentially many of her well-brought-up girl readers – had never heard of Boches or Bochie before. The readers grasp (or re-grasp, given the relatively late publication of the Bécassine war stories) the amplitude of the war, its many manifestations and impact on everyday life with Bécassine. In contrast, godmothering soldiers is one of the war-specific elements that brings us back to the stark difference between Semaine de Suzette and Fillette. The different stances regarding godmothering confirm how the two magazines had more differences than similarities, despite the shared propaganda and the intended readership.44 The godmothering of adults began in 1915: women were encouraged to write to soldiers at the front, to provide them with companionship and material goods with the aim of strengthening their morale.45 In an era of otherwise carefully contained female morality, such a practice was not always regarded with a favourable eye and could even be considered immoral should the mothering relationship implied by the godmother title transgress into a sexual one.46 It is therefore somewhat surprising that calls for godmothering were published in girls’ magazines such as Fillette (in the ‘Sac à Malices’ section!) and Semaine de Suzette.47 Apart from concerns regarding the sexual swerve that such a godmothering relationship could take, it also generates a noteworthy inversion of child–adult relationships. As underscored by Pignot, the (girl) child was here called upon to share the emotional burden of a soldier’s struggles in the trenches; the adult confronting death or imprisonment was encouraged to confide and seek comfort in a child. This task was framed as a patriotic duty, much like the knitting of socks and mufflers for soldiers – something which readers of Semaine de Suzette were encouraged to do in lieu of adding to Bleuette’s wardrobe. Fillette published announcements for godmothership in December 1915. In contrast, Semaine de Suzette began only in August 1916 and then, due to limited response, again in December 1916. Within a year, then, of the first calls for the emotional investment of women, girls too were encouraged to contribute to the national effort as if they were already adults. Unsurprisingly, Bécassine has a somewhat humorous account of godmothering.48 When asked by a group of injured soldiers whether she has any godsons, she first replies that the entire French army is her godchild because she loves all French soldiers. One of the soldiers proposes a fellow soldier about to join them as her godson. This soldier is Prince Boudou of Timbuktu. As a joke the prince acts out all the stereotypes of the

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‘savage’ who cannot communicate in French and is tempted to eat people. All of this, however, turns out to be a farce. The soldier, who is a real prince – in a relatively rare reversal of stereotypes – reveals that he can speak perfect French and paints a portrait of Bécassine. He has already received a Croix de Guerre for ‘fighting like a lion’ (en se battant comme un lion) in Timbuktu, which both celebrates his bravery while reaffirming the clichés of barbarity and physical prowess associated with the colonised.49 Although serving as godmother to soldiers was treated with some suspicion, children were encouraged to write and send parcels to the front, even to soldiers they did not know. Both boys and girls could ‘adopt’ soldiers.50 Such calls did not appear only in magazines but also in other publications, such as the popular collection, ‘Livres roses pour la jeunesse’ published by Larousse from 1909 to the Second World War (which emulated the immensely successful ‘Bibliothèque rose’ published by Hachette since the mid-nineteenth century and continuing to date, for children aged six to twelve). Pignot emphasises the important role played by guilt-tripping children; the sacrifices made by the soldiers were, after all, for the future of the nation, the children.51 Further, in wartime, children were given no other choice but to be ‘heroic’, to do everything possible to help the nation vanquish the enemy. An important, almost self-destructive contradiction can be discerned in the heroic child in which ‘youthful heroism, nourished by rebellion against the adult world, ends with the acknowledgement of and integration into the latter’ (l’héroïsme juvénile, nourri de rébellion contre le monde adulte, s’achève par la reconnaissance, par l’intégration de ce dernier).52 There is, however, an alternative to the kind of capitulation described by Audoin-Rouzeau. According to Jean-Marie Apostolidès, the shock of the First World War, which incarnated a collapse of adult responsibility, contributed to the proliferation of the surenfant, or superchild (a figure already present in literature and the arts in the second half of the nineteenth century). The superchild freezes time, questions patriarchal adult authority and, most importantly, reconciles generations, stepping in where adults fail, which they do repeatedly in the Tintinverse.53 Could the resilient girl protagonists encountered in Fillette already be superchildren rather than heroic ones? Even if it is shaken, patriarchal authority is never completely undone in these stories, as is also the case for the Tintin adventures. Still, it would be Lili rather than the blundering Bécassine who would come closest to the possibility of a female superchild who remains miraculously unscathed in situations of extreme peril.

The Near Future of Children’s Magazines The end of the war did not imply the immediate end of children’s heroics and war stories in the periodicals. Lili, for instance, continues to resist and sabotage the enemy after the Armistice.54 Offenstadt’s war special, La Croix d’Honneur (1915–18), merged with another Offenstadt magazine, Le Cri-Cri (1911–37).55 Carrying the somewhat misleading subtitle, ‘novels for the young’, it hints at the increasing image-dominance and the diversification of image use in children’s periodicals. Croix d’Honneur did not limit itself to illustrations and comics, but also incorporated photographs: four of its sixteen pages are covered with photographs capturing the (purported) daily lives of Allied soldiers, French citizens but also the German army. Here, fiction and reality edge closer to each other than ever before. This proliferation of visual material encouraged further experimentation in terms of design and layout.

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Competition among children’s periodicals would increase in the interwar period, most notably with Editions Montsouris’ Lisette (1921–74) and Pierrot (1925–57) magazines. Remarkably enough, the girls’ magazine preceded the boys’ magazine by four years. These were complemented by the ‘Stella’ and ‘Printemps’ collections of children’s novels. Montsouris, known for Le Petit Écho de la Mode (1880–1955), began its foray into children’s magazines with Guignol (1919–36). Originally subtitled ‘children’s cinema’ and bearing the hefty price of one franc, the magazine tended to reproduce the familiar genres and protagonists of boys’ magazines. Its richly illustrated fifty-two pages – almost four times the size of a regular magazine – justified its high ‘entry’ price. Officially for both boys and girls, the magazine was more inclined towards the former due to the predominance of adventure stories and limited female protagonists. Despite the increased competition, both Semaine de Suzette and Fillette would continue uninterrupted until the German Occupation during the Second World War. While children’s publishing remained a lucrative venture during the First World War, despite the many wartime constraints, the Second World War imposed a hiatus (and sometimes a definite folding) of most magazines.

Notes   1. Many French periodicals for children, including the ones discussed here, have been extensively digitised by the BnF and the CIBDI, both of which also preserve the originals: and , accessed 24 April 2022. Children’s magazines can also be read on the Kiosque Juventa website: , accessed 24 April 2022.   2. Alain Fourment sees the beginning of a new kind of children’s press around 1894. Alain Fourment, Histoire de la presse des jeunes et des journaux d’enfants (1768–1988) (Paris: Eole, 1987), 153. Raymond Perrin suggests that the magazines competed with children’s books but we also see a synergy forming between magazines, albums and book collections published by the big presses. Raymond Perrin, Fictions et journaux pour la jeunesse au XXe siècle (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2014), 35–61.  3. Like numerous other periodicals, both magazines had to stop press during the Second World War.  4. Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, La Guerre des enfants 1914–1918: essai d’histoire culturelle (Paris: Armand Colin, 1993); Laurence Olivier-Messonnier, Guerre et littérature de jeunesse (1913–1919): analyse des dérives patriotiques dans les périodiques pour enfants (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012). On wartime childhood, see Manon Pignot, Allons enfants de la patrie. Génération Grande Guerre (Paris: Seuil, 2012).   5. For Abbé Bethléem and the clergy at large who regularly issued recommendations to guide the public through the plethora of publications, the ideologically Catholic (but independent of the Church) Semaine de Suzette belonged to the ‘honest but neutral’ publications for children. Fillette, like other publications by the Offenstadt press, was fiercely criticised because of the heavily entertaining and didactically light material. See Manon Pignot, ‘Suzette contre Fillette: la Grande Guerre de deux illustrés français’, in Les Presses enfantines chrétiennes au XXe siècle, ed. Thierry Crépin and Françoise Hache-Bissette (Arras: Artois Presses Université, 2008), 211–24, here 212. See also Olivier-Messonnier, Guerre et littérature de jeunesse.   6. See Magnon Pignot, L’appel de la guerre: des adolescents au combat, 1914–1918 (Paris: Anamosa, 2019).

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  7. See Margaret Beetham, ‘Open and Closed: The Periodical as a Publishing Genre’, Victorian Periodicals Review 22, no. 3 (1989): 96–100; and Katie Lanning, ‘Tessellating Texts: Reading the Moonstone in All the Year Round’, Victorian Periodicals Review 45, no. 1 (2002): 1–22.   8. Matthieu Letourneux, Fictions à la chaîne: littératures sérielles et culture médiatique (Paris: Seuil, 2017), 8. All translations from the French are mine.  9. Letourneux, Fictions à la chaîne. 10. Fionnuala Dillane, ‘Forms of Affect, Relationality and Periodical Encounters, or, “Pine-apple for the Million”’, Journal of European Periodical Studies 1, no. 1 (2016): 5–24. 11. Launched in 1796, the Imagerie Pellerin exists to this day, now known as Imagerie d’Épinal. For more on the connections between Épinal prints and other popular publishing and comics, see Patricia Mainardi, Another World: Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Print Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). 12. Annie Renonciat, ‘Arthème Fayard’s Magazines and the Promotion of Picture Stories “à la française”’, trans. Ann Miller, European Comic Art 1, no. 2 (2008): 145–56, here 149–50. 13. Renonciat, ‘Arthème Fayard’s Magazines’, 150. 14. For more on the First World War adventures of one of the most popular Offenstadt comics, Les Pieds Nickelés, see Benoît Glaude, ‘Contextualising the Offenstadt Brothers’ Wartime Comics and their Reception: From Barrack-room Comedy to “Amazing” Propaganda’, European Comic Art 8, no. 2 (2015): 9–33. 15. Lanning, ‘Tessellating Texts’. 16. Audoin-Rouzeau, Guerre des enfants, 109. 17. Audoin-Rouzeau, Guerre des enfants, 110. 18. Pignot, ‘Suzette contre Fillette’, 217. 19. Audoin-Rouzeau, Guerre des enfants, 151. 20. Bernard Lehembre, Bécassine – une légende du siècle (Paris: Gautier-Languereau, 2005), 12. 21. Lehembre, Bécassine, 12. 22. Thierry Crépin, «Haro sur le gangster!»: la moralisation de la presse enfantine (Paris: CNRS, 2001), 33–5. 23. Lehembre, Bécassine, 14. 24. Pinchon would also make a name for himself as a successful illustrator of children’s magazines and books. Before the war broke out, he was appointed artistic director of the Paris Opera. 25. Semaine de Suzette, 7 January 1915, 201. 26. Semaine de Suzette, 4 February 1915, 15. 27. Semaine de Suzette, 18 February 1915, 47. 28. Semaine de Suzette, 4 January 1917, 268. 29. For more on the camouflage unit, see Annette Becker, Voir la Grande Guerre: un autre récit (1914–2014) (Paris: Armand Colin, 2014), 115–60. 30. Semaine de Suzette, 11 January 1917, 280. 31. Maurice Caumery and J. P. Pinchon, Bécassine pendant la guerre (Paris: GautierLanguereau, 2014), 34. 32. Semaine de Suzette, 25 May 1916, 246. 33. Olivier-Messonnier, Guerre et littérature de jeunesse, 73. 34. Maurice Caumery and J. P. Pinchon, Bécassine mobilisée (Paris: Gautier-Languereau, 2014), 61. 35. See, for instance, Marie-Anne Couderc, La Semaine de Suzette. Histoire des filles (Paris: CRNS éditions, 2005). Online: https://books.openedition.org/editionscnrs/8847?lang=fr. 36. Perrin, Fictions et journaux, 217. 37. Lili, 30 October 1919, 1. 38. Fillette, 18 August 1910, 13. 39. See Audoin-Rouzeau, Guerre des enfants, 112.

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40. See the collector Michel Dennis’s online article: ‘Fillete avant-guerre: 1909–1942 (première partie)’, BDzoom.com, 29 March 2016, , accessed 24 April 2022. 41. Olivier-Messonnier, Guerre et littérature de jeunesse, 155. 42. Pignot, ‘Suzette contre Fillette’, 216. 43. Semaine de Suzette, 2 February 1916, 1. 44. Pignot, ‘Suzette contre Fillette’, 217–19. 45. See, for instance, Marysa Demoor, Birgit Van Puymbroeck and Marianne Van Remoortel, ‘La Revue des marraines (1916–1917): A Journal for War Godmothers and their Godchildren’, Journal of European Periodical Studies 2, no. 1 (2017): 21–38. 46. See Susan R. Grayzel, ‘Mothers, Marraines, Prostitutes: Morale and Morality in First World War France’, The International History Review 19, no. 1 (1997): 66–82. 47. Of course, pen pals and other forms of correspondence with peers was facilitated by these magazines, for instance through the ‘Petite Poste’ section curated by Aunt Jacqueline in Semaine de Suzette. 48. Semaine de Suzette, 10 August 1916, 18–19. 49. Semaine de Suzette, 10 August 1916, 19. 50. Audoin-Rouzeau, Guerre des enfants, 160. 51. Pignot, ‘Suzette contre Fillette’, 218. 52. Audoin-Rouzeau, Guerre des enfants, 118. 53. Jean-Marie Apostolidès, ‘Hergé and the Myth of the Superchild’, Yale French Studies 111 (2007): 45–57, here 47. 54. Audoin-Rouzeau, Guerre des enfants, 116. 55. Perrin, Fictions et journaux, 61.

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Part II: Contributors

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7 Authors Argha Kumar Banerjee

I

n her short story ‘The Fly’, Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) explores the profound grief of a father whose only son has been killed in the First World War. When old Woodifield leaves the office, after telling the ‘boss’ that both their sons’ graves in Belgium are ‘beautifully looked after’, in a ‘neat’ garden with ‘nice broad paths’ and ‘flowers growing on all the graves’, he inadvertently reignites a trauma that had ruined the boss’s plans for the future.1 Mansfield’s nuanced psychological dissection of paternal mourning underscores the irreconcilable nature of the boss’s grief: ‘Other men perhaps might recover, might live their loss down, but not he.’2 The boss’s deep sense of void in the story resonates with Mansfield’s sudden tragic loss of her younger brother Leslie Beauchamp on 6 October 1915. An officer with the South Lancashire Regiment, Beauchamp lost his life in Ploegsteert Wood after his bomb exploded prematurely while he was conducting a grenade-throwing demonstration. Mansfield’s close examination of the boss’s trauma in ‘The Fly’ is emblematic of the profoundly complex yet inexorable nature of the grief experienced by the victims of the war generation. First published during the author’s lifetime in the Nation and the Athenaeum (1921–31), Mansfield’s story was subsequently reprinted in the Century Magazine (1881–1930) and the New Republic (1914–) in 1923 before being included in the collection The Dove’s Nest (1923).3 The tale underscores the significant role played by periodicals in British publishing culture in and around the years of the First World War. Like Mansfield’s story, many important works of the time – both in verse and prose – were first published in contemporary dailies, weeklies and other periodicals, before they were subsequently gathered in various collections and anthologies. As Annalise Grice observes: ‘Literary journals, magazines and newspapers played a significant role in the publishing culture of the modernist period, providing writers with money, networking opportunities and platforms from which to promote their public voices.’4 Mansfield is not a solitary instance in this regard. Cutting across various genres, many leading writers of the years around the Great War discovered artistic spaces for themselves in periodicals to experiment and articulate their myriad voices of loss, propaganda, trauma, disillusionment, horror, mourning, dissent, aesthetic experimentation, anguish or even new-found freedom. Through a close critical exploration, I aim to provide a rare insight into the complex yet somewhat symbiotic relationship between literary authors and various periodicals of the time. If the latter exploited writers to further the propagandist and political designs of a nation at war, writers too found the lure of literary recognition and aesthetic experimentation in periodicals difficult to resist.

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Influencing Public Opinion: Writers, Periodicals and Propaganda The onset of the war, coupled with the propagandist designs of the state, served as a significant catalyst to the nation’s writers, especially poets, to explore their varied reactions to the conflict. Catherine Reilly’s crucial work English Poetry of the First World War: A Bibliography lists 2,225 published poets, testifying to the immense popularity of poetry during the war.5 As Tim Kendall also points out, during the First World War, ‘poetry became established as the barometer for the nation’s values’ and the composition of poetry was perceived as a ‘patriotic act’ as ‘it celebrated and (at least potentially) enhanced the nation’s cultural ascendancy’ over its rivals.6 Shortly after the declaration of hostilities, newspapers such as The Times (1785–) and the Daily Mail (1896–) were teeming with poetic contributions. In fact, on 23 June 1915 the Daily Mail amusingly complained about the literary epidemic that had led to ‘A Serious Outbreak of Poets’, observing that more poetry had ‘found its way into print in the last eleven months than in the eleven preceding years’.7 Besides the work of civilians, the plethora of contributions from combatants created problems for newspapers such as the Wipers Times or Salient News (1916–18) and the Westminster Gazette (1893–1928); so much so that, on 20 March 1916, the Wipers Times referred to the poetic fad as ‘an insidious disease’ that contributed to ‘a hurricane of poetry’.8 Leading British writers were not insulated from the overriding mood of the hour. Contributions to various dailies and periodicals by established writers such as Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) and Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), among others, testify to their deep engagement with the sociopolitical developments of the time.

Of Loyalty and Altruism: Thomas Hardy, Periodicals and the First World War Thomas Hardy, who introduced armed conflict as a recurrent motif in several of his works, grew up in Dorchester, an army town that was frequently ‘made colourful by the constant presence of the red-coated and splendidly accoutred soldiery of those days’.9 Before the onset of the First World War, Hardy had composed poems on earlier conflicts such as the Boer War and the Napoleonic campaigns. His celebrated poem ‘Drummer Hodge or the Dead Drummer’, which was first published on 25 November 1899, was one of eleven ‘War Poems’ inspired by the Boer War.10 In spite of his candid admission to John Galsworthy (1867–1933) that he failed to ‘do patriotic poems very well – seeing the other side too much’, Hardy did respond to the call of the War Propaganda Bureau with his ‘Poems of War and Patriotism’, largely to boost the morale of the British troops and their allies.11 His contribution of patriotic verse to various periodicals during the early years of the war was more a dutiful response to the call of the state than a spontaneous impulse from within. Notable among these patriotic lyrics is ‘Men Who March Away’, published in The Times on 9 September 1914 under the title ‘Song of the Soldiers’.12 The poem, in all probability inspired by the poet’s witnessing of troop movements from the barracks in Dorchester to France, was immensely popular with the masses. Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) mentioned the poem as his personal favourite when he wrote his first letter to Hardy, seeking his consent to dedicate his The Old Huntsman and Other Poems (1917) to his senior counterpart: ‘I have always liked your “Men who March Away” more than any other poem which the war

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has produced.’13 Contrasting with such patriotic endeavours, Hardy’s ‘Before Marching and After’, which was first published in the Fortnightly Review (1865–1954), was dedicated to the memory of his cousin, Lieutenant Frank William George, who was killed in action on 15 August 1915 at Gallipoli.14 Apart from elegising, the lyric explores the complexity of the moral dilemma when exercising the choice to volunteer for the ‘Game with Death’.15 Hardy’s much-anthologised war poem ‘In the Time of “The Breaking of Nations”’ was written in 1915 and published the following year in the London weekly Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art (1855–1938).16 The lyric, which asserts the endurance of human life in spite of the cataclysmic changes unleashed by a violent war, immediately struck a chord with contemporary readers. Some of Hardy’s other war poems in periodicals captured the anxiety of the hour. ‘A New Year’s Eve in War Time’, published in the Sphere (1900–64), potently conveys an all-pervasive apprehension and unease plaguing the human mind.17 As Ralph Pite observes: ‘The butchery of the Western Front was, to Hardy, literally unendurable, and not being able to bear it made him ashamed.’18 He had witnessed the gruesome plight of the prisoners of war in a camp in Dorchester, and he visited the injured British soldiers at a hospital nearby. These experiences deeply moved Hardy, leading him to gradually advocate the cause of universal brotherhood in his verse. His sonnet ‘The Pity of It’, first published in the Fortnightly Review, explores the affinity between the country folk of Wessex and their German counterparts, thereby underscoring his realisation that the war was being inflicted on the hapless common multitude by egocentric warmongers on either side.19 Kendall points out that ‘[Hardy’s] experiences led him to advocate a benign internationalism in which sovereign interests would be overridden by a greater brotherhood’.20 This observation is all too evident in Hardy’s ‘And There was a Great Calm’, which he contributed to The Times Armistice Supplement of 1920.21 Akin to Charlotte Mew’s (1869–1928) ‘The Cenotaph’, published in the Westminster Gazette a year earlier, Hardy’s poem criticises the commemoration rituals, wondering whether such a colossal loss of young lives could have been averted.22

‘Words as Weapons’: Periodicals and the Diversity of Rudyard Kipling’s Output23 If Thomas Hardy had cycled to Southampton to witness the British flotilla leave for South Africa, another established writer of the time, Rudyard Kipling, had direct experience of the Boer War while working as a war correspondent during the conflict. Kipling had anticipated the European crisis long before his other contemporaries, constantly warning Britain to be better prepared. As Andrew Rutherford observes, ‘when the conflict which he had foretold did come in 1914, Kipling met it not with confidence or exultation, but with grim fortitude and a bleak awareness of its likely hazards’.24 This is evident from his verse contribution to The Times on 2 September 1914: ‘All that We Have and Are’. A prolific contributor to various periodicals in multiple forms such as reports, short fiction and poems, Kipling espoused the propagandist agenda of the state from the start of the war. Throughout the conflict, he carried out several literary commissions for the War Propaganda Bureau, contributing multiple series of articles to various dailies in the UK and the US such as The Times, the Daily Telegraph (1855–),

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the Morning Post (1772–1937), the New York Tribune (1841–1924) and the American Saturday Evening Post (1821–1969, 1970–), among others. His war journalism included sequences of articles which were later compiled in single collections: ‘Tales of “The Trade”’ (The Times, 21–28 June 1916), ‘Destroyers at Jutland’ (Daily Telegraph, 19–31 October 1916), ‘The Fringes of the Fleet’ (Daily Telegraph, 20 November–2 December 1915), ‘The War in the Mountains’ (6–20 June 1917 in the Daily Telegraph and the New York Tribune) and ‘The Eyes of Asia’ (the Morning Post and the American Saturday Evening Post in May–June 1917).25 A close perusal of Kipling’s diverse contributions to various periodicals, in and around the years of the war, seems to suggest a slow shift from his initial robust propagandist fervour towards an empathy for the suffering multitude. His personal bereavement, the loss of his son John at the Battle of Loos in September 1915, might have been a significant contributory factor in this regard. Yet it is imperative to remember, as Kendall also asserts, that ‘Kipling publicly mourned not as an individual but as a conduit for his country’, subsuming ‘his own emotion into a communal grief’.26 This is evident in the writings and other activities that preoccupied him subsequent to John’s tragic death. Kipling’s ‘The War and the Schools’, which was published in the 1915 December issue of the Wykehamist (1866–1945), was based on a lecture delivered at the inauguration of a rifle range at Winchester College, in memory of George Cecil of the Grenadier Guards. Beyond such remembrance ceremonies, deep empathy for all the constituents who rallied round the Allied cause – ranging from Indian sepoys to VAD nurses – is apparent in Kipling’s sequence of epigrams, ‘Epitaphs of War’. His other famous elegiac verse, ‘My Boy Jack’, published untitled on 19 October 1916 in the Daily Telegraph, The Times and the New York Times, was inspired by the heroic exploits of the Battle of Jutland, with the Jack of the title in all probability referring to ‘Jack Tar’, the generic name for a sailor.27 On similar lines, ‘A Nativity’, first published in the Daily Telegraph of 23 December 1916, is the prayer of a mother who has lost her son in the conflict. The recurrent lines in the poem, ‘For I know not how he fell / And I know not where he is laid’, seem to resonate with the poet’s personal loss in the war.28 In ‘The Children’, Kipling ‘becomes spokesman for a nation of mourners who share his knowledge and pain’ by mourning the loss of countless innocent lives.29 Kipling’s deep commiseration for the grief-stricken victims of British society is also palpable in his short stories carried by various contemporary periodicals such as the Century Magazine (1881–1930), Nash’s and Pall Mall Magazine (1914–27), the Metropolitan (1895–1925), Nash’s Magazine (1909–14, 1927–9), the Story-Teller (1907–37), McCall’s Magazine (1873–2002) and the Strand Magazine (1891–1950). These stories range from a protest against brutality and barbarism, through Frau Ebermann’s traumatic encounter with five Belgian children in ‘Swept and Garnished’ (January 1915 in the Century Magazine and in Nash’s and Pall Mall Magazine), to a veiled criticism of the neutral forces in ‘Sea Constables: A Tale of 15’ (Metropolitan, September 1915, and Nash’s Magazine, October 1915). Kipling’s ‘Mary Postgate’ (Nash’s and Pall Mall Magazine, Century Magazine, September 1915) moves on to narrate a dark tale of vindictive retribution, bereft of any sympathy for the young dying German airman in the story. ‘In the Interests of the Brethren’ (Story-Teller and Metropolitan, December 1918), which argues for the relaxation of rules during wartime, was written in 1917. It reveals Kipling’s shift towards a more empathetic and humane social concern which later culminated in his exploration of Helen Turrell’s

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experience in ‘The Gardener’ (McCall’s Magazine, April 1925, also in the Strand Magazine, May 1925).30

Providing a Creative Outlet: Periodicals and the Quest for Identity From shaping public opinion at home to potentially influencing politics in the US, periodicals served a wide gamut of purposes for recognised literary authors such as Hardy and Kipling during the First World War. However, beyond enhancing the reputations of established writers, periodicals also gave a new impetus to younger writers by providing them with invaluable creative space to experiment with their works. Most poetsoldiers of the Great War initiated and sustained their creative journeys by contributing to various periodicals. While Rupert Brooke (1887–1915) honed his poetic skills by contributing to New Numbers (February–December 1914), Siegfried Sassoon began his creative journey by contributing to magazines such as Cricket Magazine and the Academy (1869–1915).31 For Charles Hamilton Sorley (1895–1915), the publication of Marlborough College, the Marlburian (1843–), provided the requisite platform, publishing poems such as ‘Peace’, ‘A Call to Action’, ‘Rain’ and ‘The Massacre’ among several others.32 Edmund Blunden (1896–1974) also initiated his career as a writer by contributing works such as ‘A Summer Idyll’, ‘Summer Peace’, ‘A Poem Dreamed’ and several others to Blue, the school magazine of Christ’s Hospital.33 Similarly, Robert Graves (1895–1985), who attended Charterhouse, contributed most of his early poems to his school magazine, the Carthusian (1872–). Graves’s contributions to periodicals during the early war years were infrequent but extremely significant in shaping his poetic career. After publishing ‘Some Trench Scenes’ in the Spectator (1828–) in 1915, he contributed ‘The Morning before the Battle’ and ‘The Dead Fox-Hunter’ to the Westminster Gazette the following year.34 Teaming up with Sassoon, he published ‘The Last Post’ in the Nation (1907–21) under the title ‘Two Poems by Soldiers’ in March 1917.35 Sassoon’s contribution to the joint effort was the bitterly ironic composition ‘Died of Wounds’. Graves’s other significant wartime contributions to periodicals such as the Cambridge Magazine (1912–23), the New Statesman (1913–) and the Colour Magazine (1914–32) included significant works such as ‘The Dead Boche’, ‘Peace’ and ‘Country at War’, respectively.36 Like Rupert Brooke, the war poet Wilfrid Gibson (1878–1962) found an opening in the Spectator at a very young age. As a co-founder of the journal New Numbers, during his early career Gibson also sustained himself by writing reviews for the Glasgow Herald (1783–) and later briefly working as a sub-editor for the ailing magazine Rhythm (1911–13).37 Having been rejected for enlistment four times due to his poor eyesight, Gibson was ultimately recruited as a private in the Army Service Corps Motor Transport in October 1917. His compilation of poems Battle (September 1915), which served as a major influence on later war poets such as Rosenberg, Graves and Sassoon, earned him appraisal from the Athenaeum (1828–1921), the Quarterly Review (1809–1967), The Times, the Nation and the Boston Evening Transcript (1830–1941). Lascelles Abercrombie (1881–1938), reviewing for the Quarterly Review, mentioned that the ‘emotion they imply is not patriotic, but simply and broadly human; that is what war means, we feel, these exquisite bodies insulted by agony and death’.38

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The transition to contemporary leading periodicals came relatively late for Ivor Gurney (1890–1937) and Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918). Under the editorship of Marion Scott, the Royal College of Music Magazine (1904–) remains a witness to Gurney’s remarkable struggle as a poet. When leading dailies and periodicals seemed elusive to the young writer, the magazine played an encouraging role by publishing poems such as ‘To Certain Comrades’, ‘To the Poet before Battle’, ‘Songs of Pain and Beauty’, ‘Ypres’, ‘After Music’ and a few others.39 Buoyed by these publications, Gurney’s verse gradually made its way to other leading periodicals of the time: ‘The Volunteer’, ‘In a Ward’ (Spectator), ‘The Immortal Hour’ (Westminster Gazette) and ‘The Day of Victory’ (Gloucester Journal, 1772–1816, 1837–1950).40 Isaac Rosenberg’s creative association with periodicals preceded the onset of the war in journals such as South African Women in Council (1913–18), A Piece of Mosaic (a booklet produced for a Palestine Bazaar organised in London, 13 May 1912) and three privately issued pamphlets: ‘Night and Day’ (1912), ‘Youth’ (1915) and ‘Moses. A Play’ (1916).41 In the years of the war, only two of Rosenberg’s poems, ‘Marching’ and ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’, were accepted by Harriet Monroe for Poetry (1912–).42 It is important to remember, however, that the critical recognition of Rosenberg’s war verse was largely due to the persistent efforts of multiple critics and reviewers who fought for his cause in various periodicals in the decades immediately following his death on 1 April 1918. The significant role played by periodicals in this context is undeniable and can be easily gauged by the string of critical efforts undertaken in this regard: ‘Aspects of the Poetry of Isaac Rosenberg’ by D. W. Harding; ‘The Recognition of Isaac Rosenberg’ by F. R. Leavis; Jack Lindeman’s ‘The Trench Poems of Isaac Rosenberg’; Joseph Cohen’s ‘Isaac Rosenberg: From Romantic to Classic’; and Dennis Silk’s ‘Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918)’ among others. Rosenberg’s collection of poems, edited by Gordon Bottomley in 1922, received mixed response from reviewers. The Times Literary Supplement (1902–) was of the opinion that Rosenberg ‘had a genius for the vivid phrase; for illumination in flashes’, moving on to affirm that ‘the name of Isaac Rosenberg must be added to the long list of those whose promise was cut short by the war’.43 Herbert Read (1893–1968), reviewing for the Criterion (1922–39), called the collection ‘a worthy memorial’.44 While the Manchester Guardian (1821–) referred to Rosenberg as ‘An Obscure Poet’, Edith Sitwell writing for the New Age (1894–1922) acknowledged him as ‘one of the two great poets killed in the war, the other being Wilfred Owen’.45 In spite of the mixed critical response, periodicals and journals ensured that Rosenberg’s war poetry found its richly deserved place in the literary history of the Great War. Some of the most memorable works pertaining to the war appeared in periodicals anonymously or pseudonymously. The veil of anonymity may have been prompted because of the sensitive nature of the ongoing conflict, encompassing an inevitable clash of opinions and ideological perspectives in various creative expressions. Authors preferred to articulate personal views and attitudes towards the war from behind a mask. The most notable instance of this is the Canadian Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae’s (1872–1918) poem ‘In Flanders Fields’, which, after being rejected by the Spectator, was published anonymously in Punch (1841–1992) on 8 December 1915.46 McCrae published his other war poem, ‘The Anxious Dead’, in the Spectator on 20 June 1917; but it was no match for the popularity of his earlier composition, which immediately struck a chord with civilians and soldiers alike, poignantly exploring topical issues of

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loss and remembrance. The leading war poet Edward Thomas (1878–1917), who in the pre-war years had contributed to periodicals such as New Age, Atlantic Monthly (1857–), the Daily Chronicle (1872–1930) and the Bookman (1891–1934), published several of his important works as ‘Edward Eastaway’ in periodicals such as Form, A Quarterly of the Arts (1916–22), Poetry and Root and Branch (1912–26?). Some of these poems were significant works: ‘Lob’ (Form, April 1916), ‘The Unknown’ (Poetry, February 1917) and ‘The Lofty Sky’ (Root and Branch, December 1917).47 For the present-day reader, First World War poetry seems almost synonymous with the name of Wilfred Owen (1893–1918). As Owen could not publish his planned compilation of poems during his lifetime, periodicals remain the sole witness to a few of his published poems. Two of these appeared anonymously in the Hydra (1917–18): ‘Song of Songs’ (1 September 1917) and ‘The Next War’ (29 September 1917).48 Owen’s ‘Song of Songs’ earned a special mention in a poetry competition organised by the Bookman in May 1918. The Nation carried the three other of Owen’s poems published during his lifetime in 1918: ‘Miners’, ‘Futility’ and ‘Hospital Barge’.49 Besides writing poetry, as a part of psychiatrist Arthur John Brock’s (1879–1947) ergotherapy at Craiglockhart War Hospital, Owen also edited the Hydra for six consecutive issues from 21 July 1917 onwards. As Meredith Martin observes, ‘his editorials provide indirect mediation on coming to terms with the different requirements of therapy at Craiglockhart, and show how Owen’s own poetic writing might be read for “marks” of neurasthenic disconnection from time’s proper marching’.50 Owen’s recuperation at Craiglockhart underscores the crucial palliative role played by the Hydra in the psychological recovery of a combatant poet. Like their male counterparts, periodicals also testify to the engagement of women writers, as several of them discovered new avenues in the context of the ongoing conflict. May Sinclair (1863–1946) hailed the war as an occasion to gain experience of ‘a new and more intense life, freed from stultifying conventions’.51 Writing for the magazine Woman at Home (1893–1920) in 1915, she referred to the war as an experience of ‘purifying by fire which nations must pass through from moment to moment of their history, the supreme test of their fitness to endure’.52 Incidentally, Sinclair’s experience of the war inspired her autobiographical work A Journal of Impressions in Belgium (1915). On 25 September 1914 Sinclair set out for the front in the official role of secretary and publicist to a Motor Ambulance Unit. However, the experience ended in disappointment as she was ordered to return to England in the second half of October 1914. Sinclair’s three poems, ‘Field Ambulance in Retreat’, ‘Dedication (To a Field Ambulance in Flanders)’ and ‘After the Retreat’, chronicle her intensely personal experiences of the war.53 Published in the Egoist (1914–19), ‘After the Retreat’ makes brilliant use of topographical imagery to poignantly convey a deep sense of loss and desolation. While Sinclair’s stint with the Motor Ambulance Unit was abruptly cut short, the war opened up new opportunities of experience for other women writers. Nursing allowed several women writers such as Vera Brittain (1893–1970), May Cannan (1893–1973), Eva Dobell (1867–1963), Carola Oman (1897–1978) and Mary Borden (1886–1968) to chronicle their unique experiences of the war in their writings. Mary Borden’s contributions to the English Review (1908–37) – ‘At the Somme’ (August 1917) and ‘Unidentified’ (December 1917) – poignantly capture realistic images of the conflict.54 Periodicals also allowed space for nascent female political voices, especially

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in the poems of Eva Gore-Booth (1870–1926), Margaret Cole (1893–1980) and Margaret Sackville (1881–1963). Booth’s poem ‘Conscientious Objectors’ was published in the Herald (30 March 1916) and articulates her deep pacifist concerns.55 Lady Margaret Sackville also advocated the pacifist cause in poems such as ‘The Pageant of War’, ‘A Memory’, ‘Sacrament’, ‘To One Who Denies the Possibility of a Permanent Peace’ and several others, most of which she contributed to the Nation, Everyman (1912–16 and 1929–35), the Sphere and The Times.56 The Times Literary Supplement lavished praise on her compilation The Pageant of War: ‘The bitterest recrimination in this book is not against the Prussian, but against those who deny the possibility of a permanent peace, those who of old “poisoned Socrates” and crucified Christ.’57 Beyond these new experiences in verse and prose, a string of obituaries, articles, reviews and reports in contemporary periodicals exercised a strong cultural influence during the war years. With newspapers and magazines at their catalytic best, leading authors themselves, sometimes unwittingly, became propagandist tools for the state, being exploited for a diverse range of strategic aims by a nation at war. The rapid mythologisation of the British poet Rupert Brooke following his sudden death in 1915 serves as an apt case for critical scrutiny in this regard. The inception and subsequent circulation of the Brooke myth also underscores the formidable impact exercised by British periodicals in shaping public opinion among the general masses.

‘Went to war with Rupert Brooke . . .’: Periodicals, Eulogies and Mythical Construction A few months before his sudden death on 23 April 1915 on board Duguay-Trouin, a French hospital ship at Trebuki Bay near the Greek island of Scyros, Rupert Brooke penned his famous war sonnets, which made their first appearance in the Dymock poets’ quarterly New Numbers. These sonnets were critically acclaimed by The Times Literary Supplement: ‘It is impossible to shred up this beauty for the purpose of criticism. These sonnets are personal [. . .] and yet the very blood and youth of England seem to find expression in them.’58 Such appreciation gained further public attention just a few weeks prior to Brooke’s death, when his sonnet ‘The Soldier’ was quoted in full by William Inge, the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, during the Easter Sunday service. The Times of 5 April 1915 carried Inge’s sermon, citing the sonnet in full, thereby sharing Inge’s optimism that in due course Brooke ‘would take rank with our great poets’.59 Inge’s observation proved prophetic, although its realisation was scripted by the massive propagandist campaigns launched by politicians such as Winston Churchill and Herbert Henry Asquith in various dailies and magazines of the day subsequent to Brooke’s sudden death. As Alisa Miller observes: ‘Brooke’s visibility, as well as his literary reputation, were aided by the timely publication of articles affirming his place in the national consciousness alongside his poetry and prose.’60 Succumbing to septicaemia rather than an adversary’s bullet, Brooke’s loss was greeted with a flurry of effusive tributes in British periodicals, all exalting the nobility of his martyrdom. Most notable among them was Churchill’s impassioned threnody in The Times on 26 April 1915, which was skilfully drafted not only to genuinely mourn Brooke’s death but also to enhance the prevalent conscription rhetoric of the state. Describing Brooke as ‘joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed, with classic

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symmetry of mind and body’, Churchill recommended him as a role model of ‘all that one would wish England’s noblest sons to be in the days when no sacrifice but the most precious is acceptable’.61 Commenting on Churchill’s ‘wily political manoeuvring’, Joseph Bristow observes in ‘Rupert Brooke’s Poetic Deaths’: Given that Churchill’s commentary built on the Dean’s sermon to transform the young poet into a national legend, Brooke’s perished body came to stand for indomitable patriotic values, ones in which the sons of the soil would remain ‘forever England’, no matter how far-flung their graves were from the homeland.62 Other newspapers and magazines were quick to tread in the footsteps of Churchill’s eulogy. Writing in the Cambridge Review (1879–1998), Gilbert Murray (1866–1957) observed: ‘I cannot help thinking that Rupert Brooke will probably live in fame as an almost mythical figure.’63 The Sphere went a step further and compared him to Sir Philip Sidney: ‘Brooke was the only English poet of any consideration who has given his life in his country’s wars since Philip Sidney received his death wound under the walls of Zutphen in 1586.’64 Writing for the Morning Post, Lascelles Abercrombie (1881–1938) observed along similar lines: ‘Not since Sir Philip Sidney’s death have we lost such a gallant and joyous type of the poet soldier.’65 While the Star (1788–1960) referred to Brooke as ‘the youth of our race in symbol’, the Daily News (1846–1930) asserted that ‘to look at he was part of the youth of the world’.66 The poet Walter de la Mare (1873– 1956), writing for the Westminster Gazette, similarly mourned: ‘Nature is as jealous of the individual as of the type. She gave Rupert Brooke youth, and may be [. . .] in doing so grafted a legend.’67 Brooke’s mythologisation and the cult of hero worship were not confined to Britain. It sent ripples across the Atlantic, fomenting America’s search for its own romantic war idol. Ironically, facts became a casualty when the American poet Joyce Kilmer (1886–1918) penned his two-page biography of Brooke for the 12 September 1915 edition of the New York Times Magazine (1896–). Ignorant of Brooke’s actual demise due to toxaemia without his firing a single shot on the battlefield, Kilmer erringly wrote: ‘Rupert Brooke’s death at the Front illustrates the paradox of the effect on literature of war, which ended his career and made him immortal.’68 The spate of such eulogies in newspapers and magazines inevitably swelled Brooke’s popularity as a war poet to unprecedented proportions. The subsequent publication of his collection 1914 and Other Poems by Sidgwick and Jackson met with astounding success, being reprinted fourteen times between May 1915 and September 1916. It also facilitated a revival of his earlier compilation Poems (originally published in 1911), which rapidly went through six editions in 1915 and a further four in the following year. Ironically, the Oxford Magazine (1883–) had earlier dismissed Poems as a book ‘full of bad taste and at times positively revolting’.69 However, it is also imperative to note that along with the upsurge in the cult of Brooke, periodicals also record occasional discordant voices of reason, caution and restraint. Writing for the Edinburgh Review (1802–1929), Edmund Gosse (1849–1928) asserted: ‘There is very little of the poetry of Rupert Brooke which can be definitely identified with the war.’70 In the same article, he was swift to point out ‘the tact’ with which Brooke’s sonnets were ‘presented to the public’, underscoring that the poet-soldier was being used for the ulterior purposes of the state: ‘He was the finest specimen of a certain type produced at the universities and then sacrificed to our national necessity.’71 On similar

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lines, the New Statesman warned: ‘A myth has been created: but it has grown round an imaginary figure very different from the real man.’72 Brooke’s contemporary poet Charles Hamilton Sorley, serving with the Suffolk regiment on the Western Front, was also prompted to criticise Brooke’s verse. Writing to his mother on 28 April 1915, Sorley expressed his disenchantment at the changed stance of the Morning Post towards Brooke’s poetry following his sudden death: ‘The Morning Post, which has always hitherto disapproved of him is now loud in his praises because he has conformed to the stupid axiom of literary criticism that the only stuff of poetry is violent physical experience, by dying on active service.’73 Sorley was also critical of the Times Literary Supplement for having ‘over praised’ Brooke’s famous sonnet sequence.74 In spite of such reservations, the prevalent media frenzy could perhaps be aptly summarised through Bernard Bergonzi’s observation in Heroes Twilight, where he refers to Brooke’s war sonnets as works of ‘great mythic power’ that ‘formed a unique focus for what the English felt, or wanted to feel in 1914–15’, during the early years of the war.75 In this context, it is also interesting to observe that Brooke’s so-called war sonnets served as a source of inspiration for a number of female poets writing during the early years of the war. Poets such as Emily Underdown (1863–1947), Helen Hamilton (1853–1925), Virna Sheard (1862–1943), Ruth Mitchell (1889–1969), Cicely Smith (1882–1954), Katharine Tynan (1859–1931), Alice Cooke (1867–1940), Ellen Spencer (1850–1936) and May Aldington (1872–1954) trod in the footsteps of Brooke, perfunctorily articulating the propagandist agenda of the state in various periodicals. However, no instance embodied the jingoist mood of the hour as much as the popular poems composed by Jessie Pope (1868–1941), who frequently contributed to dailies and periodicals such as the Daily Mail, Punch and the Daily Express (1900–). Dismissed today as nationalistic rhetoric, Pope’s jingoistic poems were even encouraged by The Times Literary Supplement: ‘they are apt and racy comments in verse on many phases of the war – everyone hitting a different point on the head with a smart tap’.76 The Pall Mall Gazette (1865–1923) insisted that ‘nothing could be better than her scathing verses on the Kaiser, or gayer than her rallies for the troops, or tenderer than her thoughts’.77 However, the grim realities of trench warfare coupled with the endless casualty lists trickling back home gradually transformed such popular exuberance in verse to renderings of disillusionment and resentment towards the dragging conflict. By the end of 1916 the stalemate had led to authorial voices of dissent. Siegfried Sassoon’s staunch epistolary protest in 1917 and his subsequent refusal to carry on duties as an officer triggered a reverse ripple effect on the publications of the time.

‘. . . came home with Siegfried Sassoon’: Anguish, Dissent and Periodicals Sassoon’s war poems, unlike those by other combatant poets, were frequently published in contemporary periodicals such as the Cambridge Magazine, the Spectator, The Times, the English Review, Time and Tide (1920–86) and the Hydra before being compiled in single collections. Reviewing Sassoon’s The Old Huntsman for the Times Literary Supplement, Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) hailed the poet’s capacity to powerfully capture the ‘sordid and horrible’ nature of the war, producing ‘a new shock of surprise’ among his readers.78 In another review of Sassoon’s Counter-Attack and

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Other Poems in the Times Literary Supplement, Woolf praised his unique ability to depict ‘the terrible pictures which lie behind the colourless phrases in the newspapers’.79 Woolf’s words of praise for Sassoon marked a clear departure from the earlier critical endorsements of pro-war romanticised rhetoric articulated by writers such as Rupert Brooke, Jessie Pope, May Cannan and several others. Commissioned into the Royal Welch Fusiliers as a second lieutenant, Sassoon was revered by his compatriots, being nicknamed ‘Mad Jack’ for his fortitude and the daring exploits he undertook at the front. Periodicals testify to his gripping combat experiences expressed in verse, which Sassoon frequently contributed in the course of his military service. A cursory glance reveals the diverse range of his contributions to the leading dailies and periodicals of the time: ‘To Victory’ (printed anonymously in The Times, 15 January 1916), ‘The Poet as Hero’ (Cambridge Magazine, 2 December 1916), ‘Conscripts’ (Spectator, 17 February 1917), ‘The Optimist’ (Cambridge Magazine, 21 April 1917), ‘Supreme Sacrifice’ (Cambridge Magazine, 9 June 1917), ‘Does it Matter’ (Cambridge Magazine, 6 October 1917), ‘How to Die’ (Cambridge Magazine, 6 October 1917), ‘Glory of Women’ (Cambridge Magazine, December 1917), ‘The Fathers’ (Cambridge Magazine, 13 October 1917), ‘Sick Leave’ (English Review, January 1918), ‘Suicide in the Trenches’ (Cambridge Magazine, 23 February 1918), ‘Attack’ (Cambridge Magazine, 20 October 1917) and ‘Fight to a Finish’ (Cambridge Magazine, 27 October 1917) among several others. Sassoon’s anti-war protests in verse contrast starkly with the pro-war romanticism of Brooke’s war sonnets or Pope’s exuberant patriotic poems composed during the early years of the conflict. In fact, by the end of 1916 a general mood of scepticism and resentment tended to prevail among the combatants, as the violent reality of the trenches irretrievably transformed the romantic pre-war convictions of Valour, Honour and Glory. This transformation is glaringly evident in the Westminster Gazette’s rejection of Sassoon’s poems ‘In the Pink’ and ‘The Death Bed’ in 1916 – both of which it was feared would have an adverse impact on the recruitment process.80 In spite of his remarkable achievements on the battlefield as an officer, Sassoon refused to return to his duties at the end of his convalescent leave following his wounding on 14 April 1917 during the Battle of Arras. On 7 June 1917 he contacted John Middleton Murry (1889–1957) and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) through H. W. Massingham (1860–1924), the long-time editor of the Nation. Both were of the opinion that an open proclamation by a noteworthy officer such as Sassoon would provide impetus to the anti-war movement. This encouragement paved the way for Sassoon’s famed public statement, ‘Finished with the War: A Soldier’s Declaration’. Written on 15 June 1917, the declaration was distributed to prominent British personalities and to the mainstream media, including papers such as the Bradford Pioneer (1913–36) and the Woman’s Dreadnought (1914–24). On 30 July 1917 Sassoon’s declaration was formally delivered in the House of Commons, and subsequently printed in The Times on 31 July 1917. Sassoon’s statement of ‘wilful defiance of military authority’ was largely triggered by his deep conviction that the war was ‘being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it’.81 Sassoon’s declaration in 1917 lies at the opposite end of the spectrum to Churchill’s eulogy for Brooke carried by The Times in 1915. Through his declaration Sassoon intended to ‘protest against the deception’, the ‘political errors’ and ‘insincerities’ of the statesmen through which an ‘unjust’ extended war had been imposed on the soldiers suffering at the front.82 Narrowly escaping being court-martialled for his outspoken anti-war stand, Sassoon

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was referred by the Medical Board for treatment of shell shock under Dr William Halse Rivers (1864–1922) at Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh.

Conclusion: Periodicals, Authors and the First World War From a close analysis of the diverse range of contributions made by established voices such as Hardy and Kipling on the one hand, and the varied nature of experiences articulated by combatant poets and women writers on the other, it is evident that most British authors were passionately involved with the periodicals of the time. They used periodicals to disseminate a wide variety of ideological perspectives, ranging from overt propaganda – often in complicity with the state – to political dissent. These contradictory perspectives demonstrate the distinctive nature of individual responses to the First World War. What were the predominant trends underlying these distinctive authorial engagements with periodicals during the conflict? Besides playing a key role in shaping public opinion through established authors, periodicals also aided in constructing literary reputations for young writers such as Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfrid Gibson, Charles Hamilton Sorley, Wilfred Owen and several others. Magazines and dailies also provided a significant outlet for wider cultural expressions such as collective mourning or articulating nascent experiences resulting from the conflict. Such interactions paved the way for an ingenious expression of varied sentiments, whether pro- or anti-war. As explored elsewhere in this Companion, the war years also witnessed a deluge of aesthetic experiments carried out in periodicals by various leading authors and artists. In spite of the short lifespan of some of these periodicals, their pivotal role in the fashioning of literary modernism is unprecedented in literary history. Through a diverse cross-section of authorial voices, periodicals capture the literary drifts and cross-currents of the turbulent war years in considerable detail. For present-day readers and critics, they serve as unique ‘repositories of literary taste and social history’.83 Collectively, no other form of publication engaged authors so passionately, or so faithfully chronicled the finer recesses of the British literary landscape during the First World War.

Notes   1. Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Fly’, in Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2006), 346.   2. Mansfield, ‘The Fly’, 346.  3. Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Fly’, The Nation and the Athenaeum 30, no. 25 (18 March 1922): 896–7; Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Fly’, Century Magazine 104, no. 5 (September 1922): 743–6; Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Fly’, New Republic 34, no. 434 (28 March 1923): 129–31.   4. Annalise Grice, ‘Journals, Magazines, Newspapers’, in D.H. Lawrence in Context, ed. Andrew Harrison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 47–56, here 47. Other critics also underscore the significant role played by magazines in the initiation of modernism. For more details, see Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman, Modernism in the Magazines: An Introduction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).

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 5. Catherine. W. Reilly, English Poetry of the First World War: A Bibliography (London: George Prior, 1978).   6. Tim Kendall, ed., Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), xv.   7. Twell Brex, ‘A Serious Outbreak of Poets’, Daily Mail, 23 June 1915, 11.  8. ‘Notice’, The Wiper Times or Salient News 2, no. 4 (20 March 1916): n.p.  9. Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 51. 10. Thomas Hardy, ‘Drummer Hodge or the Dead Drummer’, Literature, 25 November 1899, 513. 11. Thomas Hardy to John Galsworthy, 4 August 1918, The Collected Letters, vol. 5: 1914–1919, ed. Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 275. 12. Thomas Hardy, ‘Men Who March Away’, The Times, 9 September 1914, 9. Also published in Times Literary Supplement, 10 September 1914, 413, and The New York Times, 10 September 1914, 5. 13. As cited in James Whitehead, ‘Thomas Hardy and the First World War Companion Poems: “Men Who March Away” and “Before Marching and After”’, The Thomas Hardy Journal 15, no. 3 (1999): 85–98, here 86. 14. Thomas Hardy, ‘Before Marching and After’, Fortnightly Review, 1 October 1915, 609. 15. The Variorum Edition of the Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. James Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1979), 544. 16. Thomas Hardy, ‘In the Time of “The Breaking of Nations”’, Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art 121, no. 3 (29 January 1916): 108. 17. Thomas Hardy, ‘A New Year’s Eve in War Time’, Sphere, 6 January 1917, 10. 18. Ralph Pite, ‘“Graver Things . . . Braver Things”: Hardy’s War Poetry’, in The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry, ed. Tim Kendall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 34–50, here 49. 19. Thomas Hardy, ‘The Pity of It’, Fortnightly Review, April 1915, 567. 20. Kendall, ed., Poetry of the First World War, 4. 21. Thomas Hardy, ‘And There was a Great Calm’, The Times, special Armistice Day section, 11 November 1920, iii. 22. Charlotte Mew, Charlotte Mew: Collected Poems and Prose, ed. Val Warner (London and Manchester: Virago and Carcanet, 1982), 35. 23. Alice Goldfarb Marquis, ‘Words as Weapons: Propaganda in Britain and Germany during the First World War’, Journal of Contemporary History 13, no 3 (1978): 467–98. 24. Andrew Rutherford, ‘Introduction’, in Rudyard Kipling: War Stories and Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), xx. 25. As cited and mentioned in , accessed 20 April 2021. 26. Tim Kendall, ‘Civilian War Poetry: Hardy and Kipling’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the First World War, ed. Santanu Das (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 198–209, here 205. 27. ‘My Boy Jack’, , accessed 14 May 2021. 28. Rudyard Kipling, The Collected Poems of Rudyard Kipling, ed. R. T. Jones (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2001), 229. 29. Kendall, ‘Civilian War Poetry’, 206. 30. All stories and relevant details about publication accessed through the Kipling Society website. 31. Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of a War Poet. A Biography 1886–1918 (New York: Routledge, 1999), 113, 146.

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32. The Collected Poems of Charles Hamilton Sorley, ed. Jean Moorcroft Wilson (London: Cecil Woolf, 1985), 113; ‘Peace’, Marlburian, 19 December 1912, 100; ‘The Massacre’, Marlburian, 17 October 1912, 105; ‘A Call to Action’, Marlburian, 31 October 1912, 102; ‘Rain’, Marlburian, 31 October 1912. 33. Edmund Blunden, ‘A Summer Idyll’, Blue 40, no. 9 (July 1913): 224–5; ‘Summer Peace’, Blue 40, no. 7 (May 1915): 173; ‘A Poem Dreamed’, Blue 42, no. 8 (June 1915): 187. As cited in B. J. Kirkpatrick, A Bibliography of Edmund Blunden (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), 297–8. 34. Robert Graves, ‘Some Trench Scenes’, Spectator 115 (1915): 329–31; ‘The Morning before the Battle’, Westminster Gazette, 13 March 1915, 2; ‘The Dead Fox-Hunter’, Westminster Gazette, 20 September 1915, 2. Also cited in Fred H. Higginson, A Bibliography of the Works of Robert Graves (London: Nicholas Vane, 1966), 219–22. 35. ‘Two Poems by Soldiers’, Nation 20 (3 March 1917): 735. 36. Robert Graves, ‘The Dead Boche’, Cambridge Magazine, 10 February 1917, 302; ‘Peace’, New Statesman, 21 September 1918, 493; ‘Country at War’, Colour, March 1918, 39. See also Higginson, A Bibliography, 219–22. 37. Tonie and Valmai Holt, with contributions and illustration by Charlotte Zeepvat, Poets of the Great War (Yorkshire: Leo Cooper, 1999), 221. 38. Holt, Poets of the Great War, 224. 39. Ivor Gurney, ‘To Certain Comrades’, Royal College of Music Magazine 12, no. 3 (1916): 78; ‘To the Poet before Battle’: 10–11, Royal College of Music Magazine 12, no. 1 (1915). ‘Song of Pain and Beauty’: 89, Royal College of Music Magazine 13, no. 3 (1917). ‘Ypres’ and ‘After Music’, Royal College of Music Magazine 14, no. 2 (1918): 48. As cited on the website of the Ivor Gurney Society, , accessed 24 April 2022. 40. Ivor Gurney, ‘The Volunteer’, Spectator, 22 February 1919, 230; ‘In a Ward’, Spectator, 11 January 1919, 39; ‘The Immortal Hour’, Westminster Gazette, June 1918; ‘The Day of Victory’, Gloucester Journal, 11 January 11, 1919: , accessed 24 April 2022. 41. Isaac Rosenberg, Poems by Isaac Rosenberg, ed. Gordon Bottomley, with an introductory memoir by Laurence Binyon (London: William Heinemann, 1922), xi–xii. 42. Isaac Rosenberg, ‘Marching’ and ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, December 1916, 128. 43. Unsigned review, ‘Isaac Rosenberg’s Poems’, Times Literary Supplement, 15 June 1922, 393. The Times Literary Supplement was initially published with The Times, but became, in 1914, a separate publication. 44. Herbert Read, ‘Books of the Quarter’, Criterion 17, no. 66 (October 1937): 136–8. 45. ‘Obscure Poet’, Manchester Guardian, 1 August 1922; Edith Sitwell, ‘Readers and Writers’, New Age 31, no. 13 (27 July 1922): 161. 46. ‘In Flanders Fields’, Punch, 8 December 1915, 468. 47. Edward Eastaway [Edward Thomas], ‘Lob’, Form, April 1916, 33; ‘The Unknown’, Poetry, 9 February 1917, 249–50; ‘The Lofty Sky’, Root and Branch, December 1917, 32. Also cited in Robert P. Eckert, Edward Thomas: A Biography and a Bibliography (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1937), 275–7. 48. Wilfred Owen, ‘Song of Songs’, Hydra 1, no. 10 (1 September 1917): 13; ‘The Next War’, Hydra 1, no. 12 (29 September 1917): 21. 49. Wilfred Owen, ‘Miners’, Nation, 26 January 1918, 539; ‘Futility’ and ‘Hospital Barge’, Nation, 15 June 1918, 285. 50. Meredith Martin, ‘Therapeutic Measures: The Hydra and Wilfred Owen at Craiglockhart War Hospital’, Modernism/modernity 14, no. 1 (2007): 35–54, here 45. 51. Kendall, ed., Poetry of the First World War, 16. 52. May Sinclair, ‘Women’s Sacrifices for the War’, Woman at Home, February 1915, 11.

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53. See May Sinclair, A Journal of Impressions in Belgium (London: Hutchinson, 1915), v; and ‘After the Retreat’, Imagist number of the Egoist 2, no. 5 (1 May 1915): 77. 54. Mary Borden, ‘At the Somme’, English Review, August 1917, 97; ‘Unidentified’, English Review, December 1917, 482. 55. Eva Gore-Booth, ‘Conscientious Objectors’, Herald, 30 March 1916, 3. 56. Lady Margaret Sackville, The Pageant of War (London: Simpkin Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., 1916), 9–10; ‘A Memory’, 32; ‘A Sacrament’, 46; ‘To One who Denies the Possibility of a Permanent Peace’, 134. 57. Times Literary Supplement, 18 May 1916, 233. 58. Walter de la Mare, ‘Thoughts by England Given’, Times Literary Supplement, 11 March 1915, 85. 59. ‘Dean Inge at St Paul’s: Spirit of the Martyr-Patriot’, The Times, 5 April 1915, 8. 60. Alisa Miller, Rupert Brooke in the First World War (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2017), 123. 61. W.S.C., ‘Death of Mr. Rupert Brooke. Sunstroke at Lemnos’, The Times, 26 April 1915, 5. 62. Joseph Bristow, ‘Rupert Brooke’s Poetic Deaths’, ELH 81, no. 2 (2014): 663–92, here 664. 63. Gilbert Murray, Cambridge Review, 1 May 1915, as cited in Christopher Hassall, Rupert Brooke (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1964), 516. 64. As cited in Hassall, Rupert Brooke, 516. 65. As cited in Nigel Jones, Rupert Brooke: Life, Death and Myth (London: Richard Cohen, 2014), 527. 66. As cited in Jones, Rupert Brooke, 527. 67. As cited in Jones, Rupert Brooke, 528. 68. Joyce Kilmer, ‘A Genius Whom the War Made and Killed’, New York Times Magazine, 12 September 1915, 19. 69. Oxford Magazine 31 (7 November 1912): 62. Also cited in Hassall, Rupert Brooke, 366. 70. Edmund Gosse, ‘Some Soldier Poets’, in Some Diversions of a Man of Letters (London: William Heinemann, 1919), 270. Initially published in the Edinburgh Review, October 1917, 296–316. 71. Gosse, ‘Some Soldier Poets’, 268. 72. New Statesman, 26 June 1915, 281. 73. Charles Sorley, The Letters of Charles Sorley (London: Cambridge University Press, 1919), 262. 74. Sorley, Letters, 262. 75. Bernard Bergonzi, Heroes Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War (New York: Coward-McCann, 1966), 41. 76. Times Literary Supplement, 7 January 1915, 8. 77. Jessie Pope, More War Poems (London: Grant Richards, 1915), 2. 78. ‘Mr Sassoon’s Poems’, Times Literary Supplement, 31 May 1917, 259. 79. ‘Two Soldier Poets’, Times Literary Supplement, 11 July 1918, 323. 80. Sassoon, ‘In the Pink’, 22, as cited in Sassoon, The War Poems: ‘The Westminster refused the poem, as they thought it might prejudice recruiting!!’, 22. Sassoon, ‘The Death-Bed’, 53, as cited in Sassoon, The War Poems: ‘Refused by the Westminster without comment’, 53. 81. As cited in Moorcroft Wilson, Siegfried Sassoon, 373–4. 82. Moorcroft Wilson, Siegfried Sassoon, 373–4. 83. The Edinburgh Companion to the First World War and the Arts, ed. Ann-Marie Einhaus and Katherine Isobel Baxter (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 246.

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8 Artists Selena Daly

T

he outbreak of war threw modern art into a crisis across the European continent. As exhibitions were halted, the art market collapsed and commissions dried up, art and artists were often marginalised and even demonised in public discourse.1 In the decade leading up to 1914, the world of modern art in Europe had been transformed through the emergence of multiple avant-garde groupings from Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, based in Dresden and Munich respectively, to the Cubists active in Paris from 1907, and the Futurists in Italy from 1909. As well as organising provocative exhibitions, avant-garde artists had significantly contributed to the already thriving culture of artistic and literary little magazines, which were essential to ensuring the wide circulation of their theories and artworks.2 During the years of the First World War, periodicals would assume an even greater importance, as many artists’ avenues for sales, self-promotion and networking crumbled. Faced with hostility to modern art from the press and general public, periodicals were used as a forum to demonstrate the commitment of artists to their nations’ respective war efforts and were deployed as vehicles to prove the continued vitality and relevance of modern art movements in the face of global war. This chapter will focus on the major periodicals and artists associated with the three most important avant-garde movements active during the war years and before, namely Cubism in France, Futurism in Italy and Dada in New York and Switzerland. I will first examine how art was put at the service of nationalism in periodicals in France and Italy before moving to non-belligerent locales to explore how the latitude offered by a neutral context opened up new possibilities for innovation in artistic periodical publishing.

Artists as Soldiers in France and Italy The heady days of August 1914 saw military-aged artists in France called up to fight, while across the Alps, mobilisation would only occur in May 1915 when Italy entered the war alongside the Allies, a delay that caused no little frustration to the Futurists led by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944), many of whom were desperate to see military action.3 In the absence of exhibitions, the focus of Cubist and Futurist artistic activity coalesced around periodical publications. Mobilised artists continued to contribute to periodicals, creating a vital conduit between the front line and the home front and allowing artists to flaunt their military service and patriotic credentials. In this section, I will examine L’élan (Paris, 1915–16), Vela Latina (Naples, 1915–16) and L’Italia Futurista (Florence, 1916–18) as well as the soldier newspapers La Ghirba

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and Il Montello (both Italian war zone, 1918). Many of the most vocal of the Parisian avant-garde served in the French army from 1914, notably Guillaume Apollinaire (as a volunteer due to his Polish-Italian roots, 1880–1918), Albert Gleizes (1881–1953) and Georges Braque (1882–1963), leaving the Cubist movement in somewhat of a crisis. As a citizen of neutral Spain, Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) could engage in his work relatively unimpeded, but as an alien non-combatant his was a precarious position and he did not significantly contribute to unfolding artistic debates.4 Thus, the reins of leadership were assumed by a previously marginal figure, Amédée Ozenfant (1886–1966), who had been deemed unfit for military service in 1914, and from 15 April 1915 began to publish L’élan.5 During its relatively short lifespan, the magazine sought to support the French war effort and to bear witness to the continued vitality of the Parisian avant-garde and the direct military engagement of many of its exponents. The magazine was unambiguous in its support of the French war effort; indeed the title ‘élan’ (meaning ‘vitality’) was a buzzword for French military power, determination and patriotism. As Ozenfant wrote in the first editorial, ‘those who are fighting, our friends, write to us to say how much the war has attached them to their art’ (ceux qui se battent, nos amis, nous écrivent combien la guerre les a attachés davantage à leur art) and he declared that L’élan would be the forum for them to demonstrate that commitment.6 The magazine was unabashedly nationalist in its approach and aesthetics. Contributing artists were identified by their military rank where appropriate, and much was made of the fact that they were engaging with the magazine from the front line. In the third issue, Ozenfant urged his readers to reflect on the fact that painter André Dunoyer de Segonzac (1884–1974) was a mobilised soldier and that ‘the same hand, in consecutive moments, commanded an attack and drew this line’ (la même main, en des instants consécutifs, a commandé l’attaque et construit ce contour).7 Other serving soldiers and noted pre-war artists showcased in L’élan were Luc-Albert Moreau (1882–1948), Roger de la Fresnaye (1885–1925) and Jean Marchand (1883–1940), who all contributed sketches of fellow soldiers and scenes of life at the front, although in almost all cases scenes of calm contemplation or domesticity were depicted rather than anything that pointed to the chaos and horror of the battlefield.8 Some also contributed images of women’s contributions to the war effort, whether as ‘guardians of the home’ or as nurses.9 However, although all of these artists had worked in a Cubist style before the war, the works that featured in L’élan were rather more conservative in style and modest in their ambition. Given that they were sketching in the trenches, often on scraps of paper, such simplicity is to be expected perhaps, but these works were not the most effective in promoting the French avant-garde as being on the cutting edge of developments in modern art. In L’élan’s eighth issue of January 1916, Ozenfant changed tack somewhat, writing that ‘L’élan thus affirms itself as an avant-garde magazine researching Art and the Spirit. It gathers all free effort & shows that the war has not slowed down the vitality of thought in France’ (L’élan s’affirme ainsi la revue d’avant-garde des recherches de l’Art & de l’Esprit. Il accueille tout effort libre & témoigne que la guerre n’a pas ralenti en France l’élan de la pensée).10 From that issue and for the final two of L’élan’s short life, a more noticeably Cubist style crept in when Ozenfant announced the participation of some of the movement’s most famous proponents, who had hitherto been absent from the magazine’s pages, including André Derain (1880–1954), a serving soldier, and André Lhote (1885–1962) and Jean Metzinger (1883–1956), who

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had both been discharged from the army on medical grounds, as well as Picasso.11 The inclusion of Picasso was somewhat of an exception to the editorial line adopted by Ozenfant. Although he had declared in the first issue that the magazine was directed towards France’s friends and allies as well as France itself, the overwhelming majority of the artists featured were French, and Cubism was defended as an unambiguously French style of art.12 In Italy, the approach adopted by the Futurists was similar and even more nationcentred. The most notable Futurist artists of the pre-war and war years were Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916), Luigi Russolo (1885–1947), Carlo Carrà (1881–1966), Giacomo Balla (1871–1958), Mario Sironi (1885–1961), Fortunato Depero (1892–1960) and Ardengo Soffici (1879–1964). Marinetti had long understood the importance of periodicals for publicising his activities and had edited the journal Poesia from 1905 to 1909. From January 1913 a publication based in Florence, Lacerba, edited by Soffici and Giovanni Papini (1881–1956), had been the premier Futurist journal for showcasing the movement’s achievements and ideology.13 Although initially closely aligned with Marinetti’s circle in Milan, by December 1914 a definitive split between the two groups had occurred due to both political and artistic differences. As a result, during the crucial months of Italy’s neutrality and the intervention crisis between August 1914 and May 1915, Marinetti had to rely on publicising the work of his artists and poets in the marginal publication La balza futurista (Ragusa, Sicily, 1915), edited by Guglielmo Jannelli (1895–1950), Luciano Nicastro and Vann’Antò (1891–1960).14 Lasting for only three issues between April and May 1915, the journal did not devote significant attention to Futurist art. As soon as Italy entered the conflict at the end of May 1915, Jannelli and Vann’Antò were called up for service and the magazine ceased publication. Italy’s entry into the war answered the prayers of many of Futurism’s main protagonists, including Marinetti and the artists Boccioni, Russolo and Sironi, who all volunteered for the Lombard Battalion of Volunteer Cyclists and Motorists.15 They issued a manifesto declaring that the movement was suspended due to Marinetti’s absence at the front and continued: ‘As long as the war lasts, let’s leave to one side poems, paintbrushes, chisels and orchestras!’ (Finchè duri la guerra, lasciamo da parte i versi, i pennelli, gli scalpelli e le orchestre!).16 However, non-mobilised artists soon realised the need for a Futurist publication so that their pre-war efforts at building their reputations would not be entirely squandered. In addition, they realised the importance of the Futurists’ military engagement in silencing their critics. Thus, the Futurist poet and artist Francesco Cangiullo (1884–1977) began to edit two ‘Futurist pages’ in the Neapolitan journal Vela Latina between October 1915 and its closure in March 1916, and Emilio Settimelli (1891–1954) would take up the baton through the publication of L’Italia Futurista, an entirely Futurist periodical, from June 1916 to February 1918.17 The Futurist pages of Vela Latina aimed to prove the continued relevance of the Futurist movement to a country at war, while L’Italia Futurista sought to re-engage with the artistic activities of the Futurist movement, which had largely stalled during 1915. The role that art played in these periodicals and the use that artists made of these publications was similar and will thus be considered in tandem. In Italy, unlike the magazine style of publications such as L’élan, Futurist art was published in a newspaper format with rather limited black-and-white printing capabilities. Of the thirtynine issues of L’Italia Futurista, only eighteen featured artworks on the front page,

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which were often but not exclusively on war themes.18 Neither publication featured reproductions of Futurist paintings. With so many artists mobilised at the front and unable to produce large-scale new work, in addition to the publications’ limitations in publishing such reproductions, both journals showcased the other talents of Futurism’s multidisciplinary artists. Thus, short plays, known as sintesi teatrali, by Russolo and Boccioni were published alongside articles and manifestos about artistic matters penned by the same authors.19 Some artists also experimented with so-called ‘words in freedom’ (parole in libertà) compositions, which were verbo-visual poems featuring the typographical innovation that Marinetti had pioneered in his 1914 work Zang Tumb Tumb.20 In most issues of L’Italia Futurista, one of its four pages was dedicated to publishing these graphic poems that featured varying font sizes and the schematic arrangement of text outside of the confines of the newspaper line and column. Despite their arresting organisation on the page, most of these were by Futurist poets rather than artists. However, in some notable cases, these words-in-freedom poems employed such typographical manipulation that they can also be considered artworks. Notable in this regard are Marinetti’s ‘Battaglia a 9 piani’, which depicted a cross-section of the front line at Lake Garda with the Austrians on one side and the Italians on the other, and ‘Morbidezze in agguato + bombarde italiane’ depicting frontline explosions in graphic form as recounted in a soldier’s letter to his beloved.21 Most importantly, though, the pages of Vela Latina and L’Italia Futurista were used to highlight and promote the military engagement of Futurism’s main protagonists. When the Futurist pages of Vela Latina were launched, the patriotism and volunteerism of serving soldiers Marinetti, Boccioni, Russolo and Sironi were praised.22 By December 1915 their volunteer battalion had been disbanded and the Futurists were once again on the home front, awaiting mobilisation. Marinetti took this opportunity to publish a manifesto in Vela Latina (signed by Boccioni, Russolo, Sironi and others) attacking artists and intellectuals who were not doing their military duty, declaring: ‘The Italian artist who, physically able [. . .] closes himself off as if in a sanatorium or a lazaret for TB patients and does not offer his life to magnify Italian pride deserves to be slapped, kicked and shot in his back’ (Merita schiaffi, calci e fucilate nella schiena l’artista [. . .] che, fisicamente valido [. . .] si chiude nell’arte come in un sanatorio o in un lazzaretto di colerosi e non offre la sua vita per ingigantire l’Orgoglio italiano).23 This demonstration of commitment to Italy’s war effort would become a central component of the mission of L’Italia Futurista. Contributors were given the identifier ‘Futurist at the front’ (futurista al fronte) or ‘Futurist injured at the front’ (futurista ferita al fronte) to allow Marinetti to ‘parade the movement as being fully engaged with the realities of the war’.24 The publication was also used as a way to communicate in triumphant terms the injuries sustained by Marinetti and Russolo and the deaths of Boccioni and the architect Antonio Sant’Elia (1888–1916). Marinetti opposed sentimental obituaries for fallen artists, preferring to adopt a position of ‘artificial optimism’.25 The entire issue of 25 August 1916 was dedicated to celebrating the ‘Futurist genius’ of the movement’s greatest painter Boccioni, who suffered an ignoble death through falling off his horse while in training. The front-page announcement featured the abstract design by Balla for a sculpture depicting Boccioni’s body in movement as he was about to throw a punch, rather than a traditional photograph of Boccioni in uniform (Figure 8.1). Similarly, the wounding of Marinetti at the front was announced through an abstract portrait of his

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Figure 8.1  Giacomo Balla, ‘Il pugno italiano di Umberto Boccioni’, L’Italia Futurista, 25 August 1916, courtesy of Archivio del ’900, Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Fondo Mino Somenzi. head in profile with bombs exploding around him.26 Roll calls of the Futurists who had lost their lives or had been injured in the war were featured prominently on the front pages of the issues of 15 July 1917 and 27 January 1918, as a testament to Futurist sacrifice for the war effort.27 As well as acting as contributors to home-front periodicals such as L’Italia Futurista, serving Italian artists also shaped the soldiers’ newspapers being produced behind the Italian front lines.28 The most significant examples were La Ghirba, edited by Soffici, which ran weekly for twenty-nine issues from 7 April to 31 December 1918, and Il Montello, edited by Sironi and writer Massimo Bontempelli (1878–1960), which ran for four issues from 20 September to 27 November 1918.29 These newspapers were official publications of the Italian army’s propaganda service, which had been founded in 1918 in the wake of the disastrous rout at Caporetto, and both Soffici and Sironi were redeployed from other fighting battalions to take up their positions as editors.30 As was the case for many trench newspapers, they were designed to entertain the ordinary, often semi-literate, soldier. Approximately half the eight pages of each publication were full-page humorous colour drawings on themes of military life, while the remainder were dedicated to short articles, poems and letters from soldiers. While both newspapers wished to present themselves as representative of the ordinary soldiers in the trenches, initially at least they did not have enough contributions, and so the editors carried out most of the work themselves. In both cases, in what has been called the ‘authenticity effect’ with regard to La Ghirba, both Soffici and Sironi disguised their identities so as not to undermine the purpose of these periodicals, which was to raise the morale of the ordinary soldier.31 In the earliest issues of La Ghirba, Soffici drafted in his friends, the painters Carrà and Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978),

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to contribute drawings to the publication. Much as had been the case in L’élan, their drawings consisted of rather modest line sketches on typical themes, including relationships between soldiers and the easy life of bourgeois couples on the home front. In La Ghirba, neither is identified as a well-known painter but rather solely by their military title.32 Aside from one Cubist-inspired collage featuring newsprint by Soffici, La Ghirba was not a space for artistic experimentation, and Il Montello, launched five months later, adopted a similar approach.33 Although Il Montello was an avowedly Futurist periodical comprising an editorial staff and contributors who were all major figures in Marinetti’s movement, all such traces were scrubbed from the content.34 Unlike La Ghirba, almost all contributions were published anonymously. Each issue featured an unsigned colour drawing by Sironi on the front cover, usually violent and often quite gruesome in content. The first cover image depicted red, white and green bombs crashing into a crowd of helmeted enemy soldiers, while the third issue featured the heads of enemy leaders on pikes held aloft. A 1914 manifesto by Carrà highlighting the struggle between Futurism and Passéism was rebranded in Il Montello to a more universal conflict between freedom and barbarism. As I have argued elsewhere, ‘Il Montello shows evidence of a concerted attempt by leading Futurists to produce a more palatable version of Futurism, which would be less antagonistic and more acceptable to the ordinary soldier.’35

Periodicals as Spaces of Experimentation in New York and Zürich ln countries that were neutral for some or all of the conflict, artists had more freedom to focus on aesthetic and artistic questions, and the pages of their periodicals became sites of significant experimentation in ways not pursued by artists in belligerent countries such as France and Italy. The two most notable locales in this regard were New York, where French artists Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) and Francis Picabia (1879–1953) were based from 1915, and Zürich, which provided refuge to artists such as Alsatian Hans/Jean Arp (1886–1966), the German Hugo Ball (1886–1927) and his wife Emmy Hennings (1885–1948), and the Romanian Tristan Tzara (1896–1963), who together founded the Dada movement there in 1916. Since the staging in 1913 of the International Exhibition of Modern Art, better known as the Armory Show, and led by photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946), New York had been establishing itself as a rival to Paris as the centre of the modern revolution in art. The outbreak of war in Europe in 1914, while the United States remained neutral (at least until 1917), provided something of an opportunity for artists working across the Atlantic: as William Camfield has remarked, ‘there was cause to think that while the Europeans were absorbed by the war, the time had come for America to assume leadership in art’.36 The arrival of Duchamp and Picabia from Europe in 1915 injected a new energy into the New York art scene. The little magazine 291 (nine issues, three of them double between March 1915 and February 1916), edited by Marius de Zayas (1880–1961), Paul Haviland (1880– 1950), Agnes Ernst Meyer (1887–1970) and Picabia, was a revelation in terms of its design and format. As Francis Naumann has argued, ‘its large folio format, heavy paper stock, bold imagery and inventive typography demanded that the publication

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itself be considered a work of art – an aesthetic concept that was, at the time, truly revolutionary’.37 The magazine was named after photographer Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery on Fifth Avenue, which had opened in 1905, but the editors of the eponymous journal felt that Stieglitz and his magazine Camera Work (1903–17) had ceased to represent the most cutting-edge elements of the American art scene. This was in part due to the outbreak of war in Europe, which meant fewer sales for the 291 Gallery and, as Stieglitz later recalled, de Zayas, Haviland and Meyer ‘felt the war had put a damper on everything’.38 The magazine 291, modelled on Apollinaire’s Les Soirées de Paris (1912–14), was to be their response to those difficult conditions as well as a bold statement of breaking with Stieglitz’s approach.39 The editors immediately positioned 291 as a space of experimentation. In the first issue, Haviland declared that the periodical was ‘nothing but a laboratory, only a place for experiments’.40 The editors hoped to gain subscribers in Europe, mainly Paris and Zürich, and connections with the European avant-garde were clear from the outset. The first issue featured a drawing by Picasso and a verbo-visual composition by Apollinaire that had previously appeared in Les Soirées de Paris. This emphasis on verbo-visual poetry, which would also become a focus for Vela Latina and L’Italia Futurista as we have seen, continued in subsequent issues. The second issue featured the poem ‘Mental Reactions’ by Meyer, given new life on the page thanks to de Zayas’s typographical arrangement and the interspersing of geometric shapes between the lines of verse, later christened a ‘psychotype’ by de Zayas.41 As Naumann has argued, it was ‘the first time within the context of American literature that a poem had been given such a prominent visual presence’.42 In the four pages of the November 1915 issue, ‘psychotype’ verbo-visual drawings by de Zayas and Picabia were bookended by reproductions of drawings by Braque and Picasso, self-assuredly positioning the outputs of the 291 coterie as on a par with the very best that European Cubism had to offer.43 However, despite these ongoing links between 291 and avant-garde practitioners across the ocean, there was a concerted attempt by Picabia to establish a new kind of art in the pages of the journal, which was declaredly American in its subject matter and orientation. The most innovative artistic element of 291’s short life were Picabia’s mechanical portraits, featured in the July–August 1915 issue, which elevated the issue to the status of a standalone art object. Hannah Wong has recently argued for the need to analyse the materiality of Picabia’s drawings, not just as two-dimensional images, as many scholars have done, but as works embedded in this single issue of 291.44 This materiality is important, as 291 was notable for its format, which was larger than that of a typical magazine, and for the unusual modes of engagement it engendered through its ability to be unfolded like a booklet or into a large-scale poster.45 Having been mobilised for the French army in 1914, Picabia had arrived in New York only in June 1915 en route to the Caribbean on a mission to collect sugar, but soon became distracted and remained in the city for several months. He immediately became involved in editing 291. Picabia’s mechanical portraits were a new departure for the artist, inspired by his encounter with the city, which he had visited two years earlier during the Armory Show: ‘Almost immediately upon coming to America it flashed on me that the genius of the modern world is in machinery and that through machinery art ought to find a most vivid expression.’46 As de Zayas would later comment,

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Of all those who have come to conquer America, Picabia is the only one who has done as did Cortez. He has burned his ship behind him. He does not protect himself with any shield. He has married America like a man who is not afraid of consequences.47 The entire July–August 1915 issue was comprised of Picabia’s ‘mechanomorphic’ portraits, each taking up a full page of the magazine. Each portrait represented a different member of the 291 community depicted in entirely abstract form as a mechanical object: he depicted himself as a car horn; Stieglitz was represented as a broken camera, again signalling the break between the 291 group and the photographer (Figure 8.2); Agnes Meyer, the benefactor who made the magazine possible, was appropriately represented as a spark plug; Paul Haviland was a portable electric lamp, highlighting his frequent travel between Europe and the United States; and de Zayas, who had a reputation as a Casanova, was depicted as an ‘automatic seducing machine’.48 Wong has highlighted the interactive nature of the works’ positioning on the magazine’s pages, which could be configured in various different ways (two pages facing each other or three pages open in a triptych-style format), suggesting new connections between the portraits therein. She notes, for example, that when one opens the magazine, one turns over Stieglitz’s portrait and finds it replaced by Picabia’s self-portrait, an indication of the changing of the guard that the editors of 291 envisaged.49 Although 291 would publish its final issue in February 1916, it established avant-garde periodical publishing in New York as a space worthy of recognition and attention.

Figure 8.2  Francis Picabia, ‘Ici, c’est ici Stieglitz, foi et amour’, 291, nos. 5–6, July–August 1915. Collection of International Dada Archive, Special Collections and Archives, University of Iowa Libraries. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2021.

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The next significant New York publication to take up the baton was the Blind Man, whose two issues appeared in April and May of 1917.50 Despite the brief life of the journal, its influence in the history of modern art is unparalleled, and the figure at the centre of this journal was Marcel Duchamp. Based in France in 1914, Duchamp had been declared medically unfit for military service.51 He was less concerned about his status as a non-combatant than the stultifying impact the unfolding war was having on Parisian artistic life: ‘I have not seen any artist for a long time [. . .] The Montparnasse is still as ever [. . .] Here, there are naturally no exhibitions. Flags are the only things in color that one can see.’52 While on the one hand, he decried the fact that his artist friends were absent, on the other he expressed a desire to escape the confines of the avant-garde circles of Montparnasse and move to New York, finally arriving on 15 June 1915.53 Duchamp immediately fell in with a circle of avant-gardists who clustered around art collectors Walter and Louise Arensberg (1878–1954 and 1879–1953) and Walter Pach (1883–1958). One of the group’s initiatives was the establishment of the Society of Independent Artists in December 1916, which included in the ranks of its organising committee Duchamp as well as American artists Man Ray (1890–1976) and Joseph Stella (1877–1946). Their intention was to stage an exhibition, with neither jury nor prizes, that would accept every piece of work submitted, provided the entry fee of $1 and annual dues of $5 were paid.54 In tandem with the exhibition, which opened on 10 April 1917 featuring 2,500 works, a magazine would be published. The Blind Man, edited by Henri Pierre Roché (1879–1959), Mina Loy (1882–1966), Beatrice Wood (1893–1998) and Duchamp, was conceived of as ‘a forum for opinions and commentary’ on the exhibition, and the first issue was distributed by hand at the Society of Independent Artists Exhibition.55 The front page featured a cartoon by Alfred Frueh (1880–1968) of a blind man walking through an exhibition led by his dog, an allusion to the attitudes of the American public who were blind to developments in modern art. However, the Blind Man is most famous and important for the content of its second, and final, issue, published in May 1917. In one of the most provocative and consequential acts in the history of modern art, Duchamp decided to challenge the Society’s vow to accept all works submitted to it and entered into the show, via a proxy so that he could retain his anonymity, a white porcelain urinal crudely signed in capital letters ‘R. Mutt’ and entitled Fountain.56 The work was rejected, which caused Duchamp to resign from the organising committee in protest. The incident was widely reported in the press, but initially it was unclear what the offending object was; news reports of the time merely referred to it as a ‘bathroom fixture’.57 It was only in the pages of the Blind Man that this object was first seen by the public (Figure 8.3). Duchamp had taken the urinal to Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery and requested that he photograph it for the Blind Man’s second issue.58 Due to its rejection from the exhibition, the original Fountain is known only from photographs by Stieglitz and some have argued that its fame ‘is due as much to the photograph by Stieglitz as the controversy that surrounded it’.59 The photograph was certainly carefully constructed in terms of backdrop and composition, but the emphasis on the photograph overlooks the fact that people could only encounter the photographed object in the pages of the little magazine the Blind Man.60

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Figure 8.3  R. Mutt [Marcel Duchamp], ‘Fountain’, Blind Man, May 1917, 3. Collection of International Dada Archive, Special Collections and Archives, University of Iowa Libraries. © Association Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2021.

It was only in the editorial on the page facing the photograph, entitled ‘The Richard Mutt Case’, probably written by Beatrice Wood but certainly with the full approval of Duchamp, that the full details of the incident emerged. Elucidating Duchamp’s concept of the readymade, the editorial stated: ‘Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.’61 Underneath, in an article entitled ‘Buddha of the Bathroom’, Louise Norton reiterated this point, rejecting critics who claimed that Fountain could not be art if a plumber had made it by stating that ‘the Fountain was not made by a plumber but by the force of an imagination’.62 Fountain was not Duchamp’s first experiment with ‘readymade’ objects as art. As early as 1912, while in Paris viewing a collection of motor parts, Duchamp had declared to his friend Fernand Léger (1881–1955): ‘Painting is finished. Who can do better than that propeller?’63 While still in Paris in 1913, he had produced readymades in the form of a bottle dryer, a coat rack and a bicycle wheel, and continued this work after he arrived in New York.64 But it was Fountain, showcased in the Blind Man, that would prove to be his most consequential readymade and a major turning point in the history of art. This cluster of artists in New York were not the only ones to take advantage of the relative calm of a neutral nation in order to continue pursuing an avant-garde agenda through periodical publishing. Picabia, Duchamp, Man Ray and others would come to be called proto-Dadaists after the movement that was founded in Zürich

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in 1916. Those artists and writers who gathered in neutral Switzerland hailed from across the European continent and were united in their opposition to the unfolding war. Some had initially volunteered to serve in their respective armies, such as the Germans Hugo Ball (rejected for service) and Richard Huelsenbeck (1892–1974, discharged on medical grounds by the end of 1914), while others who sought refuge from the war in Switzerland were the Romanian Tristan Tzara and Hans/Jean Arp, of French-German parentage and wishing to avoid conscription into the German army. Ensconced in Zürich and led by Ball, this international group established the Cabaret Voltaire in February 1916 and a one-off magazine of the same name in May of that year.65 These activities ‘served as a cosmopolitan antidote to nationalist and jingoist propaganda’.66 Although the magazine Cabaret Voltaire is often regarded as a mere record of the performances at the cabaret itself, Emily Hage has analysed it convincingly as a ‘living magazine [. . .] defying conventional divisions between performance and print media [becoming] a transportable, active means of publicizing the Zurich group’s activities’.67 The magazine was produced in both French and German, an indication of the rejection of nationalism that was central to the group’s ideology, and it listed all the nationalities of the many contributors on the penultimate page, including representatives of the Allied Powers (France, Italy and Russia), the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary) and neutral states (Spain and the Netherlands).68 When viewed in the context of the most gruelling war the European continent had ever seen, the transnational exchange evident in this Dada journal has been called ‘a defining, subversive act of defiance’.69 Cabaret Voltaire was much more of a broad church artistically than either L’élan or L’Italia Futurista, welcoming exponents of Futurism, Cubism and Expressionism by featuring Futurist words-in-freedom, an etching by Picasso and a Cubist-style collage by Arp as well as the Expressionist drawings of Marcel Janco (1895–1984).70 Some of these works had already been reproduced elsewhere, and the quality of the reproductions and photographs often left much to be desired, but it was not so much their content that was important but rather the message that placing them all alongside each other conveyed. The following year, Tzara would begin to publish Dada (Zürich, Paris, 1917–21).71 The purpose of the first two issues in particular, published in July and December 1917, was to publicise the nascent Dada movement, to begin a dialogue with other artists around the major avant-garde hotspots of Paris, New York and Florence, and thus expand the group’s network. While the war made staging exhibitions and travel difficult, the magazine was the only viable method of achieving these ambitious aims. All but one of the artworks reproduced in Dada 1 were by Dada artists, mostly Arp and Janco. Tzara changed tack in the second issue, opening up the pages of Dada 2, much as had been done in Cabaret Voltaire, to a diverse array of artistic movements, from the Expressionist Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) and Orphist Robert Delaunay (1885–1941) to Futurist Enrico Prampolini (1894–1956) and the metaphysical De Chirico alongside the exponents of the young Dada movement, who were to be viewed as existing on a par with their more established counterparts.72 While the first two issues were conservative in their design, from the third issue onwards, published in December 1918, Dada adopted a more innovative and interactive design approach, compelling its readers through the unusual placement of text and image to ‘become active participants rather than complacent observers’.73

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Conclusion For artists active in the years of the First World War, periodicals proved a lifeline, quite literally in the case of those mobilised in belligerent countries for whom contributing to little magazines served both as an artistic outlet and as a vital way of keeping in contact with their friends on the home front and their pre-war identities. For those in neutral countries, periodicals proved essential, as Dada artists in New York and Zürich sought to publicise their movements and circulate their experiments, thus creating pan-European and transatlantic avant-garde networks and flying in the face of the more insular and nationalistic impulses of French and Italian artist periodicals of the time. Unlike the outbreak of war in 1914, the armistices in November 1918 did not mark a rupture in the production of artists’ periodicals. While soldier newspapers such as La Ghirba and Il Montello ceased to exist out of necessity, privately funded ventures continued apace, including Roma Futurista, a political Futurist periodical which had been born in September 1918 and would continue until May 1920; Tzara’s Dada, which would continue until 1921; and the successor to 291, Picabia’s 391, which he edited in Barcelona, New York, Zürich and Paris between January 1917 and October 1924. However, the avant-garde had changed irrevocably during the war years: Cubism ceased to exist as a defined grouping, the Futurists had divided themselves into artistic and political factions and the centre of Dada shifted from Zürich to Berlin. Periodical publishing would continue to be vital to the circulation of artists’ ideas and the consolidation of their networks but, as exhibitions and travel became possible once more, they would never again be quite as crucial to the success of the avant-garde as they had been during the years 1914–18.

Notes   1. James Fox, ‘“Fiddling while Rome is burning”: Hostility to Art during the First World War, 1914–18’, Visual Culture in Britain 11, no. 1 (2010): 48–65; Kenneth E. Silver, Esprit de corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 8–12.   2. See Peter Brooker, Sascha Bru, Andrew Thacker and Christian Weikop, eds, The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. III: Europe 1880–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).   3. Selena Daly, Italian Futurism and the First World War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 10–49.   4. On Cubism and the First World War, see Belén Atencia Conde-Pumpido, ‘Synthetic Cubism at War: New Necessities, New Challenges. Concerning the Consequences of the Great War in the Elaboration of a Synthetic-Cubist Syntax’, RIHA Journal (2020): 1–20; Christopher Green, ed., Cubism and War: The Crystal in the Flame (Barcelona: Fundació Museu Picasso, 2016).  5. All issues can be consulted via the International Dada Archive, University of Iowa, , accessed 24 April 2022. See also Silver, Esprit de corps, 51–9, and Willard Bohn, ‘Apollinaire and the New Spirit’, in Brooker et al., eds, Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, III, 120–42, on L’élan 134–42.   6. [Amédée Ozenfant], untitled, L’élan, 15 April 1915, 2.   7. [Ozenfant], untitled, L’élan, 15 May 1915, 2.

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  8. Luc-Albert Moreau, ‘Types de la grande guerre’, L’élan, 15 April 1915, 11; Roger de la Fresnaye, untitled, Moreau, ‘Types de la grande guerre’, Jean Marchand, ‘Les pillards’, all in L’élan, 1 May 1915, 4, 5, 11 respectively; André Dunoyer de Segonzac, untitled sketches, L’élan, 15 May 1915, 3; 1 June 1915, and 2 January 1916, 10.   9. Jean Marchand, ‘La gardienne du foyer’, L’élan, 15 May 1915, 6–7; Amédée Ozenfant, ‘Virgo Consolatrix’, L’élan, 15 December 1915, 13. 10. [Amédée Ozenfant], untitled, L’élan, January 1916, 2. 11. André Lhote, ‘Deuil’, L’élan, January 1916, 14; Lhote, ‘Convalescence’, Jean Metzinger, ‘Infirmière’, André Derain, untitled, Pablo Picasso, untitled, L’élan, February 1916, 6–7, 9, 10 and 12 respectively; Picasso, untitled, L’élan, March 1916, 4. 12. [Amédée Ozenfant], ‘Aux camarades cubistes’, L’élan, January 1916, 4–5. Aside from Picasso, the only foreign contributors were those from Allied nations, namely the Russian painters Zina Ozenfant (wife of Amédée) and Maximilien Volochine, and Polish émigrée Sonia Lewitzka. 13. On Lacerba, see Daly, Italian Futurism, 36–42; Alessandro del Puppo, Lacerba 1913–1915 (Bergamo: Lubrina, 2000). 14. See Daly, Italian Futurism, 44–5; Claudia Salaris, ‘La balza futurista’, in Riviste futuriste, ed. Claudia Salaris (Pistoia: Gli Ori, 2012), 120–9. All issues can be consulted via the CIRCE database, University of Trento: , accessed 24 April 2022. 15. See Selena Daly, ‘“The Futurist Mountains”: F.T. Marinetti’s Experiences of Mountain Combat during the First World War’, Modern Italy 18, no. 4 (2013): 323–38. 16. F. T. Marinetti, ‘Per la guerra, sola igiene del mondo’, May 1915. 17. See Daly, Italian Futurism, 100–7; Luca Somigli, ‘Past-Loving Florence and the Temptations of Futurism’, in Brooker et al., eds, Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, III, 469–90, on L’Italia Futurista 481–5; and Salaris, ‘L’Italia Futurista’ and ‘Vela Latina’, in Salaris, ed., Riviste futuriste, 350–61, 708–17. Vela Latina can be consulted via the CIRCE database: . L’Italia Futurista can be consulted via the Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence: , accessed 24 April 2022. 18. For example, Giacomo Balla, ‘Treslì Trelno’, 25 February 1917; Gino Galli, ‘Villaggio sotto bombe d’aeroplani’, 15 April 1917; Rosa Rosà, ‘Conflagrazione geometrica’, 7 October 1917; and Arnaldo Ginna, ‘Caricatura stato d’animo del tedesco’, 2 December 1917, all in L’Italia Futurista. 19. Giacomo Balla, ‘Futurismo igienico’, and Umberto Boccioni, ‘Il corpo che sale’, Vela Latina, 23–31 December 1915, 2; Luigi Russolo, ‘L’arte dei rumori, nuova sensazione acustica’, Vela Latina, 12 February 1916, 2; Boccioni, ‘Manifesto futurista di Boccioni ai pittori meridionali’, Vela Latina, 5 February 1916, 1–2; Russolo, ‘ABC della pittura futurista’, L’Italia Futurista, 10 July 1916, 1. 20. Umberto Boccioni, ‘Uomo + Vallata + Montagna’, L’Italia Futurista, 25 August 1916, 3; Fortunato Depero, ‘Canzone futurista’, L’Italia Futurista, 22 April 1917, 3. On Zang Tumb Tumb, see Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 121–31. 21. F. T. Marinetti, ‘Battaglia a 9 piani’, Vela Latina, 8 January 1916, 1, and ‘Morbidezze in agguato + bombarde italiane’, L’Italia Futurista, 9 September 1917, 3. 22. [Ferdinando Russo], untitled, Vela Latina, 14–20 October 1915, 1. 23. F. T. Marinetti et al., ‘L’Orgoglio italiano. Manifesto futurista’, Vela Latina, 15 January 1916, 1. 24. Daly, Italian Futurism, 102. 25. See Selena Daly, ‘Constructing the Futurist Wartime Hero: Futurism and the Public, 1915–1919’, Annali d’Italianistica 33 (2015): 205–21, here 210–12.

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26. Francesco Cangiullo and Pasqualino 13, ‘Marinetti ferito. Ritratto parolibero’, L’Italia Futurista, 15 July 1917, 1. 27. Futurist painters who had died in combat were Carlo Erba and Athos Casarini, while the injured were Ardengo Soffici and Luigi Russolo. Umberto Boccioni was listed as having died ‘in service’ (sotto le armi). See L’Italia Futurista, 27 January 1918, 1. 28. On trench newspapers, see Mario Isnenghi, Giornali di trincea (1915–1918) (Turin: Einaudi, 1977); Robert Nelson, German Soldier Newspapers of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Men at War: National Sentiment and Trench Journalism in France during the First World War, trans. Helen McPhail (Providence, RI: Berg, 1992). 29. All issues of both newspapers can be consulted via and , accessed 24 April 2022. 30. See Koenraad Du Pont, ‘The “Authenticity Effect”: A Propaganda Tool in Trench Newspapers’, in The Great War in Italy: Representation and Interpretation, ed. Patrizia Piredda (Leicester: Troubadour, 2013), 3–12; and Emily Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics under Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 231 n. 44. 31. Du Pont, ‘The “Authenticity Effect”’, 3–12. 32. Giorgio de Chirico, ‘La romanza di Lafaradossi’, 14 April 1918, 2, and ‘Ammirazione’, 21 April 1918, 6; Carlo Carrà, ‘L’inventore del cannone che tira su Parigi’, 28 April 1918, 4, and ‘Le coppie delle retrovie’, 2 June 1918, 7, all in La Ghirba. 33. Soffici, ‘Primavera’, La Ghirba, 14 April 1918, 8. 34. See Daly, Italian Futurism, 131–44; Salaris, ‘Il Montello’, in Salaris, ed., Riviste futuriste, 428–35. 35. Daly, Italian Futurism, 140. 36. William Camfield, ‘Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain: Its History and Aesthetics in the Context of 1917’, in Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century, ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli and Francis M. Naumann (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 64–94, here 66. On the impact of the war on New York City more generally, see Ross Wilson, New York and the First World War: Shaping an American City (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016). 37. Francis Naumann, ‘Marius de Zayas and Alfred Stieglitz Part Ways: The Publication of 291 and Formation of the Modern Gallery’, first appeared as ‘Marius de Zayas y Alfred Stieglitz se Separan: La Publicación de 291 y la Formación de Modern Gallery’, in Marius de Zayas: Un Destierro Moderno, ed. Antonio Saborit (Mexico City: El Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 2009), 76–99, accessed on the artist’s website: , accessed 24 April 2022. 38. Alfred Stieglitz, quoted in Dorothy Norman, ed., ‘Introducing 291’, 291, reprint (New York: Arno Press, 1972). 39. See Willard Bohn, ‘Guillaume Apollinaire and the New York Avant-Garde’, Comparative Literature Studies 13, no. 1 (1976): 40–51. 40. Paul Haviland, untitled, 291, March 1915, 4. All issues can be consulted via the International Dada Archive, , accessed 24 April 2022. 41. Pablo Picasso, ‘Oil and Vinegar Caster’, and Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Ideogramme’, 291, 2 and 5 March 1915 respectively; Agnes Ernst Meyer, ‘Mental Reactions’, 291, April 1915, 3. 42. Naumann, ‘Marius de Zayas’, 5. 43. Georges Braque, untitled, Marius de Zayas, ‘Elle’, Francis Picabia, ‘Voilà elle’, Pablo Picasso, untitled, 291, July–August 1915, 1–4. 44. Hannah W. Wong, ‘Powering Portraiture: Francis Picabia’s 291 Mechanomorphs Revived’, American Art 29, no. 3 (2015): 118–31, here 120.

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45. Lori Cole, ‘What is 291? Iterations of an Avant-Garde and its Legacies’, Journal of AvantGarde Studies (2020): 1–31, here 3. 46. Cited in ‘French Artists Spur On American Art’, New York Tribune, 24 October 1915, pt. IV, 2. See William Camfield, ‘The Machinist Style of Francis Picabia’, The Art Bulletin 48, nos. 3–4 (1966): 309–22. 47. Marius de Zayas, untitled, 291, July–August 1915, 6. 48. Willard Bohn, ‘The Abstract Vision of Marius de Zayas’, The Art Bulletin 62, no. 3 (1980): 434–52, here 447–9; see also William Rozaitis, ‘The Joke at the Heart of Things: Francis Picabia’s Machine Drawings and the Little Magazine 291’, American Art 8, nos. 3–4 (1994): 42–59. 49. Wong, ‘Powering Portraiture’, 120. 50. The second issue can be consulted via the International Dada Archive, , accessed 24 April 2022. 51. Duchamp to Pach, 19 January 1915, in Francis Naumann and Marcel Duchamp, ‘Amicalement, Marcel: Fourteen Letters from Marcel Duchamp to Walter Pach’, Archives of American Art Journal 29, nos. 3–4 (1989): 36–50, here 37. 52. Duchamp to Pach, 19 January 1915, in Naumann and Duchamp, ‘Amicalement, Marcel’, 37–38. 53. Duchamp to Pach, 27 April 1915, in Naumann and Duchamp, ‘Amicalement, Marcel’, 40; and ‘French Artists Spur On American Art’, 2–3. 54. Catalogue of the First Annual Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists (New York: Society of Independent Artists, 1917), n.p. 55. Camfield, ‘Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain’, 67. 56. He claimed that a female friend had submitted the work. See Duchamp to Suzanne Duchamp, 11 April 1917, in Francis Naumann and Marcel Duchamp, ‘Affectueusement, Marcel: Ten Letters from Marcel Duchamp to Suzanne Duchamp and Jean Crotti’, Archives of American Art Journal 22, no. 4 (1982): 2–19, here 9. 57. ‘His Art Too Crude for Independents’, New York Herald, 14 April 1917, 6; Franklin Clarkin, ‘Two Miles of Funny Pictures’, Boston Evening Transcript, 25 April 1917. 58. Beatrice Wood, I Shock Myself: The Autobiography of Beatrice Wood, ed. Lindsay Smith (San Francisco: Chronicle, 2006), 30. It was very briefly displayed at the 291 before disappearing, variously described as lost, stolen or broken. See Camfield, ‘Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain’, 64. 59. Thomas Folland, ‘Readymade Primitivism: Marcel Duchamp, Dada, and African Art’, Art History 43, no. 4 (2020): 802–26, here 812–13. 60. See Camfield, ‘Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain’, 76, 84; Thierry de Duve, ‘The Story of Fountain: Hard Facts and Soft Speculation’, The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 57–58 (2019): 10–47, here 21–5; and [Marcel Duchamp] R. Mutt, ‘Fountain’, Blind Man, May 1917, 3. 61. [Beatrice Wood], ‘The Richard Mutt Case’, Blind Man, May 1917, 4. 62. Louise Norton, ‘Buddha of the Bathroom’, Blind Man, May 1917, 4–5, here 5. The scandal would also be reported on by Apollinaire in the pages of Mercure de France, where he argued that art can ‘ennoble an object’ (ennoblir un objet), a further indication of the strong links between avant-garde artists on both sides of the Atlantic. Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Le cas Richard Mutt’, Mercure de France, 16 June 1918, 757–68. 63. Léger quoted in Dora Vallier, ‘La vie dans l’oeuvre de Fernand Léger’, Cahiers d’Art 29, no. 2 (1954): 133–77, here 140. 64. Duchamp to Suzanne Duchamp, 15 January 1916, in Naumann and Duchamp, ‘Affectueusement, Marcel’, 5. 65. The issue can be consulted via the International Dada Archive, , accessed 24 April 2022. 66. Geert Buelens, ‘Reciting Shells: Dada and, Dada in & Dadaists on the First World War’, Arcadia 41, no. 2 (2006): 275–95, here 284.

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67. Emily Hage, ‘A “Living Magazine”: Hugo Ball’s Cabaret Voltaire’, The Germanic Review 91, no. 4 (2016): 395–414, here 398. 68. ‘Notes redactionelles/Redactionelle Notizen’, Cabaret Voltaire, 1916, 32. 69. Emily Hage, ‘Transnational Exchange, Recontextualization, and Identity in Dada Art Journals’, English Language Notes 49, no. 1 (2011): 63–76, here 63. 70. Pablo Picasso, ‘Dessin’, Jean Arp, ‘Papierbild’, Marcel Janco, ‘Affiche pour le Chant Negre’, F. T. Marinetti, ‘Dune’, Cabaret Voltaire, 1916, 10, 15, 17 and 22–3 respectively. 71. All issues can be consulted via the International Dada Archive, , accessed 24 April 2022. 72. Enrico Prampolini, ‘Bois’, Dada 1, July 1917, 12; Robert Delaunay, ‘La fenêtre sur la ville’, Wassily Kandinsky, ‘Aquarelle’, and Giorgio de Chirico, ‘Le mauvais genie du roi’, Dada 2, December 1917, 5, 9 and 15 respectively. Dada works included Otto van Rees, ‘Intérieur’, Jean Arp, ‘Tableau en papier’, Walter Helbig, ‘Peinture’ and Marcel Janco, ‘Relief 3’, Dada 2, December 1917, 1, 3, 11 and 13 respectively. 73. Emily Hage, ‘Mise-en-page to Mise-en-scène: Intersecting Display Strategies in Dada Art Journals and Exhibitions’, Dada/Surrealism 21 (2017): 1–25, here 8–10.

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9 Editors Christophe Declercq

A

lthough Belgium was established as a nation-state in 1830 – a buffer between the competing powers of France, the Netherlands, Britain and Germany – it was not until the 1839 Treaty of London that the Netherlands, from which Belgium had separated, recognised its independence. Article VII of that Treaty stipulated that Belgium would remain neutral in perpetuity, with the United Kingdom acting as guarantor. When the German armies entered Belgium on 4 August 1914, they not only violated Belgium’s neutrality and the 1839 Treaty, but also incited Britain to declare war on Germany. In barely ten weeks German troops moved from east to west, and they had occupied almost the whole of Belgium by the time the first Battle of Ypres began on 19 October 1914. The moving front stalled, and a stalemate trench war began that was to last for the next four years. One small part of the country between the river IJzer (Yser), the English Channel and the border with France was left unoccupied. The Belgian king and queen, Albert I (1875–1934) and Elisabeth (1876–1965), resided in the unoccupied region, as did some of the Belgian intelligentsia. While the Belgian government settled in Le Havre in France, notable Belgians such as the writer and activist Marie E. Belpaire (1853–1948) continued to develop cultural and political narratives – which included an increasing awareness of Flemish identity within a Belgian nation-state – from unoccupied De Panne. Most of Belgium, however, was occupied by the Germans for pretty much the entire period of the war. Yet there was more to wartime Belgium than the two different parts of the homeland and opposing entrenched armies along the river Yser. In the first few months of the war there was a massive displacement of Belgians. More than 1.5 million – about one in five – sought refuge abroad, mainly in the Netherlands, but also in France and the United Kingdom. Most Belgians immediately went to the Netherlands, more than a million in a matter of days, but by the end of the war only 100,000 Belgians remained there, along with Belgian soldiers, interned in camps. The presence of so many Belgian civilians in the Netherlands affected that country’s principle of neutrality, so they were urged to return to Belgium. Most did so, but many also continued on to the United Kingdom or France. About 325,000 refugees spent part of the war in France. Between 225,000 and 265,000 – estimates vary – resided in the UK at one point or another. Ultimately, nearly 600,000 Belgians spent the entire war period abroad.1 With about 90 per cent of Belgian territory rendered a battle zone or occupied by Germans, for four years Belgian sociocultural, political and ideological life developed in unoccupied Belgium, as well as in the nations that hosted sizeable refugee communities.

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During the First World War, the Belgian nation relied heavily on its exile press in order to overcome the wartime fragmentation of its society and create a sense of a transnational imagined community. The mere fact that Belgians in exile were allowed to create an intricate press network is a fine representation of refugeedom. Belgians were allowed to be refugees in a host society and to develop a proprietary space, or rather displaced politicised spaces across unoccupied Belgium, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Through the exile press, the respective Belgian refugee communities helped continue Belgian identity, not only the identity in exile, but also the national one. This chapter focuses on one particular network of editors emerging from the newspaper De Standaard (1918–) and its wartime periodicals, nearly all of which were published in exile, and how the agency of that transnational network helped shape ideas that drove the emancipation of Flemish people towards increased self-determination within the Belgian state.2 The mere fact that the Belgian exile press was able to transfer pre-war social, cultural and political constellations to Belgian communities in different countries demonstrates Peter Gatrell’s concept of refugeedom: a matrix of practices and relations in which the refugees were allowed to shape their exile and resulting identity on the one hand, and on the other hand the ways in which their deterritorialised shared sense of belonging – made possible by existing networks and the agency of editors – supported the continuation of homeland debates.3

Four Nations, Three Languages The Belgian transnational exile press played an important part in Belgium’s wartime history.4 That press consisted of an intricate network of connections established along personal, political, ideological, religious and linguistic lines, quite a few connections of which were already well established prior to the outbreak of war, and continued to be so afterwards.5 The fragmentation of the Belgian community in exile was such that periodicals often had their base in one host nation, but editorial offices or at least distribution points in other nations.6 Circulation figures for Belgian exile newspapers show a clear distance between Le XXe Siècle (1895–1919) and the rest. In July 1917 Le XXe Siècle sold over 100,000 copies, more than all the Belgian exile periodicals in Britain combined. Typically 15,000 copies of Le XXe Siècle were for the Belgian army.7 In all, Belgian exile newspapers became platforms for exchanging information on the whereabouts of Belgian refugees, supplemented with reports on the conflict, news from the home front and advertisements for local shops aiming at Belgian customers and the emergence of Belgian shops in the host society. The Belgian wartime press during the First World War, most of which was published in exile, was diverse and multilayered. Most of the main exile papers appeared in Dutch or French or as bilingual publications, therefore always aligned with the official language of either the Netherlands or France. The main francophone periodical, Le XXe Siècle, was published in France, and the main one aimed at the Dutchspeaking Flemish Belgians, Vrij België (Free Belgium, 1915–18), in the Netherlands. In Britain the situation was different in relation to the languages used. With English as the main official language, the Belgian exile press was able to use French or Dutch in its pages more freely. Also, despite geographical boundaries, a cross-fertilisation occurred between different periodicals, to the extent that the exile press in one host

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christophe declercq Table 9.1  Belgian exile press, published from France1

De Diestenaar (Le Havre, 1917–18), De Payot der Taalgrens (Paris, 1917–18), Hemixem-Reeth (Le Havre, 1917–18), Herenthals (Le Havre, 1916–18), Het Belgisch volk (Paris, 1916–18), Het Heidebloemken (Le Havre, 1917–18), Het Soete Waesland (Le Havre, 1917–18), Het Vaderland (Le Havre, 1915–18), Ik Ben Roeland (Le Havre, 1917–18), Informations Belges (Le Havre, 1916–18), Int’ nous Autes (Villiers le Sec, 1916–18), Kring God en Vaderland (1917–18), L’Opinion wallonne (Paris, 1916–19), La Nation Belge (Paris, 1918–56), La Patrie Belge (Paris, 1914–19), La Nouvelle Belgique (Paris, 1915–16), La Wallonie (Paris, 1915), Le XXième Siècle (Le Havre, 1895–1919), Le Courrier de l’Armée/De Legerbode (Le Havre, 1914–18), Le Petit Belge de Normandie (Caen, 1914–15), Les Annales (Paris, 1916–18), L’idéal sous les armes (Lyon, 1917–18), L’invalide belge/De Belgische gebrekkige (Port-Villez, 1918), Malonne Aux Armes (Boulogne-sur-Mer, 1916–18), Notre Belgique (Calais, 1916–18), Ons Limburg (Le Havre, 1916–18), Ons Sinjorenblad (Le Havre, 1916–19), Onze Toekomst (Le Havre, 1918), Ons Vaderland (De Panne/Calais, 1914–22), Ons Vlaanderen (Paris, 1915–19), Sous le Drapeau (Le Havre, 1916–19), Uit ’t Land van Aelst (Calais, 1917–18) 1

Titles in bold indicate periodicals established prior to the war. The lists that make up these tables are based on several sources: Jean Massart, La Presse clandestine dans la Belgique occupée (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1917), 2–3; Hans Vanden Bosch, Michaël Amara and Vanessa D’Hooghe, Guide des sources de la Première Guerre Mondiale en Belgique / Archievenoverzicht betreffende de Eerste Wereldoorlog in België (Brussels: Algemeen Rijksarchief/Archives générales du Royaume, 2010), 36–7; Declercq, ‘Belgian Refugees’, 172–3, 183–4; Declercq, ‘Belgian Exile Press in Britain’, 124, 126. The list of newspapers was verified through online repositories including the British Library catalogue, Erfgoedbibliotheek Hendrik Conscience, HetArchief.be’s Nieuws van de Groote Oorlog, the online collections of Belgian newspapers published during the First World War () and the Belgian newspaper collection at the Hoover Institution (Online Archive of California).

Table 9.2  Belgian exile press, published from the Netherlands Amon Nos Autes (Amersfoort, 1917–18), De Katholieke Illustratie (Haarlem, 1914–18), De Klok uit België/Le Cloche de Belgique (Maastricht, 1917–18), De Vlaamsche Stem (Amsterdam/Bussum, 1915–16), Het Belgisch Dagblad (The Hague, 1915–18), Het Vlaamsche Land (Rotterdam, 1915), Hoop in de Toekomst (Amsterdam, 1915–18), Journal des Réfugiés (Bergen-op-Zoom, 1914), La Belgique: journal des réfugiés (Rotterdam, 1915–18), La Cloche de Belgique (Tilburg, 1918), La Vesdre (Maastricht, 1916–18), Le Courrier de la Meuse (Maastricht, 1914–19), L’Echo Belge (Amsterdam, 1914–18), L’Echo d’Anvers (Bergen-op-Zoom, 1914–15), Les Nouvelles (Maastricht, 1914–18), Le Socialiste Belge / De Belgische Socialist (The Hague, 1916–18), Vrij België (The Hague, 1915–18)

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Table 9.3  Belgian exile press, published from the United Kingdom2 Anglo-Belgian Exports (London, 1917–18), De Belgische Metaalbewerker / Le Métallurgiste Belge (London, 1915–18), De Dageraad (London, 1918–19), De Stem uit België (London, 1914–19), Gazetje van Thielt (Camberley, 1916–18), L’Indépendance Belge (London, 1843–1940), La Belgique Nouvelle (London, 1915–16), La Dépêche (London, 1914–15), La Métropole (d’Anvers) (London, 1894–1974), La Tribune Congolaise (London, 1902–40), Le Belge Indépendant (London, 1918–19), L’Echo de Belgique (London, 1915–16), Le Courrier Belge/De Belgische Koerier (Derby, 1914–15), Le Franco-Belge (de Folkestone) (Folkestone, 1914–15), Neptune (d’Anvers) (London, 1915–19), Questions–La Revue Belge/The Belgian Review (London, 1915–16), The Anglo-Belgian Trade Review (London, 1915), The Birtley Echo (Birtley, Gateshead, 1917) 2

Titles in bold indicate periodicals established prior to the war.

nation played a part in the exile press in another, often resonating in the main journal published from unoccupied Belgium, De Belgische Standaard (1915–18). In addition to this, some of the Belgian exile journals appearing in Britain also included English in their pages. Finally, the position of the exile press there, which was different compared to the exile press in the Netherlands or France, was dictated by the fact that several of the most important exile newspapers in Britain had already been in existence prior to the war. Not all the Belgian wartime press is included in this chapter. Apart from the exile press and the press that was published in the small unoccupied part of Belgium, mainly De Belgische Standaard, there was also the wartime press that published from occupied Belgium. However, as journals appeared through a system of German control and censorship, the value of this wartime press in occupied Belgium is not overly relevant to identity in exile. Also periodicals appearing in occupied Belgium barely made it across the heavily guarded borders. The exile press itself barely made it into occupied Belgium, not least because exile periodicals naturally acted against the interests of the occupying forces. The clandestine, underground press in occupied Belgium is not included in this chapter, although some of the more notable publications have been included in the overview of each host nation.8 Also excluded are pamphlets produced by soldiers at the front or by prisoners of war in Germany, and periodicals catering for smaller communities of refugees in Switzerland, Spain, the US or Canada. However, in order to properly frame the position of language and the role of a specific wider network of Flemish editors in the history of the transnational Belgian press in exile during the First World War, pre-war networks need to be discussed first.

Pre-war Networks Prior to the First World War, Belgium was divided along different fault lines. Linguistically it was split between Francophone and Dutch-speaking parts, which cut across the country as a geographical boundary, and across society, dividing French,

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the language of social advancement, from Flemish, a variety of Dutch. In this context, Flemish intellectuals and politicians aimed to cater for about half the Belgian nationals.9 Prior to the First World War, several Dutch-language newspapers already existed in Flanders, such as De Nieuwe Gazet (liberal, 1863–), Het Algemeen Belang der Provincie Limburg (Catholic, 1879–), Het Laatste Nieuws (liberal and notably anti-clerical, 1888–), Gazet van Antwerpen (Catholic, 1891–) and Gazet van Mechelen (Catholic, 1896–). In May 1914, Frans Van Cauwelaert (1880–1961), Alfons Van de Perre (1872–1925) and Arnold Hendrix (1866–1946) – a group of Flemish intellectuals and politicians – established a Flemish Catholic newspaper, De Standaard, with the aim of advancing Flemish culture and the Dutch language spoken in Flanders.10 However, the First World War began prior to the publication of the first issue, which did not appear until after the war, on 4 December 1918. When the paper was established in 1914, however, no fewer than 151 individuals signed up for 1,000 shares.11 The Catholic politician Van de Perre, a close friend of Belpaire’s, backed De Standaard financially, acquiring over 10 per cent of the shares. Van Cauwelaert was a lawyer and a Catholic Member of Parliament and councillor in Antwerp. Hendrix was a chemist but was heavily involved in several of the Flemish Catholic networks emerging in education.12 Hendrix was a close friend of the industrial patron Lieven Gevaert (1868–1935), who also had shares in De Standaard.13 The idea of establishing De Standaard did not come out of the blue. Between 1896, when the Gazet van Mechelen was established, and 1914, the start of the First World War, a series of precursors to De Standaard emerged. Catholic intellectuals were already catered for by a range of organisations and publications. In 1898 Marie E. Belpaire established Eigen Leven (Our Own Life), a society with its own journal, which aimed to provide a home for Flemish Catholic literati.14 Among the members were Lodewijk Dosfel (1881–1925), who helped set up the administrative template for De Standaard prior to the war. In 1900 the Eigen Leven platform was instrumental in merging two existing literary and cultural journals into one major beacon of Flemish literary and cultural life, De Dietsche Warande & Belfort (Great-Dutch Domain and Belfry, 1899–), as well as facilitating a periodical for women, De Lelie (The Lily, 1909–14), and also one for university students and alumni, Hooger Leven (Higher Life, 1906–14).15 Rutten et al. place Belpaire, Dosfel and Jules Persyn (1878–1933) at the heart of several similar literary and cultural endeavours.16 In 1910, for instance, Dosfel, Hendrix and Van de Perre met on the editorial board of the Geneeskundig Tijdschrift voor België (Medical Journal for Belgium), already showing their early connections. The weekly periodical Ons Volk Ontwaakt (Our Nation Awakens, 1911–74) appeared in 1911 and was managed by the association Volksontwikkeling, itself established by Van Cauwelaert, Van de Perre and Hendrix, each of whom was instrumental in establishing De Standaard three years later. Ons Volk Ontwaakt followed on from its predecessor Tijdingen, a weekly that had sprung from the circles around the Vlaamse Hogeschooluitbreiding (Flemish Continued Education), an organisation that championed continued education for all, not just for the happy few. Belpaire, Van de Perre and Floris Prims (1882–1954) were among those who were seminal in establishing the Vlaamse Hogeschooluitbreiding. The last two basically made up De Stem Uit België (The Voice from Belgium, 1914–19), the Belgian exile newspaper in Britain during the First World War, and the first two were instrumental in setting up the sole periodical to appear in unoccupied Belgium during the war, De Belgische Standaard.

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Eigen Leven, Dietsche Warande & Belfort, Hooger Leven and Ons Volk Ontwaakt were all instrumental in the maturing of Flemish intellectual life. These periodicals brought to the fore supporters, editors and contributors who were pivotal figures in the transnational network of editors of the Belgian wartime exile press, but who also became players in the emerging schism in Flemish nationalism. This divide was to widen drastically during the war between those who advocated a more moderate approach to nationalism (more rights for Flanders but still within a Belgian state), called the passivists, and those who would not rest until Flanders had been separated from Belgium, the activists. This schism was not helped by the fact that the activists themselves were split over whether to use the German occupation to further the Flemish nationalist agenda. Some of the Dutch-speaking Belgians who belonged to specific cultural networks prior to or during the war became radicalised in their political and linguistic convictions to such an extent that they affiliated themselves with the German occupying forces for the purpose of advancing their own Flemish nationalist agenda, or aligned themselves with similar ideas while in exile.17

De Standaard and its Predecessor Wartime Periodicals The network behind Eigen Leven, Dietsche Warande & Belfort, Hooger Leven and Ons Volk Ontwaakt not only progressed into establishing De Standaard before the war, but also developed a true De Standaard stable of periodicals during the war, journals for which core members of the network were pivotal. To varying extents, during the war years De Standaard was anticipated by several temporary periodicals in exile such as De Stem Uit België, Vrij België and De Belgische Standaard.18 The editors, main contributors and primary supporters of these periodicals – financially, ideologically or both – can be considered as a transnational team with editorial aspirations stimulated by the establishment of De Standaard immediately prior to the war. Not only did these periodicals publish content along very similar ideological lines (Catholic, pro-Flemish but moderate, in Dutch), they also drew from one another and referred to one another, a process referred to here as replication, showing their close affiliation. Replication relates to printing edited, borrowed content and frequent referencing of editorials in friendly journals, so this was not reproduction for the purpose of copying content or filling pages. De Stem Uit België, Vrij België and De Belgische Standaard all relied on and referred to each other. Replication also allowed for more contentious opinions to be borrowed more easily, as periodicals that replicated such content could more easily deny responsibility. A fourth exile journal of relevance here is Ons Vaderland (1914–22). Published from France, it was a more radical Flemish nationalist extension of De Belgische Standaard. Editors and contributors to one periodical also appeared elsewhere, but typically there was one platform of note for contributions. Marie E. Belpaire, Juul Callewaert (1886–1964), Frans Van Cauwelaert and Alfons Van de Perre appeared frequently in at least two of the De Standaard stable of periodicals. The contributions included here are only those by the editors themselves. In terms of referring to fellow editors, for instance, Belpaire was referenced about seventy times in De Stem Uit België and Vrij België combined; 10 per cent of the total number of references were to her own work in De Belgische Standaard. It should be noted as well that the Belgian wartime exile press was not a static situation of people behind desks. Along with the reasonable freedom

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Table 9.4  De Standaard precursor periodicals and the location of their editorial base3 Periodical

Editors

De Stem uit België (UK)

Jozef Arras, Jozef Calbrecht, Juul Callewaert, Ernest Claes, Marcel Cordemans, Oscar Dambre, Filip De Pillecyn, Constant Eeckels, Karel Elebaers, Aloïs Janssens, Jacob Muyldermans, Floris Prims, Georges Rutten, Alfons Van de Perre, Jozef Van Mierlo

Vrij België (NL)

Daan Boens, Arthur Buysse, Jozef Calbrecht, Ernest Claes, Abraham Hans, Julius Hoste Jr, Aloïs Janssens, Gabriël Opdebeeck, Jules Persyn, Gustaaf Sap, August Van Caewelaert, Frans van Cauwelaert, Alfons Van de Perre

De Belgische Standaard (unoccupied Belgium)

Marie E. Belpaire, Jozef Calbrecht, Juul Callewaert, Frans Daels, Adiel Debeuckelaere, Firmin Deprez, Louise Duykers, Juul Filliaert, Ildefons Peeters, August Van Caewelaert, Alfons Van de Perre, Victor Vangramberen, Jozef Verduyn

Ons Vaderland (France)

Hendrik Borginon, Juul Callewaert, Frans Daels, Oscar Dambre, Adiel Debeuckelaere, Filip De Pillecyn, Lodewijk Dosfel, Hilaire Gravez, Jozef Simons, Alfons Van de Perre, Victor Vangramberen, Jozef Verduyn, Cyriel Verschaeve

3

In bold are editors who contributed to more than one exile journal. In italics are editors and contributors involved in the establishment of De Standaard prior to the war. Underscore is used to indicate editors and contributors involved in the establishment of De Standaard after the war.

of mobility that Belgians enjoyed between the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and France, the visit of Van de Perre and Van Cauwelaert to their friend August Laporta (1864–1919) in Lincoln, in the United Kingdom, in October 1916 is anecdotal but indicative.19

De Stem Uit België With increasing numbers of Belgians crossing the Channel and seeking refuge in Britain in September and October 1914, the Belgian Catholic authorities became concerned about the possible influence of Anglican habits and learning on the mainly Catholic refugees. The Archbishop of Mechelen, Cardinal Désiré-Joseph Mercier (1851–1926), sent Antoine Alphonse de Wachter (1855–1932), the auxiliary bishop of Mechelen, to Britain to make sure that Belgian refugees remained true to their faith. Van de Perre was the main financial backer of the newspaper De Standaard, and on the outbreak of war his attention to supporting a like-minded periodical shifted to the UK. In close

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collaboration with the Catholic authorities such as De Wachter’s Belgian News Fund, Van de Perre became a vital supporter of the surrogate of De Standaard in exile, De Stem Uit België.20 Juul Callewaert, Floris Prims, Georges Rutten (1875–1952) and Jozef Van Mierlo (1878–1958) were among the dozens of priests and clerics who joined De Wachter, and all became involved with De Stem Uit België. Prims became its editorin-chief; Callewaert, who was in charge of the Belgian community in Stockport, Manchester, became one of the journal’s most frequent contributors.21 Indeed, De Stem Uit België was dominated by Catholic themes, but more progressive and liberal Flemish intellectuals such as Julius Hoste Jr (1884–1954) were also allowed to contribute.22 Although there are a few references to women working in the editorial offices, there are almost no references to women contributors in the pages of the many periodicals.23 Logistically, De Stem Uit België was able to rely on support from British Catholics, who offered Prims and his team office space in the centre of London. Both the Belgian and British authorities supported De Stem Uit België financially.24 In the background Van de Perre played an important role both financially and ideologically. To a large extent, the inclinations of the group who established De Standaard prior to the war translated in Britain into De Stem Uit België. Although De Stem Uit België was a bilingual weekly initially (the pendant francophone title being L’Echo de Belgique), the periodical should be considered mainly as a platform for Dutch-speaking refugees, since the majority of articles were in Dutch. The reason for the move of De Stem Uit België to become entirely Dutch-speaking in February 1916 was quite clear: francophone Belgian refugees in Britain were already catered for by periodicals such as L’Indépendance Belge (Independent Belgium, 1843–1940) and La Métropole d’Anvers (Metropolitan Antwerp, 1894–1974), two newspapers of renown, liberal and Catholic respectively. The focus on the Dutch language made the increasingly Flemish nationalist tendencies of De Stem Uit België more authentic to more radical Flemish nationalists. Driven by the enthusiasm, energy and vision of Floris Prims, De Stem Uit België soon became an enterprise that transcended the confines of a periodical. The newspaper set up an information desk in London where requests for information could be logged, managed and tracked. The London home of De Stem Uit België also became a charitable organisation, supported by Belgian Catholic ministers such as François Schollaert (1851–1917), Paul Berryer (1868–1936) and Cardinal Mercier. The entire organisation of De Stem Uit België and the services that stemmed from its platform was called the Volksbureel (People’s Office). The Volksbureel also became an intermediary for Belgian refugees through the American Commission for Relief in Belgium, allowing money to be transferred to relatives in occupied Belgium. Letters between the homeland and the exiled community in the UK were exchanged through the Netherlands.25 Prims not only edited De Stem Uit België and managed the Volksbureel, but he was also in charge of the bookshop associated with the periodical. Mirroring similar efforts by Belpaire in unoccupied Belgium, Prims helped issue publications, often in collaboration with Alfons De Groeve (1885–1945), a Belgian publisher in exile in Leiden. Among the noted publications were A Glance at the Soul of the Low Countries by literary critic Jules Persyn, the only wartime issue of Ons Leven – Hoogstudent (Our Life – University Student) and some brochures by the Flemish nationalist physician Frans Daels (1882–1974).26 As well as religious texts, literary series printed by De Stem Uit België were subsequently published in book format,

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such as Refugeeliefde (Refugee Love) by Floris Prims and Lief en Leed – uit dagen van lijden (Love and Sorrow – Days of Suffering) by Karel Elebaers (1880–1961). As proof of the transnational reach of the Belgian exile press in Britain, the Elebaers series also appeared in De Belgische Standaard. In 1917 De Stem Uit België editor Marcel Cordemans (1891–1991) published a series entitled Soldatenpennen (Soldiers’ Pens); the subsequent book was published via the distribution network of De Stem Uit België.27 As a result of activities organised by Prims and his team, De Stem Uit België became part of the transnational Belgian refugee community, that is, the Belgian nation in exile. In terms of the exchange of information and lines of action, De Stem Uit België aligned itself with two other members of the Standaard wartime stable, Vrij België and De Belgische Standaard. This can be seen in the contributions by Jozef Calbrecht (1886–1977), who contributed to all three periodicals.

Vrij België The Belgian exile press in the Netherlands typically runs along two lines of chronology. The first relates to relatively short-lived periodicals, ushered in on the back of the sheer numbers of the massive population displacement of early September–midOctober 1914. Nearly all of these journals ceased publication by the end of 1914, when the majority of the Belgians in the Netherlands returned home or moved on to other host nations. A second line concerns periodicals that had a longer run, but appeared from 1915 onwards only, by which time the exile press in France and the UK was already well established. One such publication was De Vlaamsche Stem (The Flemish Voice, 1915–16). Appearing from January 1915 onwards, the journal’s editorial team included Arthur Buysse (1864–1926), René de Clercq (1877–1932), Alberic Deswarte (1875–1928), Johan Eggen (1883–1952), Julius Hoste Jr and Frans van Cauwelaert. De Vlaamsche Stem advocated increased Flemish self-determination, but still within a Belgian context. However, later that year several new editors joined and the focus shifted towards a more anti-Belgian attitude. This caused the initial editors Hoste and Van Cauwelaert to leave in August 1915 and establish a new weekly journal, Vrij België, along the lines of how De Vlaamsche Stem had presented itself initially. De Vlaamsche Stem is not considered here because it moved towards an explicit activist stance, had ceased publication by 1916, and most importantly did not draw from nor feed into the network behind De Standaard. Vrij België, a true De Standaard stable periodical, openly condemned Flemish activism, especially its achievements in collaboration with the occupying German administration. Besides Van Cauwelaert and Hoste – a Catholic and a liberal in the same editorial team – the main contributors to Vrij België included Gabriël Opdebeek (1895–1979) and Arthur Buysse (both of whom also contributed to De Vlaamsche Stem), as well as Aloïs Janssens (1887–1941) and Ernest Claes (1885–1968) (both of whom also contributed to De Stem Uit België). Yet another editor, Emiel Hullebroeck (1878– 1965), collaborated with Lieven Gevaert. Gustaaf Sap (1878–1965), who had shares in De Standaard, also contributed to Vrij België, which claimed to have a circulation of 7,000. With Van Cauwelaert in charge and contributions from Alfons Van de Perre, it was clearly a partial continuation of the pre-war De Standaard. Both went to some lengths to appease both factions in the Flemish movement, including a

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degree of empathy for those who settled for collaboration with the German occupying forces. Towards the end of the war, Vrij België had become the most prominent periodical of the passivist Flemish press in exile. Its editorial conviction was that the well-being of the Flemish people and the prosperity of Belgium were not mutually exclusive. This attitude did not match radical Flemish nationalist convictions as expressed in other Belgian exile periodicals and caused a lasting post-war split between activist Flemish nationalists and passivist Flemish people. This divide was also visible in the editorial relations between De Belgische Standaard and its more radical extension, Ons Vaderland.

De Belgische Standaard and Ons Vaderland De Belgische Standaard was the only Belgian newspaper to appear in unoccupied Belgium during the First World War and was mainly aimed at Flemish soldiers behind the front lines. Due to its presence close to the front, De Belgische Standaard had access to fast and reliable information, which was then replicated by other newspapers. Technically De Belgische Standaard was not a journal in exile, even though it was separated from the homeland. De Belgische Standaard is included here because it belongs to the De Standaard stable and because it relied on the replication of content from other exile periodicals, and continually referred to members of the network. De Belgische Standaard was founded by Ildefons Peeters (1886–1929), who was supported by Marie E. Belpaire. Belpaire became an important editor and contributor, and above all was the embodiment of the spirit behind De Belgische Standaard. During the war Belpaire resided in De Panne, and her house functioned as a meeting and cultural centre for Flemish intellectuals, writers and politicians alike. Alfons Van de Perre visited Belpaire often and August Van Cauwelaert (1885–1945, the brother of Frans), who contributed to both De Belgische Standaard and Vrij België, was also a frequent guest. Like the journal’s secretary Juul Filliaert (1890–1946), De Belgische Standaard’s most important editor, Ildefons Peeters, was a more moderate Flemish militant. In the first issue of De Belgische Standaard, the editors promised that the paper would not only be patriotic – that is, Belgian – but also Flemish and Catholic. They aimed for a free Belgium, with free Flemish people, who would develop their own identity through their Flemish-Catholic convictions.28 Belpaire herself contributed frequently and championed Catholic principles and the rights of the Flemish people in her editorials. She followed the line taken by Van de Perre and Prims in the UK and Van Cauwelaert and Hoste in the Netherlands, calling on Belgians to remain moderate while also expressing Flemish grievances. Among the contributors and editors of De Belgische Standaard, many were contracted by Belpaire herself. Most signed their contributions with their own names, but not all. To avoid military censorship but also to be able to speak more freely about sensitive matters such as Flemish nationalism, soldiers contributed under pseudonyms.29 Still, the paper had to contend with the obstructive attitude of the Belgian military authorities, which were fundamentally opposed to the presence of journalists at the front and in its immediate hinterland. Ons Vaderland appeared at approximately the same time as De Belgische Standaard. By the summer of 1915 the Flemish orientation of De Belgische Standaard was deemed not radical enough by some. Acting as the de facto editor-in-chief, Belpaire

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complained to Van Cauwelaert that she could no longer retain the loyalty of the many restless young to De Belgische Standaard. The networks that were formed prior to the war and continued into late 1915 and early 1916 started to crack, and more radical nationalists were looking for more politically outspoken venues that went beyond religiously inspired platforms.30 Several members of the editorial staff of De Belgische Standaard also wrote for Ons Vaderland. Peeters prevented subsequent attempts by the more radical editors to merge De Belgische Standaard with Ons Vaderland, and as a result, from 1915 onwards, Flemish soldiers increasingly lost interest in the paper in favour of the more radical Ons Vaderland. In the end editors, contributors and readers had to choose between the more moderate passivism of De Belgische Standaard and the more radical Ons Vaderland.31 Although De Belgische Standaard had a circulation close to 9,000 in 1915, this slowly dwindled throughout the war, whereas the circulation of Ons Vaderland grew owing to its increasingly radical point of view, reaching a figure of 9,000 in 1917. The most renowned person to be involved in both periodicals was Cyriel Verschaeve (1874–1949), whose writings were considered insufficiently anti-German for De Belgische Standaard; only in 1916 did he get to contribute minor pieces. However, his radical Flemish nationalism made him a much more natural ally for Ons Vaderland.32 Other people who contributed to both De Belgische Standaard and Ons Vaderland included Juul Callewaert, Frans Daels, Adiel Debeuckelaere (1888–1979), Victor Vangramberen (1885–1970) and Jozef Verduyn (1884–1936). Although he was a close ally and friend of Belpaire, Van de Perre also contributed to Ons Vaderland. In this, Van de Perre appears to have moved rather smoothly between the activist and passivist spheres, a skill that most certainly paid off when he helped revive De Standaard as soon as the war was over.

Post-war Continuation(s) When on 4 December 1918 the first edition of De Standaard finally appeared after four and a half long years, the headline included the slogan ‘Vlamingen spreekt uw taal’ (Flemish people: speak your own language).33 The slogan clearly indicates that the most important purpose of the newspaper was to appeal to both of the camps that had developed in the Flemish movement – the moderate passivists and the radical activists. Given that in the Netherlands Vrij België contended with De Vlaamsche Stem and that in unoccupied Belgium De Belgische Standaard faced Ons Vaderland, the sole De Standaard precursor periodical that covered that wider middle ground was De Stem Uit België. This becomes clear in the line-up of editors of De Standaard in the first few years after the war. Van de Perre was still heavily involved in the newspaper. Marcel Cordemans, one of the main editors of De Stem Uit België and secretary to Van de Perre, became an editor for De Standaard after the war and its editor-in-chief in 1922.34 Several other pre-war De Standaard people joined the new journal after the war, including Hendrik Borginon (1890–1985), Filip De Pillecyn (1891–1962) and Lodewijk Dosfel. Mirroring the Volksbureel of Floris Prims and De Stem Uit België, as well as the meetings and publications emerging from Belpaire’s house in De Panne, the bookshop of De Standaard started publishing books in April 1919. These had previously been produced in exile by Frans Van Cauwelaert and Julius Hoste in the Netherlands and by Floris Prims and his bookshop in Britain. A book by the English architect G. A. T. Middleton was the first publication produced by the company, which was later to

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grow into the biggest bookshop and publishing company in Flanders. Ypres as it Was before the War, by Van de Perre, was printed in a French and Dutch translation and edited by Marcel Cordemans. The next publication was a letter by the priest Georges Rutten.35 The network had fulfilled its wartime role and had come home to continue. Although Marie E. Belpaire played a vital role in the emergence, existence and maintenance of Catholic and Flemish periodicals, especially before and during the war, she was one of only two women of importance to take their place in the transnational network of editors of the time. Louise Duykers (1869–1952) played a part in De Belgische Standaard, but was less engaged in efforts such as Belpaire’s. However, pre-war connections and post-war ties did exist, resulting most notably in women’s organisations immediately after the war. Maria Laporta (1896–1978), the oldest daughter of August Laporta, who spent his wartime years in England and who also contributed to De Stem Uit België, had been involved in the pre-war Catholic Flemish Girls Movement (Katholieke Vlaamse Meisjesbeweging, KVM) and through it became acquainted with Jozef Caelbrecht, who was one of the few editors to contribute to all three De Standaard precursor periodicals during the war. Both Caelbrecht and Laporta’s father were well acquainted with Jules Persyn, through whom Angela Tysmans (1890–1985) met Lodewijk Dosfel in 1920. They married in 1922, and soon afterwards Tysmans became the head of the KVM, which reached the peak of its popularity around that time.36

Conclusion This chapter on the Belgian exile press during the First World War and its network of editors, contributors and agents adds an intriguing aspect to Belgian history, refugeedom and Flemish identity. Unlike the situation in which De Belgische Standaard found itself as the war continued – facing competition from a more radical periodical – Vrij België was established as a more moderate counterpart to an already existing radical periodical. However, both De Belgische Standaard and Vrij België struggled to maintain relations with editors who were becoming increasingly radical, especially from 1916 onwards. Competition with a more radical counterpart periodical was an important aspect of De Belgische Standaard and Vrij België that De Stem Uit België did not have. In Britain, De Stem Uit België carved out a sphere of its own, which lay nicely between the passivism of its fellow periodicals De Belgische Standaard and Vrij België on the one hand, and more pronounced activist journals on the other.37 If replication is the practice by which ‘one newspaper replicates information from another source, it quotes, borrows and references the secondary source’, then this most certainly applies to the Belgian exile press.38 Moreover, close collaboration during the war and existing networks and connections provided a fertile ground: Belgians in exile in France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom constituted a transnational imagined community. The Belgian exile press was therefore a clear platform for the representation of Belgian identity abroad, including its linguistic, political and social fragmentation.39 The fact that so many Belgians – refugees as well as soldiers – were displaced gave them a sense of close connection, even though they did not, in fact, share a common territory. In short, the Belgian periodicals of the First World War and the networks behind them transcended geographical constraints, even if they also highlighted political differences.

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If the history of the Belgian refugees – more particularly their exile press – is a case of ‘refugeedom’ supported by the host country, allowing the space for refugees to develop their community, then the marked continuation of a representation of national identity through an exile press supports the transnational aspect of this temporary refugee history, and through personal connections, existing and new networks, the editors of exile periodicals shaped that part of Belgian history.40

Notes   1. Christophe Declercq, ‘Making home in limbo: Belgian refugees in Britain during the First World War’, in Refuge in a Moving World, ed. Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (London: UCL Press, 2020), 76.   2. Most Belgian exile journals were newly established. Not all of them appeared for the entire duration of the war. Quite a few continued well into 1919. For the Belgian exile press and the audiences they catered for, the war did not end with the Armistice in November 1918.   3. Peter Gatrell, ‘Refugees – What’s Wrong with History?’, Journal of Refugee Studies 30, no. 2 (2017): 170–89.  4. Christophe Declercq, ‘Belgian Exile Press in Britain’, in Beyond Flanders Fields: The Great War in Belgium and The Netherlands, ed. Felicity Rash and Christophe Declercq (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018), 121–41, here 137.   5. In this chapter many names of individuals appear. The online encyclopaedia Nieuwe Encyclopedie van de Vlaamse Beweging was used to verify and confirm personal details. Schrij­ versgewijs, the online encyclopaedia on Flemish authors, was used in addition to this. ADVN/Lannoo, online, and , accessed 5 June 2021.  6. Het Vaderland, La Patrie Belge and XXième Siècle, for instance, had their editorial offices in Le Havre or Paris, but also had a London office. Vrij België, published from The Hague, had thirteen distribution points in central London, Ilford and Folkestone. Christophe Declercq, ‘Belgian Refugees in Britain 1914–1919’, PhD dissertation, Imperial College London, 2015, 172.   7. Lode Wils, Flamenpolitik en aktivisme. Vlaanderen tegenover België in de Eerste Wereldoorlog (Leuven: Davidsfonds, 1974), 145.  8. For an appreciation of the Belgian underground press during the First World War, see Emmanuel Debruyne, ‘Combattre l’occupant en Belgique et dans les départements français occupés en 1914–1918. Une «résistance avant la lettre»?’, Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire 3, no. 115 (2012): 15–30; Emmanuel Debruyne, ‘Sursum corda: the underground press in occupied Belgium, 1914–1918’, First World War Studies 4, no. 1 (2013): 23–38.   9. The 1910 census in Belgium listed 2,934,657 Belgians older than two as speaking Dutch only, and 2,833,344 as French-speaking only. Frans Van Cauwelaert, Vrij België, 17 August 1918, 3. 10. Els De Bens, De pers in België (Tielt: Lannoo, 1997), 257–78; Gaston Durnez, De Standaard: het levensverhaal van een Vlaamse krant, 1914–1948 (Tielt: Lannoo, 1985), 23, 28, 47, 72; Jozef Deleu and Reginald De Schryver, Encyclopedie van de Vlaamse beweging, vol. 1 (Tielt: Lannoo, 1985), 1218. 11. Ons Recht: Vlaamschgezind Weekblad, 14 June 1914, 1; Durnez, De Standaard, 45–7; Ludo Simons, Geschiedenis van de uitgeverij in Vlaanderen, Part 2 (Tielt: Lannoo, 1984), 65–6. 12. Durnez, De Standaard, 26. 13. Even merely listing the other shareholders, labelling them and positioning them within Flemish cultural life prior to the First World War would need a word count that far exceeds the limitations of this chapter.

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14. Geraldine Reymenants, Marie Elisabeth Belpaire: gender en macht in het literaire veld, 1900–1940 (Leuven: Universitaire Pers Leuven, 2013). 15. Geraldine Reymenants, ‘Catholicism as a Stepping Stone to Authorship’, in From Darwin to Weil: Women as Transmitters of Ideas, ed. Petra Broomans (Groningen: Barkhuis, 2009), 121–2; Jan Persyn, De wording van het tijdschrift ‘Dietsche Warande en Belfort’ en zijn ontwikkeling onder de redactie van Em. Vliebergh en Jul. Persyn (1900–1924) (Gent: Secretariaat van de Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Taal- en Letterkunde, 1963), 53. 16. Mathieu Rutten, Jean Weisgerber and Christine Baeke, Van Arm Vlaanderen tot De voorstad groeit (Antwerp: Standaard Boekhandel, 1988), 230–8. 17. After the war some of these moved well beyond the centre right of the political spectrum, and some of these Flemish nationalists even sided with fascism in the 1930s. 18. From 25 September 1914 until 4 February 1916, the newspaper was printed as a bilingual journal called De Stem Uit België / L’Echo de Belgique. From February onwards it appeared as a Flemish newspaper only. The French L’Echo de Belgique also continued on its own, but ceased to appear in August 1916. Declercq, ‘Belgian Refugees’, 183. 19. De Stem Uit België, 27 October 1916, 1. Although Laporta did not contribute much to De Stem Uit België, he took it upon himself to gather as much information as possible about Belgian refugees in Britain and France who hailed from his hometown of Lier. 20. An Callens, ‘Het Weekblad de Stem Uit België, 1914–1919’, PhD dissertation, KU Leuven, 1980, 10. 21. Prior to crossing the Channel early in September 1914, Floris Prims had been putting up refugee families in Antwerp city centre, in a school building managed by Marie E. Belpaire. Reymenants, Marie Elisabeth Belpaire, 155. 22. Wils, Flamenpolitik en aktivisme, 112. 23. The Boeynaems family moved into 21 Russell Square in central London, the same location as De Stem Uit België. At least one of the daughters worked for De Stem Uit België. Cyriel Boeynaems, ‘The Boeynaems Family during the First World War’, BelgiansRTW, ed. Alison MacKenzie, 2017, , accessed 24 April 2022. 24. Callens, ‘Het Weekblad’, 11. 25. Callens, ‘Het Weekblad’, 11–12. 26. The 88-page publication included contributions by Frans Van Cauwelaert, Filip De Pillecyn, Frans Daels, August Laporta, Alfons Van de Perre, Hendrik Borginon, August Van Cauwelaert and Ernest Claes (in order of appearance). Simons, Geschiedenis van de uitgeverij, 47. 27. Declercq, ‘Belgian Refugees’, 196; Declercq, ‘Belgian Exile Press in Britain’, 131. 28. Daniël Vanacker, ‘Het “oorlogsdagboek 1914–1918” van Cyriel Verschaeve’, Wetenschappelijke Tijdingen LV, no. 1 (1996). 29. P. Hildebrand, Het Vlaamsgezinde Dagblad De Belgische Standaard (Antwerp: Archief der Kapucijnen, 1957), 89–93. 30. Wils, Flamenpolitik en aktivisme, 144. 31. Reymenants, Marie Elisabeth Belpaire, 150–2. 32. Vanacker, ‘Het oorlogsdagboek 1914–1918’, 23–5. 33. Ten months later the newspaper’s slogan became one that drove Catholic-Flemish circles for decades: AVV-VVK, Alles Voor Vlaanderen – Vlaanderen Voor Kristus (All for Flanders, Flanders for Christ). This change is attributed to Marcel Cordemans. Gaston Durnez, ‘Denkend aan Filip De Pillecyn’, Filip De Pillecyn Studies V (2009). 34. Cordemans also published a book on Alfons Van de Perre. Marcel Cordemans, Dr. A. Van de Perre’s Oorlogsjaren (Leuven: Universa, 1963). 35. Ludo Simons, Geschiedenis van de uitgeverij in Vlaanderen, Part 2 (Tielt: Lannoo, 1987), 66. Declercq, ‘Belgian Refugees’, 324.

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36. Maarten Van Ginderachter, ‘“Dragen en baren willen we” of “Wij zijn zelf mans genoeg”? De ambivalente verhouding tussen vrouwen en Vlaams-Nationalisme tijdens het Interbellum’, Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 80, no. 2 (2002): 531–61. 37. Reymenants, Marie Elisabeth Belpaire, 156. 38. Christophe Declercq, ‘The Power of the Transnational Native Tongue in Exile: Belgian Refugees during the First World War, their Exile Press and their Fragmented Identity’, in Immigration and Exile Press, ed. Bénédicte Deschamps and Stéphanie Prévost (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), n.p. (forthcoming). 39. Declercq, ‘Belgian Refugees’, 206. 40. Declercq, ‘The Power of the Transnational Native Tongue in Exile’, n.p. (forthcoming).

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10 Journalists Sara Prieto

W

hen the Great War broke out in Europe in the summer of 1914, the United States was in ‘the heyday of newspaper journalism’.1 Although the American population saw the European war as a remote and distant conflict at first, its impact soon aroused great interest in journalists and editors. Magazines and newspapers were flooded with information about the cataclysm and the American readership started very early in the conflict to learn about the tragic events unfolding in Europe and its political and economic consequences. Most American newspapers initially displayed an attitude of disbelief and moral disproval towards the events taking place in Europe, as Americans perceived Europe as the cradle of civilisation and intellectual learning.2 However, Americans soon started to identify with the struggle of the French and British democracies, as well as with ‘plucky little Belgium’, rather than with the cause of imperial Germany. This was due to a combination of factors related to German military decisions – such as the invasion of Belgium and the sinking of the Lusitania – and the intellectual engagement in a war of propaganda in which the Allies urged the US to join them in their fight against Germany. This chapter explores the main challenges that American journalism faced in reporting on the war in the US. It pays special attention to the case of the influential Saturday Evening Post (1897–) and to how some of its journalists engaged in the portrayal of the war in the United States during the neutral years. This iconic magazine was read by more than ten million Americans every week and it shaped a specific view of the war that impacted on the American perception of the conflict: it familiarised Americans with the European war and contributed to building a war case against Germany.

American Journalism in the First World War At the beginning of the war, the conflict was perceived in America as a struggle between Germany on the one hand and the UK and France on the other. The United States was initially divided due to the varied historical ties that Americans of European origin had with the warring nations. Americans of British and Irish origin were more prone to support the Allies, whereas those of German origin had a positive disposition towards Germany.3 The British knew how to benefit from their historical ties with the United States. Prior to the First World War, American newspapers were highly dependent on the British press for European news, and most of the news related to the Old Continent was first written in Britain and then rewritten for an American readership.4 Many Americans had, on the other hand, ties with Germany, and German culture had influenced American education and language, and was very much present in the American collective unconscious.5

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Apart from these historical connections, there are two additional factors that played a key role: the campaigns that the British government carried out in America through organisations such as Wellington House and the role that American intellectuals and journalists played in promoting the war cause.6 Both Britain and Germany were aware of the importance of having American public opinion in their favour. Early on in the war they initiated a propaganda campaign in the United States that flooded magazines and newspapers with editorials, news from the front and articles about the war reflecting on how the conflict could impact on economic, social and political affairs.7 The coverage included all types of journalism. Famous war reporters, such as Richard Harding Davis (1864–1916), who had covered more than six wars by the time hostilities began in Europe, and less prominent figures such as Will Irwin (1873–1948), Samuel G. Blythe (1868–1947) and Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958) saw in the European conflict a unique opportunity to witness modern war first-hand and to report on it to American audiences. British writers such as Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) and French politicians such as Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) became history commentators and opinion journalists for an American readership. In pieces such as ‘Liberty – A Statement of the British Case’, Bennett explained the historical tensions that had existed between Germany and Britain and Britain’s motives for ‘taking arms’ against Germany: its self-preservation and support of the ‘most highly civilized nation and the most peaceful great power in the Continent of Europe – France’.8 Clemenceau opened the 24 October 1917 issue of the Saturday Evening Post with an article entitled ‘The Cause of France’ in which he explained the reasons for the French being at war, also making a case for America to join the Allies: ‘America, however, must recognize that she is bound to this Old World, and to her wonderful history by roots that are too deep to be torn out.’9 Such pieces were usually accompanied by the voices of many American men and women of letters who had set up their residence in Britain and France in the years before the conflict, and very early on in the war took a pro-Allied stance.10 Hundreds of pamphlets and books were published in the United States by famous British novelists and poets. Lord Northcliffe (1865–1922) enlisted American journalists to write stories in a pro-Allied tone. All these activities were carried out with extreme care, disguising Wellington House as the true source of the material produced and the activities promoted in order to ‘preserve the credibility of the news’.11 ProAllied texts emphasised stories of the atrocities committed in ‘plucky little Belgium’ by the invading armies, and the Germans were presented as inhuman barbarians who had attacked a ‘tiny defenceless country’.12 American reporters on the Western Front, such as the aforementioned Richard Harding Davis and Alexander Powell (1879–1957), helped to create and consolidate this negative image of the Germans.13 They lamented the burning of cities such as Louvain and the heavy bombardment of Antwerp. They did not hesitate to present themselves as pro-Belgian after having observed the atrocities of the German soldiers. Journalists at home, such as Norman Draper, published articles in which they tried to explain the new forms of warfare to American readers and denounced its human and economic cost.14 The Germans attempted to deny the accusations, but the American people gradually became strong advocates of the Allied cause, despite German efforts to the contrary. For example, on 27 May 1915 every New York newspaper published the Bryce Report, denouncing attacks against Belgian civilians by the German troops. None of

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the newspapers hesitated to accept the accounts of the atrocities as true. Several days later the Germans sent their own report, the White Book, claiming civilian attacks against German soldiers, but it did not gain much credibility. In 1916 German Atrocities: An Official Investigation was published to supplement the Bryce Report, providing information on the brutalities committed in territories other than Belgium.15 American sympathy for the Allies was, however, not only the result of the atrocities campaign. In German Atrocities 1914: A History of Denial, John Horne and Alan Kramer argue that the war was conceived in terms of moral justification, and that, to the neutral powers, it did not matter which side made a better case but ‘which held the higher moral ground’.16 The case of the Allies defending Belgium against an alien invader, combined with the questionable methods employed by German militarism, was more favourably received in America than the German claims about the rightness of their cause.17 As early as summer 1915, most of the American press published in English was already pro-British. The sinking of the Lusitania, which took place only a few weeks before the publication of the Bryce Report, helped to worsen the image and bad press of the Germans in the United States. In the Saturday Evening Post, as we shall see, the July issues of 1915 included two articles in which the sinking of the Lusitania is directly addressed.18 At this time of the war, ‘the authors stressed the need for America to prepare for war, adding lurid engravings and photos of the destruction to show what might happen if the nation did not awaken’.19 It was then that the tone of the publications began to shift, moving from an appeal to neutrality to an appeal for intervention. Nevertheless, newspapers in neutral countries feared publishing any information that might be construed as a direct attack on any of the warring nations. For this reason, authors, journalists and editors were very cautious with the information that was published, as they had no interest in compromising the neutrality of the United States. The neutral tone naturally changed in the spring of 1917, after President Wilson declared war on Germany in April. However, bringing about this change was not an easy task. As Chris Dubbs and John-Daniel Kelley rightly note, ‘by the time the United States entered the war in April 1917, Americans knew well the gruesome nature of this conflict.’20 In April 1917 the US was still polarised by conflicting opinions about entering the war. In consequence, the American government faced two main challenges: on the one hand, it had to convince the American public of ‘the rightness of the cause’; on the other hand, and more importantly, it needed American citizens to ‘embrace sacrifice to support the war’.21 The strategy the American government followed to meet these challenges was similar to the one the British government had designed in the early months of the war through Wellington House. Only one week after the declaration of war President Wilson appointed the Committee on Public Information (CPI), conceived to disseminate facts about the war, to coordinate propaganda material and to serve as the institutional liaison with newspapers. The investigative journalist George Creel (1876–1953) was designated as the director of the committee that he himself had suggested creating.22 In the beginning, Creel did not establish any institutional censorship; instead, he issued a brief mandatory code asking editors themselves to censor any news regarding movement of troops, sailing of ships or any other event of a military character. Creel was not originally concerned with controlling the information published in the media, but with the ‘creation of thought’.23 He conceived the war as ‘the fight for the minds of men’.24 The aim of the CPI was to initiate

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a campaign ‘to spread the word of America’s war aims and appeal for public support’,25 and to educate Americans and others in the ‘gospel of Wilsonian democracy’,26 offering the image of a country going ‘to the rescue of civilization’.27 Propaganda was, again, an essential tool to achieve these objectives. The American government needed to persuade the different political, intellectual and economic lobbies about the rightness of America’s war cause, and also needed to inspire American soldiers in their fight for democracy. For this purpose, they created a strong propaganda campaign that moulded public opinion towards ‘the picture of reality’ they wanted the American public to receive and believe.28 Creel followed a similar policy to the one adopted by the British in the early stages of the conflict: he organised rallies and speeches and published the Official Bulletin of war news. His propaganda network was made up of thousands of speakers and writers who advertised and promoted the war in hundreds of magazines and newspapers nationwide. The CPI set up hundreds of lectures, designed a vast number of posters that were distributed throughout the United States, produced film documentaries, organised war exhibitions and created advertising photographs, postcards and cartoons to support the war. The News Division under the CPI sent weekly war reports to 12,000 daily newspapers, which resulted in about 6,000 columns of war stories.29 Inspired by Charles Masterman’s work at Wellington House, Creel assembled all American writers willing to support the war into a team. As Creel himself explained, the CPI ‘gathered together the leading novelists, essayists, and publicists of the land, and these men and women, without payment, worked faithfully in the production of brilliant, comprehensive articles’.30 In June 1917 Creel formed ‘The Vigilantes’ group, including members such as humourist and editor Gelett Burgess (1866–1951), who published ‘War the Creator’ in Collier’s Magazine in 1916, ‘a story about a boy who, in two months, became a man’; poet Amelia Josephine Burr (1878–1968); and journalist Irvin S. Cobb (1876–1944), who had been a guest of the German Kaiser at the beginning of the war and who was highly involved in exposing German atrocities in the United States.31 ‘The Vigilantes’ defined themselves as ‘a non-partisan organization of authors, artists and others’ with a series of objectives: 1) ‘To arouse the country to a realization of the importance of the problems confronting the American people’; 2) ‘To awaken and cultivate in the youth of the country a sense of public service and an intelligent interest in citizenship and national problems’; 3) ‘To work vigorously for preparedness; mental, moral and physical.’32 The group sought to convince the American people of the rightness of entering the war while they explained the specific nature of the conflict.33 American writers, journalists and the press in general thought that it was urgent to create ‘a national text’ with ‘a common American experience of the war’.34

The Saturday Evening Post and the First World War The American government needed to find the right tools to construct a national discourse of war. Journalism would prove essential in this enterprise, and emblematic newspapers and magazines played a key role in the promotion of the American case against Germany and in the construction of a common American experience of the war. The Saturday Evening Post was one of the main promoters of US intervention, and the view of the conflict that the Post ‘created’ undeniably pervaded the American imagination and perception of the remote European war.

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In order to understand the impact that the Saturday Evening Post had on the creation of an American discourse on the First World War, we must first explain the status that the Post had in 1914 and how it came to be the iconic magazine that it is today. In 1897, when the American publisher Cyrus Curtis (1850–1933) bought it for just $1,000, the Saturday Evening Post was a struggling publication. Curtis, considered the father of the modern magazine, saw in the Post a chance to invest and expand the editorial success that his company, Curtis Publishing, had achieved with the Ladies’ Home Journal (1883–2016).35 The publisher was to turn the Post into a profitable magazine by resorting to ‘many of the marketing techniques he had perfected on the Journal’.36 A year after the purchase of the Post, Curtis hired the editor George Horace Lorimer (1867–1937). Lorimer, who worked as the leading editor of the Post for almost forty years, led the journal through a series of editorial changes and stylistic transformations that would turn the magazine into an editorial success in the early decades of the twentieth century. During his years running the magazine, Lorimer ‘made the Post the bible of middle-class America’.37 In Creating America: George Horace Lorimer and The Saturday Evening Post, Jan Cohn reminds us that [w]hen Lorimer took over as the editor of the Post, the Spanish-American War was under way, Teddy Roosevelt was charging up San Juan Hill, and a good many people – including George Lorimer – were worried about incipient American imperialism in our Philippine adventure. When Lorimer retired, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had just been reelected, Hitler had retaken the Rhineland, and a good many people – again including George Lorimer – were deeply concerned lest America be drawn again into another European war.38 Under Lorimer’s editorial command, the Post became an icon of American journalism. As Douglas B. Ward argues in ‘The Geography of an American Icon: An Analysis of the Circulation of the Saturday Evening Post, 1911–1944’, few magazines have ever achieved the status of the Saturday Evening Post in the early twentieth century. With a weekly circulation in the millions, iconic covers by such artists as Norman Rockwell and J.C. Leyendecker, articles and stories by the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, David Graham Phillips, Agatha Christie, Richard Byrd, Edith Wharton, and Samuel Blythe, and pages packed with advertising for automobiles, soap, appliances, and other products of a growing consumer economy, the Post came to symbolize the rise of mass magazines.39 The readers of the Post changed over time. The magazine initially targeted businessmen, but it gradually shifted to focus on both men and women readers, ‘aiming to become a family magazine, but one with a strong embrace of free enterprise and the virtue of American business’.40 In its pages, writers dealt with business and public affairs, complemented by sports, photography, theatre, foreign affairs and fictional pieces. All these aspects were combined with a series of appealing and easily recognisable covers that were key to understanding the popularity of the Post, as its visual content helped keep alive ‘the nineteenth-century periodical tradition of illustrated stories’.41 The covers became an emblem of the magazine themselves.

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At the beginning of the First World War, the Post had a steady readership and circulation of at least ten million readers per week. The magazine did not get involved in the war right away; as a matter of fact, in the issues of the first three weeks of the war there are no direct references to the European conflict. The 8 and 15 August 1914 issues include a series of short stories, in line with the tradition of the magazine, and articles, mostly devoted to domestic politics. Journalists such as Irvin S. Cobb, Samuel G. Blythe and Will Irwin wrote fictional pieces as well as essays on domestic affairs and international relations. Some of them would later become famous war correspondents, but in August 1914 Cobb was mostly working on his fiction. Irwin, in turn, had abandoned the muckraking that had turned him into a reputed journalist and was attempting to make a living as a fiction writer.42 Lorimer wanted initially to devote coverage to the war for only six months, as he thought the American people would soon grow tired of it.43 He sought to follow a neutral policy in the early weeks of the war, but as the conflict progressed, the tone shifted towards an apparent neutrality that underneath condemned various German actions. This shift in tone was carried out subtly: Lorimer first tried to mobilise American public opinion to support France, Britain and especially ‘poor little Belgium’. However, by the time the Wilson administration declared war on Germany, the columns and editorials in the Post had already adopted an openly belligerent anti-German tone. As Jan Cohn explains, Lorimer ‘dedicated the power and influence of the Post to his country, supporting the war effort without stint or reservation’.44 The first direct reference to what would be known as the ‘European war’ is found in the editorial of the 22 August 1914 issue. Lorimer writes about the war in two different sections of this editorial, in ‘Strange Alliances’ and in ‘The Profits and Loss of War’, where he reflects on the consequences that the new war might bring and the difficulties of understanding it. In ‘Strange Alliances’, he puts forward the complexities of the conflict in terms of diplomacy, especially for the United States. As he sees it, the natural alliance would have been ‘between France and Germany, on one hand, and Austria and Russia, on the other’. If that had been the case, ‘sympathy in the United States would turn to France and Germany as inevitably as the needle turns to the pole’, but he feels that in the current Alliances ‘intelligent sympathy stands confounded’.45 Lorimer goes even further and adds that all this ‘shows how completely detached from real human interests this whole statecraft stuff of diplomacy and war is’. In the second section of the editorial, concerned with the economic impact of the war, Lorimer reflects on the consequences that the war might entail in terms of trade for the United States, and concludes that ‘there is no real profit to this country in a European war’.46 Given Lorimer’s concern with the potentially negative economic effects of the war on US trade and given the need to maintain an image of seeming neutrality, it is not a coincidence that the first full article devoted to the European war, published in the 29 August 1914 issue, is precisely concerned with trade, the economy and the impact that the war might have on the United States. Canadian writer and social worker Agnes Christina Laut (1871–1937) signs an article entitled ‘Can America Feed Europe?’ in which she reports on the figures that are needed to prevent a famine in Europe and on the diplomatic implications that changing navigation laws to bring US food supplies to Europe might entail.47 The editorial strategy of having the article signed by a Canadian author – Canada was a British Dominion at the time – seems clear: the Post avoided any potential accusations of taking sides in the war by including an article by a non-US

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citizen, thus avoiding violating American neutrality and offending any of the warring nations. In Laut’s article we find Lorimer’s first subtle attempt to shift public opinion in favour of the Allies. The 29 August issue also includes another editorial by Lorimer, entitled ‘The Cause of War’, in which he points at ‘national jealousy, suspicion and hatred – carefully nursed and exploited everywhere by the military class and the noisy few who find a profit in war’ as the true causes for the European conflict.48 The first true journalistic offensive carried out by the Post to flood American public opinion on the European war is found, however, in the issues published in September and October 1914. Lorimer wanted to cover ‘the largest event in world history’ for his American readership.49 There are three aspects that give evidence of the shift that the magazine took in these months: the editor’s recruitment of war correspondents who were sent to Europe, the iconic covers that were published about the war, and the different editorials and articles that appeared in the magazine and that focus on aspects that had a direct impact on America such as the economic and political effects of the conflict on American trade and diplomatic relations. In August 1914 Lorimer recruited two war reporters, Samuel G. Blythe and Irvin S. Cobb (Figure 10.1), who was already a regular writer for the magazine, and sent them to cover the war from different parts of Europe. Cobb’s role as a journalist is of special significance because he was one of the few American correspondents who witnessed the German occupation of Belgium and was a ‘guest’ of the Germans in the early months of the war. Cobb was imprisoned by the Germans in 1914 and was forced to sign a document, together with correspondents from the Chicago Tribune (1847–), the Chicago Daily News (1875–1978) and the Associated Press, denying German atrocities. In 1915 he published an explanation of the reasons why he had been forced to sign the document and became one of the strongest advocates of American intervention against Germany.50 In addition, Lorimer also recruited Corra Harris (1869–1935) as his first – but not last – female reporter. Harris spent a few weeks in London covering the war on issues related to the home front and providing what the editor expected to be a female perspective on the war: a reflection on domestic affairs and the effects of the war on civilians, life in the rearguard and events far from life in the trenches.51 Harris did not rely on official reports or statistics; she trusted her own powers of observation and was ‘inclined to editorialize a good deal more than Lorimer preferred’.52 Her reports would focus on the impact of the war on the women in England and on the husbands and sons who were wounded in hospitals in France.53 Harris was followed by other women journalists who would provide unique and unusual accounts of the war from different angles. In October 1914 Mary Isabel Brush (1888–1944), former Chicago Tribune reporter, was sent to report on the war from Russia, where she spent seven weeks, ‘wrestling with the enigma of Russian culture and character’ and trying to understand the reasons why Russia joined Britain in the fighting.54 A month later, in November 1914, Canadian-born Maude Radford Warren (1875–1934) was sent to write from Canada as it mobilised for war.55 The true star of the set of women journalists that Lorimer recruited was fiction writer Mary Roberts Rinehart (Figure 10.1). Rinehart travelled to Europe in early 1915 after having spent some time trying to persuade Lorimer to send her to Europe, and had to sign a contract guaranteeing that her articles would be solely published in the Post. During her time in Europe, she visited areas that no male journalists had

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Figure 10.1  Irvin S. Cobb and Mary Roberts Rinehart, courtesy of Patrick Vanleene.

been allowed to access, but the press of the day rendered her invisible.56 The Post benefited from the presence of all these women in unusual and remote areas, because they were writing about a topic that had been traditionally associated with men and provided a fresher perspective on the war, free from the constraints of the traditional rhetoric of war.57 As for the Post’s editorial policies and its position on the war, the magazine covers give us a hint of the shift that took place during the initial months of hostilities. As Richard Martin explains, the artist J. C. Leyendecker ‘created in imagery [. . .] a stirring record of the so-called Great War’.58 In keeping with the journalistic fashion of the early months of the war, in which ‘propaganda of love’ rather than ‘propaganda of hate’ was disseminated, Leyendecker ‘gave little image to the War’s cataclysm, but he gave instead narrative, empathetic example, and a sense of optimism that was a war diary of profound hope and incorrigible belief in, if not civilization, the individual’.59 The artist believed in ‘simple stories to keep faith in humankind’, and like the journalists from the magazine, he attempted to remain detached while America did not officially intervene in the European conflict. Martin argues that there is, however, one exception to this neutrality: the cover of the 24 October 1914 issue in which ‘a pig-tailed child witnesses the despair of a wooden-shoed European woman who has received the tragic news of a lost loved one’.60 The cover, which advertises Cobb’s story of the war, anticipates the main content and tone of this issue, which includes five articles that deal directly with aspects related to the war: an article by former French Premier Georges Clemenceau entitled ‘The Cause of France’, Albert Atwood’s ‘Crushing the People for War Money’, Will Payne’s ‘Getting Foreign Trade’, Irvin S. Cobb’s report from Germany, ‘Being a Guest of the German Kaiser’, and Norman Draper’s already mentioned ‘The New Warfare’.61 Of

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these five articles, only Cobb’s is written from the eyewitness perspective of a war correspondent in Europe.62 However, all of them deal with the economic effects of the war from different angles and how this would have a negative impact on America. There is an additional article, written by Corinne Lowe, titled ‘Will America Dress Herself? The Effects of the War on Fashion’ in which Lowe adopts what at first might seem the tone of a woman simply writing about fashion. The article nevertheless soon moves to reflect on similar matters to those discussed by her male counterparts: the economic and social side-effects of the war on American fashion, how the country relies too much on imported goods and how the industry might find room for change – or suffer from the war. This issue is key to understanding the tone of the magazine and to identifying the themes explored in war reporting from the autumn and winter of 1914. Generally speaking, and with rare exceptions, the issues include up to two eyewitness accounts from Europe, between two and five articles, and two or three editorials, reflecting mostly on the direct or potential effects of the war on US trade and economy. The second great offensive of the Saturday Evening Post took place in the early summer of 1915, at the beginning of the second year of the conflict. By this time the war had lasted much longer than Lorimer – and the warring nations – had initially expected. Although Lorimer thought that public opinion would have grown tired of the news of war by then, he still managed to steer American minds and to promote the Allied cause in America. Articles such as the series published by Mary Roberts Rinehart, which would be later gathered in her war book Kings, Queens and Pawns: An American Woman at the Front (1915), boosted the magazine’s sales, as Rinehart obtained several scoops such as an interview with the Queen of Belgium, published on 3 July 1915, and several pieces from the front in areas that no other civilian had accessed before her. However, the event that is thought to have shifted public opinion in favour of the Allied cause was the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915. This ‘tilted the scales’ of public opinion and became an offence that awoke in many Americans the feeling that they should engage in the war against Germany.63 The June and July issues of the Post rarely address the German offence, but there is a series of articles that hint at the editorial shift that took place during those months. The 5 June 1915 issue opens with an article by former President William Howard Taft (1857–1930) titled ‘The Military and Naval Defenses of the US’. In it, Taft reviews the effects that the war has had on America’s economic and trading system and invites readers to reflect on America’s preparedness ‘against the unjust aggression of another Power’. Without adding a direct reference to the submarine war that was already taking place in the Atlantic, he makes his case by referring to the anxiety that some of the latest news had caused among the American population: The news of battles on land and sea, and the enormous forces of men and armament engaged, naturally rouse among our people an anxious inquiry into our condition of defense in case the army and navy of any of the belligerents were turned against us.64 In the very same issue, Lorimer includes an editorial titled ‘The Barbarisms of Warfare’ in which he condemns the torpedoing of the Lusitania and labels it ‘the act of barbarians’,

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leaving no doubt as to the magazine’s position. Although he condemns the act, he also reaffirms America’s unwillingness to fight Germany: Americans ‘are not willing to fight until [they] have exhausted every honorable means to avoid war’.65 Similarly, in the 12 June 1915 editorial, he condemns once more the attacks on the civilian population of a neutral country and concludes that ‘the deliberate killing of an actual noncombatant by a soldier ought to be regarded as mere murder [. . .] If a submarine cannot operate effectually without killing noncombatants, then it must not operate at all.’66 Lorimer’s position is clear regarding this matter, but as I have mentioned, there are two specific articles that directly address the sinking of the Lusitania and that give further evidence of how the Post engaged with this event: Owen Wister’s (1860–1938) ‘The Pentecost of Calamity’ and Norman Angell’s (1872–1967) ‘Suppose America Declared War on Germany’. The former is of special relevance because it was written by an American reporter, who had previously displayed sympathy towards Germany. Wister claims that ‘in May, June and July, 1914, [his] choice would have been, not France, not England, not America, but Germany’, but he now feels that by this time of the war we have heard the wild incoherent ring in many German voices besides the Kaiser’s, and we know to-day that Germany’s mania is analogous to those mental epidemics of the Middle Ages, when fanaticism, usually religious, sent entire communities into various forms of madness.67 Wister’s piece gives evidence of how the feelings of many Americans about Germany’s righteousness in the war had already changed. The negative view of Germany persisted after the sinking of the Lusitania, and more and more voices joined to press President Wilson to declare war on Germany. After 1916, a year of stalemate and tiredness of the war both on the battlefield and in the American press, America joined the war in the spring of 1917, giving the conflict its final push. The covers from these months – especially those designed by Leyendecker and Rockwell – give evidence of the tone that the Post was attempting to convey: young American soldiers ready to embark on a European ordeal that would turn them into heroes.68 However, once Lorimer felt America was convinced of the rightness of entering the war, the Post dropped many of the articles related to economic affairs and no longer paid significant attention to the home front. The magazine, as if trying to relieve its readers, dropped the pressure and returned to giving more prominence to short fiction pieces and, naturally, to war reporting from the field, with American journalists in Europe trying to explain the role that the American Expeditionary Forces were playing abroad. Despite this radical change, Lorimer had met his goals: the Saturday Evening Post was the most read magazine during the First World War and became a touchstone for war reporting. Through his varied group of journalists and his own incisive editorial columns Lorimer managed to promote the casus belli as well as the creation of a specific view of the First World War in the United States that still informs the American imagination today.

Notes   1. Stewart H. Ross, Propaganda for War: How the United States Was Conditioned to Fight the Great War of 1914–1918 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1996), 12.

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  2. See Patrick J. Quinn, The Conning of America: The Great War and American Popular Literature (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), 4–8.  3. Quinn, The Conning of America, 2.  4. Quinn, The Conning of America, 5. The powerful British press baron Lord Northcliffe held strong control and influence over many of the newspapers in the United States in the years before the conflict. This influence would continue throughout the war.   5. In August 1914 the German reading population of New York City had eight dailies, five weeklies, two Sunday papers and one semi-monthly paper.   6. Many American intellectuals turned into war reporters or wrote journalistic pieces and essays to support the war. See Hazel Hutchison, The War That Used Up Words: American Writers and the First World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), for an exploration of this intellectual struggle. For further information on the British War Propaganda Bureau, see Michael Sanders, ‘Wellington House and British Propaganda during the First World War’, The Historical Journal 18, no. 1 (1975): 119–46; and Michael Sanders and Philip Taylor, British Propaganda during the First World War, 1914–1918 (London: Macmillan, 1982).   7. The British propaganda campaign proved to be effective: in a survey published as early as November 1914, 105 American editors presented themselves as pro-Allied, whereas only twenty were pro-Germany. The vast majority (204) declared themselves neutral. As the war progressed, Americans became, as Ross explains, ‘distinctly non-neutral in spirit’. See Ross, Propaganda for War, 145–94.   8. Arnold Bennett, ‘Liberty – A Statement of the British Case’, Saturday Evening Post, 17 October 1914, 12, 13, 33.   9. Georges Clemenceau, ‘The Cause of France’, Saturday Evening Post, 24 October 1914, 3, 4, 65. In the same article, Clemenceau appeals to the historical ties between the United States, Britain and France, and resorts to the American democratic tradition and its links to the French republic to mobilise American public opinion in the Allies’ favour. 10. Quinn, The Conning of America, 101. These American intellectuals abroad were ‘among the most passionate advocates of American intervention and they formed a valuable, if unofficial, cadre of propagandists’. Peter Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words: Literature as Propaganda 1914–18 and After (London: Batsford, 1989), 59. Well-known authors such as Mildred Aldrich (1853–1928), Gelett Burgess, Herbert Adams Gibbons (1880–1934), Henry James (1843–1916) and Edith Wharton (1862–1937) sent home manuscripts full of affection and sympathy for the French people and their struggle. These were later to be joined by American intellectuals and financiers at home, who supported the Allied cause as well for sentimental or economic reasons. 11. Philip Taylor, ‘The Foreign Office and British Propaganda during the First World War’, The Historical Journal 23, no. 4 (1980): 875–98, here 877. 12. Ross, Propaganda for War, 47. See John C. Hartsock, A History of American Literary Journalism: The Emergence of a Modern Narrative Form (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 2000); Chris Dubbs, American Journalists in the Great War: Rewriting the Rules of War Reporting (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, Press, 2017); and Sara Prieto, Reporting the First World War in the Liminal Zone: British and American Eyewitness Accounts from the Western Front (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), for further information on Davis and Powell. 13. Alexander Powell worked as a war correspondent for Scribner’s Magazine, the New York World and the Daily Mail. During his time in Antwerp, he became the first reporter to witness the bombardment of a city by a Zeppelin. See Prieto, Reporting the First World War, 28, 51; Alexander Powell, Fighting in Flanders (Toronto: McClelland, Goodchild and Stewart, 1915). 14. Norman Draper, ‘The New Warfare’, Saturday Evening Post, 24 October 1914, 65–6. 15. John H. Morgan, German Atrocities: An Official Investigation (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1916), 2.

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16. John N. Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 250. 17. Horne and Kramer, German Atrocities, 261. 18. See Owen Wister, ‘The Pentecost of Calamity’, Saturday Evening Post, 3 July 1915, 5, 26–8; Norman Angell, ‘Suppose America Declared War on Germany?’, Saturday Evening Post, 17 July 1915, 6, 7, 41, 42. 19. Thomas C. Leonard, Above the Battle: War Making in America from Appomattox to Versailles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 131. 20. Chris Dubbs and John-Daniel Kelley, ‘Introduction’, in The AEF in Print, ed. Chris Dubbs and John-Daniel Kelley (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2018), xi–xiv, here ix. 21. Burton St. John III, ‘An Enduring Legacy of World War I: Propaganda, Journalism and the Domestic Struggle over the Commodification of Truth’, in War and the Media. Essays on News Reporting, Propaganda and Popular Culture, ed. Paul M. Haridakis, Barbara S. Hugenberg and Stanley T. Wearden (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), 147–62, here 150. 22. Creel had a reputation as investigative reporter. In September 1916 he had published Wilson and the Issues in defence of Wilson’s first mandate. In it, Creel addresses the German occupation of Belgium and the sinking of the Lusitania. See Alan Axelrod, Selling the Great War: The Making of American Propaganda (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 47; and Chloe Maxwell, ‘George Creel and the Committee on Public Information 1917–1918’, Tenor of Our Times 4 (2015): 72–83. 23. Axelrod, Selling the Great War, 81. 24. George Creel, How We Advertised America: The First Telling of the Amazing Story of the Committee on Public Information that Carried the Gospel of Americanism to Every Corner of the Globe (London: Harper and Brother, 1920), 3. 25. Creel in Burton St. John III, Press, Professionalization and Propaganda: The Rise of Journalistic Double Mindedness, 1917–1941 (Amherst, MA: Cambria Press, 2010), 40. 26. Axelrod, Selling the Great War, 82. 27. James R. Mock and Cedric Larson, Words that Won the War: The Story of the Committee on Public Information, 1917–1919 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1939), 5. 28. Creel thought that propaganda could be based on true facts which could be moulded and manipulated to be presented as evidence to American readers. Axelrod, Selling the Great War, 49. 29. St. John III, ‘An Enduring Legacy’, 150. 30. Creel, How We Advertised America, 8. 31. Gelett Burgess, War the Creator (New York: Collier and Sons, 1916), 5. The story about his friend George Cucurou, initially published in instalments in Collier’s, was turned into a war book as a result of its success. 32. Charles J. Rosebault, ed., Fifes and Drums: A Collection of Poems of America at War (New York: George H. Doran, 1917), ii. 33. For further information about the Vigilantes, see Ross, Propaganda for War; Mark Van Wienen, Partisans and Poets: The Political Work of American Poets in the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Sara Prieto, ‘“War song of America”: The Vigilantes and American Propagandistic Poetry’, Anglica: An International Journal of English Studies 28, no. 3 (2018): 33–49. 34. Caitlín Marie Thérèse Jeffrey, ‘Journey through Unfamiliar Territory: American Reporters and the First World War’, PhD dissertation, University of California, 2007, 18. 35. Derek M. Howells, Curtis, Cyrus H.K., 2005, , accessed 17 May 2021. 36. Mary E. Waller-Zuckerman, ‘Marketing the Women’s Journals, 1873–1900’, Business and Economic History 18 (1989): 99–108, here 103.

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37. John Williams Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman, The Magazine in America, 1741–1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 81. 38. Jan Cohn, Creating America: George Horace Lorimer and The Saturday Evening Post (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989), 15. 39. Douglas B. Ward, ‘The Geography of an American Icon: An Analysis of the Circulation of the Saturday Evening Post, 1911–1944’, American Journalism 27, no. 3 (2010): 58–89, here 59–60. 40. Ward, ‘The Geography of an American Icon’, 62. 41. Margaret D. Stetz, ‘“Sideways” Feminism: Rebecca West and the Saturday Evening Post, 1928’, The Space Between IX (2013): 61–75, here 65. Norman Rockwell started his work for the Post in 1916, but his most iconic covers are associated with the Second World War. Further information on these artists and the significance of their covers in relation to the First and the Second World Wars can be found in Richard Martin, ‘The Great War and the Great Image: J.C. Leyendecker’s World War I Covers for The Saturday Evening Post’, Journal of American Culture 20, no. 1 (1997): 55–74; and Susan Meyer, Norman Rockwell’s World War II (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1991). 42. Cobb, Irwin and Blythe worked mostly as war correspondents, reporting from Europe at different stages of the war. For further information on Irwin’s work as war correspondent, see Robert V. Hudson, The Writing Game: A Biography of Will Irwin (Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1982); Sara Prieto, ‘Pure Propaganda? Will Irwin’s A Reporter at Armageddon: A Journey Beyond the Front’, in Literary Journalism and World War I: Marginal Voices, ed. Andrew Griffiths, Sara Prieto and Soenke Zehle (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy – Éditions Universitaires Lorraine, 2016), 93–112; and Dubbs, American Journalists; further information on Cobb’s war reportage can be found in Anita Lawson, Irvin S. Cobb (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green Popular Press, 1992); William E. Ellis, Irvin S. Cobb: The Rise and Fall of an American Humorist (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2017); Dubbs, American Journalists; and Prieto, Reporting the First World War. 43. Chris Dubbs, An Unladylike Profession: American Women Correspondents in World War I (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020), 50. 44. Cohn, Creating America, 101. 45. George Lorimer, ‘Strange Alliances’, Saturday Evening Post, 22 August 1914, 22; George Lorimer, ‘The Profits and Loss of War’, Saturday Evening Post, 22 August 1914, 22. 46. Lorimer, ‘The Profits’. 47. Agnes Christina Laut, ‘Can America Feed Europe?’, Saturday Evening Post, 29 August 1914, 23. 48. See George Lorimer, ‘The Cause of War’, Saturday Evening Post, 29 August 1914, 20. Lorimer would publish other editorials with this title throughout the conflict; see, for example, ‘The Cause of War’, Saturday Evening Post, 19 June 1915, 22. 49. Dubbs, An Unladylike Profession, 50. 50. See Prieto, Reporting the First World War, 134. 51. Harris also went to France but failed in her attempt to visit Soissons. John E. Talmadge, Corra Harris: Lady of Purpose (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1968). 52. Dubbs, An Unladylike Profession, 54. 53. Dubbs, An Unladylike Profession, 54–5. 54. Dubbs, An Unladylike Profession, 61. 55. Maude Radford Warren, ‘Booked through the Empire’, Saturday Evening Post, 14 November 1914, 22, 23, 49. See Dubbs, An Unladylike Profession, 58–60, for further information on Maude Radford Warren. 56. Rinehart states in her autobiography that she was invited to tour the trenches with the first group of journalists who visited no-man’s land, but no newspaper article echoed her presence there. Mary Roberts Rinehart, My Story: A New Edition and Seventeen New Years

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57.

58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

sara prieto (New York: Amo Press, 1980), 165. See Prieto, Reporting the First World War, 68; Dubbs, An Unladylike Profession, 64–77; and Sara Prieto, ‘Without Methods? Three Female Authors visiting the Western Front’, First World War Studies 6, no. 2 (2015): 171–85, for further reference. As Chris Dubbs explains in An Unladylike Profession, this strategy gave the Post an advantage as opposed to other publications which still considered war ‘a man’s affair’. In addition, it was thought that the articles written by women ‘revealed in their coverage that the hard part of war was not in dying gloriously at the front but in surviving ingloriously on the home front’. Dubbs, An Unladylike Profession, 51. Martin, ‘The Great War and the Great Image’, 55. Martin, ‘The Great War and the Great Image’, 55. Martin, ‘The Great War and the Great Image’, 55. Irvin S. Cobb, ‘Being a Guest of the German Kaiser’, Saturday Evening Post, 24 October 1914, 14, 15, 48; Norman Draper, ‘The New Warfare’, Saturday Evening Post, 24 October 1914, 65; Will Payne, ‘Getting Foreign Trade’, Saturday Evening Post, 24 October 1914, 10; Albert Atwood, ‘Crushing the People for War Money’, Saturday Evening Post, 24 October 1914, 9. See Ivor Stephen, Neutrality: The Crucifixion of Public Opinion. From the American Point of View (New York: The Neutrality Press, 1916); and Emmet Crozier, American Reporters on the Western Front, 1914–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959). Although the two major events that precipitated Wilson’s decision for war were the interception of the Zimmermann telegram and the sinking of the Laconia in 1917, the sinking of the Lusitania gave voice to a wave of anti-German propaganda in the United States. See Nigel Fountain, When the Lamps Went Out: From Home Front to Battle Front. Reporting the Great War 1914–1918 (London: Guardian Books, 2014). William Taft Howard, ‘The Military and Naval Defenses of the US’, Saturday Evening Post, 5 June 1915, 3. George Lorimer, ‘The Barbarisms of Warfare’, Saturday Evening Post, 5 June 1915, 24. George Lorimer, ‘The Submarine’, Saturday Evening Post, 12 June 1915, 22. Wister, ‘The Pentecost of Calamity’, 26. Martin, ‘The Great War and the Great Image’, 73.

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11 War Correspondents Andrew Griffiths

What was this camouflage War which was manufactured by the press to aid the imaginations of people who had never seen the real thing? Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer1 There is not a word of conscious falsehood [. . .] But [. . .] I have not told all there is to tell about the agonies of this war, nor given in full realism the horrors that are inevitable in such fighting. Philip Gibbs, The Battles of the Somme2

S

iegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) made his repugnance at the role of the war correspondent clear. In his view, correspondents camouflaged the reality of war by repeated acts of literary sleight-of-hand. With bitter irony, he imagines the correspondent to be ‘some amiable man who had apparently mistaken the war for a football match’.3 Writing in 1917, Philip Gibbs (1877–1962), correspondent for the Daily Telegraph (1855–) and Daily Chronicle (1872–1930), conceded some of the limitations of his reportage while defending the fundamental honesty of his writing.4 It is Sassoon’s assessment, rather than Gibbs’s, that has resonated through scholarly accounts of First World War writing. Paul Fussell found little space to comment specifically on journalism in The Great War and Modern Memory, but in a passage inspired by Sassoon he dismisses war correspondence as a cause of ‘civilian incomprehension’. Fussell blames ‘rigid censorship’ and asserts that ‘[o]nly correspondents willing to file wholesome, optimistic copy were permitted to visit France, and even these were seldom allowed near the line’.5 Philip Knightley, author of the most comprehensive history of English-language war correspondence, takes a harder line. ‘More deliberate lies were told’, he argues, ‘than in any other period of history.’ The accredited war correspondents, having permitted themselves to be ‘absorbed by the propaganda machine [. . .] were discrediting their craft’.6 Niall Ferguson identifies a ‘sacrifice of integrity’ in the conduct of the wartime press.7 For Martin Farrar, the war correspondents ‘had done the job the military wanted them to do [. . .] They had willingly become part of the propaganda machine.’8 In Farrar’s view, this caused lasting damage to the social fabric of the nation. The war correspondents had fallen short of an abstract ideal of a disinterested press, aloof from politics and acting only to inform. The accusation that the war correspondents knowingly deceived the public has become an established part of the national myth of the First World War. Still, the war correspondents’ patriotic willingness to accept censorship was not the only problem; public discourse itself was not up to the task of reporting on this war.

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For want of a more appropriate language, the argument goes, war correspondents and writers addressing the conflict expressed themselves in a discourse wholly inappropriate to industrialised warfare. Peter Buitenhuis detects ‘[t]he rhetoric of romance and of Victorian genteel tradition’ in war writing of the period.9 For Modris Eksteins, ‘the Home Front remained mired in euphemisms’.10 This is the register that Fussell describes as ‘high diction’.11 For Denis Boak, this style of writing ‘had to be overcome’ before an alternative could fully emerge.12 Writers apparently could not or would not locate language adequate to express the experience of the First World War until a wave of combatants’ memoirs appeared as a corrective in the late 1920s. The war correspondents’ reports, then, had failed both in their content and in their tone. Recent scholarship has begun to challenge and complicate elements of this picture, with increased emphasis on the development of the correspondents’ style. A critical reassessment is under way, with significant works by Sara Prieto (2018) and Kevin Williams (2020).13 Williams places ‘the way in which reporting was managed’ at the centre of his analysis, noting that, as the war progressed, ‘correspondents appeared to be less willing and able to challenge and criticise [. . .] the official perspective’.14 Prieto traces correspondents’ efforts to ‘overcome very substantial epistemological and physical barriers before they could publish any news that was worth writing about’.15 Significantly, Prieto argues that ‘[t]he more censorship the correspondents were exposed to, the more literary their texts became’ as they sought to convey the experience of the war by indirect means.16 As these recent works indicate, close examination of the war correspondents’ reports in relation to the shifting contexts in which they were written reveals a more complex picture of their efforts to mediate between the front lines and their readers. War correspondents had to navigate profound changes in their relationships with readers, employers and the authorities. Focusing primarily on the work of the small group of officially accredited British correspondents on the Western Front, this chapter traces the evolution of the war correspondents’ writing in response to those external pressures.17

External Pressures The correspondents of the First World War were confronted with a conflict on an unprecedented scale. A battle was no longer an event of a duration and scope comprehensible to a single observer, still less communicable in a daily newspaper column. Though the conflict was geographically closer to the correspondents’ readers and touched their communities more directly than the late nineteenth-century wars of empire in which war correspondence had come of age, the conditions in which the war was fought were further removed than ever before from the experience of the British reading public. If late Victorian conflicts had produced scenes that seemed to prefigure the destruction witnessed between 1914 and 1918, the magnitude and duration of industrial killing on the Western Front were of a different order altogether.18 This created a gulf between correspondent and reader that was near impossible to bridge in writing.19 Philip Gibbs, correspondent for the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Chronicle, was ‘exasperated’ by London-based colleagues who ‘seemed to have no understanding whatever of what was happening [. . .] no conception of that world of agony’.20 Philip Taylor, commenting on propaganda, describes the phenomenon as an ‘image-reality gap’.21 These challenges were compounded by a further intangible factor: the correspondents’ sense of duty.

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Gibbs writes that ‘proprietors and editors subordinated everything to a genuine and patriotic desire [. . .] to support the army’, while the correspondents ‘identified [. . .] absolutely with the armies in the field’.22 Scholars fetishise press neutrality, but no neutral standpoint was available to correspondents at the time. As commercial concerns first and foremost, newspapers sold what the public wanted to read. Charles Masterman (1873–1927), head of the British War Propaganda Bureau, had argued in 1909 that the ‘cheap and sensational Press [. . .] attained an immense commercial success from the provision of the stuff which [its readers] demanded’.23 Tempting as it might be to exculpate the reading public from any responsibility for the prosecution of the war by presenting them as the dupes of mendacious war correspondents, this was simply not the case.24 When newspapers diverged from the line expected by readers, the consequences could be significant. When Lord Northcliffe (Alfred Harmsworth, 1865–1922), proprietor of the Daily Mail (1896–) and The Times (1785–), wrote an article criticising the government’s failures in the provision of munitions to the army in May 1915, the Mail’s circulation fell by over a million copies overnight. A sign bearing the inscription ‘The Allies of the Huns’ was hung outside the newspaper’s offices.25 Proprietors judged that adopting a patriotic editorial line made sense both commercially and ethically.26 War correspondents had to judge their writing to satisfy editors, proprietors and readers. They also had to negotiate new legislation. Passed in August 1914, the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) was initially very brief. It was extended in November 1914, specifically empowering the authorities to prosecute any persons disseminating ‘false reports or reports likely to cause disaffection to His Majesty or to interfere with the success of His Majesty’s forces by land or sea’. Potential penalties included six months’ imprisonment ‘with or without hard labour’, with the addition or alternative of a £100 fine.27 In practice, the terms of the Act were applied to newspapers by the Press Bureau, established in August 1914. By issuing ‘D-notices’ forbidding the publication of specified information to newspaper editors, the bureau sought to limit risk to ‘prominent individuals or to military or naval planning or personnel, and not to promote a false narrative of the war’s progress’.28 David Monger judges that this reflects ‘the realization that most newspapers and journalists – particularly accredited war correspondents – undertook “voluntary self-censorship” in return for access’.29 While war correspondents certainly did censor themselves to a degree, other processes also limited their freedom to report. While the Press Bureau established limited boundaries, the military operated a tighter control of information. Introducing a volume of his reports from the 1916 Somme battles, Philip Gibbs asserted that ‘[o]ur only limitations in truth-telling are those of our own vision, skill, and conscience under the discipline of the military censorship’.30 That discipline was a significant factor, though. Martin Farrar traces its development through three phases.31 In the first months of the war, correspondents were barred from the front lines and often operated under threat of arrest by the military authorities. From May 1915 a selection of correspondents was officially accredited and provided with uniforms and accommodation at GHQ. They were also accompanied by censors who, in Philip Gibbs’s account, were to ‘live with us, travel with us, sleep with us, read our dispatches with a mass of rules for their guidance, and examine our private correspondence to our wives’.32 (It is hard to argue with Niall Ferguson’s analysis that journalists’ grumbles about censorship indicate that it had some success.)33 Between

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April 1917 and the cessation of hostilities, correspondents were provided with substantial information and support. However, they were prohibited from reporting the names of individuals or units and the scale of British losses. These changes represent a progression from the suppression of correspondents’ activities, insofar as it was in the power of the authorities to do so, to the incorporation of war correspondents into the army. This censorship had at least some effect: as David Lloyd George observed, ‘the correspondents don’t write the truth and the censor would not pass the truth’.34 The following discussion traces the evolution of war correspondence in Britain through Farrar’s three phases: the early outlaw period from August 1914; the period of official correspondence from May 1915; and, from April 1917, the final phase in which war correspondents were incorporated into the war effort.

Outlaws Lord Kitchener of Khartoum (1850–1916), appointed Secretary of State for War and Head of the War Office on 5 August 1914, defined the role of the war correspondent in the early months of the war. Kitchener’s objections to correspondents accompanying British forces in the field were of long standing. In 1898 he had controlled the coverage of his Sudan campaign by severely rationing access to the telegraph.35 After taking command of British troops in South Africa during the Boer War in 1900, Kitchener made it an offence for military personnel to comment on the conduct of the war to reporters. As that war progressed, correspondents’ ‘ability [. . .] to report at will [. . .] was progressively whittled away’.36 Kitchener’s orders relating to journalists in France and Belgium in 1914 continued the process. C. E. Montague (1867–1928), military censor and former journalist on the Manchester Guardian (1821–), put it more pithily: ‘our General Staff [. . .] treated British war correspondents as pariah dogs’.37 Correspondents were banned from entering a set area around the British army in France. There were to be no press briefings for correspondents already in France. Those still waiting in Britain for permission to follow the campaign would wait in vain.38 The War Office set up a Press Bureau, with the intention of circumventing the war correspondents altogether. The bureau prepared military reports and issued them to the world’s press. These reports contained the barest details of military activity, unleavened by human interest or the descriptive ‘colour’ typically added by war correspondents. In the absence of regular correspondence from the front, the British army had ‘disappeared behind a deathlike silence’. In this environment, the press ‘printed any scrap of description, any glimmer of truth, any wild statement, fairy tale, or deliberate lie, which reached them from France and Belgium’.39 Reports of trivial incidents filled column inches; in December 1914 William Beach Thomas (1868–1957) of the Daily Mail informed readers that ‘[i]f war has no other virtue, it cements the friendship of men and horses’.40 Among the most influential correspondents of the early months of the war was The Times’s ‘military correspondent’, Colonel Charles à Court Repington (1858–1925). Superlatively well connected, Repington used his access to senior figures in the army and War Office to report on events from London. Such a situation was clearly unsustainable. Philip Gibbs states the argument for a loosening of restrictions eloquently in his memoir:

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The immense anxiety of the nation, with its army fighting behind the veil while the fate of civilization hung in the balance, could not and would not be satisfied with the few lines of official communiqués, which told nothing and hid the truth.41 Bowing to pressure, Kitchener appointed an army officer, Colonel Ernest Swinton (1868– 1951), to produce reports for the press in September 1914. In all, 103 reports appeared between September 1914 and July 1915, published under the by-line ‘Eyewitness’. The Eyewitness reports were less than satisfactory, offering little more detail than the official communiqués; the public referred to them as ‘Eyewash’. Martin Farrar judges them as marking ‘the start of a period of conspiracy, of deliberate lies and the suppression of the truth’.42 Certainly, they lacked the detail the reading public craved. Public demand for news intensified as the period went on. From late 1914, as battalions of volunteers recruited in the early months of the war took to the field, demand for news grew in the communities they left behind.43 To satisfy that demand, war correspondents already on the Continent did their best to reach the front lines, at the risk of arrest and expulsion. Kitchener personally issued orders for the arrest of Gibbs, who then tried to return to France under cover as a ‘special commissioner of the British Red Cross’.44 He was arrested at Le Havre before he could disembark. Gibbs’s experience was not isolated. On 20 August 1914 A. Beaumont, special correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, filed a vivid account of ‘a week’s adventures in which [he] was arrested, searched, stripped, and imprisoned as a spy, and kept for five days in solitary confinement in a prison cell, and sent back under escort to Paris’.45 A Telegraph colleague, William Maxwell (1860–1928), reported being stopped by a British officer, who commandeered his car, before being harassed by a French civil official who suspected him of spying. His report was printed under the sub-heading ‘From Pillar to Post’. Maxwell was able to report that he had seen a returning French cavalry patrol and a group of soldiers firing on a wood.46 By his own account, Beaumont had reason to fear that he would be executed. Beach Thomas was twice arrested. He described his experiences at this stage of the war as ‘the longest walking tour of my life, and the queerest’.47 His news was largely gleaned from chance encounters, French official communiqués being ‘crisp and seasonal, but much divorced from fact’.48 Reportage at this stage of the war focused on the experiences of the correspondents and such news as they could gather from chance encounters with British and French troops. Despite these restrictions, some correspondents were beginning to develop a writing style that would serve throughout the conflict. Beach Thomas, in his Daily Mail columns, deployed several rhetorical strategies in a report of 16 November 1914. He acknowledges that ‘[b]etween the fine deeds and merry words the horrors are in part omitted’. That line jars with the headline ‘A Wood of Death’ and the sub-heading ‘Haunting Sight for an Engineer’, which clearly hold out the promise of some horrific revelation. After a brief outline of fighting outside Ypres, Beach Thomas describes the engineer’s haunting sight. Approaching a recent battlefield, the man stopped [. . .] under such a sense of horror as paralysed his mind and his limbs. He could not go forward or back. The trees were filled with the strange light of winter evenings, and wherever he looked he saw the forms and faces of the dead in number multitudinous. The ground was strewn, almost heaped, with forms, in every attitude, each twisted into horrible grotesqueness by the waning light.

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The dead, of course, were all German. Beach Thomas confidently asserts that ‘[t]heir losses have been as fifty to one, and the men who suffer so are fighting with little hope’.49 The article ends on a lighter note, remarking on ‘three aids to warmth and a lively spirit’: cards, cigarettes and socks. For the possessor of all three, he suggests, ‘the trenches weren’t so bad’.50 The article has the feel of anecdote amplified into news, and for good reason. As Beach Thomas later explained, censorship at this stage of the war did not permit publication ‘of any article if it indicated that the writer has seen what he wrote of’.51 Correspondents were restricted to the publication of second-hand news and were prevented from reaching the front lines. However, the rhetorical pattern of later correspondence is already apparent. The focus is on German losses, which are exaggerated (possibly to balance the depiction of horror in the article). No mention is made of British or French casualties. There is some acknowledgement of the unpleasant reality of frontline experience, though it is sensationalised in Gothic style. The coda about cards, cigarettes and socks establishes a link to the domestic life of the reader even as it diminishes the experience of the fighting soldier. The engineer’s story at the heart of the article stands as a claim to truth and authority. While Beach Thomas offers a glimpse of the consequences of industrial warfare, he clearly prioritises a positive, engaging tone and accessibility to readers. Not all coverage shared Beach Thomas’s cheery tone. An article for The Times, under the by-line ‘By our Military Correspondent’ (possibly authored by Repington), described the war with remarkable prescience, as ‘a steeplechase of national impoverishment in which the best-staying people win, if winning it can be called’. The article abounds in bleak, pithy statements. ‘Day after day’, we read, ‘the butchery of the unknown by the unseen, and events decided by the greatest mass of projectiles hurled simultaneously in the general direction of the enemy.’52 Others also drew attention to the new conditions of warfare. Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett (1881–1931), later to distinguish himself by his critical reports from Gallipoli (which brought his time as an accredited correspondent to a close), informed readers of the Daily Telegraph that ‘[a]ll colour, all show, all the glittering non-essentials have disappeared from war for ever. It is just a great business proposition, which must be carried through with a maximum of efficiency and a minimum of waste and delay.’53 At this stage the press evidently had considerable freedom, though the war correspondents did not. Writing under severe restrictions, they sought to fill an information vacuum. They had an obligation to provide saleable copy for their newspapers but were subject to censorship and excluded from the fighting zone. The rhetorical strategies by which correspondents would seek to satisfy the demands of their profession, their readers and the military were beginning to emerge.

Official Correspondents In early 1915, under pressure from newspapers and from a public frustrated by the lack of available information, the War Office began to make some concessions to correspondents.54 Beach Thomas attributed the change to Lord Northcliffe’s bullying of the War Office.55 Select correspondents were invited to the headquarters of the British Expeditionary Force. When Edwin Ashmead Bartlett of the Daily Telegraph left for France, he feared that ‘at the last moment a counter-order would come from the War

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Office delaying our departure just a little longer for “military reasons”’.56 The delay did not come and the policy grew from the arrangement of brief, supervised tours for selected correspondents to the accreditation of five official correspondents. Those correspondents wore military uniform and were subject to strict rules of censorship: they were not permitted to mention regiments by name, to refer to specific places or to quote anyone directly apart from Sir John French, the Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force.57 In more modern terms, they were embedded with the army. Philip Gibbs, Herbert Russell (1869–1944), William Beach Thomas, Harry Perry Robinson (1859–1930) and Percival Phillips (1877–1937) held these roles for much of the remainder of the conflict, with other figures – including John Buchan (1875–1940) and Henry Nevinson (1856–1941) – joining the group for periods of time. Rather than acting as individuals, the correspondents pooled their information. This marked an end to the competition between correspondents that had characterised the war correspondence of the previous half century. It also meant that the picture of the war presented in the British press had a new uniformity. In this new system, the chosen correspondents ‘worked under censors who lived with them and censored what they wrote on the spot’, though, as Beach Thomas notes, ‘they were their own best censors’.58 Brian Best offers a description of the correspondents’ carefully managed routine: Following a briefing by the press officer, each reporter would be taken to an allotted section to watch either a bombardment or to walk over newly captured ground. They would then tour rear areas and see the walking wounded and captured enemy soldiers and see the bustle of traffic going to and from the front lines. They would then move further back to get an update of news from the area headquarters before returning to GHQ. Here they would all get together and exchange information before retiring to their rooms and writing up their reports before dinner.59 The reports so produced would have to pass the censor before distribution to the newspapers. The newspapers were not permitted to add or remove material after approval by the censor. With their perspectives determined by the liaison officers who accompanied them, the correspondents had little opportunity to verify stories or to offer anything more than a distant view of often confusing events, with anecdote supplied by the walking wounded or German prisoners. The reporting of the first day of the 1916 Somme offensive demonstrated the limitations of this approach and marked a turning point in the tone of the correspondence. The early reports were optimistic. Philip Gibbs reported in the Daily Telegraph on 3 July that ‘our troops, fighting with very splendid valour, have swept across the enemy’s front trenches along a great part of the line of attack’.60 Reviewing the day’s fighting, he enlarged on the theme: At first, it is certain, there was not much difficulty in taking the enemy’s first line trenches along the greater part of the country attacked. Our bombardment had done great damage, and had smashed down the enemy’s wire and flattened his parapets. When our men left their assembly trenches and swept forward, cheering, they encountered no great resistance.61

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The advance, of course, had been less successful than Gibbs suggested, even with those careful caveats about successes coming on the ‘greater part’ of the line. Gibbs’s reports were typical. John D. Irvine (1863–1917), writing in the Daily Express (1900–), reported that ‘the day’s operations are entirely satisfactory to ourselves and our allies’.62 Within the first hour of the attack, estimates place the number of British casualties as high as 30,000; they had almost doubled by the end of the day.63 In particular, the offensive had been unsuccessful in the northern sector of the battlefield. Little of that was known when the correspondents filed their accounts of the first day’s fighting. As the scale of losses and the limited gains became apparent, the war correspondents sought to present the news in the best possible light. William Beach Thomas, writing for the Daily Mail on 5 July, under the headline ‘Gommecourt. British Failure that Won the Day’, described how [o]ur men died, and in dying held in front of them enough German guns to have altered the fate of our principal and our most successful advance in the South. They died defeated, but won as great a victory in spirit and in fact as English history or any history will ever chronicle.64 The publication of casualty lists meant that the scale of losses in the early days of the battle could not be concealed. The correspondents were also faced with the problem of how to follow on from their optimistic initial assessment of the battle. Beach Thomas cast the deaths as necessary sacrifices, embodying the spirit of the English nation, and reminded readers that ‘siege warfare is slow warfare’.65 Subsequent dispatches amplify these sentiments. He notes that ‘you could tell by the bodies lying on the field just where the machine guns had mown a swathe and what troops [. . .] had faced the music nevertheless’. Significantly, British soldiers are described as defeated, albeit in the cause of a greater victory, and British dead feature in the reports. Beach Thomas reflected later that ‘[a] great part of the information supplied to us by the intelligence was utterly wrong and misleading [. . .] Neither we nor the intelligence knew how complete and costly in life was the defeat from Gommecourt to Albert.’66 Reflecting on 1 July 1916, Beach Thomas ‘was thoroughly and deeply ashamed of what [he] had written’.67 All this had an effect on perceptions of the press in Britain and in the army. During the battle, the London newspapers reached troops on the Western Front just a day after publication.68 C. E. Montague, military censor and former Manchester Guardian journalist, explained the effects in his analysis of post-war disillusionment: ‘[n]ow, in the biggest event of their lives, hundreds of thousands of men were able to check for themselves the truth’ of press reports. ‘They felt they had found the press out [. . .] Black was only an aspect of white.’69 The war correspondents’ reports grew more realistic as the Somme battle went on. A little over two weeks into the battle, Philip Gibbs drew readers’ attention to the gap between words and reality: If any man were to draw the picture of those things, or to tell them more nakedly than I have told them, because now is not the time, nor this the place, no man or woman would dare to speak again of war’s ‘glory’, or of ‘the splendour of war’, or any of those old lying phrases which hide the dreadful truth.70

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Gibbs’s words function as a claim to personal authority, though they also anticipate later criticism. In context they specifically apply to the discovery of German wounded sheltering in a cellar. It was a theme to which he returned, too. In August, as the offensive rolled on, he explains that ‘[t]here are a lot of men buried in an advance when the official dispatch says “we made good progress”’.71 The point is leavened by the fact that Gibbs is relaying a story from a man who was buried on several occasions but lived to tell the tale. Increasingly, Gibbs and his colleagues call their readers’ attention to unpleasant details, carefully framing information so that it passes the censors. By the end of October, illness had compelled Gibbs to return temporarily to Britain. Standing in for Gibbs, Perceval Gibbon quoted from the diary of a German prisoner in one of his columns: In the front line [. . .] the men were only occupying shell-holes. In addition, there is the intense smell of putrefaction which fills the trench – almost unbearable . . . In some places bodies lie already several days uncovered in a trench recess, and nobody seems to trouble about them [. . .] All along the trench men were being buried alive.72 While this description refers to the experiences of a German soldier, it gives a glimpse of the conditions in which men lived and fought. No great effort was required on the part of the reader’s imagination to surmise that British soldiers experienced similar things. They were, after all, fighting over the same battlefield.

Incorporation Pressures within Britain were greater than ever in early 1917. Revolution in Russia freed German divisions to fight in the west. While a majority of the British public appear to have supported the continuation of the war, opposition was increasing.73 Siegfried Sassoon published, in The Times, his ‘Soldier’s Declaration’ against the war shortly after the opening of the Messines Ridge offensive in June 1917. Industrial discontent was growing.74 Recruitment slowed, with fewer recruits than the army required to maintain its strength.75 Significantly for the war correspondents, ‘greater understanding of the actual conditions at the front which accompanied veterans’ return to industry’ impacted on the public appetite for war.76 As Montague had argued, public consciousness of the gap between the image and the reality of the war was growing. Farrar judges that the progressive erosion of confidence in the press and the dislocation of newspaper readers from conditions on the Western Front had reached such a pitch that ‘[e]ven if the military had tried to bring home the reality of the fighting [. . .] by 1917 the gap between the image and actuality of the war was too great’.77 Government responded by intensifying its propaganda efforts. A new Department of Information was created; John Buchan was appointed to direct its work. By May 1917 Buchan was pressing for greater energy to be dedicated to domestic propaganda.78 From summer 1917 onwards, the correspondents were more fully incorporated into the military effort. Beach Thomas dates ‘the complete surrender of the Army and the War Office to the press’ to June of that year.79 In retrospect, it is less clear who had surrendered to whom. As Philip Gibbs pointed out, it was still the case that ‘each correspondent had a censor attached to him, a kind of jailer and spy, eating, sleeping, walking,

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and driving’.80 The freedom to report was still significantly curtailed, too. Beach Thomas recalls asking an Intelligence Officer ‘how much I might tell’. The response was ‘Say what you like. But don’t mention any places or people!’ As Beach Thomas notes, ‘one’s style was a little cramped by such a prohibition’.81 The sense grew that the correspondents were compromised by their closeness to military commanders. ‘Long before the end of the war’, recalled censor C. E. Montague, ‘the Chiefs of Staff of our several armies received them [correspondents] regularly on the eve of every battle [. . .] every perilous secret we had was put into their keeping.’82 This closeness to the military authorities, in Montague’s view, placed the correspondents in a compromised position. ‘Their staple emotions before a battle were of necessity akin to those of the staff’, he wrote. Those staple emotions included ‘cheerfulness in the face of vicarious torment and danger’ that ‘came out at times in a certain jauntiness of tone that roused the fighting troops to fury against the writer’.83 Where a lack of access to the armies in the field had been the key issue in the opening months of the war, with military leaders excluding correspondents, the problem was now excessive closeness to those very commanders. Evidence of that offensive cheeriness is not always apparent in the war correspondents’ reports, however. Following the recapture of Albert on 22 August 1918, with British troops fighting across the ground where so many had died during the first Somme offensive in 1916, Percival Phillips asks What man would have dared predict two years ago that the pitted slopes of the Ancre, after eighteen months of peace, would be the scene of a new battle, that British troops would win and lose and win again in a single night of fighting bits of dead ground that had apparently finished for ever with the grim business of war? The acknowledgement that, after two more years of war, the British army is fighting over the same ground again can scarcely be characterised as jaunty. Indeed, despite the promise of the headline ‘Battle in the Moonlight’, there is little grandiose rhetoric in Phillips’s writing. He refers to ‘stubborn resistance’ and German efforts ‘to recover nameless patches of cratered earth in the old battlefield’.84 More optimism is apparent in Beach Thomas’s report, in which a ‘horde’ of tanks ‘closed on Courcelles, which was flooded with them. No wonder that one heard how easily it fell and how well the tanks did there.’85 Elsewhere in the dispatch there is ‘heroic struggle’, troops who ‘loudly cheered’ the destruction of a Zeppelin and a group of bomber aircraft which break up a German transport column. Where Phillips and The Times’s unnamed correspondent opt for a more sober tone, Beach Thomas’s report emphasises the spectacular elements of the day. That was not purely a matter of personal style. The Daily Mail printed Beach Thomas’s report alongside a report from the RAF on the bombing of Cologne and the offer of a £1,000 reward for proof that any individual had received money as part of a ‘Hun Plot’ to ‘keep alive the pacifist agitation’.86 A new challenge faced the correspondents in the final months of the war. Since the opening of the Allied offensive on 8 August, the fighting had moved at a much higher pace and across a much broader front than at any point since 1914. That posed logistical problems for the war correspondents: The Times’s correspondent on 23 August was unable to cover the fighting reported by Phillips: ‘I have been too busy on another

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part of the front to get any news beyond the general tidings that the attack goes well.’87 Phillips’s spare style in these reports is partly a response to the scale of events. There is no longer sufficient room for detailed description alongside an outline of each day’s movement. For this reason alone, the tone and content of correspondents’ reports are far removed from that of the reports of 1914, when the correspondents’ own travails often filled newspaper columns. If it is not possible to generalise about the nature of correspondence over time, it is also impossible to draw general conclusions about the correspondents themselves. Beach Thomas, though his writing is less florid than is sometimes suggested, produced more exuberant rhetoric than his colleagues through to the end of the war. As is often noted, his writing was satirised in troop newspapers. The BEF Times published articles from its special correspondent, Teech Bomas.88 That his writing stood out sufficiently to merit parody indicates that it was not typical. It is certainly clear that several of his colleagues had adopted a simpler, starker style by 1918.

Reassessments This chapter opened with two epigraphs, one from Siegfried Sassoon and one from Philip Gibbs. In a dispassionate analysis, it is Gibbs’s assessment that has the greater ring of truth about it: ‘There is not a word of conscious falsehood [. . .] But [. . .] I have not told all there is to tell about the agonies of this war, nor given in full realism the horrors that are inevitable in such fighting.’ Elements of the war were ‘camouflaged’, as Sassoon suggests. The war correspondents took a patriotic line; they played up British successes; they avoided detailed description of the British dead and of the suffering of British troops; and they did not publish accurate assessments of British losses. In the context of censorship, they had little choice but to omit these things. As I have argued above, the correspondents’ style developed through the war. Following the grotesque misjudgement of their early reports on the Battle of the Somme in July 1916, the level of realism in their reports increased. While the suffering of British troops was not reported, the conditions endured by German soldiers were reported. Few readers can have imagined that things were dramatically different on the opposite side of no-man’s land. Nor was it truly in the power of the accredited war correspondents, the censors and the Press Bureau to wholly obscure the reality of the war, even if they had aimed to do so. The correspondents’ reports were not published in isolation. Since May 1915 casualty lists had appeared in the national newspapers. Within days it would be apparent to readers just how costly the opening hours of the Somme offensive had been; the casualty lists were longer than the reports of the battle. Other sources featured in the newspapers too. The Daily Telegraph published extracts ‘culled from an officer’s letter’ on 16 August 1916, as the Somme battle raged on. The letter offers a participant’s-eye view of the fighting, replete with unpleasant details. A bombardment causes ‘bits of trench boots, bully beef tins, shovel handles, stakes 6ft long, lengths of wire, crumpled sheets of iron, and all kinds of stuff’ to fall from the sky; a young officer’s ‘head was absolutely smashed’.89 While this was relatively rare in the Fleet Street press, provincial newspapers were less rigorously scrutinised and frequently included ‘letters from the front that were open about conditions there and about fluctuations in morale’.90 The converse of this is, of course, also true. The Daily Mail, for example, with bombastic

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headlines and rewards for the discovery of German sympathisers, framed its correspondents’ words in a manner that must have coloured the readers’ responses. As noted above, Beach Thomas’s report on 23 August 1918 appeared alongside the offer of a £1,000 reward for information leading to the apprehension of German agents. Headlines and sub-headings on the page include ‘Hun Plot’, ‘Alleged Hun Scheming’, ‘Complete British Success’, ‘5,000 Prisoners’ and ‘Six Ships Sunk’.91 A tone of sensation is established before a reader engages with the text of the articles. Sensationalism notwithstanding, the notion that the reading public was wholly deceived about the nature of combat on the Western Front does not stand up to scrutiny. As well as the development of style as the war progressed there was also significant stylistic variation between the war correspondents, with Beach Thomas’s style standing out as being much closer to the ‘high diction’ observed by Paul Fussell than that of most of his peers. This remained the case despite the collaborative nature of the accredited correspondents’ work for much of the war. Too often, those individual differences go unremarked in scholarly accounts. The correspondents’ work reflected their personal experiences of the conflict. Correspondence took a physical and psychological toll on the journalists. John Buchan, who reported for The Times for spells in 1915 and 1916, ‘was almost continuously unwell’ during the war and found his time in France ‘purgatorial’. Over twenty years later, Buchan still found himself seized by ‘a kind of nausea [. . .] when some smell recalls the festering odour of the front line, made up of incinerators, latrines and mud’.92 Henry Perry Robinson sought permission to return to England in 1916, fearing a breakdown; his editor persuaded him to remain in France.93 At the beginning of 1918 Beach Thomas ‘was at home, recuperating after an attack of sleeplessness’.94 When, in 1917, Gibbs came to republish his dispatches from the Somme, he chose to leave them ‘as they were, written at great speed, sometimes in utter exhaustion [. . .] but always with the emotion that comes from the hot impress of new and tremendous sensations’.95 While they did not share the most traumatic experiences of the fighting soldiers, the correspondents were participants in the conflict. Their writing evolved as the war progressed, in response to battlefield conditions, official regulations, the demands of editors and readers and their own experiences of the war.

Notes   1. Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer [1930] (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), 191. Online databases consulted for this chapter include Gale Primary Sources and ProQuest Trench Journals and Unit Magazines of the First World War.   2. Philip Gibbs, The Battles of the Somme (London: William Heinemann, 1917), 17.  3. Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, 190.  4. The Daily Chronicle merged with the Daily News in 1930 to form the News Chronicle, which remained in print until 1960.  5. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory [1975] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 87.   6. Philip Knightley, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq [1975] (London: André Deutsch, 2003), 84–5.   7. Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (London: Penguin, 1999), 214.   8. Martin Farrar, News from the Front: War Correspondents on the Western Front, 1914–1918 (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998), 220, 222.

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  9. Peter Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words: Literature as Propaganda, 1914–1918 (London: Batsford, 1989), 8. 10. Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 218. 11. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 21–2. 12. Denis Boak, ‘The Mimetic Imperative: War, Fiction, Realism’, Romance Studies 30, nos. 3–4 (2012): 217–28, here 220. 13. Sara Prieto, Reporting the First World War in the Liminal Zone: British and American Eyewitness Accounts from the Western Front (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave, 2018); Kevin Williams, A New History of War Reporting (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020). 14. Williams, A New History of War Reporting, 76. 15. Prieto, Reporting the First World War, 12–13. 16. Prieto, Reporting the First World War, 180. 17. Focusing narrowly on these officially accredited correspondents necessarily excludes a range of other voices. British correspondents operating on other fronts are absent, as are the correspondents accredited by other nations. Individuals serving their publications as war correspondents but not recognised by the military authorities also fall beyond the scope of this chapter. Significantly, all these categories included female writers. For an overview of the work of female war correspondents, see Stephanie Seul, ‘Women War Reporters’, 1914–1918 online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer and Bill Nasson (Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin, 2014), , accessed 6 August 2021. 18. For a fuller discussion of the ways in which Victorian conflicts anticipated aspects of the Western Front, see Andrew Griffiths, The New Journalism, The New Imperialism and the Fiction of Empire, 1870–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015), 168–81, 183–4. 19. Prieto, Reporting the First World War, 122. 20. Philip Gibbs, Adventures in Journalism (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1923), 240. 21. Philip M. Taylor, British Propaganda in the Twentieth Century: Selling Democracy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 2. 22. Gibbs, Adventures in Journalism, 247–8. 23. C. F. G. Masterman, The Condition of England (London: Methuen, 1909), 91. 24. As Niall Ferguson argues, much propaganda was produced spontaneously by members of the public. Ferguson, The Pity of War, 229. 25. Brian Best, Reporting from the Front: War Reporters During the Great War (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2014), 34; G. R. Searle, A New England? Peace and War, 1886–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004), 678. 26. Searle, A New England?, 771. 27. Defence of the Realm Consolidation Act, 1914, National Archives, MUN 5/19/221/8. 28. David Monger, ‘The Press Bureau, “D” Notices, and Official Control of the British Press’s Record of the First World War’, The Historical Journal 64, no. 1 (2021): 1–26, here 4. 29. Monger, ‘The Press Bureau’, 10. 30. Gibbs, The Battles of the Somme, 17. 31. Farrar, News from the Front, ix–xii. 32. Gibbs, Adventures in Journalism, 248. 33. Ferguson, The Pity of War, 235. 34. Qtd. in Williams, A New History of War Reporting, 79. 35. For a fuller discussion of Kitchener’s attitude to correspondents in Sudan and of Victorian war correspondents’ responses to industrialised killing, see Griffiths, The New Journalism, 155–81.

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36. Williams, A New History of War Reporting, 62. The Manchester Guardian dropped ‘Manchester’ from its title in 1959. 37. C. E. Montague, Disenchantment (London: Chatto and Windus, 1922), 94. 38. Farrar, News from the Front, 5. 39. Gibbs, Adventures in Journalism, 233. 40. William Beach Thomas, ‘These Wonderful War Horses’, Daily Mail, 9 December 1914, 6. It is only fair to add that Beach Thomas closes the article by describing the war as ‘this mad and cruel duel of destructive chemistry and mechanics against living flesh’. 41. Gibbs, Adventures in Journalism, 245. 42. Farrar, News from the Front, 24. 43. Best, Reporting from the Front, 27. 44. Gibbs, Adventures in Journalism, 245. 45. A. Beaumont, ‘Adventures of a War Correspondent’, Daily Telegraph, 20 August 1914, 9. Beaumont’s identity has not been fully established. 46. William Maxwell, ‘Adventures of a War Correspondent’, Daily Telegraph, 4 September 1914, 2. 47. William Beach Thomas, A Traveller in News (London: Chapman and Hall, 1925), 59. 48. Beach Thomas, A Traveller in News, 57. 49. William Beach Thomas, ‘A Wood of Death’, Daily Mail, 16 November 1914, 5. 50. Beach Thomas, ‘A Wood of Death’, 5. 51. Beach Thomas, A Traveller in News, 80. 52. ‘The War Day by Day’, The Times, 24 November 1914, 5. 53. E. Ashmead Bartlett, ‘At the Front with the British Army’, Daily Telegraph, 5 March 1915, 9. 54. Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words, 79–80. 55. Beach Thomas, A Traveller in News, 103. 56. Ashmead Bartlett, ‘At the Front with the British Army’, 9. 57. Farrar, News from the Front, 68. 58. Beach Thomas, A Traveller in News, 106. 59. Best, Reporting from the Front, 40. 60. Philip Gibbs, ‘First Phases of the Battle’, Daily Telegraph, 3 July 1916, 9. 61. Gibbs, ‘First Phases of the Battle’, 9. 62. John D. Irvine, ‘Our Eye-Witness Account’, Daily Express, 3 July 1916, 1. Irvine was covering for the regular Express correspondent, Percival Phillips. 63. Martin Middlebrook, The First Day on the Somme [1971] (London: Penguin, 2016), 168. 64. William Beach Thomas, ‘Gommecourt’, Daily Mail, 5 July 1916, 5. 65. Beach Thomas, ‘Gommecourt’, 5. 66. Beach Thomas, A Traveller in News, 109. 67. Beach Thomas, A Traveller in News, 109. 68. Ferguson, The Pity of War, 238. 69. Montague, Disenchantment, 98. 70. Philip Gibbs, ‘Incidents of the British Advance’, Daily Telegraph, 18 July 1916, 9. 71. Philip Gibbs, ‘British Advance’, Daily Telegraph, 23 August 1916, 10. 72. Perceval Gibbon, ‘Schwaben Redoubt’, Daily Telegraph, 24 October 1916, 9. 73. David Monger, Patriotism and Propaganda in First World War Britain: The National War Aims Committee and Civilian Morale (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), 19. 74. Searle, A New England, 767. 75. Monger, Patriotism and Propaganda, 20. 76. Monger, Patriotism and Propaganda, 22. 77. Farrar, News from the Front, 150. 78. Monger, Patriotism and Propaganda, 26–8.

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79. Beach Thomas, A Traveller in News, 119. 80. Gibbs, Adventures in Journalism, 251. 81. Beach Thomas, A Traveller in News, 122. 82. Montague, Disenchantment, 94. 83. Montague, Disenchantment, 97. 84. Percival Phillips, ‘Battle in the Moonlight’, Daily Express, 23 August 1918, 1. 85. William Beach Thomas, ‘Guards Attack’, Daily Mail, 23 August 1918, 3. 86. ‘Cologne Bombed’, Daily Mail, 23 August 1918, 3; ‘£1,000 Reward’, Daily Mail, 23 August 1918, 3. 87. The correspondent, unusually, is not named but is likely to have been H. Perry Robinson. ‘Gen. Byng’s Line’, The Times, 23 August 1918, 8. 88. See, for example, Teech Bomas, ‘We Attack at Dawn. By Our Special Correspondent Mr. Teech Bomas’, The Wipers Times: A Facsimile Reprint of the Trench Magazines, 15 August 1917, 5. 89. ‘Hell Upon Earth’, The Daily Telegraph, 22 August 1916, 11. 90. David Stevenson, 1914–1918: The History of the First World War (London: Penguin, 2005), 273. 91. Daily Mail, 23 August 1918, 3. 92. John Buchan, Memory Hold the Door (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1940), 164–5. Peter Buitenhuis tendentiously links Buchan’s illness to ‘[t]he strain of duplicity’; Buchan had been ill before the war began. Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words, 98. 93. Best, Reporting from the Front, 103–4. 94. Beach Thomas, A Traveller in News, 145. 95. Gibbs, The Battles of the Somme, 15.

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12 Photographers Jan Baetens

Some of the happiest reading experiences of my career have been in these libraries [modern French médiathèques, JB], where sixteenth-century books are often delivered to the general reading areas, with infants toddling through, and alongside war veterans with their daily papers. One of the pensioners kindly stopped by my desk to assure me that I would get far more enlightenment from his illustrated magazine than the text I had in front of me.1

H

istorical and literary research are no longer purely text-based disciplines, in which images have no other role or function than to ‘illustrate’ verbal documents and written analyses. Much like other disciplines in the broader field of the humanities, history as well as literary studies, more particularly literary history, have experienced a visual turn, and this fundamental transformation has taken three different forms. First, there is the broadening of the corpus, that is, the discovery and use of types of documents and evidence that had been neglected in favour of the almost exclusive focus on written material (to a certain extent, the work of Foucault, revolutionary as it might have been, is an example of such ‘image-blindness’). In addition, the types of visual material that have been acknowledged as worth studying have become more and more diverse. It is now commonly recognised that literary-historical research cannot be reduced to the domain of high-cultural productions, well knowing that in less prestigious forms of cultural production the place and weight of images may be stronger than that of texts. As Roland Barthes famously argued in his foundational essay on photography: ‘In other words, and this is an important historical reversal, the image no longer illustrates the words; it is now the words which, structurally, are parasitic on the image.’2 Second, the innovations in terms of corpus have provoked new debates on all kinds of methodological issues. It is certainly possible to ‘read’ images, but this reading is not of the same nature as the reading of texts. The attempts to transfer linguistic concepts and categories to visual analysis have certainly proven useful in certain cases, as shown, for instance, in the successful semiotic toolkit proposed by authors such as Kress and Van Leeuwen.3 However, the limitations of these verbo-visual transfers have rapidly come to the fore. Any direct shift from verbal theoretical frameworks to image analysis eventually falls prey to linguistic imperialism, a position all the more problematic since at the same time literary and textual scholars were being invited to question their own ways of thinking in light of the visual turn.4 A very interesting case in point is the articulation of words and images in certain types of publications such as the illustrated press or the picture book, where it is no longer possible to maintain

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the traditional hegemonic relationship between image (the dominated element, chiefly present for aesthetic or commercial reasons) and word (the dominating ‘male’ element, whose meaning encapsulates and controls the ‘wild’ and otherwise ‘uncontrollable’ meaning of the ‘female’ image).5 Third, the changes in terms of concepts and methods have also had a strong impact on the actual writing on literary-historical topics and questions. At a superficial level (but surface is never a detail when it comes down to images!), scholars and publishers have made room for visual material, while at the same time taking into account the properly visual dimension of written texts. In a more radical way, however, it should be stressed that the way in which scholars ‘materialise’ and ‘communicate’ their historical findings has equally been widened and diversified. Philippe Videlier, in his novel on the Armenian genocide, has explored the possibilities of a new genre of historical storytelling that appropriates and reshapes, yet with purely verbal means, the style of the illustrated popular press regarding the moments and episodes under scrutiny.6 Certain fields such as graphic medicine, that is, the intersection between the medium of comics and the discourse of healthcare, now consider the use of mainly visual communication as a perfectly acceptable scientific way of publishing.7 In a more collective manner and in direct connection with Patrick Boucheron’s chair at the Collège de France, the online journal Entre-Temps is a trendsetting laboratory of new forms of doing and above all writing history, with images as well as words.8 As far as our current representation of the First World War is concerned, the visual turn has not only produced a more diverse and nuanced view of the period. It has triggered in more than one regard a real landslide. A striking example of such a reframing has to do with the stereotypical belief that the home front did not have a clear idea of what was actually going on in the trenches. For many decades, we have taken for granted the famous and endlessly quoted claims about the soldiers’ ‘silence’ by Walter Benjamin: With the [First] World War a process began to become apparent which has not halted since then. Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent – not richer, but poorer in communicable experience? What ten years later was poured out in the flood of war books was anything but experience that goes from mouth to mouth. And there was nothing remarkable about that. For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power. A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.9 This ‘silence’, we know better today, is a myth, as demonstrated first by the progressive disclosure of an incredible wealth of textual evidence, long-neglected due to cultural biases against subaltern testimonies by simple soldiers or culturally less respected publications such as DIY trench journals; and second by the increasing interest in visual journalism. A key reference in this regard is the work of French historian Joëlle Beurier, whose commitment to the study of a weekly such as Le Miroir (The Mirror, 1912–20)

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has brought to the fore what we curiously had tended to forget, namely that firsthand visual testimonies and representations of the most horrible aspects of the ongoing war were not ‘absent’ but extremely ‘present’, feeding the public on a daily or weekly basis in ways that relied on all the possibilities of modern mass culture.10 Like certain other magazines in countries at war (for the UK, the example of the War Illustrated [1914–19] may come to mind), Le Miroir escapes from the alleged general rule of sanitised, censored and state-controlled information; but the more information we agree to take into account, the clearer it becomes that the home front did have a sharp and graphic representation of what was happening ‘out there’, at the very moment when these events were occurring.

War Photography in Journals as ‘Cultural Series’ When studying the presence of photography in illustrated First World War journals, it does not suffice simply to select an appropriate corpus – and there are good reasons to believe that Le Miroir is an excellent candidate in this regard. The first question to ask concerns the very notion of photography itself. This is a very simple question at first sight, but the answer is far from self-evident. Photography is definitely a medium, but not a single or clearly circumscribed one, neither in the technological nor in the cultural sense of the word. On the one hand, photography is highly technologydependent: each technological change has dramatic implications for both the form and the content of what is being photographed.11 Moreover, photographic images exist in many different material forms and formats, which all have a major impact on what is being shown and how it appears to the spectator. A vintage print of a given image is not the same as the reprint of the same image in a magazine, for instance, and not only for reasons having to do with print quality. The image’s context will be radically different (the wall of the silent, white cube museum is not the same as the ‘noisy’ context of a magazine, which might comprise publicity photographs and a wide range of accompanying texts, for instance). On the other hand, the uses of photography are so diverse (art, journalism, science, publicity, law, family photography, etc.) and the implications of this diversity so huge that it is practically impossible and theoretically erroneous to try to express the medium of photography once and for all in one all-encompassing definition. There are only photographies, radically pluralised, and there are only histories of photography. Any type of photography has to be cautiously historicised and contextualised as a cluster of features referring to questions such as technology, publication and reproduction formats (the so-called ‘support’ or ‘host medium’), style, subject matter, and last but not least the different ideas both users and producers have of a certain medium in a certain place and at a certain moment in time. In addition, photography cannot be a medium that functions independently from a larger mediascape, in which different forms of photography always interact with other forms of media. The appearance of photography may have been experienced as a threat to painting, to give the simplest of illustrations of the principle of media interplay, but it works no less the other way around: in order to become culturally acceptable, photography had to start obeying painterly subject and composition principles, even when the models it was copying were no longer cutting-edge in the field of painting proper, as seen during pictorialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In most cases, however, this media interaction involves much more than just

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two players. Besides, it is also key to underline that the contact between media further complicates the idea of linear or chronological evolution that media archaeology has fundamentally deconstructed.12 Just as media do not evolve from ‘old’ to ‘new’ or from ‘less mimetic’ to ‘more mimetic’, to follow the update of McLuhan’s medium theory in Bolter and Grusin’s remediation theory, the contacts between photography and other media do not only obey the logic of ‘before’ and ‘after’.13 What we need is a broad and open concept capable of establishing bridges between media forms, contents and uses, and thus building a less linear and radically non-teleological history of visual culture. A possible example of such an approach is the notion of cultural series as defined by film historians André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion.14 A cultural series is a way of addressing a medium at the crossroads of a cluster of other media forms and practices that explains how the medium in question is organised and changes at a certain moment in time but also throughout a larger period. It is crucial to notice that a cultural series is not an empirical fact (it is neither a technology nor a cultural practice that can be observed), but a heuristic tool that helps medium theoreticians to create if not to invent inter- and transmedial links capable of revealing new and different takes on medium history. This theoretical background is helpful when trying to understand the way photographic images play a role in war journalism. As convincingly argued by Martha A. Sandweiss in a decisive study of the role of photography in the discovery of the American West, the emergence of photography in the daily and weekly press had been relatively slow.15 Technical obstacles were definitely paramount. First, the heavy photographic equipment and the complex chemistry involved in photography before the launch of more transportable devices for amateur use (the Kodak company was founded in 1888) prevented the taking of snapshot photos during military action. Second, the distance between the place where pictures were taken and the place were pictures were developed and printed in journals and magazines made photographic war journalism a time-consuming business: instant information was often wishful thinking. Finally, the absence of commercially viable halftone techniques until the 1880s prevented photographs from being printed alongside texts (for several decades, many photographically illustrated books tended to have only pasted-in pictures, a very costly and time-consuming process). As a result of these difficulties, photographs were reprinted in a special way, namely as wood engravings, which acted as a more or less realistic substitute for ‘imagined’ pictures. Yet the shift from photography to engraving was not only due to technical handicaps, crucial as they might have been. Next to these, there were also fundamental rhetorical problems. As a matter of fact, if photographs had a sharpness that engravings could emulate but never match, the latter had a twofold advantage that explains their lasting success even after the introduction of new technologies that made photographic reprints easier, cheaper and faster. Unlike photographs, engravings were capable of making distinctions between relevant and non-relevant information, both by highlighting what really mattered and by omitting non-essential details. And unlike photographs, engravings were also better suited to telling stories. We all know that every picture tells a story, but adding a narrative twist or dimension to the image was an effect that was easier to produce in engravings than in photographs. The persistence of hand-drawn images in illustrated news magazines is therefore much more than just a trace of the past: it fundamentally reveals the communicative and rhetorical dimension

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of images, which are there to inform, but also to orient the reading of information, a task that photographs often have difficulties in performing without the help of textual supplements.

Le Miroir, an All-war Photo Magazine (with Texts and Drawings) Launched in 1910 as the photographic supplement of the popular, centre-right newspaper Le Petit Parisien (1876–1944), which had a circulation of one million copies at the turn of the century; two million copies at the end of the war, Le Miroir became an independent weekly in 1912, mainly specialising in pictorial news (in 1920 it turned into a sports magazine). At the outbreak of the war, on 8 August 1914, when paper shortages suddenly forced it to adopt a reduced sixteen-page format, it rapidly limited its content to one subject, namely war photography, always reproduced in black and white. During the first weeks after the opening of hostilities there remained some isolated non-war-related pictures, such as those on the election of the new pope, but from 20 August onwards the military conflict occupied the complete table of contents of all further issues until the end of the war (some of these issues came close to a print run of one million copies).16 The rapid transformation of an all-round news picture weekly to a magazine exclusively devoted to war journalism does not, however, imply that the publication’s content relied purely on war photographs in the narrow sense of the word. On the one hand, the structure of the table of contents is extremely stable over the years: the sixteen pages of the weekly issue continue to present the same sections, with only slight changes from one week to another, with, for instance, a written day-by-day overview of that week’s (military) events on page 3, and a mix of images that persistently revisit the same topoi (pictures of military and political leaders, war photographs, maps and charts of military topics, portrait galleries of public and anonymous heroes, pictures showing funny, didactic, entertaining or ordinary aspects of military life in the trenches and at the home front). On the other hand, not all images are photographs: until the very end of the war, Le Miroir systematically published hand-drawn maps and charts and also, perhaps more surprisingly, hand-drawn illustrations. The continuing presence of these drawings can be explained by various causes: personal ones, such as the desire to continue the employment of specialised staff (most drawings were made by the chief illustrator of the magazine); technical ones, such as the impossibility of photographing certain types of scenes (violent man-to-man combat, aeroplane engagements, actions occurring in places where no photographers were active, etc.); but also purely commercial ones, such as competition with other magazines that published highly attractive drawings of scenes and events that it was not yet possible to photograph. The drawing of the ‘bombing of an asphyxiant gas factory’ (Figure 12.1) is a typical example of this kind of image. On the one hand, it shows a scene that it would have been almost impossible to photograph – and if it were possible, it would have been even more implausible to ‘obtain’ a photograph, for no French photographer could reasonably have been in that place at that time. On the other hand, it perfectly matches the propaganda aims of the weekly, since the drawing helps illustrate the idea of ‘punishment’, in this case ‘homeopathic punishment’ of the enemy, who die by

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Figure 12.1  Le Miroir, 21 November 1915. Gallica/BnF.

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their own unfair method of warfare. Moreover, it must be stressed that quite a large number of photographs were more or less heavily retouched, less to ‘soften’ the pictorial representation (Le Miroir rapidly started to include photographs that even today appear very gory, such as rotting bodies and pictures of severed body parts) than to ‘add’ elements in order to make the image more realistic or convincing (such as, for instance, the wing of an aeroplane in the case of a bombardment picture). In general, the highly realistic style of the drawings as well as the often blurred reproduction of the photographs in print made for the fact that the difference between drawings and photographs was definitely not always as sharp as today’s readers might expect. Content-wise, Le Miroir’s journalistic ethics clearly did not lean towards the ideal of objectivity. The editorial line was a blatant and relentless example of nationalist chauvinism and propaganda, as channelled through the combination of word and image. Yet this one-sidedness is not what makes the weekly so singular and so important. Le Miroir’s uniqueness is due to its ‘invention’ of a new type of journalistic war photography, which Joëlle Beurier has skilfully summarised through three key features:17 first, the transformation of the ‘actual’ fact or event into a ‘universal’ message (a picture of a dead citizen, for instance, is not just a picture of this particular person, but proof of Germany’s barbarity); second, the search for ‘shocking’ images, putting a stronger emphasis on emotion than on information (and notice that the adjective ‘shocking’ has to be taken quite literally: Le Miroir was not the first publication to use images of rotten and mutilated corpses, but it was the first in France to do so in a purely journalistic context);18 third, voyeuristic sensationalism, which the magazine achieved through its collaboration with a new type of image and a new type of reporter-photographer, which requires closer examination. In order to analyse the features of Le Miroir’s novelty, it is useful to compare its photographs with other types of words and images that are linked with the magazine as cultural series. First of all, it is important to stress the increasing similarities between photographs and drawings. Initially, the drawn illustrations, whose visual style was comparable to other illustrations in the popular press or the images one could find on the covers of yellow literature, were much more graphic and dynamic than the photographs Le Miroir was capable of obtaining. The drawings did not refrain from violent action and gory details, which the photographs of the first weeks and months of the war period had difficulties in capturing: the war was far away (that is, from Paris), there were not yet photographers ‘in action’, and most pictures could only show, often with considerable delay, the material destruction caused by the war (in the beginning, Le Miroir even had to use historical images of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–1 to illustrate the German atrocities and barbarism of 1914). Yet quite rapidly, the magazine managed to obtain images that came close to the ‘imagined’ battle scenes displayed in the drawings (generally, each issue contained a full-page illustration of such a scene). Photographs and drawings were similarly captioned and the style of captioning did not change throughout the whole war period. In short, rather than pursuing new types of photography that would distinguish them from the previously hegemonic format of fictionalised realist drawings, Le Miroir attempted to photographically copy the main features of the popular illustrations of the period – hence the very tolerant and liberal use of retouching, which helped bridge the gap between photographs and drawings. Second, the photographic iconography of Le Miroir also showcased considerable differences with other types of photography, such as ‘family photography’ as practised

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by soldiers documenting daily life in the trenches. As Beurier rightly argues, the latter pictures were generally focused on less traumatic and sensational elements, while making room for the portrayal of individuals (the ‘band of brothers’ with whom one tried to survive as well as possible in the often very long periods before and after the actual battles).19 A comparison with photographic archives as gathered by official bodies such as city councils confirms the particularities of the weekly’s attempt to photographically reproduce sensationalist action drawings.20 These archives can be organised in three subsets: 1) human interest pictures, that is, snapshot photographs made by civilians who wanted to preserve a trace of the traumatising events; 2) historical and archaeological pictures made by professional photographers documenting the material state of the principal historical monuments of the city, in an effort to produce a contemporaneous version of the then popular photobooks and collections on the city’s ‘jewels’; and 3) legal and administrative pictures, whose main and perhaps sole objective was to constitute an exhaustive photographic record of material damage in order to serve as administrative evidence for insurance and repayment purposes. In both cases, that of the soldiers’ family photographs and of the municipal archives, the difference from the war photography of Le Miroir is considerable. Granted, the weekly also included ‘human interest’ reportage, but only once in a while, as well as testimonies of material destruction and ruins, somewhat more frequently; but these types of images were clearly not at the top of the wish list of the editors. What they actually wanted can be inferred first from the publicity campaign that Le Miroir started almost immediately after the outbreak of the war, and second from the photography contest that was initiated a couple of months later. In the second war issue, 16 August 1914, the title of the magazine was followed by this slogan: ‘Le Miroir is willing to pay any price for photographic documents that concern the war [and] have a singular interest’ (Le Miroir paie n’importe quel prix les documents photographiques relatifs à la guerre, présentant un intérêt particulier).21 That the ‘documents’ in question are ‘photographic documents’ is easy to infer from the nature of the magazine, but this becomes even clearer from the announcement on 14 March 1915 of a richly endowed contest, offering the amazing prize of 30,000 francs for the most ‘gripping’ (saisissant) war photograph (Figure 12.2).22 Some weeks after the official launch of the ‘general’ contest on 2 April (Figure 12.3), there was a second, monthly contest (Figure 12.4), equally well endowed (with three prizes of, respectively, 1000, 500 and 250 francs). Both competitions would be maintained until the end of the war. The editorial comments clearly describe what is meant by ‘gripping’, a more sensationalist rewording of the ‘singular interest’ mentioned in the weekly’s slogan. Three elements come to the fore here. First, Le Miroir exclusively opened the contest to ‘amateurs’, a further unspecified category which in practice meant soldiers in action (despite the marketable appropriation of the famous Kodak Brownie box camera, often used by women: ‘it suffices to push a button to win this little fortune’). An unusual procedure? Perhaps, although the distinction between professionals and amateurs was then not as strong as it would later become – before digital technology and citizen journalism once again blurred the boundaries between these two categories (Le Miroir was not the only publication that organised this kind of dialogue with its readership). But the proposition was certainly illegal, since neither citizens nor private soldiers had the right to photograph military installations or scenes, for security reasons (a picture could be used by the enemy, as Le Miroir itself showed by publishing

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Figure 12.2  Le Miroir, 14 March 1915. Gallica/BnF.

Figure 12.3  Le Miroir, 4 April 1915. Gallica/BnF.

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Figure 12.4  Le Miroir, 16 May 1915. Gallica/BnF.

pictures taken by German soldiers, probably prisoners of war) as well as for disciplinary reasons (a picture could also be used in order to counter official propaganda).23 As shown by Joëlle Beurier, many pictures were actually taken by military photographers, who apparently had the possibility of reusing their images for private purposes. One imagines that explicit or implicit authorisation was secured thanks to the fact that these images powerfully reinforced the goals of official war propaganda. Second, the capture of a ‘gripping’ photograph depends completely on the subject, not on the aesthetic qualities of the image. The contest regulations explicitly stated that ‘there is no use sending us “artistic pictures”’. On top of that, the subject in question could not be ‘staged’ and all forms of ‘photographic manipulation’ were strictly forbidden. A close reading of the captions accompanying most of the prize-winning pictures (strangely enough, the winners of the monthly contest are never announced in advance, but always afterwards, at the beginning of the month following the publication of the three photographs) demonstrates that a ‘gripping subject’ is above all an image that combines two characteristics. Neither is surprising and both have to do with the progressive conquest of snapshot photography in extreme circumstances. On the one hand, a gripping picture is a snapshot showing a moving object or body that had never been photographed before as it evolves or unfolds in time, such as a shell exploding, a bridge collapsing, the throwing of a grenade or an aeroplane crashing. Quite often this gripping image takes the form of a short sequence, each picture disclosing a brief and successive moment of something occurring at very high speed, while the readability of these sequences is highlighted by the page layout. On the other hand, a gripping image is also a picture that exemplifies the photographer’s audacity and courage, a war photographer’s axiom that Robert Capa (1913–54) would later express in this way: ‘If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.’24

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Figure 12.5  Le Miroir, 2 May 1915. Gallica/BnF.

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The captions of the prize-winning pictures are generally devoted more to the description of the photographer’s involvement than to the specific content of the image. One of the very first of these ‘gripping’ images, actually the first prize-winning photograph (Figure 12.5), a double spread showing the explosion of a shell, is a good example of this policy. The picture is double-captioned. On top one reads: ‘A picture taken in circumstances that demonstrate the exceptional coolness of the operator’ (Une photographie prise dans des conditions qui dénotent un rare sang-froid chez l’opérateur). At the bottom, nearly three-quarters of the caption is taken up by an explanation of what this means: Try to imagine the composure of the dragoon who in the midst of the attack has quietly taken his camera to photograph, at the very moment of its explosion, that shell that was coming close to him and whose burst caused the death of two of our men. Obviously, we do not claim that this picture is a photographic masterpiece. It lacks sharpness and pose, for it was taken in dark and rainy circumstances. Yet perhaps it is the most extraordinary ‘document’ ever published since the beginning of the hostilities. We did not want to denature this image. Therefore, we publish it in a larger format with no retouching at all, in order to maintain, both at the level of the complete image and at that of its details, its documentary authenticity. (Imaginez-vous le sang-froid de ce dragon qui, pendant la charge, a tranquillement sorti son appareil pour photographier, au moment de l’éclatement, l’obus qui s’approchait de lui et qui, dans son explosion, a coûté la vie à deux des nôtres. Évidemment nous ne donnons point cette image pour un chef-d’œuvre photographique. Elle manque de netteté et de pose, car elle fut prise par un temps très sombre et sous la pluie. Mais c’est peut-être le plus extraordinaire ‘document’ qui ait été publié depuis le début des hostilités. Nous n’avons pas voulu dénaturer ce cliché. Aussi, en publions-nous l’agrandissement sans aucune retouche, afin de lui conserver, dans son ensemble comme dans les détails, toute son authenticité documentaire).25 Third and last, and unlike what mostly happened with the drawings, the photographs published by Le Miroir were uncredited. The ‘amateurs’ were described as ‘our reporters’ or ‘the operator’, with no further details. Strangely enough, the identification of the authors of the photographs was more detailed when the magazine included pictures from the enemy, although the identification was never complete (for example: ‘photos handed over by a German prisoner’ or ‘taken by a German officer’). When handing in their pictures, either prints or glass and other negatives, the makers were obliged to answer the questions ‘what, when, where’, all elements that could be used to edit the captions; but these verbal accompaniments were generally very brief, as well as more prone to stress the circumstances of the taking of the picture than to give comprehensive information about what was really happening at the front. This lack of photographer credit is not linked to uncertainties concerning copyright or ownership, as might have been the case in previous decades when the functions of commissioner, photographer and developer were still somewhat confused, and as was still the case in the younger medium of cinema; Le Miroir informed its readers, more particularly those of its readers who might be interested in participating in the contest, that it refused to publish images by photographers who did not give the monopoly of their

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pictures to the weekly.26 This policy shows that in spite of the absence of any credit, there was a solid legal framework for the buying and selling of photographs. Le Miroir’s use of aerial photography, a topic unfortunately too complex to be analysed in detail, provides further evidence of the magazine’s policy. Although less prevalent than naval war scenes, the exceptional place of which can be explained by the enthusiastic reportage on the British war effort, the role of the air force was stressed from the first weeks of the hostilities. Already on 20 September 1914, there is a full-page drawing of a fierce combat between a French and a German plane, and aircraft-related pictures taken on the ground (preparations for air raids, crashed or captured German planes, portraits of famous pilots, air defence scenes) rapidly entered the pages of Le Miroir. It was, however, only after a certain period that the magazine started publishing aerial photography (early pictures taken from a tower or a hilltop being a kind of intermediary step towards aerial photography). Its sources were diverse: observation balloons, seaplanes (stressing the link with the war at sea, for instance through their combat against submarines) and various other types of aeroplanes (observation planes, fighter planes, bombers). Most of these aerial pictures (Figure 12.6) are panoramic views of war zones or battlefields, for instance before and after an attack or a bombing raid. However, Le Miroir also tended to publish aerial images that are closer to the rest of its visual material: sensational images, often with a more universal content, such as the stunning double page of 21 October 1917 showing the surrender, at an altitude of 2,000 metres, of German pilots adopting the ‘classic or well-known gesture’ (pose traditionnelle) of raising their hands and saying ‘kamarad’.27 When these kinds of snapshots could not be found, Le Miroir continued to include drawings that ‘re-enacted’ the event, while specifying the authenticity of the pilot’s witnessing that helped the artist produce his drawing. In a similar vein, the magazine always took

Figure 12.6  Le Miroir, 18 July 1915. Gallica/BnF.

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great care to specify authenticating details such the altitude at which the picture was taken and the general identity of its maker (‘one of our pilots’, ‘a captured German pilot’, etc.). Finally, Le Miroir also underlined the role of the medium, highlighting the increasing technical possibilities of modern photography, which was proving more and more capable of exactly capturing objects that could not be pictured before, such as the high-speed falling of a bomb taken from a fast-moving position (that of the aircraft). This kind of image remained, however, relatively rare (until the end of the war, drawings and pictures taken on the ground continue to represent the majority of scenes related to the air force). The reasons for this are easy to discover: panoramic images have great value for military intelligence, and so their publication is far from straightforward (as can be deduced from the fact that quite a few of the published aerial panoramas had been made some time before they went into print); many aerial activities took place in complete darkness (bombing raids are a good example); and finally, aerial action scenes were extremely dangerous to capture, since in order to take a picture the aviator had to abandon his machine gun, thus jeopardising the safety of the aircraft.

From Picture to Picture Story? For today’s readers, Le Miroir still seems very modern, provided one agrees to bracket the propagandistic a priori of the magazine and its systematic production of what we would today call ‘fake news’. The weekly invented a new type of war photographer, no longer the close or distant professional observer, but the amateur, often a soldier, less a participant observer than an observant participant. It also introduced a highly sensationalist take on war photography, less focused on the static ‘before and after’ diptych documenting the destruction of famous buildings if not complete city areas, than on snapshot photography disclosing violent and above all very brief actions (explosions, collapses, crashes), as well as images that were until then considered too gory to be published in mass media outlets; that is, published ‘as photographs’, for the circulation of violent and bloody images was far from unknown. Photographs with violent content were indirectly reproduced in magazines and newspapers via woodcut copies, which helped highlight the rhetorical and narrative dimensions of these pictures, while similar content was distributed in huge amounts via highly sensationalist and melodramatic postcards and hand-drawn illustrations. What made Le Miroir’s pictorial revolution so fascinating was its constant dialogue with other visual and verbal media of the period. This was not just a weekly competing with other similar media for the public’s attention and money (Le Miroir did not depend on publicity revenues but on its subscriptions as well as its weekly sales at the newsstands); it was in the first place a cultural series, at the crossroads of a wide range of other media practices. As far as the visual aspects of the magazine are concerned, one should notice the lasting influence of drawn illustrations in a venue that chose photographic news reporting as its unique selling point, not only through the launch of a new type of photo contest, the use of photographs as a marketing tool or the attempt to include as many ‘gripping’ photographs as possible, but also through the fact that these photographs occupied almost all the available space (there was only one real ‘editorial’ page, namely page 3, and this page contained no more than a telegraphic

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survey of the events of the week, in a day-by-day presentation), while the space for captions and other commentary remained rather restricted, in order to avoid any distraction from the pictures themselves. Yet in spite of this extreme novelty, it is important to stress that photography in Le Miroir cannot be reduced to a single type or format. On the one hand, the magazine continued to publish until the end of the war a great number of photographs that readers might also have found in other, visually more conservative but commercially competing publications, such as L’Illustration (1843–1944), the market leader of these years. Just like its competitors, Le Miroir published photographs that were anything but ‘gripping’, such as news reports on political and military leaders (an inspection of the trenches by a high-ranking officer is a stereotype of this kind of iconography, as is the repeated portrait photography of the generals at the army’s headquarters) or ‘human interest’ pictures frequently showing animals (mainly dogs and horses) and women (both as specific war heroines and as anonymous supporters of their men’s efforts in the trenches), but also private soldiers performing non-military activities (celebrating a victory, organising a Christmas party, participating in amateur theatre entertainment and the like). On the other hand, the implicit ideal of the ‘gripping’ photograph was clearly related to the sensationalist drawn illustration, well-known to the general public, but never shown as a photograph, that is, as a ‘real’ document. Hence the magazine’s insistence on the refusal of any kind of artifice: Le Miroir refused to accept and publish ‘aesthetic’ photographs, as if there were no such thing as the aesthetics of ruins and destruction, just as it claimed to exclude all forms of ‘staged photography’ or manipulation, though even the most distracted reading of the weekly immediately reveals that in many cases there had been a quite heavy retouching of the prints or negatives. In short, the photographic revolution performed by Le Miroir was a very complex and ambivalent one: the magazine definitely foregrounded a new form of war reportage, but this novelty cannot be separated from the emulation of already existing models and formats. In other words, what Le Miroir actually attempted to realise was not the replacement of a certain type of image by another type of image (although it would be absurd to deny that the magazine succeeded in showing images never seen before), but the mediological shift from drawn images to photographic images. Unlike the former, which represented the world not ‘as it was’ but as it was seen and thus to a certain extent always imagined, reconstructed, if not faked by a human agent, the latter could be considered ‘real’, provided that they were free of aesthetic effects as well as staging (posing) or manipulation (for instance, the superposition of two negatives). And although the indexical quality of photographic images was not (yet) theoretically challenged in these years, photography still being considered the direct, mechanical, faithful and thus reliable representation of ‘what had been’ (to quote the famous definition of photography’s ‘essence’ by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida), this indexicality was not something that could always be taken for granted.28 To convince the reader that the image was not only gripping but also ‘real’, the magazine was always at great pains to explain why this was the case; hence the singular form of many captions, less devoted to describing the ‘who, what, where, when and why’ of the image’s subject, theoretically speaking the only relevant criteria if one follows the regulations of the photographic contest, than to highlighting the action of the photographer and the way in which the observing participant had managed to take the picture in spite of all kind of dangers and technical difficulties.

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In other visual and typographical regards, Le Miroir remained a rather conservative magazine. There were certainly some timid attempts to explore a more dynamic page layout, but in comparison with other picture magazines of the pre-war period, Le Miroir did not prove inventive at all. The fact that the overall structure and composition rules of the magazine hardly changed over the four years of war reportage strongly hints at this unadventurousness. Le Miroir could have anticipated the photo essay or picture story that magazines such as Vu (1928–40) and Life (1883–2000) would impose as the new hegemonic format in the 1920s and 1930s, but the propagandistic policy as well as the gap between the editorial staff in Paris and the observant participants in the front line was too big to allow for the opening of this new chapter in the history of war journalism.

Notes   1. Andrew Pettegree, ‘The Renaissance Library and the Challenge of Print’, in The Meaning of the Library: A Cultural History, ed. Alice Crawford (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 72–90, here 82.   2. Roland Barthes, ‘The Photographic Message’, in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), 15–31, here 25. Today we might all agree on this claim, but it should be remembered that at the time of the essay’s publication it went against the grain of the then undiscussed belief that journalistic images could only signify something with the help of their captions. A typical example of this conventional, and given the propagandistic use of many captions very legitimate, claim is given by Walter Benjamin in his ‘Little History of Photography’: ‘The creative in photography is its capitulation to fashion. The world is beautiful – that is its watchword. In it is unmasked the posture of a photography that can endow any soup can with cosmic significance but cannot grasp a single one of the human connections in which it exists, even when this photography’s most dream-laden subjects are a forerunner more of its saleability than of any knowledge it might produce. But because the true face of this kind of photographic creativity is the advertisement or association, its logical counterpart is the act of unmasking or construction. As [Bertolt] Brecht says, “The situation is complicated by the fact that less than ever does the mere reflection of reality reveal anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or the AEG tells us next to nothing about these institutions. Actual reality has slipped into the functional. The reification of human relations – the factory, say – means that they are no longer explicit. So something must in fact be built up, something artificial, posed.”’ See Walter Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’, in Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1931–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Gary Smith and Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 507–30, here 526.   3. Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (New York: Routledge, 2006).   4. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).   5. On the illustrated press, see Clive Scott, The Spoken Image (London: Reaktion, 1999). On the picture book, see Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott, How Picturebooks Work (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006). For the ideological decoding of the gendered difference alluded to here, see W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).   6. Philippe Videlier, Nuit turque (Paris: Gallimard, 2005).   7. Michael Green, Graphic Storytelling and Medical Narrative: The Use of Comics in Medical Education (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2015).   8. Patrick Boucheron, ed., Entre-Temps, 2020, , accessed 24 April 2022. For a more detailed presentation of the ‘philosophy’ behind Entre-Temps, see

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  9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

jan baetens my conversation with one of the editors of the journal, Adrien Genoudet. Jan Baetens, ‘L’Histoire visuelle et l’écran’, écriture et image 1 (2000), écriture et image 1 (2020), , accessed 11 July 2022. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 83–109, here 83. Joëlle Beurier, ‘L’apprentissage de l’événement’, Études photographiques 20 (2007): 68–83, , accessed 24 April 2022. See also Images et violence 1914–1918: Quand Le Miroir racontait la grande guerre . . . (Paris: Le Nouveau Monde, 2007). Henri Van Lier, Histoire photographique de la photographie (Brussels: Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2005). Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, Media Archeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, The End of Cinema? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); and André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, ‘Bélinographisation, télécinéma et vidéocinéma’, Cinémas 29, no. 1 (2018): 33–49, , accessed 24 April 2022. Martha A. Sandweiss, Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). The complete edition of all issues of the magazine can be consulted on Gallica: , accessed 24 April 2022. See Beurier, ‘L’apprentissage de l’événement’. The most important publication of war pictures in the nineteenth century, the two-volume Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War (1866), also contained many ‘direct witness’ images, since Gardner and other employees of his studio photographed the Battle of Gettysburg and the siege of Petersburg; but these two books, each volume containing fifty hand-mounted original prints, were published after the hostilities (1861–5) and did not target a mass audience. The first use of these images had been very different: during the Civil War, the original photographs were shown in the smart New York portrait gallery of Gardner’s associate Mathew Brady, while the weekly press included woodcut engravings based on these pictures. See Keith F. Davis, ‘“A Terrible Distinctness.” Photography of the Civil War Era’, in Photography in Nineteenth-century America, ed. Martha A. Sandweiss (Fort Worth and New York: Amon Carter Museum and Harry N. Abrams, 1991), 130–79. See also Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History. Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989). Beurier, ‘L’apprentissage de l’événement’. For the example of Louvain, also documented by Le Miroir in the weeks after the so-called ‘sack of Louvain’ in August 1914, see Baetens, ‘Albert Fuglister’. Le Miroir 4, no. 38 (16 August 1914): 1. Le Miroir 5, no. 68 (14 March 1915): 3. The current value of one 1914 franc would be approximatively three euros. A recent documentary made by the Franco-German channel ARTE in the ‘Instantané d’histoire’ series (5 May 2017), offering the fictional narrative of a private soldier, Louis

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24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

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Danton, via his personal photo album, informs the audience that although this kind of picture taking was forbidden, ‘everybody was doing it’. For a brief presentation, see , accessed 24 April 2022. The complete version of the documentary seems no longer to be online: . Quoted in Richard Whelan, Robert Capa: A Biography (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 211. Le Miroir 5, no. 75 (2 May 1915): 8–9. Jean-Pierre Jeancolas, Jean-Jacques Meusy and Vincent Pinel, L’Auteur du film (Nîmes: Actes Sud, 1999). Le Miroir 7, no. 204 (21 October 1917): 8–9. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).

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Part III: Events

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13 Beginnings Samuel Foster

O

n 4 July 1914 Bosnische Post (Bosnian Post, 1884–1918), a German-language newspaper established in Sarajevo in 1884 to cater to the burgeoning professional and official classes that had emerged under the Austro-Hungarian administration of the multi-ethnic former Ottoman province of Bosnia-Herzegovina, carried a death notice on its front page. The individual in question was the late ‘Heir to the Throne Archduke Franz Ferdinand’ (Thronfolger Erzherzog Franz Ferdinand) (1863–1914).1 A week earlier, the paper had described the forthcoming visit of the multinational Habsburg Monarchy’s heir presumptive and his wife Sophie Chotek, Duchess of Hohenberg (1868–1914), in jubilant terms, despite the trip’s ostensible purpose being somewhat prosaic.2 The Archduke of Austria-Este was officially visiting in his capacity as inspector general of the Imperial and Royal Armed Forces, which were holding their summer exercises just outside the Bosnian capital.3 Sarajevo’s other dailies and those catering to certain national and religious communities, such as the recently launched Bosnian Muslim Novi vakat (The New Vacancy, 1913–14) or Hrvatski narod (The Croatian People, 1892–1914), which was read by Catholic Bosnian Croats, despite being edited in the neighbouring Croatian capital of Zagreb, were no less enthusiastic in their flattering editorials and lavish photographic spreads. This was reflected in the wider festive mood as the authorities rushed to repair building facades while balconies were decorated with bright oriental rugs and the black and yellow imperial flag.4 Such sentiment was not universally felt. Among the city’s newspapers, Narod (The Nation, 1907–14), which marketed itself towards Orthodox Bosnian Serbs, attempted to downplay the event. Chief among its critiques were the growing financial costs of the brief visit and the fact that it coincided with the Serbian national holiday of Vidovdan (St Vitus Day), on Sunday 28 June. Some even interpreted it as a calculated snub by the politically ambitious provincial governor General Oskar Potiorek (1853–1933).5 Across the territory’s eastern border, the public mood in the small agrarian Kingdom of Serbia had been no less exuberant that Sunday. The country had recently emerged victorious in the Balkan Wars of 1912–13. Serbia’s success against the Ottoman Empire and neighbouring Bulgaria had not only seen it nearly double in size, but had also led to the acquisition of Kosovo, eulogised in nineteenth-century nationalist ideology as the cradle of the Serb nation. That year’s Vidovdan celebrations were described by Serbia’s then minister in Vienna as ‘a day of the resurrection of Serbdom’, characterised by ‘patriotic fervour’.6 While some minor divisions in the Bosnian press might have seemed little more than a footnote to the events leading to Gavrilo Princip’s (1894–1918) actions at 10:45 a.m. on that fateful Sunday in June, the underlying tensions represented by the former were far more revealing of the latter’s root causes.

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Historiography concerning the origins of the First World War has generally acknowledged the events in Sarajevo as its immediate catalyst alongside the wider historical significance of south-east Europe in general. Luigi Albertini’s landmark three-volume chronology, The Origins of the War of 1914, placed Austro-Hungarian expansion into the South Slavic7 western Balkans, and the ensuing ‘Southern Slav Question’, at the heart of European geopolitical brinkmanship before 1914.8 Vladimir Dedijer opened his chronicle of the assassination by stating that ‘no other political murder in history has had such momentous consequences’.9 Subsequent dissections of the war’s outbreak, particularly those responding to Fritz Fischer’s controversial assertion that Imperial Germany bore sole responsibility, have sought to recalibrate discussions around developments in the Balkans. Joachim Remak framed it as essentially the escalation of a ‘Third Balkan War’ stemming from Ottoman decline, Serbian irredentism and the Habsburg Monarchy’s desire to pre-emptively eliminate a visible threat to its existence.10 Christopher Clarke places even greater emphasis on the region through his controversial description of Serbia as a ‘rogue state’, in an unstable corner of the world, which bore a far greater degree of culpability than previously suggested.11 Nevertheless, as Mark Cornwall has argued, this fixation on Franz Ferdinand’s death obscures a much deeper set of political, cultural and socio-economic issues largely absent from more Western-centric narratives of the Great War.12 Newspapers and the press remain a much under-explored aspect of this, being typically assigned a subordinate role. Such an approach, as Holly Case observes, ignores a far more complex relationship between the media and state power, in which the former frequently served as a broker and conduit for political influence.13 This chapter builds on this recent scholarly turn by focusing on the press in AustriaHungary and Serbia, reframing reactions to, and coverage of, the assassination as a dramatic amplification in what was an already existing state of conflict between the two countries. These open hostilities were rooted in two interconnected strands of historical contingency: Serbia and the Dual Monarchy’s evolving domestic climates and the legacy and impact of Austria-Hungary’s expansion into the Balkan peninsula, centring on its occupation and eventual annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Newspapers, and other types of periodical readily available to the public, provide a key resource in tracing and understanding these threads of social development when considering the ‘beginnings’ of the Great War before 1914.

The Origins of the Press in Austria-Hungary and Serbia At the beginning of the twentieth century, the culture of news and journalism in both Austria-Hungary and Serbia displayed a striking number of similarities. As with most other European states, this culture was largely the outcome of various shifts in the early to mid-nineteenth century. The press in both countries had effectively been shaped and defined by a lengthy period of political and cultural struggle between more radical liberal impulses and reactionary conservative forces. In the Habsburg Monarchy, the impact of the Counter-Reformation and a transition towards more centralised forms of state authority from the late sixteenth to the early seventeenth centuries gave rise to an increasingly elaborate system of censorship. Nevertheless, under the enlightened absolutist rule of Emperor Joseph II (1741–90) much of this was lifted.14 By the end of his reign in 1790, the total number of illegal titles had been

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reduced from 5,000 to under 900, while an edict issued in 1781 had even granted his subjects the right to openly criticise the imperial government in Vienna, prompting a surge of publications.15 In the wake of the French Revolution, however, the reactionary rule of Joseph’s nephew Francis I (1768–1835) and the autocratic Chancellor Klemens von Metternich (1773–1859) saw the reintroduction of harsh censorship measures. This was coupled with an extensive network of police spies tasked with monitoring the potential spread of radical politics through the press, theatres and other cultural institutions.16 The tensions stoked by these attempts at reinforcing absolutism were compounded by the various ‘national revivals’, which gradually manifested within the borders of what was then the Austrian Empire. Language became the primary focus for such movements, invariably setting them against the German-dominated state apparatus. This proved especially pertinent in the Monarchy’s Hungarian-populated regions. This escalating political unrest culminated in the outbreak of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848–9, which the young Emperor Franz Joseph (1830–1916), Franz Ferdinand’s uncle, only managed to suppress with Russian assistance. Among the ‘12 points’ comprising the revolutionaries’ stated demands, freedom of the press and the abolition of all censorship was listed first.17 Despite rising nationalist and liberal aspirations, censorship and control of press freedoms, albeit less draconian than had previously been the case, remained in place after 1849. Nevertheless, even before the 1867 compromise, which saw the Hungarians achieve their long-demanded domestic autonomy, formally establishing AustriaHungary, a vibrant journalistic culture had already taken root. Newspapers, having previously been short-lived, sporadic affairs catering to niche audiences, began to acquire more diverse and ever-expanding readerships, with journalism increasingly regarded as a more stable and professionalised form of employment by the 1840s.18 Similar to its Habsburg neighbour, Serbia’s journalistic culture had originated in the late eighteenth century while also being closely tied to the convoluted political struggles that marked the country’s own national revival. Key to this was its comparatively early re-emergence as a modern nation-state, initially as semi-independent vassal of the declining Ottoman Empire in 1817, before gaining de facto independence in 1867. This formative period was further complicated by the diasporic nature of Serbia’s native intelligentsia. Like its Bulgarian, Greek and Romanian counterparts, long after independence, society in ‘Serbia proper’ remained dominated by a large peasantry with limited access to formal education. Consequently, the earliest known periodicals written in pre-standardised Serbian were published by political exiles or Serbs hailing from the Habsburg lands, particularly the province of Vojvodina north of the Serbian capital at Belgrade. The first of these titles, Slavenoserbskij magazine (The Slavonic-Serbian Magazine), for example, was printed in Venice in 1768 (lasting only one issue), while the earliest known semi-regular newspaper, Serbskiia noviny (The Serbian Newspaper), appeared in Vienna in 1791, although it had already folded by 1792.19 Neither was Serbia’s gradual dissociation from Ottoman rule accompanied by an immediate transition to Western-style liberal democracy. Besides ongoing Austrian, Russian and Ottoman interference, for much of the nineteenth century Serbian politics remained engulfed by a prolonged dynastic struggle over the throne between the rival Obrenović and Karađorđević families.20 By the 1880s this had become entwined with diplomatic matters, significantly the secret Austro-Serbian Convention of 1881

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that effectively turned the country into a client state of the Dual Monarchy. Nevertheless, despite the turbulent political scene, ongoing efforts to implement socio-economic reforms gradually cultivated the appropriate cultural conditions for a national press. Novine srbske (The Serbian Newspaper, 1834–1919), the first newspaper to be published in Serbia with any relative consistency, appeared in the southern city of Kragujevac in 1834. Initially providing coverage of legal issues, it soon began to offer commentary on national politics and economic matters. However, it was the passing of a new liberal constitution in 1869 and the passage of various anti-censorship laws that gave rise to a more effervescent press culture in the 1870s, including the appearance of more radical nationalist and socialist periodicals.21

Media Landscapes before 1914 Like the rest of Europe, at the turn of the twentieth century the press in both Austria-Hungary and Serbia had undergone more than fifty years of exponential growth. As Tamar Scheer observes in the case of the Habsburg Monarchy, much of this stemmed from rising, albeit extremely uneven, literacy rates that were often a by-product of urbanisation. Unsurprisingly, this was significantly more pronounced in Vienna, Budapest and Prague and the industrialised western provinces dominated by Czechs and Germans.22 In Serbia by contrast, industrial growth was a strikingly rare phenomenon, limited to a few, mostly foreign-owned concerns in Belgrade, Kragujevac and the south-eastern city of Niš. Similar to Bosnia-Herzegovina and the rest of the western Balkans, the urban population itself was small, even by regional standards, with Belgrade having only just surpassed 100,000 inhabitants by the eve of the Great War.23 This was set against a stubbornly high illiteracy rate, which, according to official reports, stood at 79.7 per cent in 1900, despite the state’s concerted efforts to promote education among the peasantry.24 Indeed, this had been reflected in the fact that until the early 1900s, the process of ‘nationbuilding’ in a cultural, legal – and journalistic – sense continued to be overseen by Serbs from Hungary, operating out of Vojvodina’s capital, the ‘Serbian Athens’ of Novi Sad.25 Consequently, in contrast to many of the region’s other national groups, the duty of instilling the tenets of modern nationhood into an often apathetic, or even hostile, Serbian peasantry fell upon a small, typically déraciné, urban elite via government channels.26 Nevertheless, Austria-Hungary and Serbia did, to some extent, reflect each other in relation to the workings of their national and specialist press. Despite greater diversity in the Monarchy, both countries’ comparatively late transition away from feudalistic social structures, coupled with the divisive state of regional politics had given rise to media environments that were considerably more politicised than their British, French or even German counterparts. By 1914, for instance, newspapers and journals affiliated to specific parties and interest groups such as Arbeiter-Zeitung (1889–1991), founded in 1889 as the official paper of the influential Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria, or the magazine Pijemont (Piedmont, 1911–15), the mouthpiece for the notorious Serbian nationalist organisation Ujedinjenje ili smrt (Unification or Death) or Crna ruka (Black Hand), commanded a major presence in the public sphere. Nevertheless, journalists often remained limited in what they could print owing to legal restrictions or an inability to access sources of information still monopolised by the elites.

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The relationship between media and state power was exemplified by Franz Ferdinand himself. The emergence of a Nebenregierung (subsidiary government) within the ever-more politically proactive archduke’s military chancellery from 1905–6, his so-called ‘Belvedere circle’, collaborated extensively with Austria’s more prominent conservative journalists and editors. Among these, by far the most significant was Friedrich Funder (1872–1959), chief editor of the powerful Christian Social Party’s newspaper Reichspost (1894–1938), which soon doubled as the Belvedere circle’s main press organ. This proved essential in cutting through the earlier tabloid-inspired sensationalism surrounding the archduke’s marriage and presenting his ambitious agenda for political reform to the wider public, much to the chagrin of an overwhelmingly hostile Hungarian press.27 Even at a more local level, the content of newspapers and other periodicals almost invariably crystallised around the key issue of nationality. Within the Monarchy, the ever-present threat of the state censor led non-German editors to declare the spread of language and culture, rather than nationalist politics, as their publications’ ‘official’ aim.28 Media reflective of the Monarchy’s ‘high-status’ ethnic groups, Austrian Germans being the prime example, followed a similar logic, albeit as a means of reinforcing their position within the post-1867 status quo. As Pieter Judson observes, since the late nineteenth century nationalists in the Monarchy’s western region had sought to redefine more ethnically mixed rural areas as ‘language frontiers’ as a means of demarcating the envisioned borders of hoped-for future nation-states. This contrasted with developments in autonomous Hungary where the government’s enforced ‘Magyarisation’ policies, specifically in education and electoral enfranchisement, stoked open resentment among its Romanian and Slavic subjects – no less the Vojvodina Serbs.29 Unsurprisingly, German-language newspapers dominated Austria-Hungary’s media landscape, both domestically and, arguably more so, internationally. Unlike Hungarian, German’s historic status as the Central European lingua franca, coupled with an overabundance of Teutonic influence at all levels of government and business, saw a proliferation of newspapers even in areas where Germans represented only a small minority. The Bosnische Post was an obvious example. Most prominent were the Vienna-based broadsheets: the government’s official newspaper Wiener Zeitung (1703–), Franz Ferdinand’s own de facto mouthpiece, the Catholic conservative Reichspost, and their liberal-oriented rivals Die Presse (1848–) and Neue Freie Presse (1864–1939). These were joined by Budapest’s main German daily, the liberal, business-focused Pester Lloyd (1852–). Despite having comparatively small circulations, the political and economic sway commanded by these titles’ readerships, like The Times (1785–) in Britain or Le Figaro (1826–) in France, heightened their influence even beyond the German-speaking public sphere. This was reinforced, in a more cultural sense, at the other end of the media spectrum by popular satirical magazines such as Die Bombe (1871–1925) and Kikeriki (1861–1933), while the more brash humour of Simplicissimus (1896–1967) and other German publications was no less popular among Habsburg audiences.30 This domination by German-language newspapers did not imply, however, that Hungarian and other non-German periodicals were irrelevant. As exemplified by the presence of titles catering to specific ethno-national groups across the Habsburgruled Balkans, such as Narod, Novi vakat and Hrvatski narod, the situation grew increasingly convoluted as rising literacy rates and political frustration served to both enlarge and fragment the wider public sphere. Moreover, as with the concept of language frontiers, the presence of independent Italy, Romania and Serbia as obvious

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national alternatives to Habsburg imperial rule created further convergence between the domestic and the foreign. Such a situation was made even more volatile by the far stricter censorship exercised in Hungary. Similar developments had also shaped Serbia’s media landscape, which mostly followed the trajectory of the country’s national domestic politics while also being heavily influenced by events beyond its borders. Having risen to power in the 1880s as a broadly left-wing alternative to the periodic authoritarianism of the country’s feuding royal houses, the pro-Russian People’s Radical Party, under the leadership of Nikola Pašić (1845–1926), emerged as its nexus; like its Habsburg counterpart, government policy announcements and efforts to shape the political narrative were usually filtered through the Party’s own newspaper Samouprava (Autonomy, 1881–1941).31 The Radical Party’s rise to pre-eminence marked a sea-change across much of the Serbian press. By the outbreak of the First Balkan War in 1912, no fewer than 124 newspapers were published regularly, notably Srpske novine (formerly Novine srbske, which had relocated from Kragujevac in the 1850s) and Politka (Politics, 1904–), which emerged as Serbia’s leading daily broadsheet following its founding in 1904.32 This filtered into Serbia’s diaspora press, notably in Novi Sad, where Serbianlanguage publications such as Zastava (The Flag, 1866–1929) and Branik (The Defender, 1885–1914) increasingly orbited within the Radical Party’s wider sphere of influence. Indeed, even before Bosnia-Herzegovina’s formal annexation on 5 October 1908, Habsburg diplomatic officials in Belgrade were warning of its growing presence as a ‘benefactor’ to the regional media in the Monarchy’s South Slavic territories, notably Hungarian-ruled Vojvodina and neighbouring Croatia-Slavonia.33 This was indicative of the general narrativised escalation in tension that had increasingly preoccupied both countries’ national presses.

The Long Road from Berlin While historians of the longue durée might be tempted to push the causal chain of events back to the waning of Ottoman power in the late eighteenth century, Albertini’s tracing of the Great War’s origins to the 1878 Treaty of Berlin provides a useful point of departure. Central to this was the ratification of Austria-Hungary’s military occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, following a Serbian-backed uprising that had broken out in the summer of 1875.34 In contrast to the groundswell of anti-Turkish sentiment that characterised editorial reactions in other European countries, the once pejorative image of the Monarchy’s Islamic neighbour began to soften in the German-led press. This stemmed from ongoing concerns over Serbia’s nationalist aspirations to become the South Slavic ‘Piedmont’, like its namesake in Italy.35 Such concerns were far from unfounded. Serbia’s vigorous, albeit inconsistent, territorial expansion based on the 1844 Naćertanije (Draft Plan), calling for the liberation of all Serbs and other South Slavs through an annexation of Habsburg and Ottoman territory, was spurred on by Italian and German unification in the 1860s and 1870s. By the 1890s, even Pašić’s Radicals had adopted it as part of a more conservative nationalist platform.36 No less important was the appearance of what James Lyon terms ‘Praetorian politics’ during the 1890s, which saw an increasingly elite and

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professionalised officer corps, similar to that of Austria-Hungary, acting outside of civilian political oversight.37 Under the secret 1881 convention, Vienna had initially lent some support to Belgrade’s expansionist agenda in the hope of offsetting suspected Russian encroachment into the Balkans. This was brought to a sudden and dramatic end following the ‘May Coup’ of June 1903 in which a group of Serb military officers stormed the royal palace and killed the unpopular pro-Habsburg King Aleksandar I Obrenović.38 The subsequent accession of the pro-Russian Petar I Karađorđević saw the continued presence of some of the conspirators in the military and state institutions – notably the Black Hand’s future leader, Dragutin T. Dimitrijević ‘Apis’, commonly viewed as the mastermind behind Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. As Danilo Šaranec notes, Apis’s acquisition of official power was an extremely late development, only becoming head of Serbian military intelligence following the end of the Balkan Wars in August 1913. Nevertheless, his vast informal network of contacts granted him the ability to interfere extensively in Serbia’s political and military affairs.39 Across the northern border, anti-Serb sentiment was already an entrenched feature of Hungarian press dialogues long before 1903. Magyar journalists routinely expressed a general contempt for Serbs in print, portraying Serbian nationalism as an insidious and direct existential threat to Hungarian nationhood. The erasure of this perceived threat through military conquest was frequently touted as the only realistic solution, along with condemnation of Vienna’s alleged cowardice in having failed to pursue a harder line.40 This politically toxic atmosphere also prevailed in the Serbian diaspora press, with publications such as the Novi Sad journal Zastava routinely accusing Budapest of waging war ‘in all but name’ (u svemu osim u imenu) against its South Slav subjects by the 1890s.41 Nevertheless, as Albertini argued, while 1903 marked an acute deterioration in relations, erupting into an outright trade war in 1906, the 1908 annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina which had seen Vienna renege on its earlier commitment to maintain the post-Berlin status quo, effectively placed Austria-Hungary and Serbia on a war footing.42 Politka, Srpske novine and Serbia’s other leading dailies estimated that around a quarter of the capital’s population had joined spontaneous demonstrations; similar occurrences in other parts of the country often lasted several days. Nationalistic slogans such as ‘Death to Austria!’ (Smrt Austriji!) and ‘Death to usurpers!’ (Smrt uzurpatorima!) and even calls for Serbs to march on the Drina river, which demarcated the western border with Bosnia-Herzegovina, were reportedly chanted by the crowds of frustrated protesters.43 Although typically associated with 1914, these ever-heightening political tensions had already reached a crescendo in 1912. Prior to the outbreak of the First Balkan War in October, Hungary was already under a state of emergency, with the army mobilised and ordered to suppress a series of industrial strikes by force. This was accompanied by a tightening of censorship laws. Journals and newspapers, including some Austrian publications, were subject to full state censorship. Even the more liberal German-ruled provinces placed a blanket ban on certain Serbian and Croat publications, particularly those published by the more overtly radical North American diasporas. This was accompanied by random police raids and inspections targeting Serbs and other South Slavic intellectuals known to subscribe to titles such as Zastava.44 Serbia’s success in the Balkan Wars saw an especially dramatic escalation of restrictions in Bosnia-Herzegovina, with civilian elements in the provincial government

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progressively sidelined by the military authorities under Potiorek. As well as further militarisation of the territory’s borders, with the Monarchy directly threatening a war with Montenegro, and by extension Serbia, in May 1913, the crisis saw the suspension of civil rights. Besides abrogating freedom of movement, speech and the rights to assembly and private correspondence, the new repressive measures specifically targeted Bosnian Serbs and Serb cultural and educational institutions. While these emergency restrictions were lifted after only twelve days, their brief period of enforcement proved irreparably damaging. In a special issue on the Balkan Wars published in early 1914, the prestigious Sarajevo-based literary magazine Bosanska vila (Bosnian Villa, 1885–) opined that in alienating the Bosnian Serbs while fatally weakening public trust in the province’s governing institutions, the military had achieved in less than two weeks what Serbian nationalists had been trying to do for nearly forty years.45 This was illustrative of the Monarchy’s growing recourse to emergency legislation that granted both the army and internal security agencies further powers to restrict or even rescind press freedoms in anticipation of a future conflict with a Russian-backed Serbia. During this period, lawmakers also delineated the role and operational parameters of the future Kriegsüberwachungsamt (War Surveillance Office) that would preside over wartime censorship and state control of communications from July 1914.46 The outbreak of the First Balkan War, which pitted the Ottoman Empire against Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro and Serbia, also engendered widespread support for the former across Habsburg press outlets. In contrast to its fellow European powers, Austria-Hungary’s mainstream periodicals described the Ottomans as friends and sympathetic victims of belligerent Balkan nationalism whose presence remained essential for maintaining international peace.47 Unsurprisingly, much of this was predicated on a general understanding that any change in the regional power balance would directly affect Austria-Hungary domestically through what the Reichspost termed its ‘ethnic correlations with the Balkan states’ (ethnische Zusammenhänge mit den Balkanstaaten).48 This awareness of a perceived vulnerability to external forces made the Monarchy a ‘sensitive organism, and each external shock makes all parts vibrate’.49 Such concerns were often more heightened in leading regional German-language newspapers such as Bozner Nachrichten (1894–1925), published, tellingly, in the Italian-majority Habsburg border territory of South Tyrol. While acknowledging the immediate threat that the Southern Slav Question posed, the conflict to the south and east was invariably framed by the more immediate concern of Italy and suspicions surrounding the professed loyalty of Habsburg Italians.50 This pattern was echoed by other papers based in areas with large non-German or Magyar populations, unfolding along seemingly unanimous partisan lines. Contentious debates, which often aimed to deliberately provoke certain groups, were reignited by questioning their stated loyalties to the Emperor; alongside the Serbs, Croats, Czechs, Italians, Romanians and Ruthenes were frequently cast as potential separatists and nationalist saboteurs, in direct contrast to Germans, Hungarians and Bosnian Muslims.51 The Prague-based Prager Tagblatt (1876–1939), for instance, wasted no time in finding and publicising examples of Czech politicians deviating from the official pro-Ottoman line or medical doctors who had lent their services to the Serbian army.52 Depictions of the Serbs themselves also played to popular preconceptions of the Balkans as Europe’s violent, uncivilised cultural antithesis. Extensive coverage of alleged widespread atrocities committed by the Serbian army against Albanian civilians, for example, predated

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the types of atrocity propaganda commonly associated with the German ‘Rape of Belgium’ from August 1914. ‘Every decent person in Europe sympathises with the Turks’ (Jeder anständige Mensch in Europa sympathisiert mit den Türken), stated the Marburger Zeitung (1862–1945) in October 1912 as the first reports of Serbian violence against non-combatants started to arrive.53 Other papers, most notably the Neue Freie Presse, tended to emphasise the First Balkan War’s wider consequences as a direct threat to European peace. During the conflict’s opening weeks, the paper dedicated extensive front-page column space to the issue. The Ottoman Empire was ‘fighting not only for herself but for Europe’.54 Those who had thrown their support behind the independent Balkan states, as many liberal figures in Britain and France had done, were openly chastised for inviting a possible ‘general war’ that guaranteed the ‘suicide of Europe’.55 Summarising Budapest’s position a week after the war’s outbreak, Pester Lloyd reiterated the need to maintain the Monarchy’s ‘freedom of action’ (Handlungsfreiheit) through the continued status quo: ‘We have no reason to disappoint Turkey’ (Wir haben keinen Grund, die Türkei zu enttäuschen).56 Like its official Habsburg counterparts, most of the Serbian press, barring a few titles affiliated to the opposition Social Democrats and Radical Left, remained committed to the government line. Indeed, patterns and styles of coverage and reportage that would become associated with the Great War were mostly established before or during the 1912–13 conflicts. The Illustrovana Ratna Kronika (The Illustrated War Chronicle, 1912–13), for example, was founded in 1912 for the sole purpose of convincing Serbian public opinion that the wars were entirely justified in both moral and historical terms. Central to this was the acquisition of Kosovo in May 1912; its annexation was not only presented as a military success but represented the crux of Serbia’s national destiny. This message was reinforced through an emphasis on the figure of the Serbian soldier and a string of carefully reproduced field reports detailing individual and collective acts of military heroism.57 Established papers such as Politka followed a similar, albeit more restrained, pro-war government message, focusing on the movements of the Serbian army, ignoring or downplaying the role of Serbia’s allies and demonising its Ottoman and Albanian opponents.58 In keeping with Belgrade’s policy of stoking anti-Habsburg sentiment, the reactions of some South Slavic periodicals across Austria-Hungary lent accusations of rampant disloyalty a degree of justification. Zastava, for instance, attempted to cut through the Monarchy’s virtual moratorium on reporting anything besides atrocities by presenting its readers with a series of sympathetic reports on the frontline experiences of Serb soldiers.59 Even beyond Serb-majority areas, significant portions of the Monarchy’s South Slavs continued to exhibit signs of mounting discontent – without necessarily being encouraged by the Serbian government. Nowhere was this more evident than in CroatiaSlavonia and the coastal province of Dalmatia, the centre of the growing Yugoslavist movement. An article in the popular Dalmatian paper Crvena Hrvatska (Red Croatia, 1891–1914) in August 1912 stated that Southern Slavs would not send their sons to war over ‘Albanian autonomy’ (Albanska autonomija) while Vienna continued to deny them the same political rights at home. Should this continue, then ‘every Croat, Serb and Slovene will be a rebel’ (svaki Hrvat, Srbin i Slovenac bit će pobunjenik).60 The Second Balkan War’s conclusion in August 1913 ultimately locked AustroHungarian and Serbian press narratives into a cycle of politically charged escalation.

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Serbia’s victories and military performance had imbued more extreme forms of nationalism with a broader appeal that made a future confrontation with the Monarchy appear less daunting – despite the country’s dire post-war economic state and exhausted military forces.61 From the perspective of Vienna and Budapest’s government-aligned dailies, this was an alarming development that only served to further expose AustriaHungary’s relative international isolation while accentuating the existing sense of a latent wartime climate that could not simply be confined to the Balkans.

Sarajevo and its Aftermath As Cornwall observes, few historical events have provided the basis for a ‘historiographical industry’ as labyrinthine as the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Suffice it to say that, within hours of receiving the news, prominent figures such as the liberal Austrian politician Josef Redlich were already divining the Dual Monarchy’s imminent collapse.62 Press reactions to the death of the heir presumptive echoed Redlich, although these were characterised more by a sense of existential dread. Contrary to Stefan Zweig’s later assertions of general public indifference, such reports fed into the politically charged sense of latent vulnerability cultivated in press narratives during the Balkan Wars.63 The Neue Freie Presse, a paper that had mostly viewed the archduke’s politics with contempt, described the Vienna public as being gripped by a ‘kind of paralysis’: With their eyes wide open the people stand there, in groups of ten or twenty bend over the paper sheets and murmur a dull horrific sound [. . .] life has been frozen and turned into muffled sorrow. (Mit weit aufgerissenen Augen stehen die Menschen da, in Zehner-oder Zwanzigergruppen bücken sie sich über die Papierbögen und murmeln einen dumpfen Schreckenslaut [. . .] das Leben ist erstarrt und in gedämpfte Trauer verwandelt.)64 Even the socialist Arbeiter-Zeitung joined with its liberal counterparts in lamenting Franz Ferdinand’s death as having effectively killed the best prospect of urgently needed reform.65 Similarly, the anti-Habsburg Zastava expressed regret for the archduke’s loss while also imploring the wider public to ‘exercise restraint’ rather than seeking out scapegoats.66 The outpouring of official grief in the Habsburg papers, however, belied an almost immediate resurfacing of anti-Serb hostility and reigniting of political tensions. Over the following days, the Monarchy’s mainstream and regional press provided running commentaries on riots across the South Slavic territories. Only hours after the assassination, demonstrations in Sarajevo and the city of Mostar further to the south had reportedly devolved into anti-Serb pogroms. Rampaging mobs were described as attacking, looting and then often demolishing Serb-owned properties, businesses, schools, libraries and Orthodox churches while also assaulting their owners and employees.67 Arbeiter-Zeitung and other government-critical papers accused Potiorek of permitting or even encouraging the violence, noting how rarely the security forces intervened.68 Similar incidents were reported in the Croatian capital Zagreb, where Franz Ferdinand had been viewed as a key ally against Budapest.69

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Bosnia-Herzegovina’s main dailies, finding themselves in the unexpected position of potentially guiding the narrative, sought to channel this flaring of anti-Serb sentiment. Bosnische Post, while leveraging its status as the provincial government’s semiofficial mouthpiece, provided near-comprehensive coverage of Princip’s interrogation by the police. Particular emphasis was placed on the source of the bombs used by the assassins. On 30 June, an editorial traced the munitions manufacture to the Serbian military arsenal at Kragujevac, offering this as key evidence of Belgrade’s involvement in the murders. The paper concluded by stating that ‘the death of the crown prince and his wife’ (der Tod des Kronprinzen und seiner Frau) now lay on the consciences of ‘elements’ (Elemente) of the Bosnian Serb community. Said community was warned that it now bore responsibility for seeing Bosnia-Herzegovina ‘cleansed of these vermin’ (von diesem Ungeziefer gereinigt).70 Across the border in Serbia, news of the archduke’s death reached Pašić relatively late that Sunday afternoon, as he travelled south to campaign in the forthcoming parliamentary elections that were scheduled to take place in August.71 The following morning’s editorial in Samouprava expressed Belgrade’s formal condolences, stating that the Serbian government shared the international community’s horror and disgust at the actions of the ‘mentally unbalanced youths’ (mentalno neuravnotežena omladina) who had carried out the crime. It also hinted that the incident should be treated as a purely domestic matter, for Princip and his co-conspirators were Habsburg citizens, after all.72 This initial appeal backfired almost immediately. By the evening of 29 June Pašić and his cabinet, desperate to maintain Serbia’s neutrality, faced a litany of pressures reflective of the expanding rift between the government and the extreme nationalist elements of their country’s political landscape, embodied in the figure of Apis. Both the Austro-Hungarian newspapers and government quickly seized on the reaction from Serbia’s popular tabloid press, highlighting articles praising Princip as a martyr and openly celebrating Franz Ferdinand’s death.73 That same day, Bosnische Post’s late afternoon edition directly contradicted the statement printed in Samouprava, describing Princip as an ‘extraordinarily intelligent man, who gave precise answers to each question’ (außergewöhnlich intelligenter Mann, der auf jede Frage genaue Antworten gab).74 Moreover, neither he nor his colleague Nedeljko Čabrinović had denied that they had acquired the explosives while studying in Belgrade. Evidence uncovered through further interrogation compounded the issue: not only had the assassins received their weapons and training in Belgrade, but Serbian officials had been complicit in helping them illegally return to their homeland in May.75 On 14 July, with what James Lyon describes as a ‘tabloid feeding-frenzy between Vienna and Belgrade’ having failed to subside, Pašić issued an emergency telegram to all Serbian legations abroad.76 Staff were to inform their host governments that the unfolding crisis was being deliberately whipped up by Vienna’s provocations and misrepresentation of Serbian public opinion by only citing examples from the Belgrade ‘gutter press’ (preša za oluke). The fact that this included the paper of his own party’s youth wing, Odjek (Echo, 1881–1941), was later omitted.77 In another telegram, dated 18 July, Pašić informed Serbia’s embassies that the government had attempted to calm the media and had advised them ‘to simply dispel the tendentiously released false rumours’ being promulgated by Austria-Hungary. However, large numbers of papers refused to comply. Even as this war of words escalated, emboldening pro-war factions

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on both sides, the Serbian prime minister insisted that he could do little, since ‘complete freedom of the media is guaranteed by constitutional clauses and laws’ (potpuna sloboda medija zagarantovana je ustavnim odredbama i zakonima).78

Conclusion In the eight years preceding Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, Austria-Hungary and Serbia’s deteriorating relations had already brought both parties to the verge of outright war four times. In each instance, these spiraling hostilities filtered and amplified through myriad periodicals. While usually far from being representative of their respective general populations, they nevertheless served to outline the political and social contours, domestic as well as regional, in which the possibilities for greater conflict evolved. Furthermore, despite both the Habsburg and Serbian press remaining prone to external manipulation or outright repression, the socio-political role played by both sets of media was anything but subordinate. As Franz Ferdinand’s efforts to disseminate his agenda or Pašić’s anxiety over the Serbian tabloids revealed, by 1914 press narratives were recognised as potent conduits for political and cultural power. Gaining a place within this new system of communications, or limiting access to it, emerged as another site of conflict that played a far from minor role in the origins of the First World War. When viewed against the broader European context, the volatile and antagonistic media landscapes of central and south-eastern Europe in 1914 resembled something more akin to those of the late twentieth, or even the twenty-first, century. What might have seemed a similar set of tensions in the case of Britain and France’s relationship with Germany was still ultimately a political and colonial legacy of the late 1800s. In contrast, the hostilities being actively chronicled in the Austro-Hungarian and Serbian press since 1903 represented an emerging form of nation-state-oriented narrative formulated around the totalising experiences of ongoing conflict, cultural and economic as well as military. The outbreak of the First Balkan War in 1912 – Europe’s first actual experience of modern technological warfare – served to amplify an already unfolding era of twentieth-century global conflict that reached far beyond the historical confines of 1914–18.79

Notes   1. ‘Thronfolger Erzherzog Franz Ferdinand’, Bosnische Post, 4 July 1914, 1. Accessing these older regional newspapers presents researchers with a considerable challenge since many exist only as incomplete collections of originals that are still awaiting digitisation. Others can be difficult to access owing to paywalls or lack of linguistic proficiency. Some useful, and relatively user-friendly, online archives include (for Bosnia-Herzegovina) kolekcije. nub.ba, (for Serbia) digitalna.nb.rs, (for Croatia) digitalna.nsk.hr, (for Austria-Hungary) anno.onb.ac.at and digital.tessmann.it/tessmannDigital/Zeitungsarchiv.   2. The Habsburg or Dual Monarchy, or simply ‘the Monarchy’, is an umbrella term often used by historians when denoting the numerous territories and kingdoms under the rule of the House of Habsburg from 1282 to 1918. Apart from the recently annexed ‘Condominium of Bosnia and Herzegovina’ and a small concession in the Chinese port of Tianjin, by 1914 the dynasty’s territorial holdings had largely been reduced to Austria-Hungary itself. For the sake of avoiding repetition, this chapter will use these four names interchangeably.

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It also uses the internationally accepted abbreviation of ‘Bosnia-Herzegovina’ in reference to the territory in general.   3. ‘Hoher Besuch’, Bosnische Post, 25 June 1914, 1–3.   4. Vladimir Dedijer, Sarajevo 1914 (Belgrade: Provesta, 1966), 523–4.  5. Dedijer, Sarajevo, 524–5.  6. Jovan M Jovanović, Borba za narodno ujedinjenje, 1914–1918 (Belgrade: Geca Kon, 1935), 19.   7. In this specific historical context, the term South Slavs is used in reference to the following ethnic groups: Bosnian Muslims, Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Serbs and Slovenes.   8. Luigi Albertini, The Origins of the War of 1914: European Relations from the Congress of Berlin to the Eve of the Sarajevo Murder, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Isabella M. Massey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 18–19.  9. Dedijer, Sarajevo, 19. 10. Joachim Remak, ‘1914 – The Third Balkan War: Origins Reconsidered’, The Journal of Modern History 43, no. 3 (1971): 353–66, here 365. 11. Christopher Clarke, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (London: Penguin, 2013), 452. Similar studies published in anticipation of the centenary of the First World War’s outbreak have also placed greater emphasis on developments in the Balkans, albeit to a far lesser extent than Clarke. See, for example, Margaret Macmillan, The War that Ended Peace: How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War (London: Profile, 2013); T. G. Otte, The July Crisis: The World’s Descent into War, Summer 1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 12. Mark Cornwall, ‘Introduction: The Southern Slav Question’, in Sarajevo 1914: Sparking the First World War, ed. Mark Cornwall (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 2. 13. See Holly Case, ‘The Media and State Power in South-East Europe up to 1945: A Comparative Study of Yugoslav, Romanian, and Bulgarian Media’, in Ottomans into Europeans: State and Institution Building in South-East Europe, ed. Alina Mungiu-Pippidi and Wim van Meurs (London: Hurst, 2010), 279–305. 14. Joshkin Aziz Sezer, ‘Austrian High Enlightenment: Josephinism, Literature and State Building’, Central Europe Yearbook 1 (2019): 31. 15. Habsburg authors and publishers were still forbidden, however, from attacking foreign leaders and remained subject to stringent blasphemy laws. Pieter M. Judson, The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), 64. 16. The more high-profile targets suspected of subversive intent included Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose famous 1791 opera The Magic Flute was accused of secretly being a political allegory for the recent events in France. Walter Consuelo Langsam, ‘Emperor Francis II and the Austrian “Jacobins”, 1792–1796’, The American Historical Review 50, no. 3 (1945): 471–90, here 487. 17. R. J. W. Evans, Austria, Hungary and the Habsburgs: Essays on Central Europe, c.1683–1867 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 173. 18. Judson, The Habsburg Empire, 146. 19. These early periodicals were written in Slavonic-Serbian, a blend of Old Church Slavonic and Serbian and Russian vernacular that predated the linguistic reforms and standardisation instigated by the famed Serb philologist Vuk Karadžić from 1814. Anon, Sērbskīę noviny povsēdnēvnëyę (Novi Sad: Matica Srbska, 1963), 13; Mihailo Bjelica and Zoran Jevtović, Istorija novinarstva (Belgrade: Megatrend Univerzitet primenjenih nauka, 2006), 218–20. 20. In 1882 the Principality of Serbia was elevated to the status of a kingdom with the reigning Prince Milan I Obrenović duly proclaimed king. 21. Mihailo Bjelica, Štampa i društvo: Istraživanje istorije novinarstva (Belgrade: Jugoslovenski Institut za novinarstv, 1983), 151–3.

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22. Tamara Scheer, ‘The Habsburg Empire’s German-Speaking Public Sphere and the First Balkan War’, in The Wars before the Great War: Conflict and International Politics before the Outbreak of the First World War, ed. Dominik Geppert, William Mulligan and Andreas Rose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 304. 23. John R. Lampe and Marvin R. Jackson, Balkan Economic History, 1550–1950: From Imperial Borderlands to Developing Nations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 168–76. 24. Popis obradjene zemlje u Kr.Srbije 1900g, vol. XVI (Belgrade: SKS, 1900), cxxvii. 25. Bojan Aleksov, ‘Jovan Jovanović Zmaj and the Serbian Identity between Poetry and History’, in We, the People: Politics of National Peculiarity in Southeastern Europe, ed. Diana Mishkova (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2009), 277–8. 26. See Dimitrije Djordjevic, ‘Balkan Versus European Enlightenment: Parallelism and Dissonances’, European History Quarterly 9, no. 4 (1975): 487–97. 27. Leopold von Chulumecky, Erzherzog Franz Ferdinands Wirken und Wollen (Berlin: Verlag für Kulturpolitik, 1929), 290–3. 28. Case, ‘The Media and State Power in South-East Europe up to 1945’, 279. 29. The term ‘Magyar’ is an alternative historical name for the Hungarians, used in reference to the various tribes claimed to have migrated from Central Asia into the lands of the Pannonian Basin, including modern-day Hungary, during the early medieval period. See Pieter M. Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 30. Scheer, ‘The Habsburg Empire’s German-speaking Public Sphere and the First Balkan War’, 305. 31. Miodrag Avramović, Dva veka Srpskog novinarstva (Belgrade: Institut za novinarstvo, 1992), 146. 32. Dragoslav Jakonović, Srbija i jugoslovensko pitanje, 1914–1915 (Belgrade: ISI, Export Press, 1973), 26; Avramović, Dva veka Srpskog novinarstva, 178–85. 33. ‘Otto Franz (Belgrade) to Vienna, 30 September 1908’, in Österreich-Ungarns Aussenpolitik von der bosnischen Krise 1908 bis zum Kriegsausbruch 1914: Diplomatische Aktenstücke des österreichisch-ungarischen Ministeriums des Äussern, vol. 1, ed. Ludwig Bittner (Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesverlag für Unterricht, Wissenschaft und Kunst, 1930), 108–9. 34. Albertini, Origins of the War of 1914, 20–3. The Treaty also granted Austria-Hungary administrative control of the Sanjak of Novi Pazar directly to the south of BosniaHerzegovina. This authority was relinquished in 1908, however, following the withdrawal of the Habsburgs’ military garrisons. It was subsequently annexed by Serbia during the First Balkan War. See Tamara Scheer, ‘A Micro-Historical Experience in the Late Ottoman Balkans: The Case of Austria-Hungary in the Sanjak of Novi Pazar (1879–1908)’, in War and Nationalism: The Balkan Wars (1912–13) and Socio-Political Implications, ed. Hakan Yuvuz and Isa Blumi (Salt Lake City: Utah University Press, 2013), 197–229. 35. Maureen Healy, ‘In aller “Freundschaft”? Österreichische “Türkenbilder” zwischen Gegnerschaft und “Freundschaft” vor und während des Ersten Weltkriegs’, in Glanz-GewaltGehorsam: Militär und Gesellschaft in der Habsburgermonarchie (1800–1918), ed. Laurence Cole, Christa Hämmerle and Martin Scheutz (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2011), 272–3. 36. James Lyon, Serbia and the Balkan Front, 1914: The Outbreak of the Great War (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 38–40. 37. By 1900 the Serbian army was proportionately one of the largest in Europe, with Belgrade being capable of mobilising 250,000–300,000 personnel. Dimitrije Djordjević, ‘The Role of the Military in the Balkans in the Nineteenth Century’, in Der Berliner Kongress von 1878: Die Politik der Grossmächte und die Probleme der Modernisierung in Südosteuropa in der Zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Ralph Melville and Hans-Jürgen Schröder (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1982), 324–8; Lyon, Serbia and the Balkan Front, 40–1.

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38. At this point in history, the Julian calendar was still in official use in Serbia. Foreign newspapers thus recorded the murders as taking place on 10 June, while for their Serb counterparts it was 28 May. In the interests of brevity, this chapter will use the former, more widely used dating system, which Serbia would adopt in 1918. 39. As Šaranec further notes, from 1906 to 1914 every appointee to the post of Minister of War required Apis’s approval. Danilo Šarenac, ‘Why Did Nobody Control Apis? Serbian Military Intelligence and the Sarajevo Assassination’, in Cornwall, ed., Sarajevo 1914, 130–1. 40. Eric Beckett Weaver, ‘Yugoslavism in Hungary during the Balkan Wars’, in War in the Balkans: Conflict and Diplomacy before World War I, ed. James Pettifer and Tom Buchanan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), 51. 41. Dimitrije Boarov and Vladimir Barović, Velikani srpske štampe (Belgrade: Slu žbeni list, 2011), 140. 42. Albertini, Origins of the War of 1914, 219–25. 43. Quoted in Šarenac, ‘Why Did Nobody Control Apis?’, 132–3. 44. Weaver, ‘Yugoslavism in Hungary during the Balkan Wars’, 60. 45. The removal of the restrictions was largely in response to Montenegro having been forced to withdraw from the city of Shkodër in northern Albania, which it had occupied in April, in the face of international pressure. ‘Udovnik’, Ratna Spomenica: Bosanska vila 29, no. 1–6 (1914): 1–3. 46. Mark Cornwall, ‘Disintegration and Defeat: The Austro-Hungarian Revolution’, in The Last Years of Austria-Hungary: A Multi-national Experiment in Early Twentieth-century Europe, ed. Mark Cornwall (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002), 182–4. 47. ‘Zeitenwende’, Bozner Nachrichten, 3 January 1913, 1–2. 48. ‘Die Rückwirkung des Balkankrieges auf unsere innere Politik: Eine parlamentarische Rundfrage’, Reichspost, 1 January 1913, 2–3. 49. ‘Neujahr 1913’, Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung, 1 January 1913, 1–2. 50. ‘Oesterreichs Chancen in einem Krieg’, Bozner Nachrichten, 18 October 1912, 1. 51. Scheer, ‘The Habsburg Empire and the First Balkan War’, 312–13. 52. ‘Dr. Pribicevic in Belgrad’, Prager Tablatt, 19 October 1912, 2; ‘Tschechische Ärzte gehen auf den Kriegsschauplatz’, Prager Tagblatt, 20 October 1912, 2. 53. ‘Macht geht vor Recht’, Marburger Zeitung, 19 October 1912, 1. 54. ‘Kreuz gegen Halbmond’, Neue Freie Presse, 18 October 1912, 1. 55. ‘Feuilleton: Kreigsbericht aus Wien’, Neue Freie Presse, 20 October 1912, 1. 56. ‘Budapest. 17. Oktober’, Pester Lloyd, 18 October 1912, 1. 57. ‘Najmlađi Srpski Vojnik’, Illustrovana Ratna Kronika, 20 June 1913, 1. 58. Milan Miljković, ‘Prilog analizi medijskih predstava o Albancima u Srpskoj štampi 1912– 1913’, in Figura neprijatelja: Preosmišljavanje Srpsko-Albanskih odnosa, ed. Aleksandar Pavlović, Adriana Zaharijević, Gazela Pudar Draško and Rigels Halili (Belgrade: IFDT and KPZ Beton, 2015), 55–74. 59. ‘Štampa u ratu: kojim vestima treba verovati’, Dokumenti današnjice 2, no. 62 (Belgrade: Sedma sila, 1940): 5–19. 60. ‘Za Tursku-da! A za nas?’, Crvena Hrvatska, 24 August 1912, 2–3. 61. See Lyon, Serbia and the Balkan Front, 75–94. 62. Cornwall, ‘Introduction: The Southern Slav Question’, 1–2. 63. Much of the popular negative Western image of both Ferdinand and Austria-Hungary in 1914 comes from Zweig’s memoir, The World of Yesterday, despite it not being published until 1942. Alma Hanning, ‘Franz Ferdinand: Power and Image’, in Cornwall, ed., Sarajevo 1914, 17–18. See also Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Pushkin Press, 2011). 64. ‘Reaktionen in Wien’, Neue Freie Presse, 29 June 1914, 4.

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65. ‘Kommentarseite’, Arbeiter-Zeitung, 29 June 1914, 1. 66. ‘Uvodnik’, Zastava, 28 June 1914, 2. 67. Lyon, Serbia and the Balkan Front, 20–2. 68. ‘Die Ermordung des Thronfolgers. Potioreks Ausreden’, Arbeiter-Zeitung, 30 June 1914, 1. 69. Lyon, Serbia and the Balkan Front, 20. 70. ‘Kommentarseite’, Bosnische Post, 30 June 1914, 1. 71. For an assessment of press and public reactions to the assassinations from a Western perspective, see Samuel Foster, Yugoslavia in the British Imagination: Peace, War and Peasants before Tito (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 73–6. 72. ‘Uvodnik’, Samouprava, 29 June 1914, 1. 73. Lyon, Serbia and the Great War, 28. 74. ‘Der Attentäter von Sarajevo wird befragt’, Bosnische Post, 29 June 1914, 3. 75. Dolph W. A. Owings, ed., The Sarajevo Trial, vol.1 (Chapel Hill, NC: Documentary Publications, 1984), 54–6 76. Lyon, Serbia and the Balkan Front, 28. 77. ‘Telegram from Serbia’s Foreign Ministry to all Serbian embassies (14 July 1914)’, in Dokumenti o spoljnoj politici Kraljevine Srbije 1903–1914, ed. Vladimir Dedijer and Života Anić (Belgrade: SANU, 1980), 553–5. 78. ‘Telegram from Serbia’s Foreign Ministry’, 595. 79. As has been argued elsewhere, a more useful historical timeframe would be to start with the Italian invasion of Ottoman Libya in September 1911 and conclude with the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne in July 1923. See, for example, Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela, eds, Empires at War: 1911–1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Joshua A. Sanborn, Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Sean McMeekin, The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908–1923 (London: Penguin, 2016); Geppert, Mulligan and Rose, eds, The Wars before the Great War; Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917–1923 (London: Penguin, 2017); Jay Winter, ‘The Second Great War, 1917–1923’, Revista Universitaria de Historia Militar 7, no. 14 (2018): 160–79.

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B

attle reporting evolved significantly between 1914 and 1918. At the start of the First World War, publications from across the combatant nations and beyond struggled to keep abreast of operational developments and failed to satisfy a public clamouring for war news. By 1918, however, daily newspapers were publishing vivid battlefield reports, with news from the front reaching publications later that day or the following morning. Scholars have foregrounded these developments by focusing on the writings of war correspondents, but they have often paid less attention to the outlets in which war news was published.1 Exactly when and where battle news was printed is rarely the focus of works centred on the war correspondents themselves. And yet their articles accounted for only a small proportion of war news in the press, the majority of which comprised reports and editorials based on official communiqués. Examining this breadth of responses, across a range of different publications, provides a clearer picture of how news from the battlefield reached its readers. This chapter therefore presents the first comparative study of how English-language periodicals represented the battles of the First World War. It considers these publications in their full breadth, examining editorials, reports and correspondents’ articles, alongside headlines, cartoons and photographs. In doing so, it reveals the transnational character of war news and the role played by international news agencies, which ensured the dissemination of battlefield news across the globe. This chapter begins with an overview of how English-language battle reporting evolved during the war, before examining how British, American, Canadian and Australian periodicals responded to the Battle of Amiens, a successful Allied operation which lasted chiefly from 8 August to 11 August 1918.2 To be sure, other more costly battles, such as the Somme and the third Battle of Ypres, are worthy of attention. But these were lengthy campaigns, which lasted many months. The short duration of the Battle of Amiens, on the other hand, allows its day-by-day representation in the press to be reconstructed. As one of the war’s final offensives, Amiens took place when reporting on the conflict was at its most sophisticated. Unlike many earlier battles, the representation of the Battle of Amiens exemplifies the efficiency of English-language war reporting at the end of the war and the extent to which it had evolved during the conflict. It also perfectly illustrates the transnational dimensions of war news: as an operation involving British, Canadian, Australian and American troops, the battle was the subject of intense interest in all of these Allied nations. This case study demonstrates how news from the battlefield suffused the press and how it portrayed military developments. It identifies striking similarities in how the war was reported in different Allied nations, but it also reveals how publications differentiated their

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reporting and appealed to distinct national readerships. By focusing on weekly and monthly magazines, in addition to daily newspapers, the chapter further examines how periodicals moulded public understandings of the battle through a variety of means, and not solely through official dispatches or the writings of correspondents.3

The Evolution of Battle Reporting Upon the outbreak of hostilities, there was a significant appetite for war news across the Anglophone world. The British War Office, however, feared that unrestricted reporting from the battlefield might undermine military operations. It therefore banned all correspondents from the front, with no reporters permitted to enter a military zone surrounding the British Expeditionary Force (BEF).4 On 7 August 1914 the British government established the Press Bureau, initially overseen by the Conservative MP F. E. Smith (1872–1930), which sought to regulate press coverage of the war.5 The Press Bureau oversaw the dissemination of official war news to the press and was responsible for press censorship, which included the censoring of all telegrams received and transmitted by the press.6 The powers of the Press Bureau were underpinned by the passing of the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) on 8 August 1914, which enabled the British government to prosecute publications for printing material deemed harmful to the war effort.7 To prevent newspapers from contravening these regulations, the Press Bureau invited editors to submit articles voluntarily for censorship, but they were not obliged to do so.8 Dominion publications were soon subjected to similar restrictions: in Canada, the War Measures Act, passed on 22 August, allowed the government to censor and suppress publications.9 Australia’s War Precautions Act, passed on 28 October, afforded its government similar powers.10 Australian and Canadian publications also relied largely on cables from London for their war news, all of which were subject to censorship before they could be transmitted. This too restricted battlefield reporting in the Dominion press. As the war progressed, this censorship framework especially shaped the reporting of battles in British and Dominion newspapers. In Britain, it was augmented by the Press Bureau’s issuing of ‘D-notices’, which instructed the press on what could and could not be published about a range of topics. These were primarily concerned with security issues, such as preventing risks to prominent individuals or military personnel.11 Many pertained to military operations and warned editors not to publish the names of units, the numbers of specific battalions or other information regarding the order of battle that might benefit the enemy.12 A lack of authorised access to the front, combined with censorship, prevented periodicals from responding in a timely or comprehensive manner to military operations during the war’s early months. British war correspondents therefore began to contravene military regulations by travelling to the warzone and risking arrest. They struggled, however, to observe military operations, and correspondents tended to focus on issues behind the lines, including the plight of civilians.13 For battle news, newspapers relied on the Press Bureau’s irregular and brief communiqués which avoided military setbacks and the realities of fighting for the BEF.14 There were exceptions: a report published in a special Sunday edition of The Times (1785–) on 30 August 1914, for instance, revealed the desperate plight facing the BEF in its retreat following the Battle of Mons. Despite

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its stark depiction of events, F. E. Smith decided to permit the uncensored publication of the article, realising that it might encourage more men to enlist. The report triggered a wave of enlistment, and the number of volunteers to the British army peaked during the first week of September 1914.15 The War Office, however, continued to refuse correspondents access to the BEF. Instead, it appointed Colonel Ernest Swinton (1868–1951) as an official ‘eyewitness’ at the BEF’s General Headquarters (GHQ), to provide the press with summaries of military developments. Swinton’s dry and technical reports, however, failed to satisfy the public demand for war news, and correspondents continued to travel behind the lines in search of more captivating stories.16 American correspondents were also unable to accompany the British and French armies and struggled to report on military operations.17 If they did secure a scoop, they still had to evade censorship when sending their copy back to the United States. In the first week of the war, the Royal Navy cut the transatlantic cable linking the United States with Germany. Telegrams to the US had to be sent via London, where they would be censored before they could reach the United States. Despite this, American periodicals often published more complete accounts from the front than their British counterparts. This was partly because American correspondents sometimes found ways to circumvent British censorship, either through wireless transmissions or through mailing their stories from the neutral Netherlands.18 The Press Bureau was also more lenient when censoring articles bound for the United States owing to its ‘geographical position [. . .] and the resultant difficulty of conveying news to the enemy’.19 Consequently, American readers were often better informed than those in Britain. The situation improved for the press in May 1915, when the War Office agreed to allow a select number of accredited correspondents to accompany the BEF. Although the accredited journalists primarily represented a small number of publications – including large national papers such as The Times, the Daily Mail (1896–) and the Daily Telegraph (1855–) – international news networks ensured that periodicals across the Anglophone world accessed the correspondents’ articles. Hebert Russell (1869–1944) represented the London-based news agency Reuters, which supplied other news agencies across the British Empire. Its relationship with the Australian Press Association and later the United Cable Service in Australia enabled it to provide copy to dozens of newspapers across Australia and New Zealand.20 The American correspondent Frederick Palmer (1873–1958), meanwhile, supplied the three major wire services in the United States: the Associated Press, the United Press and the International News Service.21 Between them, thousands of newspapers across North America, including numerous Canadian dailies, were supplied with accredited war news. Other news-sharing arrangements ensured that major American newspapers published copy from the official correspondents. Phillip Gibbs’s (1877–1962) dispatches for London’s Daily Chronicle (1872–1930), for example, were also published in the New York Times (1851–). The first major British offensive to be reported on by accredited correspondents was the Battle of Loos, which commenced on 25 September 1915. There was a delay, however, before the correspondents’ reports were passed by the censors and wired to London, and it was not until 29 September that their words reached the pages of newspapers.22 Until then, readers relied on communiqués issued by GHQ. Despite their privileged access to the front, correspondents faced significant obstacles. They could only watch events unfolding from a distance and their view was often obstructed. This, combined with censorship, led to accounts which often overlooked or minimised the

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reality of the battle. Their reports made no mention of the British use of poison gas, downplayed the ultimate failure of the operation and elided the heavy casualties during the fighting.23 Similar omissions characterised reporting during the Battle of the Somme the following year. The BEF was now under the command of Douglas Haig (1861–1928), and a growing trust between the press and the higher command had begun to develop. Correspondents benefited from relaxed censorship restrictions and were permitted to send their reports using official wires, which meant that articles could be written and sent on the same day as the action they described, reaching the pages of newspapers the following morning.24 And yet reports on the battle’s infamous first day – during which nearly 20,000 British soldiers lost their lives – are particularly jarring given the popular memory of the Somme, which typically characterises the battle as a futile disaster.25 Newspapers portrayed the advance on 1 July 1916 as a resounding success and gave no indication of these losses. The Daily Mail’s correspondent William Beach Thomas (1868–1957), for example, declared on 3 July that ‘we have beaten the German by greater dash in the infantry and vastly superior weight in munitions’.26 But it was not solely the accredited correspondents who exaggerated British achievements. All the war news in this issue of the Daily Mail created a similar impression. Beach Thomas’s article appeared beneath a headline that celebrated ‘Sunday’s British and French Successes’. On the same page, Haig’s official communiqué was printed beneath a headline which highlighted the capture of Fricourt, Frise and ‘9,500 prisoners’.27 An analysis of the offensive, written by Lovat Fraser (1871–1926), observed that it had ‘begun gloriously well’.28 British casualties were scarcely mentioned by the newspaper. This illusion of unmitigated success was not unique to the British press. American newspapers, too, echoed this message, not least because they relied on the same official reports. The front page of New York’s Evening World (1887–1931), for instance, was emblazoned with the headline ‘Haig Reports New British Gain’.29 These oversights were not solely the result of censorship: neither higher command nor the correspondents had a complete picture of what had occurred, and the scale of the British losses was not yet known.30 As more information became available, newspapers did provide a more candid account of the fighting.31 On 21 July Philip Gibbs’s dispatch for the Daily Chronicle and the New York Times described the ‘fine courage’ that some of the ‘London battalions’ had displayed on 1 July 1916, but he also revealed the stiff defences that the surviving infantrymen faced when they reached the well-defended enemy lines and realised that they were caught in ‘a death trap and cut off from escape’.32 Accounts such as these dispel the notion that correspondents and the press were solely propagandists who concealed the reality of warfare from the public.33 As Sara Prieto has argued, their writings in fact ‘bear witness to the correspondents’ struggle to reveal the grim side of war’.34 They also demonstrate that censors at GHQ and the Press Bureau were willing to allow more realistic accounts such as these to be published. The way that different newspapers presented Gibbs’s account, however, is telling. In the Daily Chronicle, the article’s headline, ‘Londoners’ Courage in the Battle’, frames his story as a tale of heroism in the face of adversity.35 Military censors checked headlines at the front, and editors were under strict instruction not to alter them without Press Bureau approval.36 The New York Times, however, did not face these restrictions and had less motivation for presenting the battle in a positive light while the USA remained neutral. Its headline for the same article is ‘Londoners Caught in a Death Trap’, accompanied

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by the words: ‘City men pay heavy penalty for swift advance into foe’s trenches.’ When read beneath this headline, Gibbs’s article creates a rather different impression.37 It also underscores the importance of examining the transnational context in which the correspondents’ reports were published. The formation of the Department of Information in February 1917, which coordinated the dissemination of British propaganda, led to greater cooperation between the British state and the press, both at home and abroad. The War Office’s Director of Military Operations now gave American, Allied and Dominion reporters in London a weekly lecture which led to more informed battle reporting.38 At the front the correspondents also benefited from greater transparency from the higher command regarding military operations, in addition to a relaxation of censorship restrictions. This was evident during the third Battle of Ypres, often known as the Battle of Passchendaele (Passendale), which commenced in July and lasted until November 1917. Like the Somme, Passchendaele is now often characterised as a futile disaster in popular memory, though the press response, of course, did not portray it as such at the time.39 Reports on the offensive, however, were far less triumphant than those which had accompanied the Battle of the Somme, and correspondents provided a graphic picture of the squalid conditions that many soldiers encountered. Ultimately, though, they were still committed to presenting a positive interpretation of events, and selfcensorship, as much as any official restrictions, prevented them from providing a complete picture of military setbacks or the extent of British casualties.40 The entry of the United States into the war in April 1917 also had significant implications for battle reporting in American publications, which were now subject to domestic censorship. Publications that spoke out against the war effort could be prosecuted under the Espionage and Sedition Acts, both of which were introduced during the war to curtail dissent.41 War correspondents were likewise subject to American military censorship. Following the British, the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) introduced an accreditation scheme for correspondents who had to submit all articles to a chief censor before they could be approved for publication.42 By 1918 battle reporting was more efficient and informed than it had been in 1914. The armies at the front transmitted regular official communiqués to major newspapers and news agencies, which then distributed copy to publications across the globe. Regular briefings to the Allied press in London also ensured that newspapers kept abreast of military developments. Articles written by accredited correspondents supplemented these reports and provided eyewitness perspectives from the battlefield. Military censorship and laws inhibiting freedom of expression restricted what could be printed, though self-censorship, too, played a significant part, for most correspondents felt it was their duty to support the war effort and maintain morale among their civilian readers.43 This did not mean that the grimmer aspects of warfare were entirely hidden, but it did lead journalists to downplay military setbacks and exaggerate successes. These characteristics of battlefield reporting were evident during the Battle of Amiens.

Newspapers and the Battle of Amiens In July 1918 the German spring offensives launched earlier that year ground to a halt, enabling the French army, supported by American troops, to launch a counterstrike at the second Battle of the Marne. The battle allowed the Allies to regain the initiative and

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paved the way for the Battle of Amiens. Australian raids had identified weak defences in the Amiens area, and Henry Rawlinson (1864–1925), commanding the BEF’s Fourth Army, proposed an offensive in the region that would make significant use of tanks. Haig agreed, as did Ferdinand Foch (1851–1929), now General-in-Chief of the Allied armies. Foch hoped to drive the Germans away from the strategically important Amiens–Paris railway line and insisted on the involvement of the French First Army, which would operate to the south of Rawlinson’s men. Although Rawlinson initially envisaged the attack as a limited operation, Haig expanded its scope, hoping to achieve a major blow to the German army.44 The Fourth Army consisted of five Australian, five British and four Canadian divisions, in addition to one American division. The BEF avoided arousing suspicion during the preparations for the battle and the Germans were unaware of the planned offensive.45 The advance of the British and Dominion infantry, which began at 4:20 a.m. on Thursday, 8 August, achieved complete surprise. French forces, meanwhile, attacked to the south with the aim of taking the village of Montdidier. Waves of British, Canadian and Australian troops advanced under the cover of mist and often encountered minimal resistance. Dominion troops were especially successful. By 11 a.m. the Canadian infantry had already advanced four miles behind enemy lines.46 The BEF made significant use of tanks, including the smaller, faster Whippet tanks which were employed alongside the cavalry to achieve a breakthrough. The French to the south and the British Third Corps to the north advanced more slowly, but the first day of the offensive was an overwhelming success. The Allies had gained eight miles and had inflicted huge casualties, capturing over 12,000 German prisoners.47 The following day, the Allied advance began to slow. The advancing men were now tired and out of the reach of their artillery. Communications, largely reliant on telephone cable, had begun to break down due to the speed and depth of the advance. The Allies also no longer had the benefit of surprise. The Germans began to bring in reinforcements and launched counterattacks which stemmed the tide of the Allied advance.48 Nevertheless, the Fourth Army advanced a further three miles on 9 August and took further objectives.49 Rawlinson decided to call upon American troops, for example, with the 131st Infantry Regiment of the 33rd Division helping to capture the Chipilly Spur.50 The following day German resistance began to strengthen and returns began to diminish for the Allies. Though the French successfully captured Montdidier, the BEF made only limited progress. On 11 August Rawlinson decided not to press on and the battle began to grind to a halt, though Haig did not officially call off the attack until 14 August.51 Despite mounting German resistance, the offensive had been a huge success. The Allies had advanced around twelve miles, though in a war of attrition these gains were less significant than the huge damage done to the German army, especially in terms of its morale: Erich Ludendorff (1865–1937), commanding the German forces, famously described 8 August as the ‘black day of the German army’.52 The first newspapers to report on the battle were evening publications. On 8 August London’s Westminster Gazette (1893–1928), a popular evening paper, carried early news of the offensive, based on a communiqué released by GHQ at 11:50 a.m. The paper noted that the British Fourth Army and the French First Army had launched an offensive near Amiens, but it had few details regarding the success of the attack, simply noting that ‘satisfactory progress’ had been made.53 New York’s Evening World, due to the time difference with London, was published a few hours

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Figure 14.1  The front page of New York’s Evening World on 8 August 1918, the first day of the Battle of Amiens.

later, and contained significantly more information about the offensive. American newspapers, unlike many British publications, printed news on their front pages, and those like the Evening World, which was aimed at a mass market, emblazoned these with bold and arresting headlines. That evening the paper’s headline read: ‘Allies Take Four Towns; 5-Mile Gain in New Drive’ (Figure 14.1). Based on an official dispatch from London that afternoon and reports from the Associated Press, Reuters and the United Press, the Evening World provided a detailed picture of the offensive, which highlighted the significant number of prisoners taken, ‘the use of an extraordinary number of tanks’, and the fact that the ‘attack must have taken the Germans by surprise’.54 The following day, morning papers dated 9 August in Britain, Canada and the United States reported on the offensive, though Australian papers that day, which went to press much sooner, still only carried limited news of the battle.55 Due to the undeniable success of the offensive, a triumphant tone abounded in most newspapers, with editors emphasising the amount of ground gained and the number of prisoners taken. The Manchester Guardian (1821–) described the attack as a ‘wonderful rush’, while The Times described it as a ‘great Allied attack’.56 The Daily Mail’s accredited correspondent William Beach Thomas exclaimed that it was ‘one of the greatest feats of arms in the annals of the British Army’.57 Canadian newspapers told a similar story. Montreal’s Gazette (1778–) described the offensive as a ‘smashing blow’ and a ‘strategic victory’.58 These celebratory assessments were not unwarranted given the success of the attack, but they were not dissimilar to the tone of reports that followed the first days of the battles of the Somme and Third Ypres. These offensives had not yet gained the

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disastrous reputation that characterises their popular memory. The accredited correspondent for The Times, Perry Robinson, even suggested that the successful advance on 8 August recalled ‘the great attacks of the Somme, the Battle of Arras, or that of Flanders’, in a comparison that few would make today.59 Keen to thrill their readers with exciting stories from the battlefield, many reports also romanticised the fighting with recourse to traditional motifs. An article in the Scotsman (1817–), an Edinburgh daily, praised the ‘gallantry of the Allied infantry and the dash and vigour of their attacks’.60 Reports highlighted aspects of the offensive which appeared novel and dramatic, too. The successful use of cavalry, with all its chivalric resonance, featured heavily, as did the exploits of the Whippet tanks, which held undeniable appeal for many correspondents.61 Thomas, applying chivalric language to mechanised warfare, described them as ‘iron horses on caterpillar feet’.62 There was an inevitable degree of homogeneity in these reports, regardless of where they were published. While some newspapers had their own accredited correspondents in the field, many relied on international news agencies and news-sharing arrangements when reporting on the BEF. The Associated Press, the largest wire service in the United States, was an important source of news across North America, supplying, among others, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle (1865–) and the Gazette with news on the first day of the offensive. Reuters, likewise, provided both Canadian and American newspapers with the same battle summaries on 9 August 1918. British newspapers also shared their correspondents’ articles with other newspapers, sometimes after a short delay. Perry Robinson’s article in The Times on 9 August was published the following day in Toronto’s Globe (1844–1936), while an article analysing the strategic importance of the battle, written by the journalist Herbert Sidebotham (1872–1940), appeared first in The Times and then in the Gazette the following day.63 It was primarily through their editorials and headlines, therefore, that newspapers differentiated their war news from one another. Accredited correspondents also covered different areas of the battlefield and shared information with each other. This pooling of resources allowed them to write more comprehensive reports than if they had worked alone. But it also led to the recycling of anecdotes. One such story, which circulated widely on 9 August, related to a Whippet tank chasing a German general. The Manchester Guardian’s report, likely written by its correspondent H. W. Nevinson (1856–1941), noted that: Many wonderful stories of the exploits of our tanks are gaining currency. One of the most amusing of these is the chasing of a German general by a tank which machine-gunned him as he fled, all Teutonic arrogance and dignity having been cast to the wind.64 Thomas, writing in the Daily Mail, also referred to the event, though he too implied that he had not actually witnessed it himself: ‘it is said that among the scamperers was a German general [. . .] running for his life from a pursuing tank’.65 An Associated Press report also observed that ‘a British tank, probably one of the fast little whippets, had been chasing a frightened general up the road’. These words were published in numerous North American newspapers, including the Gazette, the Toronto Daily Star (1892–), the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times.66 Editors across the Allied nations no doubt realised that many of their readers would appreciate

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stories of German humiliation on the battlefield. The press aimed to entertain as well as inform. By 10 August Australian newspapers also contained much of the information that publications in Britain and North America had printed in their 9 August editions. The Sydney Morning Herald (1831–) described the offensive as a ‘pronounced success’, while Melbourne’s Argus (1846–1957) observed that ‘Tanks and aeroplanes cooperated with great effectiveness in the attack.’67 British and North American papers, which went to press many hours later, now contained news of the fighting on 9 August, in addition to further details regarding the first day of the battle. Most headlines in these papers downplayed German resistance. A headline in The Times reported ‘The Good Progress of the Allies’, while the San Francisco Chronicle noted that 17,000 men and 300 guns had been taken in the ‘Somme Smash’.68 Several journalists, however, tempered expectations among readers who might have been expecting a definitive, war-winning breakthrough. The Times’s military correspondent in London explained that ‘The sound military principle is to exploit a victory to its utmost profitable return, not to the utmost gross return [. . .] and it is an important part of generalship to know when to leave off.’69 The Manchester Guardian, likewise, observed that ‘The gains are usually reaped in the early days of these contests, and more and more it has come to be seen that profit lies in breaking off the battle when the losses are becoming even.’70 Rawlinson, too, had come to realise this and would seek to conclude the offensive the following day. Newspapers did not sidestep the grimmer aspects of the fighting either. An Associated Press account printed in the Gazette and elsewhere noted that the ‘bodies of men and horses were lying where they fell’, while a report from Nevinson, printed in both the Gazette and the New York Times, provided a more sobering picture of the recent advance by warning readers that Allied casualties were mounting and that ‘the dead were being buried with unusual rapidity’.71 Such reports again demonstrate that the press did not completely conceal the realities of warfare, despite censorship restrictions. On 10 August the readers of evening newspapers in North America, however, encountered further good news from the battlefield, including the French capture of Montdidier earlier in the day.72 News that American soldiers had participated in the battle on 9 August had also reached the press, with the Evening World triumphantly announcing ‘Americans Help British in Winning Stiffest Fight in the Picardy Offensive’.73 The following morning further details emerged, confirming that British and American troops had together captured the Chipilly Spur.74 This provided American editors with an opportunity to celebrate the contribution of the US infantry in their headlines. The New York Times described it as a ‘Brilliant Attack’ and reassured its readers that ‘Our Losses Are Not Unduly Severe’.75 In typical fashion, this report downplayed American losses. Despite the success of the operation, the casualties sustained by the 131st Infantry Regiment during the attack had in fact been rather heavy: forty-five men had been killed and 255 wounded.76 Further news regarding the exploits of Dominion troops fuelled celebratory reporting in the Canadian and Australian press, too. On 12 August the Gazette noted that the Canadians’ advance of ‘twelve miles’ in two days was a record in the history of the Canadian Corps, while anecdotes from the battlefield fuelled patriotic assessments of Canadian bravery. The Gazette even interpreted foolhardy actions as evidence of Canadian vigour:

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One of our batteries, carried away by the spirit of the thing, pushed so deeply in, that they actually unlimbered within the enemy barrage and lost a number of horses in consequence. It is such stories as that, that make Canadian hearts beat proudly.77 A headline in the Toronto Daily Star – ‘Spirit of Canadians Assurance of Success’ – also celebrated the nation’s martial valour.78 A similar degree of patriotism infused the pages of Australian newspapers. The Sydney Morning Herald dedicated an article to Australian exploits during the initial advance, celebrating the fact that its infantry had advanced ‘10 miles’ into German territory during the first day of the offensive.79 In this way, despite the homogeneity of much battle reporting, newspapers tailored the news to the interests of their readers, often expanding and reflecting upon events that had been documented in reports and communiqués. By 13 August readers would not have known that the Battle of Amiens had ground to a halt. Small-scale operations on the same front, combined with a need for secrecy regarding strategic decision making, ensured that the press did not announce a definitive end to the offensive. Nevertheless, reports indicated that progress had slowed significantly. The Manchester Guardian reported ‘a comparative pause yesterday in the Allied attack’, while Thomas, writing in the Daily Mail, observed that ‘the fighting, though desperate in places, has slowed down’.80 Over the next few days, many English-language publications instead turned their attention to new French offensives towards Lassigny and Noyon. The success at Amiens, however, continued to attract press attention over the subsequent weeks, particularly as weekly and monthly periodicals began to reflect on the battle’s significance.

Magazines and the Battle of Amiens Unlike the daily newspapers, weekly and monthly periodicals took much longer to go to press and could not provide regular reports on the battle as it unfolded. Whereas daily publications aimed to provide up-to-date news, timeliness was less of a concern for magazine editors. Though magazines may have drawn on official communiqués and reports printed in newspapers, their articles tended to differ from the bulk of the content printed in the daily press. Rather than specialising in factual news reporting, magazines offered a space for more sustained reflection, analysis and interpretation of battlefield events. The inevitable time-lag that characterised their production – combined with the offensive’s short duration – also meant that magazine reflections on the Battle of Amiens were published after the battle had concluded. The British weekly Land and Water (1860–1920) focused exclusively on the war throughout the conflict and published a regular column by the writer and critic Hilaire Belloc (1850–1953), who analysed military operations in considerable detail. Belloc’s first analysis of the Battle of Amiens, published on 15 August, provided a meticulous description of the topography of the battlefield which reflected his assiduous study of maps (Belloc was a keen travel writer). He also discussed the strategic significance of the operation, highlighting the battle’s crucial role in exhausting enemy reserves, its continued ‘manoeuvring’ of the German army and its value in forcing the enemy away from the Amiens–Paris railway.81 Though Belloc’s recounting of events is likely to have drawn primarily on official communiqués, his detailed interpretation of the broader

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significance of the battle is what distinguishes his article from many of the reports or eyewitness accounts that were published in the daily newspapers. Journalists in other magazines offered similarly detailed assessments of the battle. The Review of Reviews (1890–1936), a British monthly focusing on politics and the arts, employed an anonymous ‘military critic’ to analyse battlefield developments. Its military column in September 1918 placed an even greater emphasis on logistics and stressed that ‘The main results of the Allies’ strokes, of course, consist in the freeing of the great main ways of communication from Amiens to Paris.’82 Other magazines provided a more simplistic analysis of events. On 22 August the American satirical magazine Life simply observed that news had been ‘mighty good of late’ because ‘the Allies are moving towards Berlin’.83 What commentators were not aware of at this stage, however, was the devastating impact that the battle would have on German morale. Its significant role in hastening the German defeat was not yet known, and so analyses of the battle were more measured than we might expect. Critics were aware, though, that the Allies were now likely to win the war, and newspapers, too, had begun to make confident predictions following 8 August 1918.84 In the 22 August issue of Land and Water, Belloc reflected on the strategic significance of the Battle of Amiens and the second Battle of the Marne in conjunction. The crucial achievement here, Belloc rightly noted, was that the two offensives had allowed the Allies to regain the initiative. Belloc offered a confident prediction as to the war’s outcome: ‘It is difficult to see how these advantages, now definitely obtained, can be lost through any military cause. They would seem to be final.’85 The military critic in the Review of Reviews also confidently stated in the wake of Amiens that ‘The war will be finished in the right way, by German defeat.’86 Though some magazines published dedicated military columns, others refrained from providing detailed discussions of operations. But many reflected on battles through other means. The fact that the German army was now on the back foot was a motif in humorous cartoons, many of which were published in satirical periodicals. A cartoon drawn by Arthur Moreland (1867–1951) in the British satirical weekly Punch (1841–1992), for instance, depicted German soldiers fleeing from a tank, while one says to the other: ‘The All-Highest has the truth spoken – the worst is behind us’ (Figure 14.2).87 Humour was by no means confined to British periodicals. A cartoon from the Philadelphia Inquirer (1829–), which was reprinted in the monthly Cartoons Magazine (1912–22) in the United States, suggested that the Kaiser’s days were numbered by depicting a noose next to his head. The darkly comic caption reads: ‘Fashionable neckwear for the murderer of millions.’88 Just as news was recycled on both sides of the Atlantic, so too were the motifs in cartoons: the front page of the Bystander (1903–40), an illustrated British weekly, also depicted the Kaiser beside a noose in its 26 September issue. Not all cartoons were humorous. A striking illustration on the front cover of the 22 August issue of the Bulletin (1880–2008), an Australian satirical weekly, reflected changing military fortunes by depicting Mars, the God of War, turning an hourglass in his hands, in which the sands are shifting from the half marked ‘German jubilation’ to the side labelled ‘German depression’. The caption – ‘the Reverse’ – also alluded to recent military developments.89 An equally striking double-page illustration in the Bystander dramatised the worsening military situation for the Germans. With the caption ‘The Cloud’, it depicts two German commanders retreating in a storm. The ominous dark

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Figure 14.2  Arthur Moreland’s depiction of the Battle of Amiens in Punch, 21 August 1918.

clouds above them form the shape of advancing Allied soldiers with lightning bolts emanating from their rifles.90 Images like this – which were often less nuanced than correspondents’ reports – served a more overt propagandistic purpose. By denigrating the enemy and celebrating Allied military prowess, they were no different to many other examples of visual propaganda published during the conflict. Magazines were also more likely to publish photographs from the front. Though some of the mass-market newspapers discussed here, such as the Evening World and the Daily Mail, had embraced photography by the time of the First World War, not all newspapers had done so. Regardless, photography was not a feature of battlefield reporting while the Battle of Amiens was underway because photography could not keep pace with news reporting. Towards the end of August, however, magazines began to publish photographs taken in the wake of the offensive. On the 24th, the War Illustrated (1914–19), a patriotic British weekly, dedicated a page to the ‘Men of the Maple Leaf in the Allied Advance’ and lauded the exploits of Canadian troops. Photographs rarely depicted combat itself, but these images did reflect the huge logistical effort that accompanied the offensive by depicting ‘telegraph cables being laid in the wake of the advancing British line’.91 Other photographs in the War Illustrated celebrated the success of the offensive by showing the number of guns and prisoners captured during the battle.92 Photographs, like cartoons, were important propagandistic tools. Publications such as the War Illustrated did not intend to portray a complete narrative of events on the battlefield, and nor could they: photographers, like war correspondents, were subject to censorship restrictions and most, out of a sense of patriotic duty, were committed to presenting a favourable interpretation of the Allied war effort.93

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Conclusion During the offensive, newspapers and magazines did not always present the Battle of Amiens as a uniquely significant moment of the war. Though the press welcomed it as an impressive victory, they did not necessarily distinguish Amiens from previous major operations, such as the Somme or Passchendaele, which are now often remembered as futile bloodbaths. By paying attention to the reporting of battles in the press, we are reminded that understandings of these events at the time often contrast with how they are remembered today. Indeed, the popular memory of battles often owes less to wartime responses and more to post-war representations.94 There are also differences between historical accounts of battles and their wartime representation in the press. Though Amiens did lead to accurate predictions regarding an Allied victory, commentators in August 1918 did not realise just how soon victory would follow the offensive. Amiens tended to be seen, along with the second Battle of the Marne, as a key step in the Allies’ regaining of the initiative, but it was not always understood to be a decisive moment in the war. With the benefit of hindsight, however, many historians now often view Amiens as a key turning point in the war, which kickstarted the ‘Hundred Days’ that brought the conflict to a close.95 Gary Sheffield, for instance, recognises the battle not only for its devastating impact on the German army, but also because of the sophistication of the BEF’s tactics during the offensive, which had evolved significantly since the beginning of the war.96 Battlefield tactics were not the only aspect of the Allied war effort to have matured since August 1914. By 1918 battlefield reporting in English-language periodicals was also far better coordinated. Multiple official communiqués were released to the press each day, allowing news from the front that morning to reach the pages of newspapers that evening. By the following morning, detailed reports of the previous day’s operations – including eyewitness reports from accredited correspondents – filled the pages of newspapers. To appreciate how readers digested news from the front, however, it is important to examine how the words of these correspondents, alongside other responses to the battle, were disseminated across different periodicals. By examining how battle news unfolded in various publications, the transnational dimensions of war news become apparent. A common language allowed reports to be shared and recycled between newspapers in Britain, Canada, Australia and the United States. This led to a degree of homogeneity in how newspapers responded to the war: just as there was a coordinated Allied effort on the battlefield, so too was there one in the press. And yet periodicals also differentiated their copy from one another. Publications in each country sought to emphasise the success of their nation’s troops and thus provided a unique perspective on events. To be sure, battle reporting was partial and patriotic. But it was not without nuance, for newspapers did not entirely sidestep the brutalities of warfare. Magazines also differentiated their content from that of the daily press, offering less timely but more sustained reflections on battlefield events. Other periodicals specialised in visual content, and in doing so conveyed the most direct, but also the most simplistic and propagandistic messages regarding battles. It is crucial, therefore, to examine newspapers alongside magazines – and both their textual and visual content – in order to understand how battlefield news reached the reading public.

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Notes   1. For discussions of war correspondents, see Martin J. Farrar, News from the Front: War Correspondents on the Western Front, 1914–18 (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998); Philip Knightley, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Greg McLaughlin, The War Correspondent, 2nd edn (London: Pluto, 2016); and Sara Prieto, Reporting the First World War in the Liminal Zone: British and American Eyewitness Accounts from the Western Front (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).   2. The sample of newspapers discussed primarily comprises those that are available digitally and was constrained to some extent by what could be accessed while researching under pandemic restrictions in 2021. To ensure a breadth of perspectives, it includes both morning and evening newspapers; newspapers aimed at elite and mass audiences; and newspapers published in a selection of different cities in each country.   3. The sample of magazines consulted includes a range of weekly and monthly titles, including general interest publications, illustrated magazines and satirical periodicals.  4. Farrar, News from the Front, 5.   5. Gary S. Messinger, British Propaganda and the State in the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 100.   6. Michael L. Sanders and Philip M. Taylor, British Propaganda during the First World War, 1914–18 (London: Macmillan, 1982), 20.  7. Messinger, British Propaganda and the State, 21.   8. Sanders and Taylor, British Propaganda during the First World War, 21.   9. Jeffrey A. Keshen, Propaganda and Censorship During Canada’s Great War (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1996), 65. 10. The full wording of the War Precautions Act is available at: , accessed 25 June 2021. 11. David Monger, ‘The Press Bureau, “D” Notices, and Official Control of the British Press’s Record of the First World War’, The Historical Journal (First View, March 2021): 1–26, here 4. 12. The National Archives of the UK (TNA): INF 4/4B, ‘Official Press Bureau Instructions’, 18 March 1918. These instructions summarise the key ‘D-notices’ that had been issued to the press earlier in the war. 13. Farrar, News from the Front, 25. 14. Messinger, British Propaganda and the State, 23. 15. The report is often known as the ‘Amiens Dispatch’. For a detailed discussion of its significance, see Stephen Badsey, ‘Strategy and Propaganda: Lord Kitchener, the Retreat from Mons and the Amiens Dispatch, August-September 1914’, in Propaganda and Conflict: War, Media and Shaping the Twentieth Century, ed. Mark Connelly et al. (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 21–38. 16. Farrar, News from the Front, 23. 17. Chris Dubbs, American Journalists in the Great War: Rewriting the Rules of Reporting (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017), 22–3. 18. Dale Zacher, The Scripps Newspapers Go to War, 1914–18 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 38. 19. TNA: INF 4/4B, ‘Organisation and Work of the “Military Room” of the Official Press Bureau 1914–1919’, c. 1920. 20. Peter Putnis and Kerry McCallum, ‘Reuters, Propaganda-Inspired News, and the Australian Press During the First World War’, Media History 19, no. 3 (2013): 284–304, here 286–7. 21. Dubbs, American Journalists in the Great War, 25.

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22. For example, John Buchan, ‘The Allies’ Advance’, The Times, 29 September 1915, 9. The Times (and The Sunday Times) are available at , accessed 24 April 2022. 23. Farrar, News from the Front, 84–91. 24. Farrar, News from the Front, 103. 25. Gary Sheffield, Forgotten Victory. The First World War: Myths and Realities (London: Review, 2002), 3. British casualties on the first day of the Somme totalled around 57,000. See Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, The Somme (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 112–14. 26. W. Beach Thomas, ‘Our Eyewitness’s Account’, Daily Mail, 3 July 1916, 5. The Daily Mail is available online at , accessed 24 April 2022. 27. Daily Mail, 3 July 1916, 5. 28. Lovat Fraser, ‘The Big Push’, Daily Mail, 3 July 1916, 4. 29. Evening World, 3 July 1916, 1. The Evening World is available via , accessed 24 April 2022. 30. Farrar, News from the Front, 107. 31. Prieto, Reporting the First World War, 107. 32. Philip Gibbs, ‘Londoners Caught in a Death Trap’, New York Times, 21 July 1916, 2. The New York Times is available via , accessed 24 April 2022. 33. For this interpretation, see Farrar, News from the Front, 220–6; and Knightley, The First Casualty, 104. 34. Prieto, Reporting the First World War, 123. 35. Philip Gibbs, ‘Londoners’ Courage in the Battle’, Daily Chronicle, 21 July 1916, 1. 36. TNA: HO 139/43, D 256, 16 August 1915. 37. Gibbs, ‘Londoners Caught in a Death Trap’, 2. 38. TNA: INF 4/4B, ‘Report on the scheme of working of the Department of Information, by John Buchan’, September 1917. 39. Dan Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory (London: Continuum, 2007), 81. 40. Farrar, News from the Front, 168–75. 41. David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society, 25th anniversary edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 75–80. 42. Dubbs, American Journalists in the Great War, 207. 43. Prieto, Reporting the First World War, 106. 44. David Stevenson, With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918 (London: Penguin, 2012), 118–19. 45. Stevenson, With Our Backs to the Wall, 119–21. 46. Nick Lloyd, Hundred Days: The End of the Great War (London: Viking, 2013), 49. 47. Stevenson, With Our Backs to the Wall, 122. 48. J. P. Harris and Niall Barr, Amiens to the Armistice: The BEF in the Hundred Days’ Campaign, 8 August–11 November 1918 (London: Brassey’s, 1998), 111. 49. Peter Hart, 1918: A Very British Victory (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2008), 353. 50. James McWilliams and R. James Steel, Amiens 1918 (Stroud: Tempus, 2004), 217. 51. Stevenson, With Our Backs to the Wall, 125. 52. Stevenson, With Our Backs to the Wall, 124. 53. Westminster Gazette, 8 August 1918, 5. The Westminster Gazette is available via , accessed 24 April 2022. 54. Evening World, 8 August 1918, 1. 55. See, for example, Sydney Morning Herald, 9 August 1918, 7; and Argus, 9 August 1918, 5. These reports were based on the early afternoon communiqués released the previous

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56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

vincent trott day by GHQ and conveyed little more than London’s evening papers on 8 August. The Sydney Morning Herald is available at , accessed 24 April 2022. The Argus is available at , accessed 24 April 2022. Manchester Guardian, 9 August 1918, 5. The Manchester Guardian is available via , accessed 24 April 2022. The Times, 9 August 1918, 7. W. Beach Thomas, ‘Complete Surprise’, Daily Mail, 9 August 1918, 8. Gazette, 9 August 1918, 1. The Montreal Gazette is available via , accessed 24 April 2022. Perry Robinson, ‘A Brilliant Success’, The Times, 9 August 1918, 7. ‘Cavalry Rides Down Retreating Foe’, Scotsman, 9 August 1918, 5. The Scotsman is available via , accessed 24 April 2022. For example, see ‘A Wonderful Rush’, Manchester Guardian, 9 August 1918, 5; and ‘Victory on a Great Scale’, Toronto Daily Star, 9 August 1918, 1. Beach Thomas, ‘Complete Surprise’, 8. See ‘The New Offensive: Its Place in the Allied Strategy’, The Times, 9 August 1918, 7; and Herbert Sidebotham, ‘Huns Still Too Close to Amiens for Foch’s Plans’, Gazette, 10 August 1918, 9. ‘A Wonderful Rush’, Manchester Guardian, 9 August 1918, 5. Beach Thomas, ‘Complete Surprise’, 8. See, for example, ‘Tank Followed General in a Merry Chase’, Gazette, 9 August 1918, 1; ‘Hun General Beat It: Tank After Him’, Toronto Daily Star, 9 August 1918, 17; ‘FrenchBritish Drive Nets 10,000 Prisoners’, San Francisco Chronicle, 9 August 1918, 5; and ‘Attack Begins at Dawn’, New York Times, 9 August 1918, 1. The San Francisco Chronicle is available via , accessed 24 April 2022. ‘War Notes’, Sydney Morning Herald, 10 August 1918, 13; ‘Haig’s Attack’, Argus, 10 August 1918, 17. ‘Battle Front Extended’, The Times, 10 August 1918, 7; San Francisco Chronicle, 10 August 1918, 1. ‘The Progress of the Attack’, The Times, 10 August 1918, 7. ‘The Advance’, Manchester Guardian, 10 August 1918, 4. H. W. Nevinson, ‘Resistance of Foe is Stiff beyond Somme’, Gazette, 10 August 1918, 1. See, for example, Toronto Daily Star, 10 August 1918, 1; and Evening World, 10 August 1918, 1. Evening World, 10 August 1918, 1. See, for example, ‘The Thrust of the Left’, The Sunday Times, 11 August 1918, 5; and ‘Americans Dash into Battle and Aid British in Defeating Germans’, San Francisco Chronicle, 11 August 1918, 1. ‘Americans in Picardy Battle Again Outfight the Germans’, New York Times, 11 August 1918, 1. McWilliams and Steel, Amiens 1918, 219. ‘Canadian Army Made a Record in its Advance’, Gazette, 12 August 1918, 10. ‘Spirit of Canadians Assurance of Success’, Toronto Daily Star, 12 August 1918, 5. ‘Australians Great Share in the Attack’, Sydney Morning Herald, 12 August 1918, 7. ‘A Fighting Advance’, Manchester Guardian, 13 August 1918, 5. W. Beach Thomas, ‘Mr. Beach Thomas’s Despatch’, Daily Mail, 13 August 1918, 3. Hilaire Belloc, ‘Our New Blow: The Victory before Amiens’, Land and Water, 15 August 1918, 15. Belloc’s use of maps and his interest in travel writing are discussed in C. Creighton Mandell and Edward Shanks, Hilaire Belloc: The Man and His Work (London: Methuen, 1916), 35, 43.

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82. ‘Communications’, Review of Reviews, September 1918, 151. The Reviews of Reviews is available via , accessed 24 April 2022. 83. Life, 22 August 1918, 268. Issues of Life are available at , accessed 24 April 2022. 84. For example, see ‘Paris Expects Wider Triumph’, New York Times, 11 August 1918, 1; and ‘British Press Forward’, The Times, 12 August 1918, 7. 85. Hilaire Belloc, ‘Recovery of the Initiative: A Survey of the Two Offensives’, Land and Water, 22 August 1918, 6. 86. ‘Communications’, Review of Reviews, September 1918, 151. 87. Punch, or the London Charivari, 21 August 1918, 123. This issue and others from 1918 are available at , accessed 24 April 2022. 88. Cartoons Magazine, October 1918, 475. Issues of Cartoons Magazine are available at , accessed 24 April 2022. 89. Bulletin, 22 August 1918, front cover. The Bulletin is available at , accessed 24 April 2022. 90. Bystander, 14 August 1918, 286–7. 91. War Illustrated, 24 August 1918, 21. Issues of the War Illustrated from July to December 1918 are available at , accessed 24 April 2022. 92. For example, see War Illustrated, 31 August 1918, 35, 38. 93. Jane Carmichael, First World War Photographers (London: Routledge, 1989), 53. 94. The Battle of the Somme, for example, did not become a key symbol of the war’s futility in British popular memory until the 1960s. See Helen McCarthy, ‘Commemorating the Centenary of the Battle of the Somme in Britain’, War and Society 36, no. 4 (2017): 289–303, here 290. 95. For example, see Sheffield, Forgotten Victory, 237; and McWilliams and Steel, Amiens 1918, 283. 96. Sheffield, Forgotten Victory, 237.

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15 Alliances Mauro Forno

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rom the very beginning of the war to Italy’s entry into the conflict on 24 May 1915, the Italian press was aware of its potential to determine the country’s stance on the conflict. Newspapers were crucial in championing the interventionist position in a country in which most citizens – predominantly workers and farmers – were actually opposed to the conflict and in which parliament, still strongly influenced by the former prime minister Giovanni Giolitti (1842–1928), was likewise largely neutral.1 Drawing on a vast archive of socialist, liberal, Catholic, nationalist, democratic and radical newspapers, this chapter presents an overview of the shifting alliances of the Italian press – from neutralist to interventionist – in the year leading up to Italy’s entry into the war in mid-1915. It argues that newspapers played a key role in shaping the decision to take up arms. That the influence of the press on government was not a selfevident fact, and should be interrogated, is clear from the editorial position taken by the Turin newspaper La Stampa (1867–), which will be examined more closely here. As its editor tellingly put it in a question that reverberates throughout this chapter: ‘Should the governing of Italy be entrusted to journalists?’ (Il governo d’Italia deve essere affidato ai giornalisti?).2

Initial Uncertainties At the beginning, Italy’s major liberal newspapers – both the ones that had traditionally been anti-Giolitti, from Luigi Albertini’s Corriere della Sera (1876–) to Alberto Bergamini’s Giornale d’Italia (1901–2006), and those that supported Giolitti, who had resigned as head of the government a few months earlier, from Alfredo Frassati’s La Stampa to Olindo Malagodi’s La Tribuna (1883–1944) – remained cautious at the prospect of joining the conflict. After Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, they limited themselves to endorsing the government’s 2 August declaration of neutrality in keeping with the clauses of the Triple Alliance. Almost all of the country’s newspapers expressed the conviction that only the government – called on to ensure public order in an extremely precarious situation – possessed the necessary information to make effective decisions. Of the major newspapers, the most widely read and influential, Corriere della Sera, which was edited by Luigi Albertini (1871–1941), took a particularly commanding role in asserting that the national press was duty bound to relinquish any position of critique in favour of methodically supporting and serving the government.3 Other newspapers positioned outside of the liberal sphere initially displayed a similar approach, albeit with different emphases and nuances. The Catholic newspapers at that time were intensely concerned with the events linked to Pope Pius X’s illness and

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death on 20 August 1914, and Benedict XV’s election on 3 September 1914. Of these, the main contenders – Il Momento (1903–29), Avvenire d’Italia (1896–) and L’Italia (1912–68) – cautiously stressed the need to remain faithful to the alliance with ‘powerful Germany’ (la potente Germania) and ‘Catholic Austria’ (l’Austria cattolica) against the dangerous front of ‘orthodox Slavs’ (Slavi otodossi).4 Other minor papers such as Guido Miglioli’s weekly L’Azione (1905–22) maintained a neutral position on principle, regardless of specifically political considerations. The official newspaper of the Holy See, L’Osservatore Romano (1861–), expressed deep caution. The pages of the nationalist newspapers, including the most prominent one, L’Idea Nazionale (1911–26), not only praised the government’s decisions but also occasionally remarked on the possible negative consequences of war, such as Austria gaining too much power in the Balkans.5 As for the socialist press, the party’s official voice Avanti! (1896–1993), directed by Benito Mussolini (1883–1945), firmly rejected Italy’s involvement in any form and on either side, even before the war had broken out.6 Soon, however, the newspaper also began to express ideas of a different kind: on the one hand, to dispel any doubts about the socialist party’s patriotism and on the other to explicitly oppose the Triple Alliance and the ‘Teutonic horde’ (orda teutonica) that had violated the borders of neutral parties such as Luxembourg and Belgium with unacceptable arrogance.7 Finally, the radical and democratic press displayed a similar attitude, expressing sympathy for republican France and antipathy towards militaristic, ‘monarchical’ (monarchica) and ‘imperial’ (imperiale) Austria.8 These papers began to relinquish the great principles of the pacifist and internationalist tradition in favour of a rhetoric of war – imbued with a strong Risorgimento flavour – as a necessary step towards freeing Italy’s unredeemed lands and as an essential opportunity to bring about political and social change in the country.

Interventionism Takes Shape in the Press In the landscape of the Italian press, it was nationalist newspapers that launched the first openly interventionist-type messages. In an article published on 16 August 1914 in L’Idea Nazionale, Giuseppe Bevione (1879–1976) reiterated his approval of the government’s neutrality but also warned the executive branch not to interpret that decision as excessively passive; rather, he suggested, it should be seen as ‘virile, armed, vigilant’ (virile, armata, vigilante).9 On 2 October 1914 this nationalist weekly switched to a daily format in order to support the interventionist campaign more effectively. The precise meaning of Bevione’s words became clear in the following weeks as the paper’s tone grew bolder and bolder, until it finally explicitly called for the nation to hurl itself into the great ‘bloodbath’ that was sweeping across Europe. According to the paper, that dreadful move would not only allow the country to close the Risorgimento era once and for all but also lay the foundations for its bright future as a key international player. By September more and more publications had begun to consider the prospect of war as possible, if not actually desirable; their ranks included democratic, socialreformist and, in some cases, Christian-democratic newspapers. The following month, L’Avanti! editor Benito Mussolini’s turn to interventionism emphatically consolidated this trend. In the issue dated 18 October 1914, Mussolini authored an article with the symbolic title ‘From total neutrality to active and operating neutrality’ (Dalla neutralità assoluta alla neutralità attiva ed operante).10 He explicitly invited his comrades not to narrow the realm of possibility with some sterile formulae, condemning themselves to

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immobility and renouncing the chance to become protagonists of a ‘magnificent drama’ (dramma grandioso).11 Mussolini was expelled from the party and inevitably resigned from his position as editor of the paper, announcing the news on the front page on 21 October 1914. On 15 November 1914 he founded a new daily paper in Milan, Il Popolo d’Italia (1914–43), financed by people close to the French government and a number of Italian industrialists interested in benefiting from the country’s entry into the war.12 Mussolini’s editorial line was as polemical as expected, and the paper’s rhetorical and brazen interventionism was immediately rewarded with rising readership numbers.13 Mussolini’s stance certainly impacted the approaches taken by other newspapers as they realised that readers were increasingly inclined to prefer newspapers that espoused interventionist views. Interpreting the war as a heroic and unique opportunity for Italy’s rebirth, on the premise that the country had fallen into a prolonged state of prostration and decline after its glorious unification, quickly proved highly appealing to middleclass public opinion. Two fronts were emerging: the neutralist side composed of official socialist, Catholic and liberal-Giolittian currents, and the nationalist side representing republican, anarcho-syndicalist, radical and nationalist stances. Of these two, the neutralist side remained timid and ephemeral, even though it was the expression of the majority of the country’s citizens; the nationalist side, by contrast, soon became active and highly vociferous, supported as it was by several industrial groups, as exemplified by the case of Ansaldo, who controlled Secolo XIX (1886–). In the initial months of the war, these groups had harboured the hope that they would be able to sell their products to both sides in the conflict. Later, however, they became convinced that the country needed a radical shift, one that would impose a national, vitalistic, productive and expansionist slant on its economic life.14

The Case against Giolitti in the Papers Luigi Albertini’s traditionally pro-Alliance newspaper Corriere della Sera had maintained a line of considerable moderation and caution in the weeks following the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia. And yet such caution ended up providing one of the most emblematic examples of an approach that, as the months passed, swept over much of the Italian press. As early as 27 August 1914, the Milan-based newspaper published an article by Andrea Torre (1866–1940) defining neutrality as ‘a standby’ (un’attesa) rather than ‘a solution’ (una soluzione).15 Albertini himself took responsibility for this decisive stance four days later when replying to Prime Minister Antonio Salandra’s request for an explanation. After observing that the government’s view ‘disagrees with ours’ (discorde dal nostro), the editor of Corriere stated that he had no intention of ‘silencing the newspaper’ (far tacere il giornale) at a time when fundamental interests were at stake and ‘the various currents of public opinion’ (le varie correnti dell’opinione pubblica) had a right to be kept informed.16 The newspaper’s stance became even more explicit over the course of the next few weeks until, by the beginning of the new year, it was communicating heated anti-Austrian interventionism.17 For Albertini, the prospect of war came to represent a unique opportunity for the country’s political and moral regeneration: Italy had not sought the conflict but, now that all the major nations were entering the struggle, it could not just stand by and miss out on the chance of a future of progress and glory.18

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With the beginning of the new year, the Roman newspaper Il Giornale d’Italia, Sidney Sonnino’s unofficial media outlet directed by former Corriere della Sera correspondent Alberto Bergamini (1871–1962), adopted a similar approach. He explicitly stated that the country had the right to remain neutral only as long as circumstances allowed: ‘No human mind can foresee the destiny in store for our country, a destiny that will most likely come to fruition in the new year’ (Nessuna mente umana può prevedere il destino che sarà riserbato al nostro Paese e che maturerà, con ogni probabilità, nell’anno nuovo).19 Even the many interventionist newspapers with their common anti-Giolitti stance began to publish markedly violent content over the next few months, a trend that was especially evident after a letter Giolitti had sent to his former head of cabinet, Camillo Peano (1863–1930), was published in Olindo Malagodi’s pro-Giolitti paper Tribuna on 2 February 1915. The letter was a reply to an earlier letter from Peano asking Giolitti if it was true that he had repeatedly contacted the German ambassador in Rome, Bernhard von Bülow, with a view to keeping Italy out of the conflict.20 In his letter, Giolitti argued that the country stood to gain ‘quite a lot’ (parecchio) from Austria by remaining neutral and operating intelligently on the diplomatic level. Giolitti himself authorised edits to the letter, including changing the adjective ‘much’ (molto) into ‘quite a lot’ (parecchio). Upon publication, the letter came to symbolise the former prime minister’s cynicism and inappropriate interference in government affairs, including efforts to remove Salandra from office in order to return to power. The resulting surge of anti-Giolitti sentiment further consolidated the interventionist front. Il Resto del Carlino (1885–) spoke of ‘destructive neutrality’ (neutralità distruttiva); Il Giornale d’Italia of ‘neutralist crime’ (delitto neutralista).21 In a 17 April 1915 article titled ‘Menacing Illusions’ (Illusioni funeste), even the pro-Giolitti paper La Stampa was pulled into the controversy, as it was accused of manipulating ‘Giolitti’s “quite a lot”’ (parecchio giolittiano) to hinder ‘the moral preparation of the country and impose mistaken impressions on the Italians’ state of mind’ (la preparazione morale del Paese e per provocare all’esterno impressioni errate sullo stato d’animo degli italiani).22 While a provision was approved – on 15 March by the Chamber of Deputies and 28 March by the Senate – that delegated to the government the task of restricting any news coverage deemed ‘harmful’ (dannoso) to national security, the adjectives ‘much’ and ‘quite a lot’ became keywords in the Italian press to refer to a new political and media clash. On 11 April 1915, in an article titled ‘Premises for Intervention’ (Premesse per l’intervento), Albertini stated that ‘the best spirits’ (gli spiriti migliori) throughout the country had already converted to interventionism and only a few pro-Giolitti newspapers were still convinced that they could obtain ‘quite a lot’ by remaining faithful to the Central Powers.23 On 8 May 1915, a few weeks before the country’s entry into the war, Albertini once again deployed Giolitti’s ‘much’ in a prointervention argument: It has been said that Austria offers Italy ‘much’; we repeat that it offers very little and that the gap between our just and rightful demands and the modest concessions of the government in Vienna is vast. (È stato detto che l’Austria offre all’Italia ‘molto’; noi torniamo a ripetere che offre pochissimo e che la distanza fra le nostre giuste e doverose esigenze e le piccole concessioni del Governo di Vienna è enorme.)24

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Five days later, in an article titled ‘L’inganno del “parecchio”’ (The deception of ‘quite a lot’), he added: The whole of Giolittian mentality is contained in this philosophy of day-by-day [. . .] opposed to evaluating any ideal or moral reasons [. . .] When the war is over, Austria will either be victorious or defeated. If victorious, it will certainly not forget the blackmail it suffered [. . .] And if Austria were to be defeated, we would realise that this is not the best-suited historical moment for settling a dispute between two countries in Europe. (Tutta la mentalità del giolittismo è in questa filosofia del giorno per giorno [. . .] contraria a ogni valutazione di motivi ideali e morali [. . .] A guerra finita, l’Austria sarà o vincitrice o vinta. Se vincitrice, non dimenticherà certo il ricatto subito [. . .] E se l’Austria uscisse disfatta dalla guerra, noi ci accorgeremmo che non è questo il momento storico in cui si possono in Europa regolare conti fra due.) 25 For much of the interventionist front, the move to stop vacillating and join the war thus became synonymous with liberating the country from Giolitti’s cumbersome presence. As Francesco Coppola (1878–1957) wrote on 15 May 1915 in L’Idea nazionale, clearly referencing Giolitti’s crafty ‘handling’ (maneggio) of parliament: Either Parliament will overthrow the Nation in order to prostitute it once again to the foreigner, or the Nation will overthrow Parliament and will purify with weapons and fire the alcoves of the ruffians [. . .] If the Italian Parliament is putrid, the new Italy will sweep it out from its path. (O il Parlamento abbatterà la Nazione’ per ‘prostituirla ancora allo straniero, o la Nazione rovescerà il Parlamento’ e ‘purificherà col ferro e col fuoco le alcove dei ruffiani [. . .] Se il Parlamento italiano è putrido, l’Italia nuova lo spazzerà dal suo cammino.)26 Four days earlier, in an article emblematically titled ‘Abbasso il Parlamento!’ (Down with Parliament!) in Popolo d’Italia, Benito Mussolini had used even harsher words, suggesting that what was needed for Italy’s own good was to ‘shoot, I mean shoot a few dozen deputies in the back, and send to life imprisonment at least a couple of deputies and former ministers’ (fucilare, dico fucilare nella schiena qualche dozzina di deputati, e mandare all’ergastolo almeno un paio di deputati e di ex ministri), thereby removing the ‘pestilential blight that poisons the blood of the Nation’ (bubbone pestifero che avvelena il sangue della Nazione).27 Two days after Salandra’s temporary resignation on 13 May 1915, while the interventionist press continued to claim that a ‘Giolittian conspiracy’ was operating against the ‘vast majority of the country’ (immensa maggioranza del paese), Luigi Albertini appealed to all Italians. For the citizens, Albertini asserted, it was no longer a matter of ‘a few extended portions of border territory more or less’ (qualche pezzetto più o meno esteso di territorio ai confini), but rather redemption from the ‘Austrian yoke’ (giogo austriaco), the security of the ‘natural’ (naturale) border, the ‘new relations’ (nuovi rapporti) to be cultivated ‘with the Slavs’ (con gli slavi) and the ‘freedom of the

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Adriatic’ (libertà dell’Adriatico), suggesting that the latter was essential for ‘greater growth in the Mediterranean’ (maggiore sviluppo nel Mediterraneo).28 The following day, Albertini added that ‘the conscience of non-Giolittian Italy rebels against peaceful catastrophe’ (alla catastrofe pacifica la coscienza dell’Italia non giolittiana si ribella).29

The Neutralists’ Weakness and the Interventionists’ Strength The 26 April 1915 agreement signed between Italy and the Entente provided for Italy to enter the Great War within a month. Yet until the very end, some pro-Giolitti newspapers continued to express serious doubt that this agreement even existed. La Tribuna, for example, took care to assure its readers as late as 15 May 1915 that Salandra would never make any binding decision without having first consulted parliament. This position can be read as evidence that the neutralist side not only failed to outline realistic alternatives to war but had also lost sight of the real course of developments. With only a few exceptions, the Catholic press remained faithful to a position of fundamental neutralism; this stance barely concealed a certain mistrust – fed by the Holy See – about the interventionists’ real motivations.30 According to what can be inferred from a note written by the Vatican Secretary of State Pietro Gasparri (1852–1934) on 12 February 1915, the fear was that interventionist currents, which were based on democratic and Risorgimento ideals, and to a lesser extent also those inspired by nationalism and Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938), were actually fronts for Masonic and anti-clerical plotting.31 Only after the country joined the conflict did this press, even while claiming it had always done everything possible to avoid war, acknowledge that Italy’s entry was inevitable; it took the opportunity to remind Italians that the salvation of their homeland had become ‘not only the supreme but also the universal law’ (la legge non solo suprema ma universale).32 The approach of the socialist press was equally weak until the end. In line with the party’s prevailing positions, it continued to propose a vaguely defined form of neutralism. On the one hand, socialist newspapers did not fail to remind readers of the terrible consequences the war might have for the working masses: at the end of the day, they claimed, the ‘bourgeois’ war would be financed exclusively with the ‘skin of the proletariat’ (pella della povera gente).33 On the other hand, the socialist press was coping with divergent internal impulses that proved difficult to reconcile: from patriotism to a rejection of the war on ethical grounds; from defining the conflict as a clash between imperialisms to clear preferences for one of the two fronts; from internationalism to appeals to Risorgimento-era heroism; from ‘ideological opposition’ to the war to ‘political opposition’ to Giolitti’s neutralism.34 In the end, these dichotomies gave rise to the ambiguous formula of ‘neither adhere, nor sabotage’ (né aderire, né sabotare), coined by party national secretary Costantino Lazzari (1857–1927) a few days before Italy’s entry into the conflict in an effort to maintain cohesion among the party’s many conflicting currents.35 As mentioned above, the nationalist press was spared dealing with these pitfalls – the ambiguities of Catholics and socialists – in that it less ambiguously exalted war as the supreme instrument for defeating the inertia and immobility of a country narcotised by decades of ‘mediocrity’. In addition to these arguments, newspapers of the democratic (that is, republican and radical) left tended to insist on Italy’s joining the

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conflict as a necessary step for achieving progressive social and political ideals. The Milan-based paper Il Secolo (1866–1927) was especially active in this direction. This daily with radical tendencies featured writers such as Cesare Battisti (1875–1916) and Leonida Bissolati (1857–1920), who by then explicitly framed the ‘smugglers, corrupt people’ (i contrabbandieri, i corrotti) and ‘eternal dreamers of ministerial crises’ (eterni sognatori di crisi ministeriali) as part of the group of despicable neutralists against which the country needed to fight.36 A common feature of most of the interventionist newspapers was an effort to portray the nations that opposed Austria, especially Britain, as high-ranking powers whose solid financial, economic and military bases would guarantee a sure victory for the forces of the Entente.37 Additionally, these papers frequently referenced the principle of ‘never against the British fleet’ (a long-standing cornerstone of Italian foreign policy that some observers have claimed outweighed the clauses of the Triple Alliance). Finally, the interventionist press as a whole vehemently cast the conflict as a ‘fourth war of independence’ (quarta guerra di indipendenza) and the ‘final chapter of Italian unification’ (ultimo capitolo del Risorgimento), as summarised on the front page of the 24 May edition of Corriere della Sera.38 According to Albertini, it was this resounding call that had induced the country to stand with the other exalted peoples. The pact that binds us to other peoples is not a market: it is an oath, against the common enemy. The treaty of London, which ties peoples to the same hard trials and the same sure hopes, is the oath of Pontida many centuries later. (Il patto che ci lega agli altri popoli non è un mercato: è un giuramento, di contro al nemico comune. Il patto di Londra, che stringe i popoli alle stesse dure prove e alle stesse sicure speranze, è, dopo molti secoli, il giuramento di Pontida.)39 Five days earlier, the newspaper had proclaimed that: By entering into war, we defend what we are and what we have against a greater danger of diminishment and mortification [. . .] A war of peoples, for the peoples’ peace, a war of national and human defence. (Noi difendiamo, entrando in guerra, ciò che siamo e ciò che abbiamo, contro un maggiore pericolo di diminuzione e di mortificazione [. . .] Guerra di popoli, per la pace dei popoli, come una guerra di difesa nazionale e umana.)40

Frassati’s Solitude: Unwavering Neutrality at La Stampa In a climate of intensified emphasis on war and heightened patriotic rhetoric, the liberal newspapers still faithful to the neutralist perspective included La Tribuna in Rome, the Corriere mercantile (1824–2015) in Genoa, Il Mattino (1892–) in Naples and La Stampa in Turin.41 Of these, the latter played a truly central role in part due to its wide circulation and the unquestionable prestige of its editor Alfredo Frassati (1869–1961). Unlike Albertini, whose background included significant professional experience in Great Britain, Frassati had spent three years in Germany continuing his

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university studies and engaging with the country’s tradition of regional journalism. In 1894 he became co-owner of the company that published La Stampa and five years later was appointed its editor. From that moment on, he strove to transform the newspaper into a laboratory, equipping it with all the modern technology and producing capable professionals. In just a few years he managed to reach a circulation of over 100,000 that then grew to 170,000–200,000 in the early post-war years.42 Frassati’s newspaper took various stances in the country’s ten months of neutrality, due largely to the influence of Rome-based correspondent Benedetto Cirmeni (1854–1935), who was closely allied with Giolitti and who signed his articles with the initial ‘C’. Analysing these positions, we see repeated invitations to use neutrality to obtain territorial advantages and suggestions that the country avoid meddling in a conflict whose outcome was considered particularly uncertain for various reasons, including Italy’s military unpreparedness. This position certainly did not ensure the newspaper’s peaceful existence. On the contrary, it soon fell under so much crossfire from the most extreme fringes of the interventionist front – especially young people – that its headquarters were often targeted by attackers throwing eggs, potatoes and stones. Frassati himself was the victim of verbal assaults and even faced harsh criticism from his own newspaper team, as voiced by detractors such as editor and nationalist deputy Giuseppe Bevione. Between July 1914 and May 1915 La Stampa took dozens of neutralist stances.43 An editorial published by Frassati on 19 August 1914 was particularly important in terms of its timing and content. It became a sort of line of action for the newspaper leading up to Italy’s entry into the war.44 The editorial basically called for an attentive and active neutralism enacted through diplomatic channels based on a realpolitik that was foreign to purely ideal principles.45 Indeed, Frassati advocated for a ‘cunning and mysterious’ (astuta e misteriosa) diplomacy with the ‘enigmatic face of a sphinx’ (volto enigmatico di una sfinge) resistant to any possible ‘Franciscan offer of blood or money’ (nessuna offerta francescana del nostro sangue e del nostro denaro).46 As mentioned above, with the passage of time and in the face of increasingly vociferous nationalist propaganda, this position became more and more difficult to maintain.47 Yet La Stampa held it forcefully until the end, even when almost all the other national newspapers were convinced that the government had decided to enter the conflict. As late as 11 May 1915, Frassati’s newspaper instead reiterated that the matter was not yet settled: ‘Those who, for mysterious reasons, are saying that it is too late to accept Austria’s territorial offers are wrong, very wrong. It is never too late to avoid the terrible scourge of war’ (Hanno perciò torto, grande torto, coloro i quali, non si sa perché, vanno dicendo che è troppo tardi per accettare le offerte territoriali dell’Austria. Non è mai tardi per evitare il terribile flagello della guerra).48 The newspaper proposed the same concepts the following day in an article recalling that parliament, ‘in its great majority’ (nella sua grande maggioranza), was still ‘in favour of reaching a solution through agreements’ (favorevole ad una soluzione per via d’accordi) and that the government had the ‘sacred duty to consult the Chambers before throwing the country into the dreadful conflict’ (sacrosanto dovere di consultare le Camere prima di gettare il Paese nell’immane conflitto).49 As scholars have shown, what actually occurred was the opposite: the foreign minister Sonnino had already communicated to the other signatory states on 4 May that Italy was withdrawing from the Triple Alliance. Five days later, Prime Minister

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Salandra had a conversation with the king in which he offered to resign and claimed that the commitment Italy had undertaken under the London Treaty was still ‘only political’ and thus could be revoked. Formally unaware of the Treaty, on 10 May the majority of parliamentarians resolved against intervention and in favour of negotiations aimed at obtaining territorial concessions from the Central Empires. In the meantime, while approximately three hundred deputies and one hundred senators went to leave their business cards outside Giolitti’s house as a sign of agreement with the line of action he had outlined, Salandra decided to resign. La Stampa interpreted these developments as ‘the triumph’ of a strategy that the paper had pursued almost wholly on its own to save Italy ‘from the disaster of war’ (dalla sciagura della guerra).50 However, the paper’s enthusiasm the day after the event proved premature. In the end, the line that prevailed was the one conceived by the Crown and government leaders, pressured by interventionist rallies and newspaper coverage. The Turin-based newspaper was forced to admit its defeat the following day, emphasising the role that the world of journalism had played: Everyone, not one excluded: the great majority of the Chamber of deputies is against it, the Senate is against it. Who then has the right to represent Italy? Who has the right to look after its fate, to watch over its destiny if not the majority of them [representatives]? [. . .] Should the governing of Italy be entrusted to journalists and interventionists? What right do they have? (Tutti, nessuno escluso: contraria la grande maggioranza della Camera, contrario il Senato. Ma chi dunque ha il diritto di rappresentare l’Italia? Ma chi ha il diritto di curare le sue sorti, di essere vigile sui suoi destini se non la maggioranza di costoro? [. . .] Il governo d’Italia deve essere affidato ai giornalisti e agli interventisti? Con quale diritto?)51 In the end, the king decided to confirm Salandra’s mandate with the official motivation that no other valid candidates were available. This move allowed the government to avoid engaging in a difficult parliamentary debate which, if it ended in an unfavourable vote, would have forced the king finally to accept Salandra’s resignation. Having made a binding commitment at the international level without informing parliament, the government and the Crown were thus able to avoid violating their commitments to their new allies. It is certainly difficult to establish the real reasons behind Frassati’s unwavering position on the war up until the eve of the conflict (a testimony attributed to his daughter Luciana describes him as being in tears on 24 May, overwhelmed by the awareness that a war, even a victorious one, represented the country’s ‘ruin’).52 Certainly, his ideals and political agreement with Giolitti played a role, as did his conviction that the highest hope for Italy’s future continued to be the protection of a strong international alliance, combined with the fact that, at that time, the alliance with Austria was the most promising: Italy certainly had many disagreements with Austria, but it was a less dangerous power than France. At the same time, he probably believed that the country’s best interests lay in continuing to pursue a Mediterranean political space through agreement among the Central Empires, as had occurred at the time of the Libyan War. To follow this political line of expansion into the Mediterranean (rather than into the

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Balkans, the direction the king and Salandra chose on the eve of the London Treaty), the country had to operate within a system of agreements that kept France at bay and prevented the possibility of one day facing it without the support of strong allies.53 There were also other equally relevant potential reasons, including Frassati’s belief that Italy was wholly unprepared for war and that General Luigi Cadorna (1850–1928), appointed Army Chief of Staff after the sudden death of the better-liked General Alberto Pollio (1852–1914), was completely unsuitable for such a difficult task. The fact that Frassati did not appreciate Cadorna, in no small part because they held profoundly different views on the country’s strategic positioning, can be deduced from a highly explicit editorial published on 9 July, before the general was chosen as Pollio’s successor.54 Two days after the article was published, Luigi Cadorna was appointed as the new Army Chief of Staff; later, at the end of the war, Frassati referred to this nomination explicitly and critically: Appointing him, an old candidate, removed problems and avoided discussion. It did not matter that all the previous ministries had repeatedly rejected Cadorna, in Italy and Africa, from any position of trust. Mediocre governments are governed by no other criterion than expediency and inertia [. . .] Thus Luigi Cadorna was appointed Chief of Staff of the Italian army on 10 July 1914, on the eve of the greatest war that has ever stained the world with blood [. . .] Bureaucratic pedantry had kept the man afloat when he should have fallen into oblivion. (Nominare lui, antico candidato, toglieva noie, evitava discussioni. Né certo nuoceva al Cadorna l’essere stato costantemente scartato da qualsiasi incarico di fiducia, in Italia e in Africa, da tutti i precedenti Ministeri. I Governi mediocri non si regolano con altro criterio che della opportunità e dell’inerzia [. . .] Così Luigi Cadorna fu il 10 luglio 1914, alla vigilia della più grande guerra che abbia insanguinato il mondo [. . .] nominato Capo dello Stato Maggiore italiano. Una pedanteria burocratica aveva tenuto a galla l’uomo quando doveva precipitare nell’oblio.)55 In conclusion, as a result of various political, diplomatic, strategic, military and even personal reasons, Frassati found himself in the uncomfortable position of presiding over the pro-Giolitti editorial front between July 1914 and May 1915. Finally, on 21 May 1915, he acknowledged his definitive political defeat and aligned himself with the choices of the government: The die is cast. The supreme hour has come. We are facing a new state of existence, and it entails only one duty: discipline. Before the path had been marked, it was not only citizens’ right but also their duty to educate public opinion [. . .] We would have betrayed our readers and our consciences if we had kept silent [. . .] Today, discussion and criticism ceases to be legitimate for all Italians; this is true for us as well. (Il dado è tratto. L’ora suprema è giunta. Ci sta innanzi una nuova condizione di esistenza, ed essa non comporta che un solo dovere: la disciplina. Prima che la via fosse segnata, era non solo diritto, ma dovere del cittadino illuminare la pubblica

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opinione [. . .] Avremmo tradito i nostri lettori e le nostre coscienze se avessimo taciuto [. . .] Oggi cessa per tutti gli italiani la legittimità della discussione e della critica; cessa anche per noi.)56 But, although the die had been cast, in the background there continued to be a staggering gap between the interventionist front and the views of the silent majority, the majority that had suffered through the warmongering zeal of the radiant days of May without managing to counter it.

Conclusion Like all media, newspapers are double-edged instruments: on the one hand, they provide a snapshot of orientations, perceptions and (political, social, cultural) climates; on the other, they contribute to determining these climates, becoming living actors, producing history as well as documenting it. It was precisely this second aspect that prevailed in the months preceding Italy’s entry into the First World War. By setting the terms of the debate, interventionist newspapers contributed to directing the outcome of a challenge that could potentially have proved lethal to them and their position. By setting themselves up as representatives of the dynamic, healthy and productive part of the nation, they succeeded in setting fire to the mood of the masses. Their appeals to the many Italians still labouring under the Austrian yoke to return to their homeland, framing the war as a necessary step to ensure a prominent future for Italy, and the ‘bloodbath’ young people were asked to participate in as a necessary step for regenerating a people dulled by Giolitti’s inertia proved emotionally engaging.57 The neutralist press, especially the Catholic and socialist papers, were not successful in presenting other, equally effective appeals. Additionally, the interventionist press had an easy job accusing the liberal Giolittian and neutralist press of ‘bargaining’ for the country’s future without ever risking their own honour. A number of powerful entrepreneurs – along with the publishers of large liberal papers – also played an important role in these dynamics. They were convinced that the war would represent an excellent opportunity both to do business and to rid themselves of a politician whose social, political, electoral and labour reforms had risked placing them at the mercy of an ever more ‘unruly’ labour movement. In short, many national newspapers (supported by their respective industrialist publishers) took on a heavy responsibility in the eyes of the country. With the few exceptions mentioned above, they ended up acting as an echo chamber, amplifying tendencies and moods initially only held by a minority but which were soon interpreted by those in the country who actually ‘read’ and really ‘counted’ as more politically persuasive and morally just. As I have tried to show, one of the more exemplary cases was Corriere della Sera. On 20 December 1915 General Cadorna himself commented that he expected this paper to make an essential contribution to keeping the country’s public spirit ‘high and straight’ (elevato e diritto).58 According to the intellectual Gaetano Salvemini (1873–1957), who had close ties to democratic interventionism, Italian intervention would never have materialised if newspapers such as Albertini’s had not sided with the interventionist front.59 The brief, anguished letter Albertini sent to his wife Piera Giacosa on 30 July 1914 shows that he was well aware of this ‘tremendous responsibility’ (tremenda responsabilità) deriving from a demonstrated influence on public opinion.60

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Notes   1. Multiple studies have confirmed this point. To cite some of the most recent, see, for example, Fulvio Cammarano, ed., Abbasso la guerra! Neutralisti in piazza alla vigilia della Prima guerra mondiale in Italia (Florence: Le Monnier, 2015); Giovanni Orsina and Andrea Ungari, eds, L’Italia neutrale. 1914–1915 (Rome: Rodorigo, 2016); and especially Brunello Vigezzi’s chapter in that volume, ‘L’Italia del 1914–’15 e la crisi del sistema liberale’, 11–26. The volume L’Italia neutrale (Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1966) by the same author is also fundamental.   2. ‘Chi si vuole ingannare?’, La Stampa, 15 May 1915, 1.   3. On this point, see Mario Isnenghi, ‘Luigi Albertini e la guerra del “Corriere della Sera”’, in Albertini, Carandini. Una pagina della storia d’Italia, ed. Oddone Longo (Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienza, lettere ed arti, 2005), 11; Lorenzo Benadusi, Il Corriere della Sera di Luigi Albertini. Nascita e sviluppo della prima industria culturale di massa (Rome: Aracne, 2012), 239–43.   4. See Vigezzi, L’Italia neutrale, 204.   5. Franco Gaeta, ed., La stampa nazionalista (Rocca San Casciano: Cappelli, 1965), 81.   6. Benito Mussolini, ‘Abbasso la guerra!’, Avanti!, 26 July 1914, 1.  7. See, for example, Ernesto Cesare Longobardi, ‘Contro la guerra e contro la Triplice’, Avanti!, 1 August 1914, 3; and Francesco Ciccotti, ‘In memoria della Triplice’, Avanti!, 4 August 1914, 2.   8. Luciana Giacheri Fossati and Nicola Tranfaglia, ‘La stampa quotidiana dalla Grande guerra al fascismo, 1914–1922’, in La stampa italiana nell’età liberale, ed. Valerio Castronovo, Luciana Giacheri Fossati and Nicola Tranfaglia (Rome–Bari: Laterza, 1979), 247–8.   9. Giuseppe Bevione, ‘Neutralità armata’, L’Idea nazionale, 6 August 1914, 1. 10. Benito Mussolini, ‘Dalla neutralità assoluta alla neutralità attiva ed operante’, Avanti!, 18 October 1914, 3. 11. Mauro Forno, ‘La stampa dentro la guerra’, in Dizionario storico della Prima guerra mondiale, ed. Nicola Labanca (Rome–Bari: Laterza, 2014), 323–32. 12. Some of these industrial groups were directly or indirectly enjoying the benefits and promises made at that time by both the countries belonging to the Entente and those belonging to the Alliance, and sought to direct the choices of the Italian govenment in their favour. See, for example, Valerio Castronovo, ‘La storia economica’, in Storia d’Italia, vol. 1, ed. Ruggero Romano and Corrado Vivanti (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), 201–6; Alessia Pedio, Costruire l’immaginario fascista. Gli inviati del Popolo d’Italia alla scoperta dell’altrove 1922–1943 (Turin: Zamorani, 2013), 17–24. 13. Mauro Forno, ‘Il Popolo d’Italia’, in Gli Italiani in guerra. Conflitti, identità, memorie dal Risorgimento ai nostri giorni, vol. 4, ed. Mario Isnenghi and Giulia Albanese (Turin: Utet, 2008), 792–3. 14. Ombretta Freschi, ‘Il Secolo XIX’. Un giornale e una città (Rome–Bari: Laterza, 2005), 147–84. 15. Andrea Torre, ‘Di fronte alla grande guerra. Attesa e preparazione’, Corriere della Sera, 27 August 1914, 1. 16. Letter by Luigi Albertini to Antonio Salandra, Milan, 31 August 1914, in Luigi Albertini, Epistolario 1911–1926, vol. 1, ed. Ottavio Barié (Milan: Mondadori, 1968), 272–3. 17. Regarding Corriere della Sera and Luigi Albertini, in addition to the older work by Glauco Licata, Storia del ‘Corriere della Sera’ (Milan: Rizzoli, 1976), see the more recent volumes by Simona Colarizi, Il ‘Corriere’ nell’età liberale (Milan: Rizzoli, 2011), and Lorenzo Benadusi, Documenti 1900–1925 (Milan: Rizzoli–Fondazione Corriere della Sera, 2011). Regarding Albertini, see Ottavio Barié, Luigi Albertini (Turin: Utet, 1972). 18. Colarizi, Il ‘Corriere’, 218–19.

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19. Alberto Bergamini, ‘L’anno storico della nuova Italia: 1915’, Il Giornale d’Italia, 1 January 1915, 1. 20. ‘Parole chiare dell’on. Giolitti’, La Tribuna, 2 February 1915, 1. 21. Giancarlo Tartaglia, Il giornale è il mio amore. Alberto Bergamini inventore del giornalismo moderno (Rome: All Around, 2018); see also ‘Il dovere degli italiani’, Il Giornale d’Italia, 14 February 1915, 1. 22. ‘Illusioni funeste’, Il Giornale d’Italia, 17 April 1915, 1. 23. ‘Premesse per l’intervento’, Corriere della Sera, 11 April 1915, 2. 24. ‘Il momento delle decisioni supreme’, Corriere della Sera, 8 May 1915, 1. 25. ‘L’inganno del parecchio’, Corriere della Sera, 13 May 1915, 1. 26. Francesco Coppola, ‘Il Parlamento contro l’Italia’, L’Idea nazionale, 15 May 1915, 1. 27. Benito Mussolini, ‘Abbasso il Parlamento!’, Il Popolo d’Italia, 11 May 1915, 1. 28. ‘L’unica soluzione’, Corriere della Sera, 15 May 1915, 1. 29. ‘Coscienza’, Corriere della Sera, 16 May 1915, 1. 30. For example, this was the case with Filippo Meda and Father Agostino Gemelli. On 30 March 1915 Father Gemelli, who was tied to moderate clerical groups and the Catholic right, wrote in the magazine Vita e Pensiero that Catholics were neither neutralists nor interventionists, but only ‘Italiani’, and that, when faced with the decisions of the government, they were certainly ready to stay silent and obey; see Gabriele De Rosa, ‘I cattolici’, in Il trauma dell’intervento. 1914–1919, ed. Alberto Caracciolo (Florence: Vallecchi, 1968), 174–6. 31. See Alberto Monticone, Gli italiani in uniforme 1915–1918 (Bari: Laterza, 1972), 67–72, 81–2, 162. On 12 February 1915, in a confidential dispatch to the apostolic nuncio in Madrid (though an analogous dispatch was also sent to the nuncio in Bavaria), the Vatican Secretary of State Pietro Gasparri noted that ‘just as masonic and demagogic elements incite war for anti-clerical and pro-monarchical purposes, so a possible failure to intervene would represent an easy pretext to provoke popular uprisings for the same purposes’ (gli elementi massonici e demagogici, come eccitano alla guerra per scopi anticlericali ed filomonarchici, così di un eventuale mancato intervento trarrebbero facile pretesto per provocare sommosse popolari ai medesimi fini); see Archivio Segreto Vaticano, ‘SdS, Guerra anno 1914–18, r. 244, f. 70’. 32. ‘Cattolici al posto’, Avvenire d’Italia, 23 May 1915, 1. 33. ‘Lo sciopero dei tramvieri interprovinciali’, Avanti!, 23 May 1915, 4. 34. On 20 May 1915 the socialist party periodical specified that the socialists’ neutrality had nothing in common with Giolitti’s neutrality; see Luca Antonio Tosi Bellucci, ‘La nostra neutralità’, Avanti!, 20 May 1915, 1. 35. See Luigi Scoppola Iacopini, ‘Guerra e pace. Il Partito socialista italiana nei dieci mesi della neutralità’, in Orsina and Ungari, eds, L’Italia neutrale, 165–78; and Giovanni Scirocco, ‘Il neutralismo socialista’, in Cammarano, ed., Abbasso la guerra!, 41–55. 36. ‘L’anima neutrale’, Il Secolo, 26 January 1915, 1. 37. See Emilio Gramegna, ‘La banca e la fucina. La Grande Guerra e le immagini delle nazioni come potenze economiche nelle pagine del Corriere della Sera’, in Milano in guerra 1914–1918. Opinione pubblica e immagini delle nazioni nel primo conflitto mondiale, ed. Alceo Riosa (Milan: Unicopli, 1997), in particular 71–85. See also ‘La propaganda degli interventisti’, Corriere della Sera, 16 April 1915, 1. 38. ‘Guerra!’, Corriere della Sera, 24 May 1915, 1. 39. ‘Guerra!’, Corriere della Sera, 24 May 1915, 1. 40. ‘Guerra di difesa’, Corriere della Sera, 19 May 1915, 1. 41. See Guido Ratti, Il Corriere Mercantile di Genova dall’Unità al fascismo 1861–1925 (Parma: Guanda, 1973), 188–97; Francesco Barbagallo, ‘Il Mattino’ degli Scarfoglio 1892–1928 (Milan: Guanda, 1979).

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42. Valerio Castronovo, La stampa italiana dall’Unità al fascismo (Rome–Bari: Laterza, 1995), 228–9. These circulation numbers were quite significant if we consider that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, there were still very few Italian newspapers whose sales exceeded 100,000 copies. 43. In addition to the issues of La Stampa from that period, see also the documents presented in Valerio Castronovo, La Stampa 1867–1925. Un’idea di democrazia liberale (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1987), 207–25; and Luciana Frassati, Un uomo, un giornale. Alfredo Frassati (1868–1961), vol. 1 (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1978), 111–68. 44. ‘Neutralità, ma con “le mani nette”’, La Stampa, 19 August 1914, 1. 45. See also Castronovo, La Stampa italiana, 214; Frassati, Un uomo, un giornale, 124–5. 46. ‘Non svalutiamoci!’, La Stampa, 23 December 1914, 1. 47. Castronovo, La Stampa italiana, 230. 48. ‘Giolitti ha riconfermato il suo programma. L’Italia è sempre libera di scegliere la sua via’, La Stampa, 11 May 1915, 1. 49. ‘Il dovere del Ministero’, La Stampa, 12 May 1915, 1. Again on 13 May, the newspaper defined ‘the show’ (lo spettacolo) that the interventionists were staging as ‘the least political thing’ (quanto di meno politico) a part of the country could express; see ‘Questione di coscienza’ and ‘Più di 300 deputati aderiscono alla tesi dell’on Giolitti’, La Stampa, 13 May 1915, 1. 50. ‘La soluzione’, La Stampa, 14 May 1915, 1. 51. ‘Chi si vuole ingannare?’, La Stampa, 15 May 1915, 1. 52. Frassati, Un uomo, un giornale, 168. 53. ‘Albertini e Frassati: il peso dell’opinione regionale alla vigilia dell’intervento’, in Opinion publique et politique extérieure en Europe, 1870–1915, Actes du Colloque de Rome, 13–16 February 1980 (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1981), 598–604; see also ‘La pregiudiziale’, La Stampa, 20 March 1915, 1. 54. ‘Per la scelta del nuovo capo di Stato Maggiore’, La Stampa, 9 July 1914, 1. 55. ‘Come ci avviammo a Caporetto. La scelta del Capo di Stato Maggiore’, La Stampa, 29 July 1919, 1. 56. ‘Tutti uniti!’, La Stampa, 21 May 1915, 1. 57. Alberto Mario Banti, Storia della borghesia italiana. L’età liberale (Rome: Donzelli, 1996), 331. 58. Simona Colarizi, ‘Prefazione’, in Il direttore e il generale. Carteggio Albertini-Cadorna 1915–1928, ed. Andrea Guiso (Milan: Fondazione Corriere della Sera, 2014), 10. 59. Colarizi, Il Corriere, 222. 60. Ottavio Barié, Luigi Albertini (Turin: Utet, 1972), 291–2.

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16 The Armenian Genocide Claire Mouradian

T

he Armenian genocide of 1915–16 was known in real time and reported live, often on the front pages of the press, throughout the world: in European countries at war, in neutral countries, in areas at the heart of the conflict, as well as further away, from the United States to Japan and Australia, from South America to India. Moreover, it was very early on perceived for what it was – a planned genocide – even if the term was coined only two decades later by Raphael Lemkin, who remembered that the Armenian case had preceded the Holocaust.1 The international press, as well as various publications and diplomats’ reports, used equivalent terms such as ‘murder of a nation’.2 This chapter examines how information on and eyewitness accounts of the Armenian genocide managed to evade Turkish censors and reach the wider world, and explores how the European and American press reported on the atrocities through text and image. The chapter provides important nuances to the question of the agency of the press in wartime, arguing that ample coverage led to very little in the end: no European country intervened and the genocide quickly faded from view after the Armistice.

All Was Not Quiet on the Eastern Front As early as 2 August 1914, the Young Turk government concluded a secret military alliance with Germany, before it entered the war on the side of the Central Powers on 29 October by attacking Russian ports on the Black Sea. For the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP), the war appeared as an opportunity to get rid of the hold of the Great Powers over the region, symbolised by the Capitulations, the Ottoman Public Debt Administration and above all else by the continuing interference in favour of better governance and equal rights for non-Muslim minorities. The war was also seen as the right moment to take revenge for Russian expansion in the Balkans and the Caucasus, and to find a ‘final solution’ to the Armenian Question, now a part of the Eastern Question, since the Congress of Berlin of 1878 had stipulated reforms to ensure the protection of the Armenian population from abuses by Kurdish and Circassian tribes.3 In fact it only ensured increased oppression and violence, with no more response than agitation and verbal protests by chancelleries in the face of mass killings. At the end of 1912, when Turkey had just lost its European territory after its disastrous defeat in the Balkans, the question of reforms on behalf of the Ottoman Armenians arose again on the initiative of Russian diplomacy, in the midst of increased rumours about the partition of Asiatic Turkey. In February 1914, after months of negotiations between the future belligerents, an agreement was finally reached, but war started before it could be implemented.4

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Gravedigger of empires, the First World War was to sound the death knell of Ottoman power. It sealed the fate of the Armenians located on both sides of the Caucasian front, but also of rival expansionist ideologies on the battlefield – panTuranism, pan-Slavism, pan-Germanism, and French and British imperialisms. The eradication of the Armenians from their homeland where their presence went back nearly three millennia formed part of a continuing process of discrimination and violence under three different regimes, from the last decades of the Ottoman Empire to the dawn of the Turkish Republic. The genocide followed the mass massacres of the Hamidian period (1894–6) and of Adana (April 1909) in the months following the Young Turk Revolution (July 1908). In the short term, the genocide took place in the context of the Ottoman defeats in the Balkan Wars, which reduced the empire to Anatolia, and when scapegoats were required for the bitter debacle of the ill-prepared offensive at Sarikamish launched by the Minister of War, Enver Pasha (1881–1922), in the heart of the Caucasian winter (December 1914–January 1915).5 Living on both side of the front line, and allegedly protected by the Russian arch enemy, the Armenians were the obvious choice. The formation of small volunteer units on the Russian side, although mostly made up of Russo-Armenian subjects and in no way comparable to the over 60,000 Armenian soldiers who were conscripted and serving dutifully in the Ottoman army, was exploited as ‘proof’ of Armenian ‘treason’.6 After the execution of disarmed soldiers who had been assigned to work battalions in February 1915, and after the arrest and assassination of national elites in Constantinople and other provincial capitals on 24 April, on the eve of the Battle of Gallipoli, it was the turn of the civilian population. The massacres and deportations started in eastern provinces in the spring and summer of 1915 and then moved to western provinces in the summer and autumn. The so-called provisional ‘Relocation and Resettlement Law’ (Sevk ve Iskân Kanunu) of 27 May 1915 legalised the deportation already underway of the entire Armenian population, supposedly away from the war zones towards resettlement centres.7 In September 1915 the ‘abandoned property’ law legalised spoliation.8 Even conversion to Islam was no longer an option to escape death. Armenians were dragged out of their villages, taken on long death marches towards the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia, rapidly dehumanised by the harassment of the irregulars of the Special Organisation (Teşkilât i-Mahsusa) and of Kurdish Bedouin or Chechen tribes, and finally slaughtered. Women were subjected to the worst atrocities. The survivors were gathered in concentration camps, before being systematically exterminated between April and December 1916. The massacre also extended to the Russian Caucasus and neutral northern Iran during the advances of the Ottoman army. Only the Armenians of Constantinople and Smyrna were relatively spared. While there were only rare cases of resistance, the best-known was that of the Musa Dagh, immortalised in the novel by Franz Werfel.9 A final phase of annihilation of the Armenian population took place in 1920–2, when the survivors who had tried to return to their homes with the support of the victorious Anglo-French forces were driven out by the army of Mustafa Kemal. A prototype of twentieth-century genocides, 1915 had all the components: stigmatisation and dehumanisation of the victims; deportation as the main method of extermination; a context of total war; social Darwinism; and the dictatorship of a revolutionary party-state, mobilising the entire state apparatus and all modern means of

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communication (including telegraphs and railway networks, if they existed), often to the detriment of the war effort, and camouflaging the crime by the use of censorship. It is estimated that two-thirds of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire were wiped out, between 1.2 and 1.5 million victims. The first census of Republican Turkey in 1927 counted only 67,000 Armenians. The survivors, ‘forbidden to return’, now constitute the modern Armenian diaspora.10

Worldwide Coverage, 1915–2015 Already since 1894–6 and the reign of the ‘Red Sultan’ Abdul Hamid II (1842–1918), Armenian massacres had been a recurring topic in the press worldwide. The long litany of atrocities did not stop with the Young Turks’ revolution when the 1909 Adana massacres cast doubt on the new regime. Mass killings had become a cliché when referring to the situation in the Armenian provinces of Anatolia.11 But from the outset, the events of 1915 appeared as a crime unprecedented in its scale and horror, a genuine part of the new ‘total war’ that continued on the Eastern and Caucasian fronts, even after the guns had gone silent in western Europe. At the return of peace in 1918, when the collusion between Kemal and Lenin for the delimitation of their borders in Anatolia and the Caucasus buried the Armenian Question, survivors, mostly women and orphans, were forced into exile and scattered all over the world. In Europe and the United States, the Roaring Twenties erased the memory of Armenian atrocities and other war horrors. After a long eclipse, if not occultation, and despite – or because of – the persisting Turkish state denialism, a new generation of scholars has now relaunched research on the first genocide of the century of genocides.12 Among anti-denialist works, some focus on coverage by the international press as an addition to the documentation offered by archival material.13 In 1980 Richard Kloian pioneered the field with his book The Armenian Genocide: News Accounts from the American Press (1915–1922).14 Various books and articles dealing with the press of a particular country have appeared since then.15 The digitisation of journals by libraries has facilitated the compilation of sources and given access to less-known periodicals of the Swiss, Italian, Arabic, Uruguayan and Japanese press.16 On the occasion of the centenary, in 2015, the Bibliothèque nationale de France published some samples of the French press17 selected from its digitised collections.18 Other samples can be found on dedicated websites.19 The Genocide Museum in Yerevan, the equivalent of Yad Vachem, Israel’s memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, devotes ample space to the press coverage, and its former director, Hayk Demoyan, has compiled an overview of front pages of various international titles.20 Alan Whitehorn published a small summary, ‘Searching for 1915: Newspaper Coverage of the Armenian Genocide’.21 Apart from some new monographs (published in Germany, Poland, Russia and Turkey), the edited volume Mass Media and the Genocide of the Armenians: One Hundred Years of Uncertain Representation offers a reflective contribution to research on the media coverage and iconographic representation of the event.22 One must not forget the Armenian press published in Russia and in the diaspora communities, which also extensively provided or relayed information during the war and after. Even the denialist media of the Ottoman Empire and its German and Austrian allies constitute interesting sources.23

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Iconography of all kinds – photographs, caricatures, drawings, war news movies, etc. – was also important in disseminating news of the genocide.24 These sources need to be treated with care, however, as they are often poorly dated or localised so that it is easy to draw the wrong conclusions (for instance, photographs purporting to be of the genocide may in fact show the Hamidian massacres, the Balkan Wars, or the 1916 famine in Lebanon).25 We also know of at least one example of a radio broadcast: the evocation of the fate of Armenian children by the American rabbi Stephen Wise, when he stressed the importance of the United States participating in the war.26 An exhaustive inventory of media coverage of the genocide and its consequences between 1915 and 1923 is yet to be made. It suffices to recall that for the United States alone, the administrators of a press website created for the centenary counted over 15,000 articles, ranging from news briefs and editorials to full records, such as in issues of National Geographic (1888–) in August and November 1919, or in a March 1918 issue of the Red Cross Magazine (1906–), among dozens of other illustrated newspapers. Certain episodes, such as the rescue of the Musa Dagh by the French navy in September 1915, were the subject of several illustrated and filmed reports.27 The press coverage was extended by numerous associated brochures such as that of the Swiss Relief Committee or by books, the most famous of which is Arnold Toynbee’s Armenian Atrocities: The Murder of a Nation, published in autumn 1915 and translated into several languages, or the Blue Book The Treatment of Armenians by Viscount Bryce and Toynbee.28

Informing Readers Despite Censorship As in other countries at war, the Ottoman Empire introduced strict censorship and organised propaganda even before it officially entered the conflict at the end of October 1914. The signing of a secret military treaty with Germany on 2 August 1914 and mobilisation on 7 August were immediately followed by a tightening of control over the press, initiated by the 1909 press law and reinforced during the Balkan Wars. Opposition journalists were sentenced to prison or exile, and many newspapers were closed down or chose to self-suppress. From the 377 titles circulating in Constantinople in 1908, there were only eighteen left in the capital by 1918. A similar trend can be observed for the provincial press. Those publications that survived could only publish the official dispatches of the Ottoman National Telegraph Agency, often provided by German and Austrian allies, who were at the same time the furnishers of paper (which was in short supply during the war). The slightest criticism of the government’s military or economic policies was obviously forbidden, the difficulties or defeats of the army (such as at Sarikamish in 1914–15 or at Suez in 1915) were concealed, the soldiers’ sacrifices and ‘exploits’ emphatically praised.29 Propaganda, carried out by the Army or Navy Intelligence Services of the General Staff, or by the Ministry of the Interior, shaped public opinion, notably to justify the persecutions against the Armenians and other non-Muslim minorities.30 Censorship and propaganda were not limited to the press, but also extended to private correspondence, images, literature, etc. As in other belligerent countries, nationals of ‘enemy’ countries – including diplomats – were expelled or placed under house arrest. Only nationals of allied or neutral countries could stay in the Ottoman Empire, but they were not exempt from

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surveillance and censorship. Nevertheless, it was through these intermediaries, primarily Swiss, Scandinavian and American nationals (until the entry of the United States into the war in April 1917), that information on the genocide reached the outside world very quickly. Some German and Austrian diplomats and missionaries, horrified by the atrocities and fearing that their countries would be associated with them, also contributed to these efforts, at least by informing their respective governments. In addition, testimonies by Armenian survivors who managed to take refuge in the Russian Caucasus, in Persia and in the Balkans, were systematically collected by Armenian organisations and translated. It is also worth mentioning the testimonies of Turkish and/or Muslim opponents of the dictatorship of the Enver–Jemal– Talaat triumvirate (1913–18), who were forced into exile. And nobody was fooled by the declarations of Ottoman or German representatives who remained in neutral countries. In a way, a statement such as ‘All the reports of Armenian atrocities are pure inventions’, by the German ambassador in Washington, Count von Bernstorff (1862–1939), or stories justifying the allegations of Armenian revolts and attacks against the Ottoman government, contributed to publicising the events.31 Diplomats, missionaries, soldiers, travellers, war reporters, survivors: there was no lack of informants, nor of publications. The American press was undoubtedly where the genocide received the highest media coverage, from the most prestigious national newspapers (such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times) to the modestly circulated local press. On the occasion of the centenary, over 15,000 articles from the American press were digitised. The prominent role of the American ambassador in Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau (1856–1946), who from the very first days of the massacres relentlessly dedicated himself to informing the State Department and intervening with the Turkish authorities, was undoubtedly a major factor in this exceptional coverage and mobilisation of the public. The press in the United Kingdom and France was also very responsive, but more oriented towards war propaganda, with reports focusing on the role of the arch enemy, Germany.

Detailing Atrocities: Text and Image Along with public and private archives, the press provides extensive documentation of the events and attests to the early awareness of their nature. The groundwork had been laid by the previous widespread coverage of the Hamidian massacres in the mid1890s, which had triggered a vast Armenophile movement in Europe and the United States, bringing together the greatest intellectual, moral and political figures of the time: for example, James Bryce, William Gladstone, Theodore Roosevelt, Anatole France, George Clemenceau, Jean Jaures, Charles Péguy.32 A similar mobilisation took place during the Adana massacres of 1909, generally attributed to the dying reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II rather than the new regime. These precedents were regularly, if not systematically, recalled in the press.33 This is also the case for the Declaration of the Triple Entente between Russia, France and the United Kingdom of 24 May 1915, which refers to ‘these new crimes of Turkey against humanity and civilisation’.34 Almost from the start, the terms used to cover the events – in papers such as the London Times (1785–), Melbourne Argus (1846–1957), New York Times (1851–) and Washington Herald (1906–39) – show that there was an early perception of a completely

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different scale of violence in 1915, aimed at the total annihilation of the Armenians: ‘atrocities’, ‘horrors’, ‘extermination of the Armenian race’, ‘war of extermination’, ‘massacre of a nation’, ‘destroying a nation’, ‘systematic slaughter of Armenians’, ‘wiping out the Armenians from the face of the earth’, ‘murdering a people’, ‘greatest crime in history’, etc.35 The articles in the contemporary press dealt in detail with the ‘thousand deaths’ suffered by a population deprived of its very humanity: the Armenians were killed with all kinds of edged weapons (knives, daggers, swords, bayonets), decapitated, hanged, drowned in the sea or rivers, burned alive in churches and villages, starved to death, cruelly tortured or mutilated, even after they had exhaled their last breath. The fate of the women was described at length as they were driven like cattle, raped, converted and married by force, sold at auction, reduced to sexual or domestic slavery, if they were not killed and disembowelled. The press paid equally detailed attention to the fate of the surviving orphans, who wandered on their own, and were often abducted or Turkified in orphanages or ‘adoptive’ families. The litany of atrocities carried out throughout Anatolia, with testimonies coming from all regions, underlines the systematic, methodical planning of the genocide. The scale of the toll repeated from one newspaper to another on the basis of the dispatches of the press agencies of the time – American Associated Press, British Reuters, French Havas and Italian Stefani – contributed to shed light on a ‘pattern’. Already in the first year, the press mentioned a dreadful toll: ‘Over 1,000,000 Armenians had been exiled, of which three-quarters were killed or enslaved by the Turks.’36 And yet the slaughter was to be carried on in 1916 and 1917. Some articles provided more local but equally monstrous data: for Trebizond (now Trabzon), the Red Cross representative indicated that when the Russian troops entered the city in the spring of 1916, out of 8,343 inhabitants in the forty-five surrounding villages, only 367 survivors were found, while in Trebizond itself, less than 100 out of 10,000 inhabitants remained. War reporters provided more data. The Australian C. E. W. Bean (1879–1968), for example, who followed ANZAC troops to Gallipoli, collected testimonies from Armenian prisoners of war enlisted in the Ottoman army. These testimonies show that, in addition to being assigned to labour battalions, a well-known fate, Armenians were underfed and used as cannon fodder in the front line against the ANZACs.37 Other journalists gave various eyewitness accounts, such as the wife of an English doctor in Beirut who witnessed the Urfa massacres, or missionaries reporting the annihilation of their flocks and the destruction of their lifelong humanitarian work.38 Many articles are devoted to rescue attempts and humanitarian aid, not only in 1915 but throughout the war and into the early 1920s, typically beginning with reminders of the atrocities suffered by the Armenian people.39 They are often accompanied by rare photographs of corpses along the roads, mass graves discovered by the Russian army when it advanced into Anatolia in 1916, concentration camps in the deserts of Syria, or later refugees and orphans amassed in the Caucasus or the Near East. The fundraising campaigns of humanitarian associations, from the Red Cross to specific organisations such as the American Near East Relief Foundation created at the time or the Armenian aid societies, also used images to raise awareness. The slogan ‘Starving Armenians’ was illustrated by photographs as well as by a whole range of orientalist imagery in posters and advertisements. This motto was used in programmes such as the ‘Children’s Crusade’ launched by the Near East Relief Foundation with the support of Nestlé and the commitment of actor Jackie Coogan (1914–84), Charlie Chaplin’s adopted son in The

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Kid, for the benefit of Armenian and Greek orphans. Coogan’s 1922 tour of the United States and Europe was widely publicised in the press and news movies.40 So was the first Hollywood film on the subject, Ravished Armenia or Auction of Souls (1919), based on the story of a young survivor, Aurora Mardiganian (1901–94). The film was screened in the 1920s in the United States, Europe and as far away as Australia.41 The post-war period provided further opportunities to remember the genocide: the peace conferences at Versailles and Sèvres, where the question of sanctions and reparations was raised; the Constantinople court-martial trials of Young Turk criminals, set up in 1919–20 by the Ottoman armistice government, before Mustafa Kemal put a stop to them;42 the trial of Soghomon Tehlirian (1896–1960), who executed Talaat Pasha in Berlin in March 1921;43 the attempt to create an Armenian home under French mandate in Cilicia; the fall of the Russian Empire and the proclamation of ephemeral independent republics in the Caucasus, among them Armenia, where many of the survivors had taken refuge. Alexandropol (then Leninakan, today Gumri) became a city of orphans, with thousands of children in the care of the Near East Relief Foundation.44

Stereotypes and Denialism The fate of the Armenians, at the global, regional and local levels, was thus known in real time and widely publicised in the press and other media. The exception is Germany, where the facts were denied and the Armenians were accused of deceit, greed, disloyalty, treachery and armed revolt.45 Themes of denial and stigmatisation were combined with antisemitic prejudice.46 The Entente media, too, were not always exempt from this kind of prejudice. The horrors suffered by the Armenians were indeed denounced in very empathetic terms. But the emphasis was often placed on the enemy’s barbarity, and more specifically, German barbarity and culpability (Figure 16.1). The sworn enemy was more indicted and vilified than Turkey, perhaps because the ‘barbarity’ of the latter was considered a self-evident natural characteristic. The Young Turks were vilified above all for being loyal allies of pan-Germanists. Some German missionaries and diplomats in Turkey, horrified by the atrocities, tried to draw the attention of their authorities to the attempts by the Young Turk government itself to deflect the blame on to Berlin, an opinion sometimes embraced by the Turkish population. They feared that this would only add fuel to the Entente’s mockery of German ‘gross Kultur’. At the same time, German censors strove to spare their ally from criticism for strategic purposes in time of war, thus encouraging accusations about the responsibility of Germany.47 The cartoons in the Entente press sum up the customary association between the Kaiser and the Sultan. The victims were not spared from orientalist clichés either, as is clear, for example, from images on the covers of two popular Parisian newspapers, Le Petit Journal (1863–1944) and Le Petit Parisien (1876–1944), long before 1915 (Figures 16.2, 16.3, 16.4). The evolution in the titles for these cover images, between 1895 and 1915, indicates the growing awareness of a wholesale murderous policy against the Armenians. These images, among other examples lifted from the French press, provide examples of two particular clichés. First, they were often tinged with sexualising fantasies about the harem, slave markets, rapes, etc. This is all the more so because most of the survivors were women. One can also see this in humanitarian relief campaigns or in celebrations

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Figure 16.1  ‘The Apostles of “Gott”’ (Les Apôtres du ‘Gott’). Front cover of Le Rire rouge, Paris, 23 October 1915. The phrase ‘Gott mit Uns’ crowns the figures of the sovereigns of the Triple Alliance: from left to right, German Kaiser Wilhelm II, Austro–Hungarian Emperor Franz–Josef I and Ottoman Sultan Mehmed. The image is by Charles Lucien Léandre.

Figure 16.2  ‘The Events of Turkey. A Massacre of Armenians by Kurds’ (Les événements de Turquie. Un massacre d’Arméniens par les Kurdes). Front page of an illustrated supplement to Le Petit Parisien, Paris, 17 November 1895.

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Figure 16.3  ‘Massacres of Christians in Turkey’ (Massacres de chrétiens en Turquie). Front page of an illustrated supplement to Le Petit Journal, Paris, 2 May 1909. The image is by Eugène Damblans.

Figure 16.4  ‘The Massacres in Armenia’ (Les massacres d’Arménie). Back cover of an illustrated supplement to Le Petit Journal, Paris, 12 December 1915. Two columns in the issue are dedicated to the history of the Armenian Question from Sultan Abdulhamid II to the present.

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of the ‘protection’ by the Russians. Second, they often placed an emphasis on religion, reviving the image of the martyrdom of Christians thrown to the beasts in the Roman arenas. Many headlines refer to the massacre of Christians, an all-encompassing term that could refer to other persecuted ‘Christians’ (Greeks, Assyro-Chaldeans) but that was mostly used as the equivalent of ‘Armenians’. Here the memory of the massacres under the aegis of the pan-Islamist Abdul Hamid II played a major factor. One must not forget that many of the witnesses and informants were missionaries. The emphasis on alleged Turkish backwardness and a kind of archaic struggle of the Crescent against the Cross, together with the use of mainstream exotic iconography, tended to obscure the modern nationalist dimension of the Young Turks’ social Darwinist project, the dual purpose of which was to eradicate the Armenian population from its historical territory and to Turkify what remained of the Ottoman Empire after the loss of the Balkans and African territories. Among the more fine-tuned analyses, one can distinguish Arnold J. Toynbee’s (1889–1975), who foresaw, with a historian’s approach, the radical nationalist dimension of the Young Turks’ plan as early as the autumn of 1915, when the genocide was still under way.

Conclusion It is evident that the media coverage of the Armenian genocide was extensive, almost universal, both throughout the war years and beyond. In the mid-1920s the genocide began to fade from view with the ‘final solution’ to the Armenian Question: the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) had given birth to the Turkish Republic out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire and the unburied corpses of its Armenian and other Christian populations, while the recognition of Soviet rule by Britain (1922) and France (1924) brought back the nations of the tsarist empire into the Russian orbit, thus putting an end to the dreams of an independent, reunited and free Armenia. At the end of the day, the shared purpose of both Kemalists and Bolsheviks to remove the Western powers from their area of influence, the realpolitik of trade and the ‘fatigue’ of war and its sufferings all contributed to the forced disappearance of an event that can be seen in retrospect as central to the First World War. It remains an essential part of European and world history and served as the prototype for other genocides to come. Full knowledge of the events, through the press, did not lead to action. This raises important questions about the press and public opinion, and about the reception of information concerning a remote country, particularly in Europe, which was experiencing a hecatomb on its own soil. It was perhaps in neutral countries, such as the United States, Scandinavia and Switzerland, which were not directly impacted by the brutality of the war and which had a greater philanthropic tradition, that the press coverage had a greater impact. In the 1970s and 1980s the memory of the ‘starving Armenians’ was still vivid for some older Americans who recalled the much-mediatised Near East Relief action – as I experienced myself, in 1975, on a visit to my friend’s grandmother in California, who was about thirty years old at the time of the genocide. On the other side, in Europe, Hitler could say on the eve of the attack on Poland in 1939: ‘Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?’ (Wer redet heute noch von der Vernichtung der Armenier), thus demonstrating that there are clear limits to remembrance.48

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Notes   1. Cf. Vartkes Yeghiayan, Raphael Lemkin’s Dossier on the Armenian Genocide, with a foreword by Michael J. Bazyler (Glendale, CA: Center of Armenian Genocide Remembrance, 2008); Annette Becker, Messagers du désastre, Raphael Lemkin, Ian Karski et les génocides (Paris: Fayard, 2018).   2. Arnold J. Toynbee, Armenian Atrocities: The Murder of a Nation (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1915).  3. For a synthesis, see Richard G. Hovannisian, ‘The Historical Dimension of the Armenian Question, 1878–1923’, in The Armenian Genocide in Perspective, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1986), 10–42.  4. Cf. Roderic H. Davison, ‘The Armenian Crisis, 1912–1914’, The American Historical Review 53, no. 3 (1948): 483–505; and Hans-Lukas Kieser, Mehmet Polatel and Thomas Schmutz, ‘Reform or Cataclysm? The Agreement of 8 February 1914 regarding the Ottoman Eastern Provinces’, Journal of Genocide Research 17, no. 3 (2015): 285–304.   5. For a synthesis and chronology of events, see among others, Hamit Bozarslan, The General Ottoman and Turkish Context from the Tanzimat (1838) to the Suppression of the Dersim Rebellion (1938), ; and Raymond H. Kévorkian, L’extermination des Arméniens par le régime jeune-turc (1915–1916), , both accessed 24 April 2022.   6. Even Enver Pasha sent a letter of gratitude to the Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople, congratulating him on the courage of Armenian soldiers on the Sarikamish front. It is said that one of them saved Enver from being taken as prisoner of war.   7. Also called the Tehcir (displacement) law, it was officially enacted on 1 June 1915 and expired on 8 February 1916, although deportations and massacres started as soon as February–March 1915 and were carried through 1916. On the Young Turks’ demographic engineering, see Fuat Dündar, A Crime of Numbers: The Role of Statistics in the Armenian Question (1878–1918) (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2010). Also on the issue of ‘resettlement’ and some others relating to the genocide, see Taner Akçam, ‘The Ottoman Documents and the Genocidal Policies of Committee for Union and Progress (Ittihat ve Terakki) toward the Armenians in 1915’, Genocide Studies and Prevention. An International Journal 1, no. 2 (2006), , accessed 24 April 2022.   8. See Taner Akçam and Umit Kurt, The Spirit of the Laws: The Plunder of Wealth in the Armenian Genocide (Oxford: Berghahn, 2015).   9. Franz Werfel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (London: Penguin, 2018). First editions in German and English were published in 1933 and 1934 respectively. 10. The words ‘Retour interdit’ (no return) were affixed by Turkish republican authorities to the passports of Armenians opting to leave the country after Kemal’s victory. 11. Arman J. Kirakossian, ed., The Armenian Massacres, 1894–1896: U.S. Media Testimony (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004); Arman J. Kirakossian, ed., The Armenian Massacres, 1894–1896: British Media Testimony (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2008); Alexandre Avakian, ‘La presse française et la question arménienne (1894–1914): des massacres hamidiens (1894–1896) à la veille de la Première Guerre mondiale’, PhD dissertation, University of Paris 1–Sorbonne, 2015. In France, the bi-monthly Pro Armenia (1900–8), created by Dreyfusard Pierre Quillard, was dedicated to the Armenian Question. 12. That is, before the 1985 UN Revised and Updated Report on the Question of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide introduced the case of the German massacres

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14. 15.

16.

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of Hereros in 1904 as another example of genocide. Annette Becker, ‘L’extermination des Arméniens, entre dénonciation, indifférence et oubli, de 1915 aux années vingt’, Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah 177–8 (2003): 295–312; Raymond H. Kévorkian, ‘Un bref tour d’horizon des recherches historiques sur le génocide des Arméniens: sources, méthodes, acquis et perspectives’, Etudes arméniennes contemporaines 1 (2013): 61–74. See also Raymond H. Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (London: Bloomsbury, 2011); Raymond H. Kévorkian with Yves Ternon, Mémorial du génocide des Arméniens (Paris: Seuil, 2014); Annette Becker et al., eds, Cent ans de recherche sur le génocide des Arméniens (Paris: Armand Colin, 2015); Alan Whitehorn, ed., The Armenian Genocide: The Essential Reference Guide (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 2015). See also the bibliographies edited by Claire Mouradian in Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah 177–8 (2003) and 202 (2015). For a bibliography of the French National Library collection, see , accessed 24 April 2022. Fatma Müge Göçek, Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present and Collective Violence Against the Armenians, 1789–2009 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Richard G. Hovannisian, ‘Denial of the Armenian Genocide 100 Years Later: The New Practitioners and their Trade’, Genocide Studies International 9, no. 2 (2015): 228–47; Yves Ternon, Enquête sur la négation d’un génocide (Marseille: Editions Parenthèses, 1989); Dogan Gurpinar, ‘The Manufacturing of Denial: The Making of the Turkish “Official Thesis” on the Armenian Genocide between 1974 and 1990’, Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies 18, no. 3 (2016): 217–40; see also , accessed 24 April 2022. Richard Kloian, The Armenian Genocide: News Accounts from the American Press 1915– 1922 (Berkeley: Anto Printing, 1980 [1st], 1980 [2nd], 1985 [3rd]; also Richmond: Heritage Publishing, n.d.). Armenian National Committee, The Armenian Genocide as Reported in the Australian Press (Willoughby/Sydney: ANC, 1983); Armenian National Committee of Canada, Le Génocide arménien dans la presse canadienne/The Armenian Genocide in the Canadian Press, vol. 1, 1915–16 (Montreal: ANCC, 1985), vol. 2, 1916–23 (Montreal: ANCC, n.d. [c. 1985]); Katia Peltekian, Heralding of the Armenian Genocide: Reports in the Halifax Herald, 1894–1922 (Halifax: Armenian Cultural Association of the Atlantic Provinces, 2000); Katia Peltekian, The Times of the Armenian Genocide: Reports in the British Press, vol. 1: 1914–19, vol. 2: 1920–23 (Beirut: Four Roads, 2013); Anne Elbrecht, Telling the Story: The Armenian Genocide in the New York Times and Missionary Herald: 1914–1918 (London: Gomidas, 2012); Jessica L. Taylor, ‘Through the Eyes of the “Post”: American Media Coverage of the Armenian Genocide’, MA thesis, East Tennessee State University, 2009; Vahe Kateb, ‘Australian Press Coverage of the Armenian Genocide: 1915–1923’, MA thesis, University of Wollongong, 2003. Swiss: see Hans-Lukas Kieser, , accessed 24 April 2022. Italian: Sona Haroutiyunian, ‘Armenian Press in Turin, 1915–1918’, , accessed 24 April 2022. Arabic: Nora Arissian, ‘The Armenian Genocide in the Syrian Press’, in The Armenian Genocide: Cultural and Ethical Legacies, ed. Richard Hovannisian (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2011), 303–7. Uruguayan: Daniel Karamanoukian, El Genocidio armenio en la prensa del Uruguay, año 1915 (Montevideo: Ani, 1985). Japanese: Astghik Hovhannisyan, ‘Japanese Media Coverage of the Armenian Genocide, 1894–1920s’, Armenian Mirror-Spectator, 8 May 2021, , accessed 24 April 2022.

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17. See , accessed 24 April 2022. 18. See the website Gallica.bnf.fr. 19. For the American press coverage, see , accessed 24 April 2022; see and , accessed 24 April 2022, for international and French press coverage. 20. See , accessed 24 April 2022. Hayk Demoyan, Armenian Genocide: Frontpage Coverage in the World Press (Yerevan: Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute, 2014). 21. See , accessed 24 April 2022. 22. Jocelyne Chabot et al., eds, Mass Media and the Genocide of the Armenians: One Hundred Years of Uncertain Representation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 23. Vahakn N. Dadrian, ‘Documentation of the Armenian Genocide in Turkish Sources’, in Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review, vol. 2, ed. Israel W. Charny (London: Mansell, 1991), 86–138; and Vahakn N. Dadrian, ed., Documentation of the Armenian Genocide in German and Austrian Sources (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994). 24. Benedetta Guerzoni, Cancellare un popolo. Immagini e documenti del genocidio armeno (Milan: Mimesis, 2013). 25. Cf. Dzovinar Kévonian, ‘Photographie, génocide et transmission: l’exemple arménien’, Cahiers de la Shoah 1, no. 9 (2005): 119–49; and my conference at the Memorial de la Shoah, Paris, 27 September 2020, , accessed 24 April 2022. 26. Cf. Claire Mouradian, ‘A Case of Jewish Coverage of the Armenian Genocide in the United States: Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, “Champion of Any Wronged People”’, in Chabot et al., Mass Media and the Genocide of the Armenians, 206–32. A recording of his speech in New York on 29 March 1918, ‘What are we fighting for’, can be accessed through the Library of Congress: , accessed 24 April 2022. 27. See Georges Kévorkian, La flotte française au secours des Arméniens (1909–1915) (Rennes: Marines éditions, 2008); , accessed 24 April 2022. 28. Comité de l’Oeuvre de secours 1915 aux Arméniens, ‘Quelques documents sur le sort des Arméniens en 1915–16’, ed. A. Eggiman, September 1916; The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915–1916: Documents Presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon by Viscount Bryce (London, 1916); see also the uncensored edition by A. Sarafian (London: Taderon Press, 2005); see also the new French edition of Arnold J. Toynbee, Armenian Atrocities: Les massacres des Arméniens, le meurtre d’une nation, annotated by Claire Mouradian (Paris: Payot, 2007). 29. See Ekin Enacar, ‘Press/Journalism (Ottoman Empire)’, in 1914–1918 online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer and Bill Nasson (Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin, 2014), 11 July 2018, , accessed 24 April 2022. 30. Deniz Dölek-Sever, ‘Propaganda at Home (Ottoman Empire)’, in 1914–1918 online, , accessed 24 April 2022. 31. New York Times, 29 September 1915, 2. 32. For France, see Musée de Montmartre and Claire Mouradian, eds, Arménie, une passion française. Les Arménophiles français, 1878–1923 (Paris: Magellan, 2007); and Vincent Duclert, La France et le génocide des Arméniens (Paris: Fayard, 2015); for Great Britain, see Joanne Laycock, Imagining Armenia: Orientalism, Ambiguity and Intervention (Manchester:

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Manchester University Press, 2016); for the United States, see Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response (New York: Harper Collins, 2004); Ann Marie Wilson, ‘In the Name of God, Civilization, and Humanity: The United States and the Armenian Massacres of the 1890s’, Le Mouvement social 2 (2009): 27–44; Jay Winter, ed., America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 33. Even before the war broke out, some articles appeared ominously prescient, such as ‘The Peril in Armenia’ by the British philanthropist and Gladstone’s niece, Lucy Caroline Cavendish (1841–1925), published in the Living Age (Boston) in January 1913. 34. Distributed in France by Agence Havas, in Archives du Ministère des Affaires étrangères, AMAE, A-Guerre 1914–1918, Turquie, Arménie, août 1914–décembre 1915, 887 (1CPCOM/887), fol. 127. For the text of the English version, see the document provided by the US Embassy in Washington, , accessed 24 April 2022. Emphasis added. 35. These quotations recur throughout the press. For specific citations, see New York Times, 16 August, 16 September and 23 September 1915; The Times, 30 September 1915; Washington Herald, 19 December 1915; Register, 12 February 1916; and the Melbourne Argus, 8 July 1916. 36. New York Times, 15 December 1915, 3. 37. Erik-Jan Zürcher, ‘Ottoman Labour Battalions in World War I’, in Der Völkermord an den Armeniern und die Shoah = The Armenian Genocide and the Shoah, ed. Hans-Lukas Kieser and Dominik J. Schaller (Zurich: Chronos, 2002), 187–96. Cf. Kateb, ‘Australian Press Coverage’, 150–1 and the annexe, ‘Hard driven Armenians’. 38. Kateb, ‘Australian Press Coverage’, 152–3. 39. Charlie Laderman, Sharing the Burden: The Armenian Question, Humanitarian Intervention and Anglo-American Vision of Global Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 40. Vicken Babkenian, , accessed 24 April 2022; see also Claire Mouradian, ‘Action humanitaire et publicité d’entreprise’, Entreprises et Histoire 1, no. 74 (2014): 129–31. 41. Anthony Slide, ed., Ravished Armenia and the Story of Aurora Mardiganian (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014); Leshu Torchin, ‘Ravished Armenia: Visual Media, Humanitarian Advocacy, and the Formation of Witnessing Publics’, American Anthropologist 1 (2006): 214–20. For the film, see , accessed 24 April 2022. 42. Vahakn N. Dadrian and Taner Akçam, Judgment at Istanbul: The Armenian Genocide Trials (New York: Berghahn, 2011). 43. Tessa Hofmann, ‘A Hundred Years Ago: The Assassination of Mehmet Talaat (15 March 1921) and the Berlin Criminal Proceedings against Soghomon Tehlirian (2/3 June 1921): Background, Context, Effect’, International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies 1, no. 5 (2020): 67–90. 44. See Nora N. Nercessian, The City of Orphans: Relief Workers, Commissars and the ‘Builders of the New Armenia’: Alexandropol/Leninakan, 1919–1931 (Hollis, NH: Hollis Publishing, 2016). 45. Stefan Ihrig, Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 46. Georges Bensoussan and Claire Mouradian, ‘Arménophobie, judéophobie: stéréotypes croisés’, Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah 177–8 (2003): 368–74. 47. See, for instance, E. F. Benson, Crescent and Iron Cross (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1918).

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48. For the German original, see Akten zur Deutschen Auswartigen Politik 1918–1945, Serie D, Band VII (Baden-Baden, 1956), 171–2. This quote from the Obersalzberg speech on 22 August 1939 to the commanders of the Wehrmacht probably originated from notes secretly taken by Canaris, and has been debated by scholars. It first appeared in Lochner’s What About Germany? (New York: Dood, Mead and Co., 1942), 1–4. The Nuremberg Tribunal identified the document as L-3 or Exhibit USA-29. For a synthesis on the debate, see , accessed 24 April 2022, and a conclusion by Richard Albrecht, ‘Wer redet heute noch von der Vernichtung der Armenier? Kommentierte Wiederveröffentlichung der Erstpublikation von Adolf Hitlers Geheimrede am 22. August 1939’, Zeitschrift für Weltgeschichte 9, no. 2 (2008): 115–32. The quote is inscribed on one of the walls of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC.

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17 Revolutions Irina Zhdanova

F

rom 1916 onwards many of the warring countries experienced significant social unrest, which brought political reforms to some and revolutions to others. Four empires were destroyed in these revolutions: the Russian, the German, the AustroHungarian and the Ottoman. The first in this series was the Russian Revolution of 1917 in late February in the old Russian calendar (early March in the modern calendar).1 Before 1917, Russian periodicals, as was the case in other belligerent countries, were restricted by censorship and other limitations in expressing anti-war attitudes. The February Revolution made the press free, which resulted in a widespread anti-war movement in Russia. In other belligerent countries, anti-war sentiments still could not freely circulate, so the voice of the Russian anti-war movement was muted there. This was one of the major factors in the development of the Russian Revolution: Russia’s shift to freedom did not match the international setback in liberties that resulted from the war. The freedom of the press after the February Revolution was not unrestricted: the new mass organisations, most of all the Soviets (Councils) of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, attacked the right-wing press; army authorities hindered the distribution of the left-wing press; and, in the summer of 1917, the revolutionary Provisional Government started to repress periodicals of both the radical right and the radical left. Nevertheless, the repression was not systematic before the liberal period of the Russian Revolution ended with the Bolshevik seizure of power in late October (early November), after which the free press was persecuted even more than in tsarist Russia, or during the anti-liberal swing in the warring countries of Europe and the United States. Generally, for those eight months in 1917 between the February and October revolutions, the situation of the Russian free press was unique during the war. This chapter examines the development of the Russian press in this short but spectacular period. Since the war-and-peace question was central to the political agenda during 1917, one of the tasks of this chapter is to examine how anti-war ideas were framed in Russian periodicals. Another aim is to describe the distinctive features of the Russian periodicals of this period. The February Revolution brought the widest uneducated masses into political life. From the beginning of the revolution, there were rather chaotic soviet elections. Then came new state electoral laws based on direct, anonymous, equal, universal suffrage (including women and serving soldiers) for citizens aged twenty or older. Elections for new municipalities of all levels took place all over the empire during the summer and autumn of 1917. The elections to the Constituent Assembly were long delayed by the political elite, because both liberals and socialists hoped to use more

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time to secure favourable results for themselves through extended agitation (finally the elections came only in November–December; then the Assembly was shut down by the Bolsheviks in January 1918). The electoral system for new municipalities and the Constituent Assembly was proportional representation, which meant the parties had to propagate their views to a largely uneducated electorate. The periodicals in 1917 had to respond to this challenge.

Speeches and Resolutions One of the features of the Russian newspapers of 1917 is the heavy coverage of political meetings with their speeches and resolutions. The London magazine the New Statesman (published by the Fabians since 1913) tells us how bizarre the Russian press looked to foreigners at the beginning of the revolution. Most striking were ‘the quantity and character of the messages of congratulation which reached the Provisional Government’: Columns were filled with telegrams from important municipalities expressing their joyful adhesion to the new order, cheek by jowl with ungrammatical messages from, e.g., the 14th Company of the 7,038th Infantry (Reserve) Regiment, stationed at Little Duckpondsk, stating the determination of the men not to sheathe the sword (not lightly drawn) while honour and freedom were at stake. Factory employees held meetings, and wired Petrograd their resolution to help the new Government by working with doubled energy.2 This satirical picture is true of many Russian newspapers in 1917. They published speeches, greetings, protests, appeals and resolutions of meetings of all sorts of groups and organisations in the capital and provinces. This was one of the signs of the process of democratisation and liberation: freedom of assembly and freedom of speech were suppressed during the tsarist regime and were now enjoyed ubiquitously. Most of the population had no or little education, so they could hardly read newspapers, but practised freedom of speech in oral form; that is why meetings – small and large, organised and spontaneous – were at the heart of the February Revolution. The pages of the revolutionary press provided a platform for this new democratic order. Newspapers gave weight to the resolutions and speeches selected for publication. That way they chose which ideas to present as models to their readers. Allan Wildman pointed to the publication of countless resolutions in the Bolshevik newspaper of the Central Committee’s military organisation, Soldier’s Truth (Солдатская Правда, Petrograd, 1917–18), as one of their successful strategies. This way, ‘they were able to repeat, elaborate, and refine their message and to create the sense of identity and community of a church under the cross’.3 In 1917 many papers used this strategy: editors carefully crafted a mosaic of speeches to create a sense of group identity. Newspapers presented a biased picture of current politics by selecting which speeches and resolutions to include or omit. Sometimes they even tried to set a fake agenda. In March liberal newspapers launched a campaign juxtaposing workers against soldiers (they painted workers as selfish because of their demand for an eight-hour working day during the war, when soldiers were on all-day duty), and received in response a campaign in the socialist press which not only stressed mutual support between workers and

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soldiers, but also published resolutions that accused the ‘bourgeois’ (that is non-socialist) press of slander and proclaimed a boycott of such papers.4 The Congress of the Workers’ and Military’s Deputies of the Army and Rear of the Western Front in Minsk of 7–16 (20–29) April discussed the matter among other important questions. Even the largest paper (with a circulation of about one million in 1917), Russian Word (Русское Слово, Moscow, 1895–1918), was accused of sowing enmity between the army and the proletariat. As a result, on 12 (25) April, the editorial meeting of the newspaper had to admit the publication of two fake resolutions of army delegations that impostors had passed on to a correspondent of the paper in Petrograd.5 Of course, the resolutions of workers and soldiers about the boycott of the ‘bourgeois’ press were published in the papers of the left and not in the papers of the right. That was true for other topics too. While newspapers of soviets and socialists published resolutions against the war, the liberal papers did the opposite. In the editorial ‘The Voice of the People about the War’, the newspaper of the Moscow liberals Russian Records (Русские Ведомости, 1863–1918) presented bits of speeches and resolutions to prove that ‘the people’ wanted to continue the war to achieve victory. As evidence, the paper reported on the absence of the soviet formula of ‘peace without annexations or contributions’ in the resolutions of the Cooperative Congress (25–27 March [7–9 April]) and also on some questionable military resolutions and vague street rallies.6 Ultimately, political views shaped news coverage.

Uneducated Readers Apart from political divisions, another fragmentation of the readership played a significant role. What was available to the educated differed from what uneducated people could access, and that, of course, mirrored the division between rich and poor. The illiterate and semi-literate consumed news in a spoken form (often rumours) through personal interactions, but these oral networks of communication were fed by the printed news.7 Newspapers were important for lecturers and agitators, who could pass information and slogans to the masses. Also, there was the common practice of a literate comrade reading a newspaper aloud to those who could not read. But the sophisticated language of most papers presented a significant barrier to such forms of communal reading or to the use of the press in agitation. Hardly comprehensible to uneducated audiences, Russian periodicals, in effect, were read mostly by the elite. Editors and party leaders knew they had to change the style of their papers in order to reach a wider audience. In 1917 the Constitutional Democratic Party, or Kadets, examined the preferences of peasants who read the Kadets’ paper designed for the common people, Free People (Свободный Народ, Petrograd, 1917), and found that readers did not like long sentences.8 In a letter to one of the leaders of the Popular Socialist Party, Vasilii Vodovozov (1864–1933), the writer Sofia N. Shil’ (1863–1928) criticised the party’s newspaper People’s Word (Народное Слово, Petrograd, 1917–18) because of the lack of bright pictures in the reporting. She thought this was the reason why the initial interest in the paper had faded away.9 Also, the Bolsheviks discussed how to make the main party newspaper Truth (Правда, Petrograd, since 1912) more popular. The party’s Petrograd Committee urged the Central Committee to let it publish its own – local – paper because the city workers were looking for local news in mass-circulation ‘bourgeois’ papers. Critics from the Petrograd Committee also pointed out: ‘You do

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not write in Russian, and not all can understand your writings [. . .] The polemics with [the Russian revolutionary Georgi] Plekhanov do not matter for us’ (Вы пишете не русским языком и не все понимают ваше писание [. . .] Нам полемика с Плехановым не важна).10 Many papers in 1917 struggled to meet the needs of uneducated readers for simpler language and content, and thus they could not efficiently convey their messages to these readers.

Readers’ Letters Besides simple language and colourful pictures, a powerful way of reaching uneducated readers was by publishing their letters, mostly because they were written in simple and colourful language, but also because the letters made it easier for the common people to identify with the paper. Before 1917, letters from readers were published by the government newspaper Village Herald (Сельский Вестник, Petrograd, 1881–1917), the right-wing penny press and some workers’ periodicals. During 1917 the practice of publishing readers’ letters grew in periodicals targeting the common people. The tabloid Little Newspaper (Маленькая Газета, Petrograd, 1914–17), published by Aleksei A. Suvorin (1862–1937), held a lively dialogue with its readers. It gained popularity in the city: its circulation was 30,000–50,000 in 1916 but rose to 100,000 in 1917.11 Its readership consisted of the lower strata of the urban population, among them workers and soldiers of the Petrograd garrison. Boris Kolonitskii notes the various forms of communication between the newspaper and its readers: publication of letters, meetings at the editorial office, free legal advice, various clubs, publication of responses to letters.12 The paper’s enemies were the Bolsheviks, Jews, bourgeoisie and the government. The paper promoted a pro-war expansionist agenda and, to achieve it, the idea of a military dictatorship. The Bolsheviks published newspapers for soldiers containing letters: Soldier’s Truth with a circulation of 50,000–75,000 and Trench Truth (Окопная Правда, 12th Army, Riga, 1917), which had a circulation of only 4,000–10,000 but was still well known.13 In these Bolshevik papers, readers’ letters played a key role; dedicated staff wrote replies and edited the letters chosen for publication.14 The foes of the Bolshevik papers included all the upper classes and authorities: international and national bourgeoisie, officers and the government. All of them, the Bolsheviks believed, were participating in a counter-revolutionary conspiracy. The Bolshevik papers promoted the ideas of fraternisation and immediate peace at the front and proletarian dictatorship at the rear. An interesting detail shows the significance of oral communication for uneducated readers: both Little Newspaper and the Bolshevik newspapers received not only letters but also readers who presented themselves at the editorial offices in Petrograd. The Bolsheviks used them as grassroots party activists and for the distribution of their papers from the capital to the army and the provinces. The tradition of writing letters to periodicals originated in the nineteenth century. Editors passed unpublished petition-type letters to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which composed press reports with clippings and sent them to the officials responsible for the issue. The authorities also investigated the letters’ contents. In 1912 journalist Afanasii Petrishev (1872–1951), writing for the Popular Socialist Party journal Russian Wealth (Русское Богатство, Petrograd, 1876–1918), pointed out the peculiar character of the letters published in the far-right papers – he thought that common people manipulated

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officials in this way by exposure.15 Corinne Gaudin gives an example from the masscirculation Kopek Newspaper (Газета-Копейка, Petrograd, 1908–18): ‘A mere 19 lines in Gazeta-Kopeika alleging that one woman who received payments as a military spouse while her husband in fact worked in Petrograd triggered two months of investigation, and a governor’s summary report of four tightly typed pages.’16 For the revolutionary period, we have similar evidence from the civil war press researcher Leonid Molchanov.17 While some letters were of a petition type, many others represented a way of participating in political life. That was true for most readers who sent letters to periodicals in 1917. Most of the letters remained unpublished; many are preserved today in Russian archives.18 Some of them were cited by journalists in their articles in 1917. The famous Russian writer Maxim Gorky (1868–1936) sometimes mentioned letters from readers in the Untimely Thoughts (Несвоевременные мысли) series published in his very popular (with a circulation of 60,000–115,000) left-wing newspaper New Life (Новая Жизнь, Petrograd, 1917–18). In one instalment he gave a summary of the letters: some asked for an explanation of women’s suffrage, which had recently been introduced; some condemned the practice of lynching cheating wives; others sought to obtain knowledge and share ideas. These needs of the public were not met in the pages of the newspapers which, in Gorky’s words, were busy with bickering instead of writing about the vital interests of the people.19 There were a lot of letters from educated readers, too, but the abundance of letters from semi-literate people is striking. Many letters contain the commonplace vampirical theme of 1917 – ‘the bloodthirsty bourgeoisie’ (that is, ‘the capitalists’ accused of ‘drinking our blood’).20 For example, worker Smirnov wrote (in a letter fraught with grammatical errors, which cannot be conveyed in English) to the central organ of the Menshevik Party, Worker Newspaper (Рабочая Газета, Petrograd, 1917): comrade-workers, think about who they thought we were before and who they think we are now. They, these ministers, these bloodthirsty bastards, drank the blood of the working class [. . .] like lions they take ignorant people in their paws and start drinking blood of working people again. No, we have understood everything, and we will not fall into the clutches of these bloodthirsty beasts. (товарищи рабочие вы подумайте отом кем ане считали нас ранше и кем считают настоящее время ане же эти министри эти кравовожадные гады пили кровь трудящаво класса [. . .] как львы забирают темный люд в свои лапы и опять начинают пить кровь струдящиво люда нет мы поняли всё и недадимся влапы этим кравожадным зверям.)21 The largest group of letters was from soldiers. They presented themselves as victims sacrificed to be slaughtered. The soldiers often complained about a lack of newspapers and asked the papers for help to seek peace. Many poems were sent from the army to the newspapers. For example, Worker Newspaper received a poem about the new punitive policy which the government pursued in the army after the leftist July riots: ‘Oh! How hard it is to look / At the world. / The bourgeois bloodsuckers want / To take away the freedom / And hang the poor people / And shoot. / Again in serfdom / To take us.’ (О! как тяжело смотреть / на свет / Кровопийцы буржуи хотят / свободу отнять / А бедный народ перевешать / и рострелять / Опять в крепостное право / взять.)22

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The Russian trench press was not only made up of Bolshevik army newspapers, but also included newspapers published by the soldier committees in 1917. They were originally lifeless official army papers, but in the summer and especially after the unsuccessful coup of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief General Lavr Kornilov (1870– 1918), they were placed by the government at the disposal of the soldier committees. According to the defence ministry’s newspaper, the Army and Navy of Free Russia (Армия и Флот Свободной России, Petrograd, 1917), the army newspapers initially proved of little interest to soldiers.23 Among suggested measures to make them more appealing was the idea of including soldiers’ letters. The Conference of Army Press in October ordered army newspapers to publish the correspondence of soldiers, at least two columns daily, and advised them to write articles on the most interesting letters.24 This is a significant recognition of the crucial role of readers’ letters by army officials. The strong sense of agency in the letters is impressive. Those who took up paper and pencil were very active – not only writing but criticising, supporting, demanding, explaining – generally participating in public life. Readers used their own desires to make sense of the information storm they lived through. There is abundant evidence that from the newspapers and leaflets which poured into the army and the countryside after the February Revolution, common people chose to retain only what they liked at that moment.25 The newspapers tried to take into account the tastes of their uneducated readers. For example, Boris Kolonitskii shows that the Bolshevik newspapers did not criticise the first Russian minister-socialist Aleksandr Kerensky (1881–1970) in the spring of 1917 because he was extremely popular at that time, yet they did launch an attack on him after Kerensky became minister of defence and reintroduced disciplinary measures in the army in preparation for the summer offensive and, as result, lost the soldiers’ support.26 The strong aspirations of the unprivileged classes influenced the political arena in 1917.

Logistics During the Great War, and even more so during the Great Revolution, Russian readers were eager to know all the news. From many accounts, we know that there was a real hunger for periodicals and brochures in the provinces and the army. However, because of the war, the postal, railway and telegraph services did not work well, which is why most major newspapers, which pretended to address and give voice to the whole country, were in fact consumed in the capitals – Petrograd and Moscow. Inflation and shortages impacted the printing business too. These factors particularly affected the production and distribution of political and professional magazines, and as a result many of them reduced the number of issues during 1917. The paper with the widest national audience was Russian Word, whose location in Moscow, the centre of Russia, gave it an advantage in distribution. The Petrograd papers had a longer way to travel to reach the rest of the country. The worn-out printing presses often broke down, which led, for example, to delays in the printing of the Constitutional Democratic Party’s newspapers Speech (Речь, 1906–18) and Contemporary Word (Современное Слово, 1907–18) in Petrograd. As a result, these papers often arrived too late for early morning delivery at the railway stations, which affected their provincial readership.27 The circulation of the Socialist Revolutionary Party’s newspaper People’s Cause (Дело Народа, Petrograd, 1917–19) was limited to 300,000 – the

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maximum number of copies that their printing press could produce – but one of the editors of the newspaper, Sergei Postnikov (1883–1965), was sure the paper could reach a circulation of 500,000 if they found a bigger printing house.28 The Russian telegraph did not meet the needs of communications, which expanded in 1917. The Petrograd Telegraph Agency had to limit the number of words in its news telegrams for the provinces to 4,000 a day, and even that number was impossible to send in time because the telegraph was overwhelmed. The speed of news transmission was also slowed down by the fact that the Telegraph Agency sent its news telegrams from Petrograd via wire directly only to Moscow, Kiev and Odessa. The other major cities received them from Moscow (and the small towns got the news only with the mail). In 1917 the Telegraph Agency started to resolve this logistical problem by using the telephone and considering moving operations to Moscow.29 The delay and reduction of the nationwide news lowered the quality of the provincial newspapers. Delayed papers from the capitals, which had to travel by rail, did not help local newspapers in getting news in time to the people. The war and then the revolution underscored the urgency of the modernisation of Russian infrastructure and communications.

The World War and World Revolution A few political slogans gained tremendous popularity during the February regime; among them was ‘peace without annexations or contributions, based on the selfdetermination of peoples’. The phrase originated with the Zimmerwaldists, the left wing of the international socialist movement. In 1917 it was a small political faction persecuted in all the warring countries, except Russia, where it became mainstream right after the February Revolution. Under pressure from the Petrograd Soviet the formula made its way into the Provisional Government’s declaration of 6 (19) May. Nothing changed after the failure of the Russian summer offensive and the July riots. The soviet’s peace formula was confirmed in the declaration of the second coalition government on 21 July (3 August) and the government was supposed to prompt the Allies to adopt this formula. All three leading Russian socialist parties which shaped soviet politics in the February regime – Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries – promoted the formula in their numerous periodicals. For socialists, the formula aimed to expose the imperialist character of the war: capitalist governments tried to gain new territories and made the enemies pay for the war expenses, and the common people were supposed to lose their lives killing each other. The socialists believed that the answer to the challenges of the world war was a world socialist revolution, which would bring an end to capitalism. The revisionist theory proposed by Karl Kautsky (1854–1938) – that capitalism could survive the world war – was shared in Russia only by the right-wing sections of the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries; these groups of moderate socialists published many different periodicals, but were not popular in their parties and among the population. A world revolution seemed to be coming soon and smoothly for the socialist press at the beginning of the revolution and especially after the Petrograd Soviet spoke on behalf of the people in the ‘Peace Manifesto to the Peoples of the World’ on 14 (27) March. The Socialist Revolutionaries’ People’s Cause proclaimed:

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The great war can be followed by an equally great social and ideological upheaval all around the globe. And involuntarily, the soul of every sincere friend of progress and civilisation is seized by an almost apocalyptic thrill: the anticipation of the realisation of such things, which until recently were considered a utopia and the dream of madmen! (За великой войной может последовать столь же великий социальный и идейный переворот на всем земном шаре. И невольно душой всякого искреннего друга прогресса и цивилизации овладевает почти апокалипсический трепет: ожидание осуществления таких вещей, которые еще недавно считались утопией и мечтой безумцев!)30 The ‘apocalyptic thrill’ and the hopes for universal transformation under the influence of the Russian Revolution were widespread during the spring of 1917. We can find them even in the mass-circulation press, though mostly in a Slavophile context. The mass-circulation paper Stock Exchange Records (Биржевые Ведомости, Petrograd, 1880–1917) mentioned the ‘miracles’ (чудеса) which ‘the God-bearing country’ (странабогоносица) would perform and proclaimed Russia’s glory as ‘the People-Prophet, Teacher of all nations’ (слава Народу-Пророку, Учителю всех народов).31 In the journal Russian Freedom (Русская Свобода, Petrograd and Moscow, 1917), the journalist Valerian Muraviev (1985–1932) expressed the belief that the Slavic peoples and the peoples of the East would look at Russia with hope: ‘the image of a new Byzantium, the Fourth Rome, appears’ (встает образ новой Византии, Четвертого Рима).32 In the spring, Russian periodicals put Russia at the centre of the world and expected a series of miracles to come soon, both in a Slavophile and a socialist context. An unbearable war produced a belief in miraculous deliverance. The hope for a world revolution, especially a German revolution, was largely a reflection of the antiwar thrust. At the beginning of the February Revolution, a rumour spread in Petrograd that a revolution had also happened in Germany. For several days after the uprising newspapers refuted this rumour. In the pages of the periodicals of the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, anti-war propaganda, with a world socialist revolution at its heart, was combined with support for the summer offensive, which was a confusing strategy for soldier-readers. At this point the socialist anti-war movement split. The left-wing socialists – Bolsheviks, Menshevik Internationalists and Left Socialist Revolutionaries – did not support the offensive, and their periodicals defended the task of radicalisation at home and fraternisation at the front as a path to world revolution. This left wing of the anti-war movement did not deliver pacifism or defeatism, or demand a separate peace. But the soviet peace formula took another form in the trenches – peace at any cost. This did not embarrass the Bolsheviks who were sure that world revolution would soon cover all the problems that could arise from a peace-atany-cost approach. Liberal periodicals translated the soviet peace formula the same way that soldiers did – as the path to a separate peace, which is why they labelled it a product of German intrigue. The wartime spy mania had already devoured Russia’s politics before 1917.33 After the February Revolution it continued to occupy the imagination of the Russian liberals. Their periodicals blamed the Bolsheviks as German agents. Germany did indeed try to remove the Russian Front from the war, but it did not control the tsar’s family or

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the tsarist government, which liberals had condemned as traitors before 1917, and it was not behind the wider socialist anti-war movement, in which the Bolsheviks were actually most active. Much more than any German money or propaganda could do, the anti-war attitudes caused radical revolutionary ideas to yield remarkable gains in 1917. Melissa Stockdale has highlighted that during the war and especially after the February Revolution, the problem with Russian patriotism was not due to a deficiency of propaganda or lack of self-awareness of the masses as a nation, but rather to a fragmentation of the patriotic voice, which was presented in multiple contested versions.34 Russian patriotism assumed a highly personalised form. There was certainly a national twist even in the thinking of the Russian internationalists before October: world revolution was to save Russia from both imperialisms – Germany’s military imperialism and the Entente’s financial imperialism – so in some sense the hope for a world revolution served Russia’s national aims.35 Yet whether there was defeat or victory, Russia was rolling back economically and the Russian Empire was falling apart. When the ‘self-determination of peoples’ started to transition from the soviet peace formula to reality in 1917 Russia, this brought confusion to most Russian socialist parties, which were not prepared to face the emergence of new nation-states on the fringes of the Russian Empire.36 The new kind of patriotism should include new nation-states as neighbours or parts of the Russian Federation. The Russian anti-war movement of 1917 was complex. It consisted mostly of the left but also of pacifists. In New Life, the well-known pacifist Maxim Gorky spoke for humanism and against any violence, which was more consonant with the ideas of Tolstoy than with the socialists. The true pacifists were Tolstoyans. The pacifist ideas of Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) influenced the widespread anti-war sentiments among both the intelligentsia and the common people.37 It is not surprising, then, that the idea of peace at any cost, including concessions of Russian territory, was presented before the October Revolution in the Tolstoyans’ journal Tolstoy’s Voice and Solidarity (Голос Толстого и Единение), Moscow, 1916–18.38 This idea of peace at any cost could not be seriously considered before the complete disintegration of the Russian Front, which happened after the October Revolution.

Conclusion The Bolsheviks’ October Revolution was staged as the first act of a world socialist revolution. After 1917 the wave of revolutions and mutinies all over the world seemed to support their aspirations. Most of the unrest was driven by national and liberal ideas, but the spectre of communism from Karl Marx’s Manifesto was deeply present, especially in revolutionary events in Germany, Italy, Hungary and Finland. While the socialist movement had strengthened before 1914, the First World War gave it a new and powerful justification: the masses felt betrayed by their elites. By 1921, however, communist revolts had failed everywhere but Russia. In Russia itself, the policy of destroying capitalism (called ‘war communism’) proved to be destructive of the whole economy, and the Bolsheviks had to admit that a world revolution was delayed. In this worldwide revolutionary wave, the press played an important role as a medium for the circulation of ideas and the organisation of the masses for action. Some of the features of the periodicals in 1917 made it into the Soviet regime in the post-war period. First, there was the importance of the mass meetings and their speeches and resolutions:

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they functioned as democratic rituals, serving as a proof of mass support. A second trait of the periodicals in 1917 also persisted in the Soviet Union’s periodicals – publishing letters by readers. The intrinsic character of print news culture is a one-way communication from writer (with editor and publisher) to reader. Today interaction is facilitated by newspaper websites. The interactive character of oral news has returned, but it was absent for most of the twentieth century. Readers in 1917 tried to personalise the news by sending letters to periodicals. They sent letters to contributors, political leaders and authorities. Writing letters was part of the process of democratising public affairs. The strong sense of agency among the common people was strengthened by the socialist rhetoric which placed the ‘labouring classes’ at the centre of the political universe. The communist regime made its own use of these letters. The secret police used them as a basis to gauge ‘the mood of the population’. The tradition of people writing letters and the authorities conducting investigations reached an unprecedented scale in the Soviet regime in the 1920s and 1930s.39 Letters to the periodicals gave the Bolsheviks an idea of how to mobilise grassroots support and at the same time fill their newspapers with news from the provinces: the Bolsheviks invited the ‘worker-peasant correspondents’ to contribute. The letters from correspondents were basically the same as regular letters from readers.40 The war and the revolution caused a fragmentation of news production and distribution in 1917. The need to transmit the news in 1917 was stronger than the Russian infrastructure could support. During the civil war, news circulation was further disrupted. Still, on that fragmented basis the Bolsheviks built their propaganda state, reflecting the successful models they had developed during 1917.

Notes   1. To avoid confusion with dates and in order to reflect Russian sources, all the dates in this chapter are given in both styles – the first following the old Russian calendar used before the Bolsheviks introduced the modern one at the beginning of 1918, the second (in parentheses) following the modern calendar.   2. ‘The Russian Press Since the Revolution’, New Statesman 9, no. 216 (26 May 1917): 176.   3. Allan Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, Volume 2: The Road to Soviet Power and Peace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 43.   4. See details in Allan Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, Volume 1: The Old Army and the Soldiers’ Revolt (March–April, 1917) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 301–19.  5. Российская государственная библиотека, Отдел рукописей (Russian State Library, Collection of Manuscripts), ф. 259, карт. 3, д. 2, л. 26–31об.; карт. 26, д. 35.  6. ‘Голос народа о войне’ (The Voice of the People about War), Русские ведомости (Russian Records), 1 April (13 April) 1917, 3, , accessed 24 April 2022.   7. For more on the intersection of written and oral communication in the countryside, see Corinne Gaudin, ‘Circulation and Production of News and Rumor in Rural Russia during World War I’, in Russian Culture in War and Revolution, 1914–22, Book 2: Political Culture, Identities, Mentalities, and Memory, ed. Murray Frame, Boris Kolonitskii, Steven Marks and Melissa Stockdale (Bloomington: Slavica Publishers, 2014), 55–71.  8. Алексей Шевцов (Aleksei Shevtsov), Издательская деятельность русских несоциалистических партий начала ХХ века (Press of Russian Non-socialist Parties in the Early 20th Century) (Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo RNB, 1997), 62.

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 9. Государственный архив Российской Федерации (State Archive of the Russian Federation), ф. 539, оп. 1, д. 2564, л. 1–2об. 10. Петербургский комитет РСДРП(б) в 1917 г.: Протоколы (Petersburg Committee of RSDRP(b) in 1917: Minutes) (Petersburg: Bel’veder, 2003), 235–40, citation 239. 11. Центральный государственный архив литературы и искусства Санкт-Петербурга (Literature and Arts Central State Archive of St Petersburg), ф. 306, оп. 1, д. 49, л. 3. 12. Борис Колоницкий (Boris Kolonitskii), ‘Право-экстремистские силы в марте-октябре 1917’ (The Far Right in March–October 1917), in Национальная правая прежде и теперь’ (The National Right in the Past and Now), Part 1: Россия и русское зарубежье (Russia and the Russian Abroad), ed. Рафаил Ганелин (Rafail Ganelin) (Peterburg: Institut sociologii RAN, 1992), 112–14. 13. For details, see Wildman, End of the Russian Imperial Army, Volume 2, 49–58. 14. Александр Ильин-Женевский (Aleksandr Il’in-Zhenevskii), От Февраля к захвату власти: Воспоминания (From February to Seizure of Power: Memoirs) (Leningrad: Priboi, 1927), 62; Дмитрий Гразкин (Dmitrii Grazkin), Окопная Правда [Воспоминания] Trench Truth [Memoirs] (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossia, 1958), 83, 86–8, 114–15; Геннадий Соболев (Gennadii Sobolev), Петроградский гарнизон в борьбе за победу Октября (Petrograd Garrison in the Struggle for the Victory of October) (Leningrad: Nauka, 1985), 147; Андрей Окороков (Andrei Okorokov), Октябрь и крах буржуазной прессы (October and the Collapse of the Bourgeois Press) (Moscow: Mysl’, 1970), 49–50. 15. Афанасий Петрищев (Afanasii Petrishchev), ‘Хроника внутренней жизни’ (Сhronicle of Domestic Life), Русское Богатство (Russian Wealth) no. 8 (1912), Part 2: 80–3. Cited in Светлана Махонина (Svetlana Mahonina), История русской журналистики начала ХХ века (The History of Russian Journalism of the Early 20th Century) (Moscow: Nauka, 2004), 81–2. 16. Gaudin, Circulation and Production of News and Rumor, 68. 17. Леонид Молчанов (Leonid Molchanov), Газетная пресса России в годы революции и гражданской войны (Newspapers in Russia in the Years of the Revolution and Civil War) (Moscow: Izdatprofpress, 2002), 183. 18. Letters to 1917 papers: Русское Слово (Russian Word): Российская государственная библиотека, Отдел рукописей (Russian State Library, Collection of Manuscripts) (Moscow), ф. 259, карт. 25, 26; Русские ведомости (Russian Records): Российский государственный архив литературы и искусства (Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts) (Moscow), ф. 1701, оп. 2; Речь (Speech): Российская национальная библиотека, Отдел рукописей (National Library of Russia, Manuscripts Department) (Petersburg), ф. 482, оп. 1; Российский государственный архив литературы и искусства (Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts), ф. 1666, оп. 1; Единство (Unity): Российская национальная библиотека, Отдел рукописей (National Library of Russia, Manuscripts Department), ф. 1093, оп. 3; Рабочая Газета (Worker Newspaper): Российский государственный архив социальнополитической истории (Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History) (Moscow), ф. 622, оп. 1, д. 37, 59, 60; Государственный архив Российской Федерации (State Archive of Russian Federation) (Moscow), ф. R9591, оп. 1, д. 105–7; Дело Народа (People’s Cause): Государственный архив российской Федерации (State Archive of Russian Federation), ф. 9505, оп. 2, д. 4; Российская национальная библиотека, Отдел рукописей (National Library of Russia, Manuscripts Department), ф. 657, оп. 1; Земля и Воля (Land and Freedom): Институт русской литературы (Institute of Russian Literature) (Petersburg), ф. 185, оп. 1. Also, readers wrote to the editors and journalists. These letters are in personal archives. Some of the letters that were sent to the newspapers of the Petrograd Soviet, Soviet’s Central Executive Committee and their newspapers Известия (Bulletin) and Голос Солдата (Soldier’s Voice), were published in Солдатские письма 1917 года (Soldiers’ Letters in 1917) (Moscow, Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1927). For the publication of

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some letters that were sent to the Bolshevik newspapers, see Александр Ильин-Женевский (Aleksandr Il’in-Zhenevskii), Почему солдаты и матросы стали под знамена Октября (Письма солдат и матросов в редакции большевистских газет 1917 г.) (Why Did Soldiers and Sailors Stand under the Banner of October (Letters of Soldiers and Sailors to the Editorial Offices of Bolshevik Newspapers in 1917)) (Leningrad: Leningradskoie oblastnoie izdatel’stvo, 1933). 19. Максим Горький (Maxim Gorky), ‘Объективная ценность культуры (Objective Value of Culture)’, Новая жизнь (New Life), 9 June (22 June) 1917. Published in Революция 1917 года глазами современников (The Revolution of 1917 through the Eyes of Contemporaries), Volume 2: June–September, ed. Альберт Ненароков (Al’bert Nenarokov) (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2017), 54–6. 20. In the ‘Рабочая Марсельеза’ (Workers’ Marseillaise) by Petr Lavrov (1823–1900), which workers sang often, there was ‘the vampire tsar’ who ‘drinks the people’s blood’ (Царьвампир пьет народную кровь). The tsar became the ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘capitalists’ in 1917. One of the sources of the vampirical trope was the Jewish blood libel (antisemitism and anti-capitalism intertwined). 21. Российский государственный архив социально-политической истории (Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History), ф. 622, оп. 1, д. 37, л. 53–4. 22. Ibid, д. 59, л. 49–50об. 23. ‘Наша фронтовая печать’ (Our Front Press), Армия и Флот Свободной России (The Army and Navy of Free Russia), 26 October (8 November) 1917, 1–2. 24. ‘Совещание армейской печати’ (Meeting of the Army Press), Голос Солдата (Soldier’s Voice), 20 October (2 November) 1917, 4. Digitised under its later title Голос Революции (Revolution’s Voice), , accessed 24 Apri 2022. This is a detailed report on the Army Press. 25. Aaron B. Retish, Russia’s Peasants in Revolution and Civil War: Citizenship, Identity and the Creation of the Soviet State, 1914–22 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Wildman, End of the Russian Imperial Army, Volume 2; Александр Асташов (Aleksandr Astashov), Пропаганда на русском фронте в годы Первой мировой войны (Propaganda on the Russian Front in the Years of the First World War) (Moscow: Spetskniga, 2012). 26. Борис Колоницкий (Boris Kolonitskii), ‘Товарищ Керенский’: антимонархическая революция и формирование культа ‘вождя народа’ (‘Comrade Kerensky’: Anti-monarchist Revolution and the Formation of the Cult of the ‘Leader of the People’) (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2017), 210–20. 27. Российская национальная библиотека, Отдел рукописей (National Library of Russia, Manuscripts Department), ф. 482, оп. 1, д. 8, л. 2, 4; Российский государственный архив литературы и искусства (Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts), ф. 1666. оп. 1, д. 13, л. 56–89. 28. Государственный архив Российской Федерации (State Archive of Russian Federation), ф. Р6065, оп. 1, д. 1, л. 48. 29. Российский государственный исторический архив (Russian State Historical Archive) (Petersburg), ф. 1358, оп. 1, д. 4, ч. 2, л. 115–17, 120–4, 127–127об.; д. 5, l. 6–7, 13, 88–90, 129–129об., 137. 30. ‘Русская революция и ее отзвуки в Европе’ (The Russian Revolution and its Echoes in Europe), Дело Народа (People’s Cause), 19 March (1 April) 1917, 1. 31. ‘Слава народу!’ (Glory to the People!), Биржевые Ведомости (Stock Exchange Records), Evening issue, 24 March (6 April) 1917, 1. 32. Валериан Муравьев (Valerian Muraviev), ‘Рим Четвертый’ (The Fourth Rome), Русская Свобода (Russian Freedom), no. 2 (26 April (9 May) 1917): 8–11. 33. For more on the topic, see William Fuller, The Foe Within: Fantasies of Treason and the End of Imperial Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); Eric Lohr, Nationalizing

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the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 34. Melissa Stockdale, ‘Mobilizing the Nation: Patriotic Culture in Russia’s Great War and Revolution, 1914–20’, in Russian Culture in War and Revolution, 1914–22, 5, 22, 24–6. 35. Владимир Базаров (Vladimir Bazarov [Rudnev]), ‘Что же дальше?’, Новая Жизнь (New Life), 4 June (17 June) 1917, 1; Виктор Чернов (Viktor Chernov), ‘Сквозь туман грядущего. Часть V’, Дело Народа (People’s Course), 16 June (29 June) 1917, 2; T [Leon Trotsky], ‘Итоги и перспективы. Часть IV’, Рабочий (Worker) [Правда (Truth)], 25 August (7 September) 1917, 5. 36. See details: Ирина Жданова (Irina Zhdanova), ‘Проблема федеративного устройства государства в Февральской революции 1917 г.’ (The Federation Problem in the February Revolution of 1917), Вопросы Истории (Questions of History), no. 7 (2007): 17–28. 37. Ольга Богданова (Ol’ga Bogdanova), ‘Русская классика и восприятие Первой мировой войны’ (Russian Classics and Perceptions of the First World War), in Русская публицистика и периодика эпохи Первой мировой войны (Russian Journalism and Periodicals during the First World War), ed. Вадим Полонский (Vadim Polonskii) (Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2013), 130–1; Валерий Семигин (Valerii Semigin), ‘Русская литература в чаду войны’ (Russian Literature in the Daze of War), in Очерки русской культуры. Начало XX века, ed. Лидия Кошман (Lidiia Koshman) (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2022), 562–9. 38. Самуил Белинький [Беленький] (Samuil Belin’kii [Belen’kii]), ‘Участникам Государственного Совещания’ (To the Participants of the State Conference), Голос Толстого и Единение (Tolstoy’s Voice and Solidarity), no. 3 (1917): 11. Cited in: Ефим Агарин (Yefim Agarin), ‘Антивоенные выступления в журналах толстовцев 1916–1918 гг.’ (Anti-War Discourse in Tolstoyan magazines 1916–1918), in Русская публицистика и периодика эпохи Первой мировой войны, 508. 39. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism. Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 165. 40. Александр Лившин (Aleksandr Livshin), Настроения и политические эмоции в Советской России: 1917–1932 (Moods and Political Emotions in Soviet Russia: 1917–1932) (Moscow, ROSSPEN, 2010), 25.

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18 The Influenza Pandemic Jane Fisher

I

n Katherine Anne Porter’s 1939 novel Pale Horse, Pale Rider, the protagonist Miranda Gay is writing for an American metropolitan daily newspaper when she contracts the 1918 influenza. Her position as a member of the media does not lead to privileged knowledge of her unknown malady, however. Her newsroom colleagues relay rumours as they haphazardly guess at the flu’s origin and extent, blaming a German vessel that released a ‘strange, thick, cloud’ over Boston Harbour, laughing at their own gullibility.1 Miranda herself must rely on her observations and her lover Adam’s reports of the pandemic’s local extent: ‘It’s as bad as anything can be [. . .] all the theaters and nearly all the shops and restaurants are closed, and the streets have been full of funerals all day and ambulances all night –.’2 Enmeshed by wartime propaganda, the characters have no real knowledge of the flu because, like Miranda, they are both witnesses of it and participants in it, ignorant of and vulnerable to its power. Porter’s narrative illustrates the media’s double bind, limited in its ability to understand and represent the 1918 influenza pandemic yet obliged to find some way to write about an event that was affecting so many people. The 1918 pandemic occurred at the end of a tremendous increase in print media made possible by the invention of the Linotype machine in 1886, allowing cheaper and faster production of newspapers throughout the industrialised world. Most major cities had daily newspapers, and many sought to gain their readers’ attention through sensationalised reporting.3 Through newspapers, illustrated magazines, advertisements, editorials and cartoons, print media were central to the creation of a public body of information concerning the pandemic, explaining its progress to a distracted, vulnerable public focused on the war. Because of this flu’s unknown nature and the military censorship, however, the media found the 1918 pandemic an amorphous subject to portray.4 Every war encourages disease, and the First World War was no exception; influenza was particularly common in the spring and summer of 1918, with the German General Erich Ludendorff (1865–1937) blaming influenza among his troops for Germany’s military failures.5 Indeed, the 1918 media coverage of influenza in many Western countries initially focused on the predominance of flu among German troops as a way to build Allied morale.6 The pandemic’s familiar name, the Spanish flu, arose as a strategy to differentiate it from other less serious forms of influenza prevalent at the time. Spain, a neutral country with no press censorship, was particularly hard hit by the pandemic; the Spanish King Alphonse XIII (1886–1941) fell seriously ill early on, and the national press not only covered his debility but also circulated flu stories from other countries. Hence the pandemic’s best-known name arose primarily from media coverage rather than any social or medical impact.

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Just as print media played a major role in shaping how the 1918 influenza pandemic became visible during its duration, it was also complicit in its relative invisibility, its misunderstood status for much of the twentieth century.7 The pandemic’s after-effects, while profound, were most often private and difficult to separate from the war’s aftermath. Occurring in a period of rapid historical change, the flu pandemic itself had no obvious social impact. Most of all, it did not provide the press with an ongoing public narrative to report, as Debra E. Blakely concludes in her tabulation of 1918 flu coverage in the New York Times (1851–): ‘Once deaths had dropped off, news stories about influenza also dropped. Public health officials simply lacked scientific information at that point regarding how to deal with the deadly virus.’8 Virology research in the 1930s stimulated passing interest in the 1918 flu pandemic, Caroline Hovanec argues, raising the possibility of a vaccine and coinciding with several important literary narratives.9 The public relations industry, however, stepped in where more objective print reporting had failed, creating suggestive narratives that symbolically engaged the 1918 pandemic. During the pandemic and early in the Second World War, full-page advertisements appearing in magazines and periodicals responded to the anxiety generated by the 1918 flu. In their compelling images and copy, these texts both encouraged fearful remembrance of the flu pandemic and offered resistance to its dominance, empowering their audiences. While print media concentrated on limited medical advances, these advertisements conceived original counter-narratives of the 1918 flu’s social construction, especially sensitive to gender roles and religious apprehensions surrounding mass death.

In Search of a Public Narrative Tracking the 1918 influenza’s trail through print media illustrates the inchoate nature of the pandemic, and how difficult it was to predict its course, extent and enduring significance. Newspapers initially reported what they could investigate and verify of the 1918 influenza pandemic, predominantly local stories of outbreaks and mortality totals, or what different War Offices released concerning influenza and the military. Tom Dicke argues that there was extensive basic coverage of the first wave of the 1918 influenza pandemic in American newspapers that did not cause widespread concern, partially because medical and civic officials failed to recognise the difference between normal seasonal flu and the lethal 1918 strain.10 The more severe symptoms of the 1918 flu included sudden onset, sometimes leading to death within twenty-four hours. The first symptoms often included severe headaches, body pains, nosebleeds and very high fevers, often causing delirium. Some patients experienced ‘dry drowning’, with their lungs filling with fluid, causing pneumonia and cyanosis from lack of oxygen, with victims turning blue, almost black, just before death. This flu’s long-term after-effects were unusually debilitating, including heart and neurological problems. It had its highest mortality rate among the young and healthy, those between 20 and 40 years old.11 This new virus also represented an imaginative challenge to American culture as a whole: there was no consensus among either reporters or the general public on how to interpret this information. Coverage wavered as reporters framed the flu as a human-interest story, or focused on trivia or presented flu stories as straight news

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or fodder for jokes. When viewed as a whole, it appears reporters and editors consistently recognized something unusual was happening but were unable to recognize its implications for weeks.12 This interpretative impasse arose because conventional narrative forms used to represent individual illness and disease such as the sentimental or the heroic did not easily apply to the 1918 pandemic, and no one had enough information to portray the 1918 pandemic as the mass tragedy it soon would become.13 Individual understanding of disease often takes the form of chaotic impressions as patients move from symptom to symptom or ‘a fear of collapse, the sense of dissolution, which contaminates the Western image of all diseases’.14 The multiplication of individual chaotic experiences of illness in a pandemic created a strong need for a coherent public narrative to make sense of mass suffering and death, ideally by offering a sense of cause and effect and possible resolution to the crisis. Janice Howe argues that the 1918 flu remained remarkably resistant to narrativisation in mass-market periodicals of the time: journalists struggled mightily to figure out a beginning to the story, going as far back as Homer, but could not pinpoint it and they also could not recount or even predict the story’s end [. . .] Magazine articles from 1918 through 1920 could not pinpoint a true enemy. Were doctors the protagonist, the enemy, or were they simply incompetent? Even the medical cause of the disease was uncertain [. . .] ‘Heroes’ mentioned in the few articles that used the word were women who had ‘gone down to death, if not unwept, at least unsung [. . .] No decorations will be bestowed on these nurses. . .’ Thus, elements of narrativization were difficult and improbable for this epidemic, negating its usefulness in public memory.15 The 1918 pandemic inspired a dual sense of mystery and urgency, creating a temporal gap between the need for a public narrative and its creation. Yet crucial civic and individual decisions about public health measures regarding prevention, treatment and mourning had to be made within that temporal gap between crisis and knowledge. This led to what Dicke describes as a deadly ‘cognitive inertia’, a delay or deferral in understanding, with civic officials, physicians and the media always behind the fastmoving influenza virus, never knowing what kind of public story would be most useful to narrate.16 Knowing it was vital to give the public some account of the flu in order to quell mass anxiety, the Western medical establishment nonetheless failed in its efforts to identify or successfully treat this increasingly catastrophic illness.17 Speaking before a New York State influenza commission during the pandemic’s first wave, the state health commissioner admitted ‘[there] has never been anything which compares with this in importance [. . .] in which we were so helpless’.18 In 1919 scientific and other journals listed census and American Public Health Association statistics of deaths from influenza and pneumonia, characterising the disease as ‘mysterious’ and ‘a sphinx’, and also observing that doctors and other authorities had a ‘hopeless, helpless attitude towards it’.19 While the war offered the most obvious explanation for the growing crisis, an influential London Times (1785–) editorial entitled ‘The Mystery of Influenza’ reflected the official sense of helplessness towards the outbreak by concluding that this new plague had no conventional relation to the war: ‘There is no evidence which

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directly connects this visitation with the war at all. Typhus, smallpox, plague, dysentery, scurvy, and typhoid are epidemics often resulting from war, but influenza is not among the accepted war pestilences.’20 The editorial ends with a series of unanswered questions about the flu’s origin: Did it come from the food supply? The weather? Why is it as prevalent across the Atlantic in America as it is in Europe? Primarily, the editorial wonders at the virus’s incredible mobility: ‘How is it that it almost annihilates space?’21 By filling the vacuum of official information about the pandemic, the familiar coding of the 1918 pandemic as ‘the Spanish flu’ or ‘the Spanish Lady’ personified the virus and offered a colloquial frame of reference for it.22 The symbol of ‘the Spanish Lady’ deflected attention away from the virus’s probable origin in an American military camp (Camp Funston, Kansas), and allowed it to be interpreted as both foreign and feminine, separating it from the masculine activity of war. Drawing on the decadent femme fatales of the fin de siècle, the symbol evoked negative stereotypes of women as promiscuous and dangerous, paralleling the highly contagious nature of the flu virus and suggesting venereal disease, a malady traditionally associated with war. Italians conversationally referred to infection with the flu as being ‘in bed with that Spanish tart’, while the Swiss gave it the name ‘coquette’ because it gave ‘its favours to everyone’.23 A 1918 editorial attributed to Copenhagen’s Politiken (1884–) plays the demonic femme fatale off the idealised angel often depicted in First World War public art, portraying the pandemic as a combination of memento mori and streetwalker – a skull-faced woman dressed in black, her hair covered by a Spanish-style headdress, a fan in one hand and a handkerchief in the other. The Spanish Lady walks resolutely in contrast to the white-clad Angel of Peace, who sits abjectly, saying: ‘They won’t have anything to do with me, but that detestable Spanish woman can go anywhere.’24 Reducing the flu pandemic to recognisable cultural tropes of feminine sexual misconduct and national allegory made it easier for many to comprehend and discuss, allowing it to become part of public discourse in the absence of more reliable information. Businesses also cooperated with the press to offer the public a variety of individual actions they could take to control the spread of the disease or to speed recovery, finding in public anxiety a marketing opportunity. News stories during the deadly second wave of the influenza pandemic ran side by side with advertisements for products claiming to offer some protective benefits against the illness; for example, on 2 October 1918 a New York Times Colgate toothpaste advertisement incorporated a list of rules for avoiding all respiratory diseases that had appeared ten days earlier as a public health notice.25 The open questions surrounding the 1918 influenza pandemic allowed businesses to remind the public of the historical origins of other diseases; exterminating and disinfecting companies offered to do away with ‘germs and vermin’, recalling the allegedly flea-carrying rats of the Black Plague (1347–52) as well as the germ theory that had transformed medicine in the mid-nineteenth century.26 The English word influenza (from the Italian influenza or influence) originated from the belief that the disease is caused by foetid air from swamps or bogs; Macy’s followed this in offering ‘Sanitary Cloth Window Ventilators’ to keep out influenza infection figured as a devil.27 Food manufacturers presented their products as panaceas, simultaneously capable of preventing, treating and aiding recovery from influenza. Iron supplements, malted milk and even soft drinks such as loganberry were touted as offering health benefits.28

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The 1918 Armistice and demobilisation of millions of soldiers coincided with the second wave of the influenza pandemic and put two strong social narratives in conflict: the first, the time-honoured tradition of the warrior returning home, and the second, medical directives to avoid social contact because of the pandemic. Large numbers of these demobilised soldiers were either suffering from influenza or were potential carriers of the disease; on 26 January 1919 the New York Times reported that influenza was the chief cause of death in home military camps. Yet suspending demobilisation in order to halt influenza, in effect enforcing a worldwide quarantine, was never practical to implement. An alternative home front heroic narrative emerged, with the press employing military metaphors to offer a form for the chaotic civilian influenza experience, representing flu as an enemy ‘attacking’ a brave citizenry who were fighting like soldiers in the trenches.29 A 5 November 1918 New York Times editorial argued that the war had prepared the civilian population for the pandemic, teaching them wartime virtues such as patriotism, courage and stoicism by encouraging them to ‘think more or less constantly in terms other than those of individual interest and safety’: ‘death itself has become so familiar as to lose something of its grimness and more of its importance. Courage has become a common possession, and fear, when it exists, is less often expressed than ever before.’30 The editorial goes on to optimistically parallel the victorious end of the war with an equally successful conclusion to the pandemic, describing influenza as a danger already ‘met and conquered, and now we are caring for the wounded just as they do in France after a big encounter with the Germans’.31 Yet with millions of Americans contracting the flu and approximately 675,000 dying of it, civilian mortality undercut one of the initial rationales of going to war: protecting civilians, especially women and children.32 The print media’s difficulty in constructing a public narrative of the 1918 pandemic became especially apparent in its incoherent reporting of flu mortality and morbidity figures. Debra Blakely explains the confusion that ensued: The narrative discourse for the 1918 flu changed daily, with government and medical official portrayed as not in control. Death statistics were not timely; after public health authorities released statistics one day that might reflect a decrease in deaths, numbers reported by hospitals or mortuaries would present conflicting information the next day, showing an increase in deaths.33 For months before and after the Armistice, statistics tabulating the number of dead gathered from individual boroughs, towns, cities and countries were interspersed with reports of public figures suffering from influenza, such as King Alphonse XIII of Spain or Under-Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945). These lists of flu casualties are impressive in their density and length, appearing near war casualty lists to create a grim counterpoint. The press did not try to logically connect influenza dead with soldiers fallen or injured in the war; it simply recorded names of all the fallen for readers to make what sense of them they could. Howe describes how ‘articles mapped the spread of the disease and used statistics to report numbers of deaths, this time breaking them down in regard to geographic location, gender, race, and age [. . .] By 1920, deaths were remembered in a clinical, statistical manner.’34 As the last wave of the flu pandemic concluded in 1919–20, the will to comprehend the disaster lessened as well. Alfred Crosby termed it ‘the forgotten pandemic’

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and Susan Sontag similarly noted the ‘near total historical amnesia’ surrounding it.35 Print media moved on to cover more comprehensible events, such as the Red Summer of 1919, a period of racial violence and protest, or the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment granting all American women the right to vote. The flu pandemic survived in family mourning of dead relatives and community’s remembrances of lost neighbours; as Gina Kolata observes, the 1918 ‘flu pandemic profoundly affected the lives of ordinary people whose voices are seldom heard’.36 Although the pandemic’s ripple effects were extensive, they remained fragmented, scattered among individuals who lacked the perspective or social power to contribute to a persuasive public narrative.

Advertising as a Symbolic Space for Exploring Flu Businesses and advertisers remained focused on their audience’s desire for control over epidemic disease or contagion in general, as well as their anxious consciousness of the 1918 flu in particular. The cultural historian Nancy Tomes explains that 1900–40 was an era of ‘germ panic’ to which print media contributed: The development of new forms of mass media and advertising played a key role in building germ consciousness even as death rates from infectious diseases continued to decline. The first germ panic followed the mid-19th-century ‘print revolution’, in which new technologies such as the steam rotary press and paper pulp manufacture greatly diminished the cost of newspapers and books. Starting in the mid-1800s, a new kind of print journalism flourished as rapid turnover in news was facilitated by telegraph and international cable lines. Searching for articles to catch middle-class readers’ attention in an increasingly competitive journalistic marketplace, publishers and journalists found a gold mine of marketable topics in scientific discoveries about the cause and prevention of infectious diseases.37 Surprisingly, periodicals and magazines of the period shunned direct reporting of the pandemic, as Howe documents: equally enlightening are silences about the epidemic in some of the era’s most popular journals. Good Housekeeping, Dial, Ladies Home Journal, Harper’s Monthly Magazine, New Republic, and Scribner’s Magazine [. . .] did not include any articles about influenza. Nor did the top-circulating magazine The Saturday Evening Post [. . .] Perhaps the difficulties in dealing with a baffled medical community, or the sheer magnitude of the story at a time when these magazines were covering the war in Europe and its aftermath, dissuaded reporters and editors from reporting this major domestic crisis. Perhaps stories about World War I, with comfortable protagonists and definable enemies, were easier for journalists to tell.38 Periodical advertising of cleaning and hygiene products, however, provided a venue in which narratives of the 1918 influenza could be publicly imagined and explored both during and after the pandemic, because they relied on established conventions of containment, purification and safety that appealed to anxious readers. These advertisements symbolically engaged the 1918 pandemic and addressed their audience’s ‘germ

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panic’, offering resistance to the flu’s silencing power. Lysol and Dixie Cups in particular produced full-page, sophisticated adverts with striking original art and carefully written copy during both world wars; these adverts ran as single-page instalments in mass-circulation periodicals such as Ladies Home Journal (1883–2016), Time (1923–) and Life (1883–2000). Advertisements produced during the 1918 influenza pandemic represent narratives of domesticity and community threatened by contagion, while the Second World War Dixie Cup advertisements often drew on apocalyptic imagery to revive memories of the 1918 flu’s severity. Tomes points to cultural dynamics as crucial in inspiring interest in public health issues.39 The changing political contexts of the two world wars account for the differences we see in these advertisements: isolationist First World War America fears attack from outside and must erect barriers to protect itself, while post-Pearl Harbor America entering the Second World War braces itself for an oncoming cataclysm. Advertisements especially portray the strong emotions that the 1918 flu engendered through all of its unknowns: its unprecedented mobility, its invisibility, its lack of treatment, its catastrophic mortality rate, the fear that it could recur. As a form of public discourse particularly attuned to expressing cultural norms, codes and anxieties, advertising played a previously unexamined role in constructing public understanding of the 1918 influenza pandemic. Tomes describes the climate of bacteriological paranoia that preceded the pandemic in health-conscious America: ‘Turn-of-the-century health education emphasized the hidden dangers of germs lurking in everyday life. Any object touched by another person, whether it be paper money, library books, or common drinking cups, represented a potentially deadly carrier of infection.’40 Because so little was known about the 1918 influenza itself and because transmission of the disease remained invisible, advertisers could (and did) take liberties when representing it, having a blank screen on which to project consumers’ fears and promote their clients’ products. A 1919 Lysol disinfectant advertisement emphasises the invisibility of the pandemic, figuring it as ‘an unseen menace’ to heighten the audience’s dread, potentially ‘more fatal, more cruel than a million mad dogs – a menace that threatens your family, your community, and yourself all the time – the disease germ’ (Figure 18.1).41 Like the Spanish Lady symbol used in European countries to represent the pandemic, the ‘snarling, foaming-mouthed, wild-eyed mad dog’ symbol was colloquial and would appeal to the life experiences and emotions of smaller town or even rural audiences, communicating an immediate sense of panic and danger. This post-war advertisement offers a palatable heroic narrative of a courageous man ‘drawing on every ounce of chivalry in [his] being’ to protect helpless children, while a distant female figure shrinks in alarm. Although not in uniform, the male figure continues a guardian role in defending the vulnerable, paralleling the role of the soldier protecting the homeland assumed by many American men during the previous years. This advertisement also reflects changing gender roles of the period, offering reassurance that the public sphere was still controlled by masculine authority during this crisis. Public debate surrounding women’s rights was particularly heated in 1919 America, with Congress passing the Nineteenth Amendment allowing female suffrage. Observe how the frightened female figure here recedes into the background while the male figure leans forward to dominate the advertisement, indicating a continuing source of strength. This advert reassures anxious consumers that despite war, pandemic and social change, Lysol remains unaltered, ready to shield their families from contagion.

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Figure 18.1  ‘The Disease Germ is More Dangerous Than the Mad Dog’, Ladies Home Journal, September 1919, 177.

Some allusion to military symbolism or power appeared in many advertisements focused on the 1918 flu, demonstrating an implied connection between influenza and the First World War, effectively offering combat situations and metaphors as remedies for influenza while obscuring war as a likely cause for the pandemic. Advertising contributed to the First World War military effort, especially in the planning and production of propaganda posters. Pearl James discusses how these stylish posters crossed the boundaries separating advertising and government authority, with both sides profiting. Government agencies tried to ‘seduce’ citizens to contribute more substantially to the war effort, while producers sought to ‘annex the aura of official authority’ to support their business efforts.42 Some images, such as the coquettish ‘Christy’ girl drawn by the artist Howard Chandler Christy (1872–1952), moved directly between advertisements and war posters.43 For example, the full colour ‘Infection Can’t Dent the Lysol Line!’ advertisement that appeared in Ladies Home Journal during May 1919 offers battleformation protection to civilians at large, successfully realising the pandemic militarisation of the home front extolled in contemporary newspaper editorials (Figure 18.2). Showing happy, well-dressed women and children dancing behind a secure circle of Lysol bottles while a cloud of germs ineffectively attempts entry, the image illustrates domestic peace while the copy advises relief from ‘[m]ental stress – loss of sleep – anything that sends your vitality below par and makes you an easy victim to disease’.44 One Lysol advertisement produced during the pandemic combined military references with symbols from the Gothic and horror tradition, creating an unstable narrative of dread and guilt that even the most effective antiseptic would not be able to remedy (Figure 18.3). Published in the Ladies Home Journal in April 1918, after the first wave of the influenza pandemic began in Kansas and made its way to the Western

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Figure 18.2  ‘Infection Can’t Dent the Lysol Line!’, Ladies Home Journal, May 1919, 135.

Figure 18.3  ‘Do You Live in a Haunted House?’, Ladies Home Journal, April 1918, 110.

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Front, this ominous full-page advert asks a resonant question: ‘Do you live in a haunted house?’45 The advert presents the viewer with a darkened American upper-class home replete with Gothic tropes (twisted tree branches, a black cat, fog) suggesting mystery, perhaps some past tragedy, but no obvious ghosts. Although the advert quickly offers the reader a potential tool to ‘Banish the Ghost’, its initial query inevitably suggests a second one: Who or what could be haunting this house? Is it germs easily ‘banished’ by a disinfectant, or could the ghosts be more substantial, much harder to exorcise? This advertisement becomes genuinely frightening as it attempts to banish its audience’s fears about the influenza pandemic through a series of increasingly untenable assertions concerning the American military and disease. Authentic unacknowledged ghosts haunt its text in the form of misleading or untrue boasts about army sanitation and disease prevention that conceal millions of lost lives. In its claims that the American military was successful in quelling malaria in the ‘pest hole’ of Panama and conquered ‘the ravages of yellow fever in Havana’, the advert provides a case study of both American imperialism and Western medicine’s hubris before the 1918 pandemic.46 In April 1918, after the battles of the Somme and Passchendaele, it should no longer have been possible to hold First World War armies up as models of hygiene, claiming that ‘[i]n armies, disease no longer kills more men than bullets, thanks to rigorous disinfection [. . .] Army disinfection is compulsory. In our cities it is optional, hence neglected by those who refuse to believe in germs – and their danger – because they cannot see them.’47 First World War battlefield trenches offered gruesome conditions, where faeces mixed with dead bodies and mud in fact encouraged new diseases such as a trench fever and trench foot; Carol Byerly documents that the American army would eventually lose more soldiers to flu than war.48 When the advertisement states that ‘[e]pidemics are born of dirt and ignorance’, it recalls not only the dirt of the trenches but also the condition of the American civilian reader, deliberately kept in ignorance by wartime censorship.49 Citing both the army and hospitals as examples of sanitation, this advertisement implicitly criticises public institutions while seeking to praise them, undercutting its intended public health message: this disease is frightening but controllable, a familiar ghost story to alarm only children and urge their mothers to greater domestic efforts. This ‘haunted house’ metaphor central to the advertisement particularly relies on threatening implications regarding the pandemic’s extent and the Gothic tradition of haunting. The advert begins by acknowledging that every American community has a ‘spooky’ haunted house: ‘There is a haunted house in almost every community. Its spooky character awes and frightens the children; grown-ups shun it on dark nights.’ It further insists that the house’s biological menace, germs, remains real: ‘a menace which is far from imaginary, which is dangerously real’.50 By acknowledging that the flu represented a pervasive menace requiring military-like efforts to eradicate it, the advert validated the pandemic’s danger without offering a solution commensurate to it. The public knew of the burgeoning army casualty lists, documenting rising military deaths, and diminishing the authority upon which the advert relies for safety. Similarly, haunted houses are frightening not only because they too are linked with death, but also because they are spaces where past traumas can return and threaten the future. This advertisement ultimately excited rather than calmed public anxiety about the 1918 flu by reminding the public of those who had died in both the war and the pandemic, and what those combined traumas might mean over time.

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Figure 18.4  ‘It Almost Stopped the Works in 1918!’, Time, 30 November 1942, 107.

As the United States entered the Second World War, fear of another war-related epidemic stirred memories of the 1918 pandemic, and new symbols for the 1918 flu emerged in American advertising, suggesting a narrative regarding its apocalyptic return. In 1942, decades after the earlier flu had been apparently forgotten, elaborate single-page advertisements for sanitary disposable cups such as Dixie and Ajax offered the public an (exaggerated) history of disease during the last war (Figure 18.4): ‘Remember 1918! . . . Flu swept our nation . . . over 20 million were stricken . . . Six Hundred Thousands died – more than ten times our losses in the war.’51 Images drawn from Western religious iconography carried the weight of the advertisements’ argument against contagion: a caped skeleton clutching placards emblazoned with the words ‘FLU’ and ‘PNEUMONIA’ or a pair of Satanic hands labelled ‘FLU EPIDEMIC’ using their exaggerated claws to scoop up factory workers.52 After first exciting fear of approaching catastrophe, the advertisements promoted the use of sanitary cups to prevent such cataclysmic consequences: With our war industries needing every man and woman at their work, an epidemic NOW would be a national tragedy [. . .] With so many of our doctors and nurses serving with the armed forces, an epidemic at home could spread rapidly . . . paralyze our war industries, spread to the men in camps . . . cruelly delay Victory . . . DIXIE CUPS, used but once and thrown away, are breaking this chain of Contagion . . . are a vital health protector . . . especially in time of war.53 In 1918 advertisers drew on frightening Gothic metaphors such as a haunted house to figure the flu; a generation after its outbreak and retreat, the 1918 pandemic has

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become biblical in its apocalyptic capacity to inspire terror and destroy human life, demonstrating public recognition of its true calamitous potential. While the figure of the skeleton seems in the spirit of memento mori or danse macabre from the early Renaissance, reminding viewers of death’s ability to eventually conquer all, the Satanic hands point more specifically to the post-millennial strain of Christianity that looks forward to the Second Coming of Christ and his ultimate battle with the Devil.54 These images allude to a different kind of war between good and evil, the saved and the damned, that evoke Judgement Day and its association with plague and pestilence.55 In his introduction to Apocalypse in American Literature and Culture, John Hays contends that apocalypse has remained central to American culture because it offers a balance of fear and hope, anxiety and revelation, ultimately leading to a new order.56 American apocalyptic rhetoric adapted surprisingly well to the scientific age by substituting research for religion, with the urgency to convert an audience remaining undimmed.57 Second World War advertising of hygienic products created an eschatology for the 1918 pandemic that was absent from its original history, projecting what Tomes terms ‘germ panic’ on to the next war, offering a rhetorical narrative first of fear of the 1918 pandemic returning, and then hope that it could be prevented, urging its audience to practise hygiene as a necessary measure for this safe new world to be secured. As the Second World War approached, the news media also recalled the 1918 influenza, but in relation to medical science, attempting to calm rather than inflame public fears of another catastrophic pandemic and to reintroduce the narrative of medical conquest of epidemic disease that had been so rudely interrupted by the 1918 flu. Beginning in late October 1940, the mainstream press offered a series of stories surrounding a promising influenza A vaccine funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.58 Even before the United States entered the Second World War, researchers tested this vaccine with favourable outcomes.59 Local newspapers ran articles explicitly linking this vaccine and other medical advances, such as sulfa drugs to control pneumonia, with a lowered risk of influenza during war, even though neither this vaccine nor sulfa drugs would have been useful against the lethal H1N1 influenza strain circulating in 1918.60 The Cazenovia Republican (1854–) offered quinine as a guaranteed flu remedy, and Evelyn Rowley proffered thanks for the new vaccine in the County Review (1903–50): ‘Doctors Who are Ferreting Out the Flu are Doing Real Service for Every Family’.61 In his column ‘That Body of Yours’, James W. Barlen, MD, advised his readers that Influenza and Pneumonia May Soon Be Controlled Physicians who went through the influenza epidemic of 1918–19 and witnessed the hopelessness in the treatment of thousands of cases now look with eager eyes towards future battles with influenza. No longer is there the feeling of helplessness should another epidemic occur because the physician is now well equipped to fight this dread disease . . . Now that the physician has at hand the sulfa drugs which have reduced the death rate [from pneumonia] . . . he is able to fight influenza and pneumonia successfully.62 Second World War American press coverage acknowledged the public fear of influenza returning as another total war began and sought to assuage that anxiety logically

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by demonstrating how medical science was currently prepared to treat influenza; some articles, such are Barlen’s above, drew a direct contrast with the 1918 flu. In others, the contrast was only implied. For many civilians, influenza posed a greater threat than war itself, a threat before which they understandably felt helpless. The apocalyptic symbols employed in periodical advertising first presented a visual correlative of influenza’s power and then named hygiene as the best way to contain it, while mainstream newspapers kept up a steady stream of articles about medical advances designed to lessen influenza’s impact. The combined number of media articles and advertisements foregrounding influenza in the early years of the Second World War testify to its continuing ability to inspire public concern. The real issue was finding a plausible counterweight to its awesome power.

Conclusion As science began to learn more about the 1918 pandemic, its narrative took on a more coherent shape. In her book Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It, Gina Kolata, science reporter for the New York Times, compiled a popular history of the 1918 pandemic, devoting special attention to the Centres for Disease Control’s sequencing of the 1918 flu’s DNA. Kolata’s narrative arc provides compelling candidates for heroes, such as Jeffrey Taubenberger, the molecular pathologist who led the team that found samples of live 1918 virus in Alaska and was eventually successful in proving it to be an avian flu. Taubenberger himself offered the detective genre, capable of offering satisfying closure, as most appropriate for the continuing story of the 1918 pandemic and named the virus itself a ‘mass murderer’: ‘This is a detective story. Here was a mass murderer that was around 80 years old and who’s never been brought to justice. And what we’re trying to do is find the murderer.’63 Yet even as we learn more about the 1918 flu, its history remains incomplete, with debate continuing about its origin and final mortality rate. We have to mark the end page of the 1918 influenza narrative as ‘To be continued’ rather than ‘finis’. Media responses to the 1918 pandemic demonstrate how complex it can be for print journalism to understand and disseminate accurate information during a simultaneous pandemic and war when little is known about the disease and public anxiety is high. Surprisingly, advertising provided a medium for new narratives about the 1918 flu’s social impact to emerge, and in the twenty-first century scientific research has lifted the stigma from this misunderstood pandemic and made it part of our common discourse. Foundational questions about how media can affect mass behaviour, making people more likely to observe public health measures such as obeying quarantine rules or getting vaccinated, remain the most urgent and the hardest to answer, however. Considering photographic advances during the US Civil War, Mark Noble offers hope that seeing dead bodies on battlefields would diminish viewers’ tolerance for such violence, that changes in media technology could lead to changes in human behaviour: ‘If the war could remediate a nation based on slavery [. . .] then perhaps photography could remediate a history shaped by war.’64 But has this hope been realised? Our contemporary experience with the Covid-19 pandemic offers abundant evidence of how conflicting media interpretations of a new disease can lead to an ‘infodemic’, a global spread of misinformation that creates serious problems for public health.65 In one

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hundred years, what narratives about Covid-19 will be remembered and what will be forgotten?

Notes   1. Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1967), 162–3.  2. Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider, 184.   3. Janet Howe, ‘The “Forgotten” 1918 Influenza Epidemic and Press Portrayal of Public Anxiety’, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 77, no. 4 (2000): 898–915, here 908.  4. Howe, ‘The “Forgotten” 1918 Influenza Epidemic’.   5. John Barry, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History (New York: Viking, 2004), 171.   6. Tom Dicke, ‘Waiting for the Flu: Cognitive Inertia and the Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918–19’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 70, no. 2 (2015): 195–217, here note 47; Barry, Great Influenza.   7. Howe, ‘The “Forgotten” 1918 Influenza Epidemic’, 900.   8. Debra E. Blakely, ‘Social Construction of Three Influenza Pandemics in The New York Times’, J&MC Quarterly 80, no. 4 (2003): 884–902, here 890.   9. Caroline Hovanec, ‘Of Bodies, Families, and Communities: Refiguring the 1918 Influenza Pandemic’, Literature and Medicine 29, no. 1 (2011): 161–81. 10. Dicke, ‘Waiting for the Flu’. 11. Barry, Great Influenza, 232–41. 12. Dicke, ‘Waiting for the Flu’. 13. For sentimental representations of the 1918 pandemic, see Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward Angel: A Story of the Buried Life (New York: Random House, 1929); and William Maxwell, They Came Like Swallows (New York: Vintage, 1937). 14. Arthur Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), xiv–xv; Sander Gilman, Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 1. 15. Howe, ‘The “Forgotten” 1918 Influenza Epidemic’, 908–9. 16. Dicke, ‘Waiting for the Flu’. 17. Jane Fisher, Envisioning Disease, Gender, War: Women’s Narratives of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 17–18. 18. Fisher, Envisioning Disease, Gender, War, 18. 19. Howe, ‘The “Forgotten” 1918 Influenza Epidemic’, 905. 20. ‘The Mystery of Influenza’, The Times, 28 October 1918, 7. 21. ‘The Mystery of Influenza’, 7. 22. Richard Collier, The Plague of the Spanish Lady: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918–19 (London: Allison and Busby, 1996). 23. Collier, Plague, 41, 82. 24. Collier, Plague, illustration between pp. 120–1. 25. Colgate toothpaste advertisement, New York Times, 2 October 1918. 26. ‘Check Influenza’, Guarantee Exterminating Company advertisement, New York Times, 13 October 1918. 27. Macy’s advertisement, New York Times, 8 November 1918. 28. See advertisements for Bacardi iron supplements claiming they were ‘efficacious in treatment of influenza’, New York Times, 23 October 1918; Borden’s malted milk claimed to maintain ‘vitality and bodily resistance’, New York Times, 29 October 1918; Horlick’s malted milk labelled itself ‘The Diet During and After Influenza’, New York Times,

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1 November 1918; and loganberry soda offered health benefits: ‘We Suggest Phez, Pure Juice of the Loganberry for Fever in Influenza’, New York Times, 2 November 1918. 29. New York Times, 22 September 1918. Howe reports two magazine articles with a similar heroic civilian narrative regarding the flu pandemic. Howe, ‘The “Forgotten” 1918 Influenza Epidemic’, 905. 30. Editorial, New York Times, 5 November 1918. 31. Editorial, New York Times, 5 November 1918, 37. 32. Carol R. Byerly, The Fever of War: The Influenza in the U.S. Army during World War I (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 99. 33. Blakely, ‘Social Construction’. 34. Howe, ‘The “Forgotten” 1918 Influenza Epidemic’, 907, 908. 35. Alfred W. Crosby, The Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), 71. 36. Gina Kolata, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 286. 37. Nancy Tomes, ‘The Making of a Germ Panic, Then and Now’, American Journal of Public Health 90, no. 2 (2000): 191–8, here 193. 38. Howe, ‘The “Forgotten” 1918 Influenza Epidemic’, 907. 39. Tomes, ‘Making of a Germ Panic’, 192. 40. Tomes, ‘Making of a Germ Panic’, 192. 41. ‘The Disease Germ is More Dangerous than the Mad Dog’, Ladies Home Journal, September 1919, 177. Advertisement. 42. Pearl James, Picture This: World War I Posters and Visual Culture (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 5. 43. James, Picture This, 288–9. 44. ‘Can’t Dent the Lysol Line!’, Ladies Home Journal, May 1919, 135. Advertisement. 45. ‘Do you live in a haunted house?’ Ladies Home Journal, April 1918, 110. Advertisement. 46. ‘Do you live in a haunted house?’ 47. ‘Do you live in a haunted house?’ 48. Byerly, Fever of War, 99. 49. ‘Do you live in a haunted house?’ 50. ‘Do you live in a haunted house?’ 51. ‘It almost stopped the works in 1918!’, Time, 30 November 1942, 107. Advertisement. 52. ‘It almost stopped the works in 1918!’, 107. 53. ‘It almost stopped the works in 1918!’, 107. 54. John Hay, ‘Introduction’, in Apocalypse in American Culture, ed. John Hay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 7. 55. Theresa Heffernan, Post-Apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Post-Modernism, and the Twentieth-Century Novel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 4. 56. Hays, ‘Introduction’, 2–3, 5. 57. Hays, ‘Introduction’, 7. 58. ‘New Vaccines to Get Test in War Zones’, New York Times, 22 October 1940, 25. 59. ‘Influenza Vaccine Held a Possibility’, New York Times, 8 December 1940, 3. 60. Jeffery K. Taubenberger and David M. Morens, ‘1918 Influenza: The Mother of All Pandemics’, Emerging Infectious Diseases 12, no. 1 (2006): 15–22. 61. Cazenovia Republican, Cazenovia, NY, 13 February 1941, 4; Evelyn Rowley, ‘Doctors Who are Ferreting Out the Flu are Doing Real Service for Every Family’, County Review, 20 March 1941, 17.

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62. James W. Barlen, ‘That Body of Yours’, Dunkirk, N.Y. Evening Observer, 12 December 1942, 6. 63. Kolata, Flu, 4. 64. Mark Noble, ‘Apocalyptic Violence in Visual Media’, in Hays, ed., Apocalypse in American Culture, 35. 65. Meghan McGinty and Nat Gyenes, eds, Special Issue: Harvard Misinformation News, ‘The Causes and Consequences of COVID-19 Misperceptions: Understanding the Role of News and Media’, 19 June 2020, , accessed 19 September 2021.

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Part IV: Types of Periodicals

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19 Trench Journals Robert L. Nelson

T

rench journals, soldier newspapers, the periodicals created by the troops for their fellow troops, provide an incredibly rich source for the social and cultural history of the First World War. Unlike letters and memoirs, written by soldiers but for civilians, what makes trench journals so unique and valuable is their audience: trench journals had to appeal to a readership that knew the truth about the war and they had to discuss what soldiers at the front wanted to read about. Yet despite the fact that large numbers of these journals are now digitised and thus easily accessible, they remain shockingly underused.1 When I conducted my archival work in Germany, France and Britain at the end of the 1990s, initial important works had appeared for each of those nation’s trench journals and I felt as if it was a race against time to complete first my dissertation (2003) and eventually a book that compared all three nations’ journals (2011).2 I need not have been in any rush. The trickle of publications on First World War trench journals over the last two decades bears no relationship to the tidal wave of books and articles on seemingly every other element of that conflagration.3 It is thus with the goal of illustrating how original and eye-opening the material in these journals is that I will focus on material related to gender and race from those first archival journeys that I have never published, and that, as far as I can tell, have never appeared elsewhere.4 This new material buttresses one of my major arguments about the trench journals: what distinguished the German newspapers from their Allied counterparts was the former’s relentless employment of a discourse of manliness and honour to justify aggression and occupation. After describing the readers, audience and mechanics of the journals, I will first highlight entertainment in the newspapers, especially the fascinating role of cross-dressing, and then will focus on the gendered depictions of the peoples of the Salonika and Middle Eastern fronts. While the Germans went out of their way to ‘hide’ their cross-dressers, they expended a large amount of ink trying to highlight the masculine traits of their non-European allies.

Authors, Readers, Censorship, Distribution Trench journals were periodicals printed by soldiers for soldiers. The First World War saw propaganda produced for soldiers and was replete with soldiers’ letters and memoirs written for civilians, but with trench journals the relationship of authors with their readers was unique. In crucial ways, this source tells us an enormous amount about what soldiers actually believed, because the authors and the readers shared the same experience and knew what was ‘true’. Therefore, the authors had to write what they knew their audience would accept, indeed, would pay for.

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The authors tended to be middle-class, educated, slightly older and were often low-ranking officers.5 There were varying levels of censorship across all armies, but the newspapers were paid for and popular, and therefore cannot be seen simply as top-down propaganda, something a purchasing audience would have recognised and rejected. They began to appear in large numbers on the Western Front by the middle of 1915, as the front line settled and troops had access to a longer-term, stable situation. The German trench journal operation was by far the largest, with more than a million copies printed per month in 1916–17 on the Western Front, and two million on the Eastern Front. The Germans were everywhere an army of occupation on foreign soil. This meant that there was less competition from hard-to-get civilian newspapers. Moreover, these were troops that needed to talk to themselves about, indeed justify, what they were doing on foreign soil. The German newspapers existed at every level, from company-level journals to large army newspapers, and it is safe to say that any German soldier serving more than a few weeks at the front would surely have encountered these publications. The French produced far fewer papers (civilian newspapers were available just behind the lines), with around 100,000 being printed per month in mid-1916. Finally, the British and Dominion armies had the smallest number of titles, with very few printings of more than 5,000 copies.6 Nevertheless, it is safe to say that these publications were read aloud in the trenches and estaminets, were shared among soldiers, and so it may well be the case that very significant percentages of the French and British armies read or ‘heard’ the stories in these journals. The editorial team would both pen articles and draw sketches, as well as constantly receiving written and drawn pieces from their soldier audience.7 The newspapers were sometimes hand-pressed on gelatin trays, but for the most part were produced on printing presses located in buildings not far behind the lines, or back in Paris or even London, before being shipped back to the front. They were sent via post to subscribers, available for purchase at train stations, or left lying about in estaminets or ‘soldier homes’ (Soldatenheime). Except for the copies we enjoy today, either mailed home to family members and civilian libraries, or provided to the censor, the vast majority of trench journals were likely passed many times between soldiers before meeting their end, as it were, as they would have made ideal toilet paper.

The Purpose of the Trench Journals The most obvious indicator that the journals offered an escape from the horror of no-man’s land, and the killing of fellow human beings, is the fact that, in all three armies, these publications depicted virtually no violence, and there were few or no hateful images of the enemy. If propaganda is meant to instil a desire in soldiers to destroy the enemy, the trench journals were free of it.8 The rare depictions of the enemy were most often cartoonish jokes, such as ‘Peace Dream of a French Soldier’ in Der Schützengraben (1915–17) on 21 November 1915, in which the fashion-conscious poilu is dreaming of having a brandnew suit. Mentions of no-man’s land in the journals appeared only obliquely, as in the popular ‘rescue stories’ found in German soldier newspapers. This genre was absent from the Allied journals, and points to one of the most fundamental differences between the cultures of the two sides: the German obsession with ‘comradeship’. Instead of indulging in violence and hatred of the enemy, the German trench journals spent a lot of time discussing what good comrades and proper ‘men’ German troops

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were. Long and deep discussions of male friendship (including deep heartache at the loss of a close acquaintance) and the importance of honour and loyalty among men translated to larger themes of honourable women (both Germans and less honourable occupied women), and indeed judgements of entire populations. The degree to which Germans told themselves that they were honourable men, doing honourable things, behaving like manly men, becomes striking, especially when reading Eastern Front newspapers. Such language is absent from the Allied trench journals. The conclusion I have drawn is that it is a common discourse for soldiers to frame their duty (killing) as a defensive measure to protect house and home, women and children, as well as the nation, from aggressive outsiders. The fact that so much German messaging at the elite level was directed towards an ‘encircled’ Germany, fighting a ‘war of defence’, speaks directly to this. So when, from 1915, German soldiers found themselves, everywhere, fighting a ‘war of defence’ while occupying foreign lands and peoples, there was an especially strong desire to frame themselves as good, honourable comrades, and beyond that, of Germany as an honourable, comradely nation bringing honour and manliness, indeed ‘civilisation’, to less ‘proper’ peoples and nations. This was exceptionally pronounced on the Eastern Front as the civilising mission of the new German Empire of the East was being formed.9 Conversely, there was no discussion of the honour and duty of the French in their mission, and for obvious reasons: almost every French soldier was fighting on French soil, with French civilians literally just to the rear of the front lines. As such, the French trench journals are the most honest and straightforward of all (bordering on insubordination), containing sketches and jokes never found in the British or German journals, such as the depiction of a nurse bathing the amputated stump of a soldier in hospital, or the following joke: ‘the rank stupidity of the army and the vastness of the sea are the only two things which can give an idea of infinity’.10 Finally, the British occupy an in-between space, just as they did in the war, not directly defending British soil, but nevertheless helping defend the obviously invaded soil of their ally. Unsurprisingly, the British deal with this vague situation with one of their key tools: humour. The relentless joking, cartoons and snarky asides throughout the British trench journals is breathtaking and clearly demarcates them from the French and German. And it is in this very humour, the deflection inherent in it, the avoidance of the messy fact that British soldiers were killing Germans for the sake of the French, all in order to preserve some vague idea of a British ‘way of life’, that both makes for fabulous reading and provides a window into the mind of the Tommy.11 I will be pursuing these themes of comradeship, gender and race through discussions of entertainment, colonial troops, occupied populations, as well as the depiction of nonEuropean allies, that is, Turks and Arabs. All of these examples reinforce my overall thesis that, because they were everywhere the aggressor, German rhetoric, vis-à-vis Allied language, always emphasised the proper, manly nature of not only German soldiers, but importantly also their allies, especially non-European soldiers whose ‘otherness’ was diminished by their description as honourable men (and women).

Cross-dressing and Entertainment The major forms of entertainment behind the lines, music and theatre, are of central importance in the trench journals. Drawing on the deeply cross-class genre of music hall, the British newspapers were able to reference specific songs that most knew,

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from officers to enlisted men.12 The German Tingel-Tangel had not yet developed to the same degree, and in any case, German regional differences still militated against a national set of ditties that all readers would know.13 Thus, specific references to songs in the German newspapers tended towards classical music. However, that everyone enjoyed singing is apparent in stories and sketches across all the armies. The German journals went one step further in mentioning instruments as well, and how, by hook or by crook, the men at or near the front were going to figure out how to accompany voices with a fuller sound. Unteroffizier Fritz Simon, in ‘The Music of the Fieldgreys (Feldgrauen)’ published in the Liller Kriegszeitung (1914–18), insisted that the ear must attune itself to the sounds of war. The first and most difficult noise to get used to was that of ‘shells’, but the harmonica was not much easier to stomach, asserted Simon. A lute or piano were delightful to listen to, but rare near the front. The best was the gramophone: ‘It sings cabaret songs.’ (Es singt Brettllieder).14 The only other reference I found to gramophones in the German trench press was ‘The Adjutant and the Gramophone’, an account in the Kriegs-Zeitung von Baranowitsch (1916–18) of how a unit acquired one, and then had to arrange for every soldier to buy records while on leave.15 Although the potential for a ‘mass cultural discourse’ was here, along the lines of British music hall, the gramophone posed too many technological and logistical obstacles, as did the cinema, the other form of mass culture in Germany. Hence, the gramophone never became a significant feature of front culture.16 Although acquiring instruments might be difficult, almost every soldier could sing, and thus song was ubiquitous behind the lines. More difficult to bring together was theatre, but the overwhelming evidence in the trench journals is that in addition to the excitement of the arrival of travelling troupes, the soldiers built stages themselves and performed as much as circumstances allowed. The manner in which certain soldier actors were depicted, however, sets up a powerful contrast between the German and the Allied armies. Theatre behind the lines in the First World War presented a situation akin to the original staging of Shakespeare: female roles but only male actors. Photographs of the German theatre troupes clearly indicate men dressed as females, but this is nowhere openly discussed. The plays were popular and often referenced, but crossdressing as part of the daily experience of front theatre was quietly ignored in the text. The British and Australians, however, rather than avoiding these manifestations, were conspicuously open about their ‘girls’. These actors were interviewed, they published ‘love letters’ written by soldiers to them, and appeared generally comfortable with this decidedly ‘unmasculine’ activity. Although the presence of cross-dressers in the culture of music hall before the war might provide a partial explanation of this practice, I believe the phenomenon was eased by the ‘righteous’, comfortably ‘just’ Allied sense of mission in the war. British soldiers had no need to dwell on their ‘manliness’, and no deep desire to hide exhibitions of ‘effeminacy’.17 The September 1917 Mudhook (1917–19), a journal produced by a unit of the Royal Naval Division, asked ‘Why isn’t there a “Girl” in our Divisional Pierrot Show?’ These prayers seemed to have been answered, for in an issue that appeared just after the end of the war (Christmas 1918), there was a sketch of all the troupe’s players, which included two ‘girls’. The caption claimed that ‘some of the boys have expressed the opinion that the “lady” members of the company are the next best thing to the real goods, and, as the sketches show, they are marvellous imitations, our only fear being that the pictures may arouse unworthy suspicions at home’. Were these ‘unworthy

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suspicions’ that some civilians might believe that a few of the soldiers were ‘queer’? On the contrary, it would seem that the men were most likely concerned that their wives might believe there were ‘really’ women with their husbands at the front. The Open Exhaust or Karstinks (1916) had a review of a recent show, in the column ‘Music Hall Jottings’, which opined that the impersonator was indeed ‘some girl’. In fact, he overheard an officer exclaim: ‘Well, I wouldn’t mind.’ At the end of the programme, a bouquet had been thrown onto the stage ‘from an unknown, mayhap, male admirer’.18 Although there was the occasional recognition in the newspapers that these were ‘real’ men, such as the sketch of a smoking, overweight ‘Capt. Mathews (better known as buster)’, standing in an undershirt and tutu, there existed surprisingly open reports of the degree to which the men participated in this genderbending fantasy.19 Note the following words that appeared in a recurring advice column in the Leadswinger (1915–19) on 16 October 1915: ‘Admirer’ wishes to know if I am a lady, as he thinks my articles so kind and sweet. Ah! ‘Admirer,’ I fain would not shatter thy happy dream, but lo, I am but a mere man. But what matters it, open out thy heartburnings to me; I long to hear them, but not half as much as my readers. Returning to Mudhook, the October 1918 issue contained an interview with ‘The Leading Girl at the Follies’. Note first that the article never once refers to him as ‘him’, and secondly the manner in which ‘she’ obviously lives separately, away from the troops, as some kind of ‘diva superstar’: And if you are still not satisfied that the gentler sex appeals to the troops, then visit the Anchor Follies and watch the eager faces of the boys when the leading ‘lady’ appears. Need one say more? It was to satisfy something of the not unreasonable curiosity that exists with regard to the domestic life of this popular lady that the ‘Mudhook’ representative called upon her in her beautiful country home. I found [her] in her charming garden at Toot-Toot Court reclining in a deck chair that had quite obviously been an ammunition box at some recent period in its history. [. . .] I explained my mission to the fair one and told her the boys were dying to know something of her more intimate family life. She blushed becomingly and tried unsuccessfully to hide the fancy work on which she was engaged. I begged that she would allow me to mention this delightful incident and assured her that her many admirers would be only too pleased to hear of her love for artistic fancy work. ‘It is really only a little stitching for our brave soldiers’ was her modest response and I could not refrain from telling her how much the boys would appreciate anything that her delicate fingers had worked upon. [. . .] I assured her that the readers of the ‘Mudhook’ would be most interested to hear something of her pretty frocks and – er, yes. She begged me to remember that those nice filmy things are not now on issue as the flax is needed for war purposes but she allowed me to take a peep at the treasures in her kit bag. It would be

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divulging secrets to say all I saw, but this much, dear reader, you may know, that your heroine in private life is one of the most tastefully and daintily dressed of girls even though her stage costumes may at times be, well – just a little daring. This fascinating story was accompanied by five sketches which serve to qualify the fantastic descriptions of the author by revealing ‘the truth’: a run-down shack, and a male ‘girl’, smartly dressed in army issue clothing, with hair that stuck straight up, like a latter-day punk-rocker’s. The Australian soldier newspapers were active in this genre as well. ‘Loewe’ was the favourite ‘girl’ of the Standard of C Company (1918), and the July 1918 issue featured poems written by soldiers about ‘her’, alongside more straightforward expressions of love. The 8 March 1918 issue of Aussie (1918–32) detailed a recent ‘Fancy Dress Ball’ in which half the men had dressed as women. The success of the event was evidenced by reports of ‘stolen kisses’. In contrast to their German counterparts, the British and Australian troops not only seem to have reverently described some of their comrades as ‘girls’, they even fantasised about their ‘filmy’ clothing. Finally, and to bolster my argument that the Allied newspapers display a clear comfort with feminine expression, let us briefly turn to the French trench journals. The unit that produced the journal Marmita (1915–17) had among its soldiers an excellent singer, Paul Clérouc. In an autobiographical article, ‘Un chansonnier au front’ (A Songwriter at the Front), he described how he sang about daily life in a manner that lifted the spirits of his soldier audience. It seems as though, like the British, he could draw upon modern café concert songs that the majority of the men already knew. Another author in the journal wrote of Clérouc, especially when he performed in drag as ‘Josta, “chanteuse et danseuse à transformations”, who knew how to charm a group of soldiers’. The author referenced another cross-dressing actor, Corporal Maurice Coste, whose scenes between himself as a woman and another male actor were emotionally powerful: ‘no gesture, no bearing save that of a woman. His make-up was perfect. He sang couplets with admirable charm. The “couple” scenes [. . .] brought smiles to the crowd, caused a small shudder of emotion in the audience.’ (Aucun geste, aucune attitude qui ne fut de la femme. Son maquillage était parfait. Il chanta ses couplets avec un charme admirable. Les scènes et duos [. . .] qui eussent dû faire sourire, n’amenèrent dans le public que le petit frisson d’émotion.)20 Again, such sentiments were never expressed in the German journals. The only discussion of true emotion was preserved for the deep love between comrades.21

Cultural Stereotypes, Race and Gender The German obsession with gender and honour continued with the trench journals’ discussions of various occupied peoples as well as non-European allies. Elsewhere I have discussed extensively the German depiction of Polish and Slavic peoples as effeminate and worthy only of colonisation.22 Here, let us turn to the south and an area of growing interest in the history of the First World War: the Ottoman Empire. Trench journals were very popular along the Salonika Front where western European soldiers on both sides found themselves in a liminal space: still Europe, but with minarets in the towns.23 One group, especially prevalent in German-occupied Romania, were the Roma.

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For centuries, the Roma people of Europe had been depicted as animated, though often corrupt, characters in the folklore of virtually all nationalities.24 Indeed, by 1914 there were few well-known examples of ‘capable’ Gypsies in the eyes of Westerners. Due to the relative absence of Roma outside south-eastern Europe, they were the subject of only two articles I found on the Western and Eastern fronts. ‘The Gypsy and the Lithuanian’, in the 20 July 1916 issue of the Zeitung der 10. Armee (1915–18), actually reversed the stereotype of the deceitful Gypsy. Here, a Lithuanian befriends a Gypsy with a chicken and, after a meal, invites him to have a nap. When the Gypsy wakes up, the Lithuanian informs him that he dreamed of heaven, saw the Gypsy up there, decided he no longer needed his chicken and ate it while the Gypsy slept! An article entitled ‘Gypsy Soldiers’ (Zigeunersoldaten) appeared on the Western Front, in the 3 October 1918 issue of the Kriegszeitung der 4. Armee (1914–18). Gathered here were a few tales of Gypsies serving in the Austro-Hungarian army. Reference was made to one of the soldiers using his ‘tricks’ to fool a Ukrainian housewife out of some food. These soldiers were allies, however, and the disparaging stereotypes were constrained in an otherwise positive article. Significantly more references to Roma appeared on the south-eastern front, and with that number came stereotypical, negative comments. The Macedonian-based Kriegs-Zeitung Heeresgruppe Scholtz (1916–1918) contained the descriptive piece ‘Balkan Gypsies’ (Balkanzigeuner). The author explained that the Gypsies today came out of a ‘dark’ past, were widely dispersed throughout Europe, and were both nomadic and settled. While the settled members were positively depicted as fully assimilated inhabitants in various European countries, the nomads were described as a people who changed their domiciles as easily and quickly as they did religions. They were ‘half naked’ (halbnackt), dirty and indolent, yet happy with their fate. Interestingly, however, the author seemed to praise the aspect of their ‘Oriental’ philosophy that did not force them to constantly seek ‘money and fame’ (Geld und Ruhm).25 The tone became decidedly more critical in Rümanien in Wort und Bild (1917–18). ‘Gypsy Life’ (Zigeunerleben) began as a rather scientific history of migration and familial structure among the Gypsies, and then shifted dramatically to declare that ‘work’ (Arbeit) among these people meant stealing, lying and cheating. These were a race, argued the author, that had no concept of ‘loyalty’ (Treue) (a key trait of manly, honourable peoples).26 Another article again praised settled Roma, for they had learned Romanian, worked and were virtually indistinguishable from Romanians. Nomads, however, were ‘work-shy’ (arbeitsscheu), relied on ‘theft’ (Diebstahl), begged, and the parents, it was claimed, hit each other with their young children. The women completely lacked loyalty, sleeping with whomever, whenever. Yet these people, always excellent musicians, were the ‘charm’ (Reiz) of Romania.27 Although French newspapers never mentioned the Roma, with regard to the ‘Orient’, the newspaper La Bourguignotte (1915–19) is helpful, as this unit, the 227th Infantry, served in both Syria and Salonika. The inhabitants and culture of both fronts, however, were subsumed under the rubric ‘Oriental’, and it is very difficult to tell when an author is describing ‘Arabs’ or Macedonians. As a people, ‘Orientals’ were depicted as lazy and dirty, and the men were accused of treating their women very poorly. The French men who produced this newspaper were obviously seduced by the image of the exotic Oriental woman, as she appears throughout, in text and image, enticing interested soldiers.28 Fighting alongside the Germans on the Salonika Front were their major ally, the Ottomans. ‘The Turkish Soldier’ (Der türkische Soldat), in the 22 September 1917

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issue of Rümanien in Wort und Bild, described this warrior as ‘ideal soldier material’ (idealisches Soldatenmaterial) and declared ‘true comradeship’ (echte Kameradschaft) between Germany and Turkey. The author of ‘The Turkish Volk-Character’ (Der türkische Volkscharakter) discussed life in Turkey and explained how a typical financial transaction was conducted without a receipt. This betrayed a deep sense of ‘trust’ (Vertrauen) among these people, he argued, and was something from which Germany could learn and gain. He went further to describe these people as possessing ‘knightly virtues’ (ritterliche Tugenden). He concluded that Germany had found ‘loyal brotherhood of arms’ (treue Waffenbrüderschaft) with this ‘capable Volk’ (tüchtiges Volk).29 Such obviously masculine traits were only ever attributed to Germany’s allies, such as the Bulgarians and the Turks.30 The most significant and appreciated gift from Turkey to the West was discussed in ‘The Coffee House – A Gift of the Turks to Europe’ (Das Kaffeehaus – ein Geschenk der Türkei an Europa) in Am Bosporus (1917–18). In a surprising ‘alternate’ reading of events, the siege of Vienna in 1663, normally depicted as one of the greatest examples of the eternal incompatibility of East and West, becomes the setting for a delightful story. Instead of bloodthirsty Muslims hammering at the gates of Christendom, we hear of how the Pole, Count Kulczycki, after visiting the Turks in their camp, returned with coffee and happily established Europe’s first coffee house.31 Despite the representation of the Turks as ‘virtually German’, the ‘Oriental’ aspect of Turkish culture was inescapable in German depictions of these people, and thus authors and illustrators did their best to describe it in a manner most beneficial to the depiction of good ‘comrades’. The article ‘The Turk, as he actually is’ (Der Türke, wie er wirklich ist) claimed that this was not some ‘land of fairy tales’ (Märchenland) fixed in unchanging images. Instead of a place of ‘being’ (sein), it was a place of ‘becoming’ (werden), experiencing a ‘rejuvenation’ (Verjüngung) as it became a modern, pluralistic society (while maintaining a strong religious faith).32 A piece in the 12 February 1916 issue of the Kriegs-Zeitung von Baranowitschi described the Turks as a ‘pure’ (rein) Mongolian people who had been slow to modernise due to Koranic teaching. The Young Turks, however, had changed this and now their ‘different beliefs should not be an obstacle’ (verschiedene Glaube soll kein Hindernis [sein]) to modernisation. It was noted that Germany was also helping them to modernise. The women of Turkey were also defined in positive ways.33 Although it was difficult to describe them in a ‘Germanic’ manner, the authors did their best. Only a few articles were constrained by stereotypes of ‘the Oriental’. ‘Turkish Women’ (Türkische Frauen), in the 2 September 1916 edition of the Vilnius-based Zeitung der 10. Armee, depicted sensuous, erotic women. An identically titled piece from the nearby Kriegs-Zeitung von Baranowitschi of 8 July 1916 told of stunningly beautiful young women who quite suddenly become ‘old’ at twenty-five and settle into motherhood. The same article revealed the tale of one of these young beauties being stoned to death for sleeping with a European. The 22 September 1917 issue of Rümanien in Wort und Bild asked readers to ignore ‘the most strange and fantastic notions’ (die seltsamsten und phantastischsten Anschauungen) that Europeans have of Turkish women, for they are false. Instead, the author offered that these were serious women, full of ‘self-sacrificing patriotism’ (opferfreudigen Vaterlandsliebe). In fact, these ‘loyal’ (treue) women had ‘learned to do the work of men’ (Männerarbeit zu leisten gelernt haben). Despite the obvious cultural obstacles, it is clear that when a nation manifested such commitment to the German Fatherland as that encompassed in a

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military allegiance, those people were to be respected to the highest degree in the German soldier newspapers. While praising the ‘modern’ aspects of Turkey, the newspapers maintained respect for women with more traditional roles. ‘In the Turkish Cinema’ (Im türkischen Kino), by Elise Mehderian of Constantinople, detailed her visit to an afternoon cinema where the audience was solely female.34 Although she found many aspects of the treatment of women in Turkish society to be strange, she declared that these were nevertheless normal human beings. This tone was maintained in ‘The Turkish Mother’ (Die türkische Mutter), an article arguing that a simple, uneducated woman made the best mother, and that mothers were the most highly respected members of Turkish society. Therefore, the author continued, it was difficult for the Turks to understand Western society with its powerful, public women.35 Many sketches in Am Bosporus depicted respectable Turkish women going about their business in the city. They were clean, serious, wrapped prudently in their clothing and wearing shoes. In one amalgam of several drawings, a young woman with a transparent veil, wearing Westernised clothing, appeared beside an older woman, with traditional garments and a completely opaque veil.36 Thus the Germans recognised and differentiated both the ‘new’ Turkey and the ‘old’. In contrast to these German discussions, there were very few references in the British soldier newspapers to the hundreds of thousands of ‘coloured’ colonial troops and labourers assisting them on the Western Front. Very rarely were Indian soldiers depicted in a neutral manner, such as the sketch in the July 1918 Mudhook of a sepoy cooking. More commonly, Indians were ridiculed in jokes. One example, in the July 1917 Chronicles of the White Horse (1917), listed the letters of the alphabet with a short statement for each: ‘I is for Indians who “English no spik”.’ There were further examples in this same journal mocking Indians’ use of English, and this was present in other newspapers as well, such as the Christmas 1916 issue of the Dump (1915–18).37 The Chinese labourers were not spared from abuse either in two appearances I came across in the trench journals. ‘That Chow Chow Smile’ featured a confused worker saying ‘Bully Biff?’38 Supposed Oriental indolence was referenced in a sketch of laughing Chinese men, with a caption that stated that if ‘you’ went all over the world and were paid three francs a day for doing nothing, ‘you’ would be laughing too.39 Regarding African soldiers, ‘With the Cameroon Expeditionary Force’, in the February 1916 Mules Monthly (1916–?), detailed the campaign in Africa and praised the excellent contribution of the Hausa. While there was a lone sketch of a ‘normallooking’ Senegalese trumpeter in the June 1916 Whizz-Bang (1916), a cartoon in the 1 December 1917 Listening Post (1915–18) depicted big-lipped natives eating the very Germans sent to recruit them. These British depictions of colonials portrayed the white members of the British forces as completely indifferent to the help provided by their colonial comrades.40 Finally, both the Germans and the British had a fraught relationship with the Arabs of the Middle East, as both desired them as fighting allies, and yet were unsure of their ultimate loyalties. In the two main Middle Eastern German soldier newspapers, Am Bosporus and the Syria-based Jildirim (1918), there were articles on, and images of, the Arabs in general (and this seemed sometimes implicitly to include Turks), as well as more specific discussions of Kurds and Bedouin. Support for pan-Islamism, and the resulting positive approach to peoples of the Middle East, was linked to Germany’s

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desire for these people to rise up against the Allies. The portrayal of such populations was thus a mixture of both positive and paternalistic attitudes, but, especially in contrast to the Allied examples, highlights the German desire to emphasise manliness and honour among their own allies. ‘My Arab Servant’ (Meine arabischen Diener) listed the ‘hospitality, respect for elders and love of children’ (Gastfreundschaft, Achtung vor den Alten und Liebe zu den Kindern) displayed by the Arabs.41 A much more ambiguous image of Arabs than that given of the Turks appeared in ‘An Arab’ (Ein Araber). A German was invited into an Arab’s house for a meal. After asserting how, again, ‘hospitable’ (gastfreundlich) these people were, the author commented on the ‘European’ decorated front room, and the sparse, Arab dining room in the rear, initially difficult to see. This, he claimed, was representative of the thin veneer of modernity among the Syrians. However, the author concluded with the observation that these people could learn anything.42 The photo and text of ‘Kurdish Vehicle’ (Kurdisches Fahrzeug), in the 2 July 1918 issue of Am Bosporus, depicted very poor-looking children around a primitive cart with solid wooden wheels. The caption indicated that these were an ‘IndoGermanic Volk, whose language and customs had been kept free of Turkish and Arab influence’ (indogermanisches Volk, das seine Sprache und seine Sitten von türkischen und arabischen Einflüssen rein erhalten hat). A ‘noble savage’ theme continues: ‘Usually forming the poorer part of the population, they only have the most primitive household appliances, which, like their wagons, still possess the original archetypes of the Indo-Germans’ (Meist den ärmeren Teil der Bevölkerung bildend, verfügen sie nur über die primitivsten Hausgeräte, die wie ihr Wagen noch die Urformen aus der Zeit vor der Ausbreitung der Indogermanen aufweisen). Interestingly, ethnic populations that the Germans disliked, such as the Poles, were portrayed as ‘primitive’ in a dirty and useless manner, whereas here the Kurds were lionised for being ‘primitive’ in a ‘positive’ way because they were seen to directly represent the ancestors of the Germans, the Indo-Germanen.43 In an article explaining the horse culture of the Bedouin, a long haggling process was detailed in what was ultimately a positive story about a proud people.44 In ‘The Horse of the Bedouin’ (Das Pferd bei den Beduinen), the animal was described as ‘clever and docile’ (klug und gelehrig). His owner was deemed a trustworthy protector.45 A later article explained that Bedouin always kept their word.46 ‘Bedouins’, in the British journal Chronicles of the White Horse of April 1917, described the life of these ‘timeless’ people. They seemed to do very little, and their primitive farming was, for the most part, done by the women. In German publications, the description of diligent women was usually used to further the assertion that a certain race was ‘masculine’, but here, the British description was intended to emasculate the Arab men. There was indeed little attempt to portray these men as a ‘martial race’ worthy of fighting alongside the British. The piece ‘Life in Egypt’ praised the upperclass, mostly Christian inhabitants of Cairo, but went on to denigrate the poor Muslims as a dirty people who abused their women and underwent an ‘annual bath’.47 There were further references to the ‘negative’ nature of Arabs, such as the joke advertisement in the May 1917 Bairns Gazette (1917–?), by Mustafa McNab and Co. of Sandystreet, Cairo. The caption read: ‘Don’t go elsewhere to be cheated.’ The story ‘A Guide Guyed’ described the clothing worn by Arab men as ‘nighties’.48 The only allusion to an established relationship between the two peoples occurred in ‘Christmas in Egypt’. Here,

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a timeless, sanguine people were depicted as in need of British assistance in order to progress. When the author described how ‘some of us were on the Suez Canal, and took part in the fighting when the Turks attacked Egypt early in 1915’, there was no mention of help from the locals or the many Indian soldiers present.49 As elsewhere in the Allied journals, these soldiers were convinced of the righteousness of their role, and were thus unconcerned with defining or justifying their relationship to the ‘natives’.

Conclusion The trench journals of the First World War have an enormous amount to tell us about the everyday thoughts, beliefs and experiences of the soldiers in many armies across varied fronts. While I could have easily focused on the tropes we know so well, such as lice and the Western Front, I have instead emphasised the surprises one finds in these newspapers, from cross-dressing to Turkish women, to indicate just what potential this primary source has for future research. Overwhelmingly, our understanding of the First World War comes to us through the accounts of witnesses (soldiers) explaining what happened to the uninitiated (civilians), via letters and memoirs. With trench journals we get to read what soldiers wrote for other soldiers, what soldiers knew other soldiers found interesting and wanted to read about, and very much what soldiers did not care to read about. They did not care about politics or strategy and they did not assign blame or hatred to the enemy. Among many things, they were interested in song and theatre, and for the soldiers who were aggressively occupying people behind the lines (the Germans), it seems they were very interested in their own complicity and, therefore, their own sense of honour.

Notes   1. While the British Library holds perhaps the most complete set of British and Dominion soldier newspapers, excellent collections can also be found at the Imperial War Museum and the Cambridge University Library. The most complete set of French soldier newspapers can be found at the Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine, Nanterre. A large number can also be found at the Bibliothèque Nationale, François Mitterand, Paris, as well as at the Service Historique de l’Armée de Terre, Vincennes. The most complete set of German soldier newspapers can be found at the Deutsche Bücherei, Leipzig. Excellent collections can also be found at the Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart, and the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, Freiburg im Breisgau. See also the excellent digital archive at ProQuest, ‘Trench Journals and Unit Magazines of the First World War’. For more information on the relevant digital archives, see Chapter 3 in this volume. Due to the Covid-19 crisis, the author has had to rely on his notes; not all details could be added or verified.   2. J. G. Fuller, Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies, 1914– 1918 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990); Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Men at War: National Sentiment and Trench Journalism in France during the First World War [1986], trans. Helen McPhail (Providence, RI: Berg, 1992); Anne Lipp, Meinungslenkung im Krieg. Kriegserfahrungen deutscher Soldaten und ihre Deutung 1914–1918 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003); Robert L. Nelson, ‘German Soldier Newspapers of the First World War’, PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2003; Robert L. Nelson, German Soldier Newspapers of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).  3. The one serious book-length intervention is Graham Seal, The Soldiers’ Press: Trench Journals in the First World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). See also John

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Pegum, ‘British Army Trench Journals and a Geography of Identity’, in Publishing in the First World War, ed. Mary Hammond and Shafquat Towheed (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 129–47. Belgian trench journals are a welcome feature of Cedric Van Dijck, Marysa Demoor and Sarah Posman, ‘Between the Shells: The Production of Belgian, British and French Trench Journals in the First World War’, Publishing History 77 (2017): 67–89. For a discussion of trench journals in other armies and other wars, see Robert L. Nelson, ‘Soldier Newspapers: A Useful Source in the Social and Cultural History of the First World War and Beyond’, War in History 17 (2010): 167–91.   4. The only substantial material that I have never published, but could not fit into this chapter, is the discussion of religion and superstition. See Nelson, ‘German Soldier Newspapers’, 199ff.   5. The information in this section is explored much more extensively in chapter 1 of Nelson, German Soldier Newspapers.   6. For the Belgian trench journals, see Van Dijck, Demoor and Posman, ‘Between the Shells’.  7. For a handwritten example of a trench journal, see Marysa Demoor, Birgit Van Puymbroeck and Marianne Van Remoortel, ‘La Revue des marraines (1916–17): A Journal for War Godmothers and their Godchildren’, Journal of European Periodical Studies 2, no. 21 (2017): 21–38.   8. This is of course strong evidence against the so-called ‘war culture’ thesis, that hatred of the enemy was a prime motivation for soldiers in the First World War. See Leonard V. Smith, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, France and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).   9. See Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity, and German Occupation in World War 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). On the depiction of occupied populations in the East, see chapter 5 of Nelson, German Soldier Newspapers. 10. Bellica, January 1916; On progresse, 1 April 1917. Original French version, , accessed 24 April 2022. 11. This is the main argument of Fuller, Troop Morale. 12. See the still seminal Peter Bailey, ‘Conspiracies of Meaning: Music Hall and the Knowingness of Popular Culture’, Past and Present 144 (1994): 138–70. 13. On Tingel-Tangel and working-class culture in Germany, see Lynn Abrams, Workers’ Culture in Imperial Germany: Leisure and Recreation in the Rhineland and Westphalia (London: Routledge, 1992). 14. Liller Kriegszeitung, 6 December 1915, 5. The photos exhibited with the caption ‘Musik an der Front’, in the 18 August 1917 Zeitung der 10. Armee, depicted musicians proudly holding the most crudely constructed instruments, with tin cans for drums and an elaborately strung assortment of items that resembled a double bass. 15. Kriegs-Zeitung von Baranowitschi, 29 April 1916, n.p. 16. It did play a role for the editors of the Wipers Times; see Van Dijck, Demoor and Posman, ‘Between the Shells’. 17. See Fuller, Troop Morale, 105–6. 18. Open Exhaust or Karstinks, February 1916, 3. 19. Leadswinger, 14 May 1916, 131. 20. Marmita, 20, n.d. 21. On gender dynamics in the British army on the Salonika Front, see Robert L. Nelson and Justin Fantauzzo, ‘A Most Unmanly War: British Military Masculinity in Macedonia, Mesopotamia, and Palestine, 1914–18’, Gender and History 28 (2016): 587–603. 22. Robert L. Nelson, ‘“Unsere Frage ist der Osten”: Representations of the Occupied East in German Soldier Newspapers, 1914–1918’, Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropaforschung 51 (2002): 500–28.

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23. Robert L. Nelson and Justin Fantauzzo, ‘Expeditionary Forces in the Shatterzone: German, British and French Soldiers on the Macedonian Front, 1915–1918’, in Expeditionary Forces in the First World War, ed. A. Beyerchen and E. Sencer (New York: Palgrave, 2019), 149–76. 24. See Angus Fraser, The Gypsies, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). 25. Kriegszeitung Heeresgruppe Scholtz, 7 September 1917, n.p. 26. Rümanien in Wort und Bild, 22 June 1918. 27. Rümanien in Wort und Bild, 18 August 1917. 28. See the cover page of issue 16 (1917), on which barefoot women with head coverings run from a French soldier. It is entitled ‘L’Orient . . . vu de près ou le prestige de l’Uniforme.’ 29. Rümanien in Wort und Bild, 22 September 1917. 30. Interestingly, members of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were rarely, if ever, mentioned in the stories and images of the German soldier newspapers. 31. Am Bosporus, 20 June 1918, 3. 32. Jildirim, 15 August 1918, n.p. 33. For a discussion of Slavic and German women in the German trench journals, see Robert L. Nelson, ‘German Comrades – Slavic Whores: Gender Images in the German Soldier Newspapers of the First World War’, in Home/Front: The Military, War and Gender in 20th Century Germany, ed. Karen Hagemann and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum (New York: Berg, 2002), 69–85. 34. Kriegszeitung der 4. Armee, 25 August 1918. The only other female contributor to trench journals that I encountered was affiliated with the Liller Kriegszeitung, the largest soldier newspaper on the Western Front. 35. Am Bosporus, 19 July 1918, 3. 36. The sketches can be found in issues from 27 June, 30 July and 21 September 1918. The last sketch mentioned is in 21 September 1918. 37. Chronicles of the White Horse, 1 July 1917, 7. Gasper, 5 June 1916, contained an article entitled ‘Babu English’, making fun of a Japanese person’s difficulties with the language. For evidence and good discussions of the Indian soldier experience in the war, see David Omissi, ed., Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914–18 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1999); David Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army, 1860–1940 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1994); and Santanu Das, India, Empire and First World War Culture: Writings, Images and Songs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 38. Dagger, November 1918, 16. 39. Dump, December 1917, 12. For a discussion of Chinese labourers in the First World War, see Michael Summerskill, China on the Western Front: Britain’s Chinese Work Force in the First World War (London: M. Summerskill, 1982). 40. The depiction of Black soldiers in the French trench journals can be found in Nelson, German Soldier Newspapers, 124–6. 41. Jildirim, 17 June 1918, n.p. The author continued with a description of an enlightening conversation with his servant in which he expressed some interest in the Arabic language. The Arab described the use of gendered words when asked why, as opposed to the French language, ‘moon’ is masculine and ‘sun’ is feminine: ‘“Allah is not like the French,” was the answer, “he does not send a woman alone into the night!”’ Thus, not only were Arab men and women portrayed as honourable, but the women of France were maligned. 42. Am Bosporus, 27 June 1918, 3. 43. See the stories in Am Bosporus, 2 July, 4 and 30 August 1918, 3. A photo in Am Bosporus, 2 July 1918, ‘Kurdish Women’ (Kurdenfrauen), depicted several very poor women standing around talking to each other, with many children running about. 44. Jildirim, 16 September 1918, n.p. 45. Jildirim, 22 July 1918, n.p.

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46. Jildirim, 24 June 1918, n.p. Another article declared that Bedouin women were both excellent singers and good mothers. Jildirim, 9 September 1918, n.p. 47. Desert Rag, 25 December 1915, 2–3. 48. Chronicles of the White Horse, July 1917, 16. 49. Periscope, December 1917.

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20 Prisoner-of-War Camp Journals Anne Schwan

T

he First World War saw the mass imprisonment of both civilian and military internees, among them about 8.5 million combatants who experienced captivity globally.1 It is estimated that several hundred thousand civilians were interned in Europe between the beginning of the war and 1920, with another 50,000–100,000 outside Europe.2 Internment camp periodicals were a typical feature of the structures of self-administration set up by the incarcerated; such publications are a testament to the internees’ sheer determination and resilience while they were living and labouring under challenging circumstances, including limited food provision, resources and infrastructure. Despite the constraints of censorship – which I will elaborate upon later – these papers served as a vehicle of communication within the camp and with the outside world, offering a fascinating, often moving insight into wartime captivity and the internees’ self-perception. Providing a rich account of camp activities, these texts allow a glimpse into the lived experiences of a marginalised and often stigmatised group. Scholars have suggested that camp papers played an important role in reaffirming the prisoners’ sense of belonging to the home nation and, especially in the case of German internees, in reasserting masculine warrior ideals.3 As I have argued elsewhere, a more complex picture emerges upon closer inspection of such publications, which conveyed a diversity of (sometimes contradictory) perspectives; irony and humour facilitated a subtly subversive interrogation of more hegemonic views.4 This chapter suggests that internment camp papers, travelling between nations, served a paradoxical function, reasserting the internees’ connection to their home nation while gesturing towards moments of what Wolfgang Welsch has termed ‘transculturality’ – the ‘exchange and interaction’ between cultures.5 After a brief overview of some examples of internment camp journals, this chapter presents a case study of Stobsiade (1915–19), the German-language publication emerging from Stobs detention camp near Hawick in the Scottish Borders, which was one of the longest-running camp newspapers in Britain, founded by civilians and continued by military prisoners. This journal is both typical in format and content but also unusual in that it had a relatively large print run and catered for both civilian and military prisoners at one stage, giving new insight into commonalities and tensions between the two groups. I will focus on the role of poetry and reading for prisoner identities and show how papers such as Stobsiade promoted patriotic sentiments while also challenging narrowly nationalistic frames of reference. The chapter ends by critically reflecting on prisoner-of-war camp journals as a genre: a form of carceral writing that gave voice to internees while simultaneously reinforcing the camp’s disciplinary power in a Foucauldian sense.6

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Internment Camp Periodicals: A Brief Overview Civilian and military prisoners across the globe ran camp publications, although many of them were short-lived and had a relatively low print run. In his comparative study of German, British and French internment camp papers, Rainer Pöppinghege lists numerous titles appearing in the German Kaiserreich; over thirty periodicals were issued by German internees in Britain and more in camps across the British Empire.7 Germans interned in the United States produced the Orgelsdorfer Eulenspiegel (1918–19) at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia.8 In Japan, Germans published the Tokushima-Anzeiger (Tokushima Advertiser, 1915–16), which, unlike most other papers of this kind, included an unusually detailed, critical commentary on war events.9 Political motivations were also evident elsewhere, for example in Onze Taal (Our Language, 1915–18), a pro-Flemish paper emerging from a camp in Göttingen which was circulated in the camp and sent to Belgium with the permission of the German authorities, who supported the Flemish nationalist movement.10 Although scholars have begun examining some of these texts in more detail, they remain a rich resource for further, comparative analysis of their content, function and context of production and distribution.11 The focus of this chapter is on journals penned by prisoners of war (POWs), although it is worth noting that some internment camp papers were produced for rather than by internees. Some of these publications, such as Nedelja (1916–18), published in Russian by the Austro-Hungarian War Ministry for the primary purpose of propaganda, invited contributions from POWs.12 The German Foreign Office’s Information Centre for the Orient (Nachrichtenstelle für den Orient) also issued a propaganda paper in six languages, El Dschihad (1915–18), targeted at Muslim POWs in Wünsdorf’s Halbmondlager (Half Moon Camp) near Berlin.13 Internment publications also appeared in camps inhabited by refugees (including women and children), such as Wagna Camp in Styria, which generated the bilingual Lagerzeitung für Wagna / Gazzetta d’Accampamento di Wagna (Wagna Camp Gazette, 1915–18), providing daily war reports alongside camp news and reprints of fiction.14 Many of the papers produced by POWs follow a similar format, printing information about life in internment, including reports on the internees’ self-administration through schools, libraries, sport, drama and other societies. Typically, they offer longer editorials on specific themes, complemented by shorter accounts and poetry (either original submissions or reprints of works by well-known authors). Some, though not all, papers include illustrations. The periodicals’ titles often signal the publication’s status as a camp paper, with names such as Knockaloe Lager-Zeitung (Knockaloe Camp Paper, 1916–18), Lager-Echo (Camp Echo, 1916–18), Camp Nachrichten (Camp News, 1914–16), L’Echo des Baraques (Barrack Echo, 1915–16) and The Barb (1917–18). Some chose humorous titles, such as Le Tas de Blagues (A Lot of Jokes, 1916–18) or Stobsiade, a play on words evoking the camp’s location and the wellknown German humorist Wilhelm Busch’s Bilder zur Jobsiade (1872).15 Both the title of L’Anti-Cafard (1918) and the motto printed below the title of Le Tas de Blagues – ‘Le Cafard, voilà l’ennemi! Ecrasons l’infâme!’ (Melancholy is the enemy! Let’s crush the loathsome thing!) – employ a pun on cafard, which literally means cockroach but also low mood.16 They thus jokingly allude to the less than ideal hygiene conditions while affirming one of the publications’ main functions: to counter depressive moods brought on by long-term internment, what the Swiss medical doctor Adolf Lucas

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Vischer termed ‘barbed wire disease’.17 Reviewing internment camp papers alongside other wartime publications such as trench journals, the American periodical Living Age (1844–1941) asserted in 1917 that ‘we think the resolute cheerfulness of a prisoners’ camp is even more pathetic than the trenches’, highlighting these publications’ emotional effects and the admiration they elicited from external readers.18 Some camp publications catered for a multinational population, such as the weekly Echo du Camp de Rennbahn Münster (1916–18), a bilingual paper in French and English.19 The general look of this paper is similar to others, including Stobsiade, although unlike the latter it featured images, such as a visual representation of the camp’s multinational inhabitants on the front page (Figure 20.1). According to French editor P. Alran, the venture was avowedly driven by the broadest spirit of liberalism (Animé du plus large esprit de libéralisme) and, like similar publications, invited contributions from other internees.20 The inaugural edition also noted that technical problems precluded a Russian section of the paper – presumably the inability to print Cyrillic letters. Another format worth noting is the Barb Magazine (1918), produced by British officers in Schweidnitz near Breslau, which positioned itself as a ‘magazine’ in contrast to other POW publications, which tended to present themselves as newspapers. Demonstrating an awareness of other internment camp papers, the editorial team envisioned their magazine ‘as the omega of various “Barb” publications, the alpha of which was issued in Trier, Moselle, in November last year’.21 Barb Magazine rejected the existing ‘newspaper style’, aiming for ‘the more usual features of the modern magazine’s pages’ while conceding the need for adjustment due to ‘the Gefangener [prisoner] environment’.22 The magazine’s foreword to the first issue defiantly declares the editors’

Figure 20.1  Echo du Camp de Rennbahn Münster (1916). Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Signatur Krieg 1914/14736.

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ambition to avoid ‘the efforts of the printer to fobb [sic] us off with the sort of hybrid publication, bearing the appearance of a Government Bulletin on poultry raising, and the style and title of a Magazine’.23 Despite a difficult environment, the editors evidently embraced high aesthetic standards, seeking to mirror contemporary magazine culture.24 This short-lived periodical – comprising nearly fifty pages – included original fiction and poetry, humorous pieces, autobiographical accounts, reports on theatre performances, a puzzle competition and artwork. As the editors proudly announced, ‘[a]ll the work of this issue, including art work and typographical arrangement is executed by the staff’, although they hinted at some challenges involved in producing an English-language publication in Germany, for example ‘the absence of the italic letter on the German linotype’.25 The German team producing Orgelsdorfer Eulenspiegel in the United States faced similar difficulties in production, lacking enough type to set complete pages and sufficiency of particular letters such as ‘z’ and ‘k’.26 Censorship posed another serious hurdle that camp editors had to tackle. The Echo du Camp de Rennbahn thanked those comrades who had followed the periodical’s invitation for contributions but noted that some of them could not be printed without revision.27 The editors asked authors to make these changes, or at least assist the editors in the process, because they feared they might otherwise betray the writer’s intentions (trahir la pensée de l’auteur).28 One of the last issues of Stobsiade gave a detailed account of the production process for the benefit of impatient readers back home who did not seem to appreciate the lengthy procedure involved. The paper was typeset by an internee at Stobs detention camp, a task lasting four to five days, before a first print was sent to the censor. After the censor’s approval, which took four to six weeks, a larger print run was produced at a local printer’s in Hawick and, within eight days, sold in the camp. Prisoners were not allowed to handle copies of the paper destined for their families and friends; internees provided these details to a local company which packaged the papers before returning them to the camp where addresses were checked by the production team, under the censor’s supervision. This protracted process meant that the newspaper was shipped eight to ten weeks after initial work on it had begun.29 Despite the challenges of censorship, internees found ways to circumvent scrutiny. Pöppinghege has drawn attention to general shortcomings in the censorship process during the war, considering the sheer volume of materials and limited language skills.30 Such pressures likely impacted on camp periodicals also, which, through skilful use of linguistic nuance, irony and humour, may have escaped the censor’s attention. Richard Goldschmidt, a biologist and visiting professor at Yale University interned at Fort Oglethorpe, wrote in his memoirs that for the editors of Orgelsdorfer Eulenspiegel, ‘[a] favorite game was to inject some political joke into a poem in such a form that the censor did not understand it and passed it’.31 Such comments suggest that camp papers used literary skill to outwit political surveillance and control – at least to some extent.

Introducing Stobsiade (1915–19) Stobsiade was launched by civilian internees at Stobs detention camp in September 1915. Stobs was the largest camp north of the Scottish border, holding approximately 4,500 men at any one time.32 It initially served as a civilian camp for ‘enemy aliens’, and then had a mixed population of civilian and military internees before transforming into a purely military camp in July 1916. Fourteen issues of Stobsiade were produced

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Figure 20.2  Cover page of Stobsiade’s second issue, produced by civilian editors, 19 September 1915. Available from stobsiade.org. under civilian editorship, twenty-six by the military editors. Number 23 of the military edition did not appear, probably due to censorship.33 Blank spaces elsewhere suggest partial censorship of other issues.34 It had been the civilians’ ambition to produce two issues per month, although this was not sustained throughout the period from September 1915 to June 1916; a military edition was created every three and, from number 10 onwards, every four weeks, with the interval increasing to five or six weeks towards the end. At 4,000–4,500 copies per issue, Stobsiade had, by some distance, one of the largest print runs of all internment papers in Britain, alongside Knockaloe Lager-Zeitung, the title under which the civilian editors continued their publication after being moved to the Isle of Man.35 About 900 copies of the military edition were sold at Stobs and its affiliated working camps. The majority of the copies were sent to Germany, with the remainder shipped to other countries such as the Netherlands, Switzerland, the USA and Japan.36 In their second issue (Figure 20.2), the civilian founders proudly announce the first edition’s resounding success: Wir haben von letzter Nummer verkauft Dreitausend Exemplare. Man hat sich fast um die Zeitung gerauft: Es war brillante Ware. (Of the last number we have sold Three thousand copies People almost scuffled to get the newspaper It was a brilliant product.)37

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The paper was financed through subscriptions and supported by donations from prisoners’ aid societies in Germany and the United States, the YMCA and the London-based half-German chemist Dr Karl Emil Markel (1860–1932).38 The Hauptgeschäftsstelle für Liebesgaben (Head Office for Charitable Donations) in Erfurt served as the German office and distribution centre, which handled subscriptions for external readers. A financial summary in the military edition notes that the paper had initially generated a profit which was used for the camp’s school, societies and other charitable purposes. Stobsiade suffered a loss from March 1918, which reduced the paper’s ability to contribute to the camp’s wider infrastructure, but the editors refrained from increasing the price to preserve the paper’s ethos as a publication that was ‘primarily intended to remind and to motivate, rather than being a commercial venture’ (in erster Linie ein Erinnerungs- u. Anregungsblatt und kein geschäftliches Unternehmen).39 Prisoners paid one penny for each copy sent.40 Although this was cheap, some men were limited in their ability to send the paper; as one internee, Friedrich Strüne, remarks in a letter to his family, he would have liked to order Stobsiade more frequently for them but did not have sufficient funds.41 A poster designed by E. Behrens, a member of the civilian editorial team, in February 1916 suggests that the paper was targeted at and enjoyed by cross-generational audiences back home (Figure 20.3). The editorial team worked for free, but typesetters and those selling the paper were paid for their labour; the editors also encouraged contributions from other prisoners, promising to pay at least one to five shillings for them.42 Changes to the editorial team occurred as members were moved to working camps or exchanged, leading to

Figure 20.3  Original design for a poster for the camp paper, Stobs detention camp, Scotland, 1 February 1916, by E. Behrens. P.O.W. HAKMG 16.0615. From the Collections of Scottish Borders Council, administered by Live Borders, Hawick Museum.

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some shifts in tone and content. Stobsiade, much like similar publications, included poetry and philosophical articles about camp life alongside more descriptive accounts of educational and recreational activities, competitions, quizzes and advertisements for watch-repair, laundry and barber services. Aside from serving as a general medium of ‘infotainment’ for readers inside and outside the camp, a few additional functions emerge: the editors conceptualised their office as a central place for professional and educational guidance, inviting internees to approach them with questions big or small.43 Requesting and giving thanks for donations on behalf of the camp, the final page usually included a list of items and money received. Individual contributors deployed the platform to appeal to fellow POWs for more considerate behaviour, such as M. Wendt who, in his concert reviews, complained about smoking and late arrivals.44 Other pieces on camp life comment on the challenges of living together in confined spaces and resulting conflicts; an excerpt from an old internee’s diary expresses understanding for prisoners’ ‘misanthropic and gloomy attitude to life’ (menschenfeindliche[n] und düstere[n] Lebensanschauung) but ultimately encourages internees to ‘judge their fellow beings less harshly’ (seine Mitmenschen milder zu beurteilen), recognising that the humiliating experience of imprisonment, despite ‘its pain, has resulted in a maturity’ (mit allen seinen Schmerzen eine Reife erwirkt hat) that might have been impossible to reach otherwise.45 In this way, the camp publication served as a vehicle to reflect on and (self-)regulate communal conduct. Stobsiade recorded camp life for posterity, effectively functioning as a form of collective life writing. From its inception until the end, the paper offered a means of identification and a platform for the internees’ – at times divergent – viewpoints. As the following section shows, poetry and other original writings played a key part in the periodical’s exploration of the internees’ (national) identities and the publication’s examination of the experiences of imprisonment.

Stobsiade’s Poetry and Other Writings All civilian editions of Stobsiade and the majority of the military issues framed their publication with an epigraph consisting either of original poetry, or poems and maxims by well-known figures such as German writer Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749– 1832). All civilian issues were headed by an original poem describing the internees’ situation, in mostly playfully ironic and humorous style, although they also included more deeply reflective verses such as ‘Pech’ (Bad Luck), a metaphorical poem about a sparrow pair’s broken nest, mirroring the civilians’ disrupted family lives following arrest.46 Poems chosen by the military editors generally strike a more serious note and, with the passing of time, become increasingly sombre, culminating in Hans Puls’s poems of despair, such as ‘Wild Yearning for Home’, in Stobsiade’s penultimate issue in 1918.47 Some of the poems express overtly patriotic sentiments, such as the civilian edition’s ‘Nur Mut’ (Take Courage), which combines self-deprecating humour about the internees’ deteriorating personal possessions with the prospect of returning to the Vaterland: Nur Mut, wenn auch die Hosen platzen Und in den Strümpfen Loch an Loch, Wenn längst auch ging der letzte Batzen: Bleibt uns doch Deutschland, Deutschland noch.

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(Take courage, even if your trousers split And hole after hole appears in your socks Even if your last bit of money is long gone For us Germany, Germany still remains.)48 Such patriotism is mitigated by hints at more complex national identifications among the community of prisoners and differences in outlook between the civilian internees – many of whom had built lives and families in Britain prior to their internment as ‘enemy aliens’ – and those Germans captured while fighting for their home country. In a poem describing an internal move within the camp to separate the civilian from the military population, the author surveys the history of encounters between the two groups, addressing the military internees: Am Anfang wart ihr uns nicht grün, Da euch nicht recht plausibel schien, Das [sic] dieser oder jener Tropf Hatt’ einen anglisierten Kopf. Doch solche habt ihr bald geheilt, Indem ihr gründlich sie verkeilt. Da dieses Mittel etwas stark, Ward patriotisch bis ins Mark Gar manche schwankende Natur, Der widerstrebte solche Kur. Als man sich etwas mehr verstand, Das letzte Unbehagen schwand: Beim Kegelspiel, bei Sport und Skat Mischt’ Zivilist sich mit Soldat, Und manche Freundschaft da begann, Die wohl noch lange dauern kann. (In the beginning we didn’t like you Because it did not seem feasible to you That one or another poor devil Had an anglicised head But you soon healed them of that By giving them a thorough beating up As this method was rather rough Was patriotic to the core Even a few people who were undecided Were opposed to this treatment When we understood each other better The final uneasiness disappeared: When playing skittles, sport and skat Civilians and soldiers got together And several friendships began Which will probably last a long time.)49

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As this poem about the rapprochement between civilian and combatant internees indicates, not all captives from the same nation necessarily shared identical sociopolitical views, with some of the civilians’ divided sympathies – symbolised by their ‘anglicised head’ – meeting with an initially violent response from military prisoners. Stobsiade, through this poem, creates a space to explore such ideological tensions, as well as the subsequently harmonious coexistence – even friendship – between those of differing national-political affiliations. Although the military editions often adopt a more solemn tone, humour played an important role for the combatants also, acting as one of the coping mechanisms for tackling long-term imprisonment. The poem ‘Schweizer Fieber’ (Swiss Fever), for instance, offers a satirical account of the internees’ desperate attempts to gain medical certification for transfer to a Swiss camp, focusing on one prisoner’s futile, hypochondriacal imagination. Slumbering deeply, dreaming of Switzerland, ‘Fritz’ oversleeps and is rudely awakened to reality by roll call.50 Such original texts give insight into the external and internal realities of internment. Similarly, comments on changing weather and natural surroundings allowed the captives to paint an atmospheric picture of their living conditions for those back home as well as serving as metaphorical descriptions of their mood.51 Contributions also provided a platform for responding to external perceptions of POWs: the poem ‘Was dann?’ (What then?) is an amusingly defiant reply to the news that German women had founded a society, vowing they would never marry a former POW, demonstrating the public stigma attached to internment.52 The verses show the negative emotional-psychological impact of this news on the imprisoned men: Wir waren nah’ am Weinen, Als wir davon gehört, So mancher wurde traurig, So mancher ganz verstört. Man fragte sich vergeblich: ‘Was frass [sic] ich nun bloss [sic] aus? Ich wag’ mich, ist der Krieg vorbei Ja gar nicht mehr nach Haus.’ (We were close to crying When we heard this sorry tale Many a lad was feeling sad Many a lad was distraught In vain we asked ourselves: ‘What did I do so wrong When the war is over I can’t go home any more.’)53 Although the poem gives an insight into the men’s distress, vulnerability and worry over the future, it ends on an affirmative note, having the men conclude confidently: Was bleibt uns da noch übrig? – Wir nehmen halt ’ne Maid,

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Die nicht dem Bunde angehört, Und die wird dann gefreit. (What’s left for us to do? We’ll find ourselves a girl Who hasn’t joined the club And marry her instead.) Creative writing in Stobsiade thus provided a valve for expressing experiences of war and internment, and gave vent to frustrations at public reactions to, and misperceptions of, POWs. In this way, papers such as Stobsiade offered readers within the camps support and opportunities for identification, while challenging external audiences to develop a sympathetic understanding for the prisoners’ situation.

Cultures of Reading and Learning in Stobsiade Aside from Stobsiade’s own contributions, cultures of reading and learning more broadly speaking were a strong feature of camp life, as reflected in the paper’s reports on these activities. Stobsiade’s accounts of these intellectual pursuits were part of the paper’s mission to highlight the prisoners’ positive endeavours to external audiences; the publication thus actively affirmed the men’s value for the home nation. Whether humorous or serious in tone, reading material played an important role for internees, signalled by the men queuing in ‘long rows’ (in einer langen Reihe) outside the camp library.54 Books were seen as a link to the Heimat but also allowed glimpses into a ‘world of wonder’ (Wunderwelt), facilitating a temporary escape from the bad Scottish weather: ‘we are travelling with the trader, with the brave explorer across the wide oceans, we wander through primeval forests and palm groves’.55 Stobsiade’s first military number in October 1916 comments on the comically random composition of the library which, even at this early stage, consisted of about 2,700 volumes of mostly German works. By December 1917 the collection had grown to 3,321 works taken out by 1,094 users, constituting half the camp population at the time, although up-to-date material and more technical vocational books were often lacking.56 A concern over the quality of texts – and a class-based taste and ‘distinction’ in the Bourdieusian sense – is evident in the editors’ approach, when they insist that even those ‘who at first read nothing but the crime novels and detective stories which were circulating in the camp, have now come to realise that a good book is a friend, who remains loyal to us through war and captivity’.57 A later issue reveals that such changes in literary taste did not necessarily endure, with the editors deploring indiscriminate reading habits.58 Such reflections signal divergences in perspective, highlighting the diversity of camp inhabitants and hinting at class differences, with the editors largely drawn from the educated middle classes and not necessarily representative of the camp population as a whole.59 Through their choices of poetic epigraphs and aphorisms by esteemed writers such as the Romantic Joseph von Eichendorff (1788–1857) or German-born Swiss writer Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) on most cover pages of Stobsiade, the editors gave further prominence to the kind of writing they valued.

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Through Stobsiade, the editors requested book donations; they highlighted their peers’ thirst for valuable knowledge (Bildungsdrang) and the classics by pointing out that copies of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister were ‘requested and handed out three times’ during one lending hour (dass in einer Ausleihstunde dreimal Goethes “Wilhelm Meister” verlangt und ausgegeben wurde).60 We might infer, on the one hand, that the internees strongly identified with the humanist ideals of this Bildungsroman; on the other hand, this demand certainly springs from Goethe’s canonical status, his inclusion in school curricula and, during the Kaiserreich, his elevation to Nationaldichter (national poet) – he was also the author quoted most frequently in Stobsiade’s epigraphs.61 As exemplified in their use of Goethe, the POWs’ tastes and reading habits constituted one way in which they connected to their Heimat and a national literature that was highly valued at the time; they also found solace in the heroic figures of Germanic sagas, reflecting ideological attempts, through such legends and literature, to forge a stronger sense of collective identity and belonging for a relatively young nation.62 Stobsiade’s recourse to Goethe, however, simultaneously signals the paper’s complex allegiances, since the famous writer’s own position towards Germany was contested during the war. Although he had been elevated to national poet, Goethe’s international outlook was suspect to those whom Hermann Hesse, one of the other writers quoted in Stobsiade (and later recipient of the Nobel Prize), called ‘super-patriots’; for them, according to Hesse, writing in September 1914, in a piece published by the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung (1780–) two months later, Goethe ‘was never a patriot’ and had ‘contaminated the German mind with [his] benign internationalism’.63 Hesse, by contrast, insists that ‘Goethe was never wanting as a patriot [. . .] But his devotion to humanity meant more to him than his devotion to the German people.’64 Hesse’s essay ultimately evokes what he calls ‘the Goethean realm of the human spirit’ as an antidote to war.65 With hindsight, it is difficult to assess whether Stobsiade’s editors wished to invoke this ‘Goethean realm of the human spirit’ or whether they were using Goethe to display their patriotic credentials through knowledge of the national literature. It is impossible to determine how readers of the paper – both inside and outside the camp – would have interpreted these quotations or those of other authors. The paper’s cultural reference points here and elsewhere left scope for contradictory forms of reception, confirming the publication’s paradoxical status as one that strongly appealed to but also subtly undermined national affiliations. Such ambivalent alignments with patriotic agendas and national culture are further counterbalanced by evidence that the internees wanted to study other languages and cultures, including the writings of their host nation through an English-language library counting nearly 500 volumes, spanning literature from Chaucer to the contemporary. Stobsiade’s articles make reference to characters in the literature of the host nation – an account of the camp’s daily routine and prisoners’ outfits, for instance, alludes to Professor Teufelsdröckh in Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle’s (1795–1881) Sartor Resartus – and, aside from German plays, the camp’s theatre societies performed British works such as Jerome K. Jerome’s (1859–1927) early twentieth-century comedy Miss Hobbs.66 The editors also highlighted missing works by English-language authors.67 In addition, the library housed French- and Spanish-language material (and other languages such as Italian, Russian and Polish were studied), suggesting that the prisoners’ thirst for knowledge went beyond a desire to reconnect with the culture of the Vaterland.68 Furthermore, in a transnational gesture of solidarity, and encouraged by their own supporters at the YMCA and Society of Friends, both the civilian and military editors

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appealed to readers at home, asking for English-language book donations for English, Scottish and Irish internees in Germany, characterising books as ‘printed bringers of comfort’ (gedruckte[n] Tröster) for all those imprisoned away from home.69 Camp reading activities were complemented by a miscellaneous programme of formal education in the camp school, a series of educational lectures and slide shows delivered by camp inhabitants or external speakers, briefly reviewed in Stobsiade. Listing these educational events ensured that external readers were informed of the prisoners’ intellectual efforts. Although topics often reflected the organisers’ goal to prepare the men for citizenship after their return home, they were truly global in content, including contributions on Cameroon, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Poland, Galicia, Russia, the Balkans and British Columbia.70 Lance Corporal Sommerlatt, a member of the editorial team, gave a series of talks based on his experience of ‘living in England for many years’ (seine durch langjährigen Aufenthalt in England gewonnenen Eindrücke).71 His peers evidently appreciated this opportunity to learn more about their host country, especially since ‘many of [them] had already lived for more than two years [in the country] without having seen very much of it due to the barbed wire’.72 Such instances suggest that the military internees, despite their involuntary stay in Britain, did not necessarily harbour hostile feelings towards the country but made some effort to learn more about its history and customs. Stobsiade encouraged this attitude through its emphasis on educational opportunities.

International Encounters in Stobsiade Reports of such engagement with learning and other cultures, as well as accounts of personal cross-cultural encounters, appear throughout Stobsiade. Lack of English posed an initial challenge for those in working camps who had contact with locals in tasks such as road construction. A dispatch from Grantham working camp offered Stobsiade’s readership an insight into the men’s difficulties and need for quick adjustment: ‘At first, the amateur feels pretty helpless about the new form of employment and doesn’t know where to start, especially as “he can’t understand” the instructions given to him in English. However, after a few days he has picked up the professional skills.’73 Positive attitudes and cross-cultural understanding in challenging circumstances are similarly captured in this striking account of collaboration between a Scottish soldier and a German prisoner: At a workplace where tree stumps are being rooted out using explosions, you meet ‘Fred’ the English, or more correctly, Scottish, sapper and head of the blasting working hand in hand with Reinhard, a long-bearded German reservist. Apart from a few German expletives, ‘Fred’ speaks no German, and Reinhard speaks as little English, but the two of them understand each other perfectly. After the tree stump has been drilled and loaded with a charge, a short whistle is sounded, and all the comrades working nearby take cover. The fuse is lit and Fred and Reinhard disappear like cats behind the nearest tree stumps. After waiting for a second there is a more or less powerful bang. ‘That was a good shot’ says Fred, and Reinhard replies understandingly ‘Yes, all right’, and the work continues.74 While this account cannot erase the ultimately coercive nature of prison labour performed by men such as ‘Reinhard’ – Heather Jones rightly points out that all wartime

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internment came with varying degrees of injustice – the scene highlights cooperation and ‘perfect understanding’ (beide verstehen sich ausgezeichnet) between men from two hostile nations, despite language barriers.75 The editors’ choice to include this moment is significant as it emphasises peaceful coexistence rather than confrontation between individuals from opposing nations. Elsewhere, Stobsiade conveys fleeting examples of international encounters, from the British military doctor collaborating with two interned German doctors at the camp hospital, and the visits to camp exhibitions by British and American representatives of charitable organisations, to the prisoners’ sightings of local women on foot or behind the wheel.76 POWs saw other members of the population while en route to working camps when, marching through a village, the men, with ‘home-made mandolins and violins round their necks’, created ‘a bit of a sensation’.77 Similarly, internees at Stobs became the object of the local population’s gaze on Sundays, when people gathered on the surrounding hills to watch camp life. A newcomer’s description in Stobsiade ironically imagines the camp as an ‘arena’: Only the upper rows are permitted for ordinary spectators; the stalls are the best places and they are strictly reserved by khaki-clad warders for themselves. Like the royal box in a court theatre. But higher up it is lively: mainly Scottish ‘Tommies’ in their Sunday kilts, with their Ailies, Jennies and Lizzies. Oh yes! . . .78 Half-wistful, half-ironic, such commentaries draw attention to the prisoners’ absurd situation – in close proximity to, yet distanced from, the relative normality of life beyond the barbed wire and from the local population for whom they are a spectacle. Such accounts of distant encounters with locals contrast with the more personal crosscultural interactions between men like Fred and Reinhard, although even the latter is necessarily a limited form of transcultural exchange, framed by wartime forced labour relations. In all these reports, open animosity towards the host nation is absent. While this tone is at least partially down to caution in view of the censor, Stobsiade, through such instances of peaceful coexistence, arguably also played a role in discouraging hostility towards British people among readers back home. Overall, a tension exists in Stobsiade between this international outlook and a more inward-looking, völkisch understanding of German culture that is closer to a hermetic conceptualisation of cultures. Articles highlighting the prisoners’ desire to connect with the ‘folkdom’ (Volkstum) back home and become ‘conscious bearers of German culture and civilisation’ (bewusste[n] Träger[n] des Deutschtums) contrast with humorousironic engagements with the concept of German culture and an emphasis on ‘humanity’ (Menschentum[s]) that is ‘unconstrained by national and religious barriers’ (der weitherzige, von Volks- und Glaubensschranken absehende Geist) elsewhere.79

Prisoner-of-War Camp Journals as a Genre? As the above examples show, by drawing on a range of authoritative voices from German literature and culture, as well as the prisoners’ own creative input, Stobsiade presented a multiplicity of perspectives and at times conflicting ideas on identity, nation and culture. POW papers such as Stobsiade crossed borders and conveyed a sense of the internees’ fragile existence between home nation and a foreign environment which they embraced

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to varying degrees, although confinement and forced labour prevented unequivocally positive transcultural interactions. Even though a degree of coherence emerges across such publications, in terms of format and content, approaching these periodicals as ideologically uniform and as a genre risks losing context-related specificities while raising other ethical-political questions. Rejecting ‘prison writing’ as a generic category, Dylan Rodríguez warns that this label conceals and sanctions ‘the fundamental logic of the punitive carceral’ which involves ‘the institutionalized killing of the subject’.80 According to Rodríguez, who favours the concept of ‘counter-hegemonic prison praxis’, there is a risk that the disciplinary apparatus of the prison benefits ‘from the existence of a literary genre which foregrounds the prison’s pedagogical capacities’.81 Stobsiade’s writers in fact actively foregrounded and endorsed the prison camp’s ‘pedagogical capacities’ in the service of their nation-state while also displaying an occasionally sardonic self-awareness of the need to perform a particular kind of prisoner identity. Such tensions encapsulate the double bind that interned men found themselves in, and the ambivalent work such journals were doing as a form of ‘cultural production that is both enabled and coerced by state captivity’.82 Considering the internees’ unique position of finding themselves captives of another state, Rodríguez’s observations, emerging from contemporary American prison contexts, need to be complemented by an approach that allows for a nuanced assessment of the camp papers’ engagement with nation and identity, as this chapter has attempted to model. Inhabiting prison camps in a foreign state, internees had to negotiate their carceral alongside their national identities, a process further complicated for civilian prisoners who had called the territory home before being criminalised as ‘enemy aliens’. While we may admire the internees’ resilience and creativity, awareness of the ultimately coercive environment that facilitated these publications’ production precludes too celebratory an approach to internment camp periodicals.

Notes   1. Brian K. Feltman, The Stigma of Surrender: German Prisoners, British Captors, and Manhood in the Great War and Beyond (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 3.   2. Matthew Stibbe, ‘Civilian Internment and Civilian Internees in Europe, 1914–20’, Immigrants & Minorities 26, no. 1/2 (2008): 49–81, here 49, DOI: 10.1080/02619280802442597; see also Stefan Manz, Panikos Panayi and Matthew Stibbe, eds, Internment during the First World War: A Mass Global Phenomenon (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019).  3. Rainer Pöppinghege, Im Lager unbesiegt: Deutsche, englische und französische Kriegsgefangenen-Zeitungen im Ersten Weltkrieg (Essen: Klartext, 2006), 171. See also Feltman, Stigma, 106.   4. Anne Schwan, ‘German Military Internees Writing the First World War: Gender, Irony and Humour in the Camp Newspaper Stobsiade’, in Prison Writing and the Literary World: Imprisonment, Institutionality and Questions of Literary Practice, ed. Michelle Kelly and Claire Westall (New York: Routledge, 2021), 41–57.   5. Wolfgang Welsch, ‘Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today’, in Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, ed. Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash (London: Sage, 1999), 194–213, here 205.   6. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison [1975], trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1991).

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 7. Pöppinghege, Im Lager, 318–21.   8. The title does not easily translate into English. Jeanne Glaubitz Cross and Ann K. D. Myers offer a detailed interpretation of this pun involving the internees’ nickname for the camp and a reference to the German trickster figure Till Eulenspiegel. See ‘“Orgelsdorfer Eulenspiegel” and the German Internee Experience at Fort Oglethorpe, 1917–19’, The Georgia Historical Quarterly 96, no. 2 (2012): 233–59, here 244.  9. Transcriptions of the paper are available at , accessed 3 August 2021. For a brief discussion of the paper, see Atsushi Otsuru, ‘Prisoners of War (Japan)’, in 1914–1918 online: International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer and Bill Nasson (Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin, 2014), DOI: 10.15463/ie1418.10131, accessed 3 August 2021. 10. See Heather Jones, ‘Prisoners of War (Belgium and France)’, in 1914–1918 online, DOI: 10.15463/ie1418.10680, accessed 3 August 2021. Onze Taal is available in the ‘News of the Great War’ collection of Het Archief, , accessed 3 August 2021. 11. For analyses of specific publications, see, for example, Jennifer Kewley Draskau, ‘Relocating the “Heimat”: Great War Internment Literature from the Isle of Man’, German Studies Review 32, no. 1 (2009): 82–106; Julie M. Horne, ‘The German Connection: The Stobs Camp Newspaper, 1916–1919’, Transactions of the Hawick Archaeological Society 132 (1988): 26–32; Isabella von Treskow, ‘Baracke! Provisorische Heimstatt rebellischer Bewohner: Die Zeitung der französischen Kriegsgefangenen in Amberg-Kümmersbruck 1916–1918’, in Das Kriegsgefangenenlager Amberg-Kümmersbruck im Ersten Weltkrieg (Amberg: Kultur-Schloss Theuern, 2017), 91–123; Isabella von Treskow, ‘Französische Kriegsgefangenenzeitungen im Ersten Weltkrieg: Internationale Erfahrung, Interkulturalität und europäisches Selbstverständnis’, Comparativ: Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung 28, no. 1 (2018): 29–47. 12. See Christian Steppan, ‘The Camp Newspaper Nedelja as a Reflection of the Experience of Russian Prisoners of War in Austria-Hungary’, in Other Fronts, Other Wars? First World War Studies on the Eve of the Centennial, ed. Joachim Bürgschwentner, Matthias Egger and Gunda Barth-Scalmani (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 167–95. 13. Digitised copies are available at , accessed 3 August 2021. The Hindi and Urdu versions were published under the title Hindostan (1915–18). See Heike Liebau, ‘Hindostan (newspaper)’, in 1914–1918 online, DOI: 10.15463/ie1418.10468, accessed 3 August 2021. 14. Digitised copies are viewable through the Austrian National Library, , accessed 3 August 2021. On the paper, see chapter 2 in Josip Vretenar and David Orlović, I giorni a Wagna nella cronaca del Lagerzeitung (1915–1918). Piani e strutture dell’accampamento / Dani u Wagni prema pisanju lista Lagerzeitung (1915–1918). Planovi i struktura logora (Fiume: Unione italiana; Trieste: Università popolare; Rovigno: Centro di ricerche storiche, 2016). 15. For a further discussion of the camp paper titles’ symbolic function, see Pöppinghege, Im Lager, 223–6. On the significance of Stobsiade’s title, see Schwan, ‘German Military Internees’, 46–7. 16. ‘Ecrasons l’infâme!’ is a quotation from the French writer Voltaire, allowing the internees to display their literary knowledge. Le Tas de Blagues, 1 October 1917. The digitised journal is available at , accessed 3 August 2021. L’Anti-Cafard is available at , accessed 3 August 2021. 17. Adolf Lucas Vischer, Barbed Wire Disease: A Psychological Study of the Prisoner of War, intro. S. A. Kinnier Wilson (London: Bale, 1919).

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18. ‘The Trench Journal’, Living Age, January–March 1917, 298–301, here 300, , accessed 29 April 2021. 19. The Echo is digitised at , accessed 3 August 2021. 20. ‘A nos Lecteurs. Notre Journal’ (To our Readers. Our Newspaper), Echo du Camp de Rennbahn Münster, 10 June 1916, 1. 21. ‘Foreword’, Barb Magazine, October 1918, , accessed 25 May 2021. 22. ‘Foreword’. 23. ‘Foreword’. 24. See Oliver Wilkinson, who argues that Barb Magazine particularly resembled the Strand Magazine: ‘Captivity in Print: The Form and Function of POW Camp Magazines’, in Cultural Heritage and Prisoners of War: Creativity Behind Barbed Wire, ed. Gilly Carr and Harold Mytum (New York: Routledge, 2012), 227–43, here 229–30. 25. ‘Foreword’. 26. Glaubitz Cross and Myers, ‘Orgelsdorfer Eulenspiegel’, 247. 27. ‘A nos Collaborateurs’, Echo du Camp, 10 June 1916, 1. 28. ‘A nos Collaborateurs’, 1. 29. ‘Die “Stobsiade”!’ (The Stobsiade!), Stobsiade 24 (38), October–November 1918, 1–2. Facsimiles and English translations are available at stobsiade.org. Numbers in parentheses refer to the complete run of the paper, including the first issues produced by the civilian editors. The first number indicates the issue in the paper’s military edition. I have included exact dates when available. I am using translations as provided on the website, unless otherwise indicated. Page references are to the original. 30. Pöppinghege, Im Lager, 127. 31. Quoted in Glaubitz Cross and Myers, ‘Orgelsdorfer Eulenspiegel’, 246. 32. Panikos Panayi, Prisoners of Britain: German Civilian and Combatant Internees During the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 89. 33. Towards the end of the war, articles on exchanges and repatriation in camp newspapers tended to fall foul of the censor (Pöppinghege, Im Lager, 217). 34. ‘Im Schnee’, Stobsiade 6 (20), February 1917, 2. See also Stobsiade 9 (civilian edition), 30 January 1916, 3. 35. ‘Uebersicht [sic] über das erste Jahr der “Stobsiade”’ (Summary of the First Year of the Stobsiade), Stobsiade 15 (29), October 1917, 4. For comparative figures of other publications, see Pöppinghege, Im Lager, 318–21. 36. ‘Die “Stobsiade”!’, 2. 37. Untitled poem, Stobsiade 2 (civilian edition), 19 September 1915, 1. 38. ‘Die “Stobsiade”!’, 2; ‘Kassenabrechnung Stobsiade’ (Stobsiade Balance Sheet), Stobsiade 25 (39), December 1918, 4. 39. ‘Die “Stobsiade”!’, 2. 40. ‘Mitteilungen’ (Notices), Stobsiade 2 (16), 5 November 1916, 4. 41. Friedrich Strüne to his family, 29 October 1917. Friedrich Strüne Collection (VFM 2074), Special Collections Research Center, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University Carbondale. 42. ‘Die “Stobsiade”!’, 2; ‘Schriftleitung’ (From the Editors), Stobsiade 24 (38), October– November 1918, 4. 43. ‘Briefkasten’ (Letter Box), Stobsiade 1 (15), 15 October 1916, 4. 44. ‘Vereinsberichte’ (Club Reports), Stobsiade 3 (17), 26 November 1916, 4; ‘Vereinsberichte’ (Club Reports), Stobsiade 16 (30), December 1917, 4. 45. Untitled, Stobsiade 14 (28), September 1917, 1. 46. ‘Pech’ (Bad Luck), Stobsiade 13 (civilian edition), 1 June 1916, 1. 47. ‘Wildes Heimweh’ (Wild Yearning for Home), Stobsiade 25 (39), December 1918, 1.

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48. ‘Nur Mut’ (Take Courage), Stobsiade 5 (civilian edition), 14 November 1915, 1. I have modified the website’s translation slightly to convey the idiomatic meaning of ‘Nur Mut’ more accurately. Jennifer Kewley Draskau attributes this anonymously published poem to H. Beckmann, who was subsequently interned on the Isle of Man. ‘Kulturkrieg and Frontgeist from behind the Wire: World War I Newspapers from Douglas Internment Camp’, in Carr and Mytum, eds, Cultural Heritage and Prisoners of War, 207–26, here 221. 49. ‘Abschied vom Militaer [sic]’ (Farewell to the Military), Stobsiade 3 (civilian edition), 8 October 1915, 1. I have made adjustments to the website’s translation to correct the meaning of ‘nicht grün’ and to add nuance to two other lines. 50. ‘Schweizer Fieber’ (Swiss Fever), Stobsiade 3 (17), 26 November 1916, 2–3. 51. See, for example, ‘Stobs im Schnee’ (Stobs in the Snow), Stobsiade 18 (32), February 1918, 1; ‘Sonnenaufgang in Stobs’ (Sunrise in Stobs), Stobsiade 21 (35), June 1918, 1; ‘An Regentagen’ (On Rainy Days), Stobsiade 25 (39), December 1918, 1. 52. For a further discussion of this stigma and Stobsiade’s response, see Schwan, ‘German Military Internees’, 52–4. See also Feltman, Stigma. 53. Stobsiade 11 (civilian edition), 8 April 1916, 2. 54. ‘Die Buecherhuette’ [sic] (The Book Hut), Stobsiade 18 (32), February 1918, 2. 55. ‘[M]it dem Kaufmann, mit dem kühnen Entdecker segeln wir über die weiten Weltmeere, wandern durch Urwald und durch Palmenhaine.’ ‘Unsere Lagerbuecherei’ [sic] (Our Camp Library), Stobsiade 1 (15), 15 October 1916, 2. 56. ‘Die Buecherhuette’ [sic], 3. 57. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste [1979], trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). ‘Kameraden [. . .] die anfänglich noch an den im Lager umlaufenden Räuberpistolen und Detektivgeschichten Gefallen fanden, haben eben erkannt, dass [sic] ein gutes Buch ein Freund ist, der durch Krieg und Gefangenschaft treu zu uns hält.’ ‘Unsere Lagerbuecherei’ [sic], 3. 58. ‘Die Buecherhuette’ [sic], 3. 59. On the role of editors, see also Pöppinghege, Im Lager, 31. 60. ‘Unsere Lagerbuecherei’ [sic], 2. 61. On Goethe in school curricula, see Anja Ballis and Vesna Bjegac, ‘Literatur im Deutschunterricht des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts’, in Grundthemen der Literaturwissenschaft: Literaturdidaktik, ed. Christiane Lütge (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), 47–75, here 71. 62. The internees associate their fate with the trials endured by Wieland der Schmied (Wayland the Smith) (‘Unsere Lagerbuecherei’ [sic], 2). The German Empire as a nation-state had been founded in 1871, following the Franco-Prussian War. Reading national literature was not unique to German internees. Edmund G. C. King has shown that Australian POWs’ reading choices reflect a ‘self-conscious literary nationalism’. ‘A Captive Audience? The Reading Lives of Australian Prisoners of War, 1914–1918’, in Reading and the First World War: Readers, Texts, Archives, ed. Shafquat Towheed and Edmund G. C. King (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 153–67, here 162. 63. Hermann Hesse, ‘O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!’ (September 1914), in If the War Goes On . . . Reflections on War and Politics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), 9–14, here 12–13. In his Foreword to the 1946 edition of this collection (Krieg und Frieden: Betrachtungen zu Krieg und Politik seit dem Jahr 1914), reprinted in this volume in English, Hesse refers to the newspaper as Neue Zürcher Nachrichten, but this appears to be a mistake. 64. Hesse, ‘O Freunde’, 13. 65. Hesse, ‘O Freunde’, 14. 66. ‘Vom Wecken bis Zapfenstreich’ (From Wakening to Lights Out), Stobsiade 7 (21), March 1917, 2; ‘Tonkunst und Schauspiel’ (Music and Theatre), Stobsiade 1 (15), 15 October, 1916, 4.

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67. ‘Unsere Lagerbuecherei’ [sic], 3. 68. ‘Gegenwärtige Lehrfächer’ (Current Subjects Taught), Stobsiade 16 (30), December 1917, 2. 69. ‘An unsere Leser in Deutschland’ (To our Readers in Germany), Stobsiade 2 (civilian edition), 19 September 1915, 3; ‘An unsere Leser in Deutschland’ (To our Readers in Germany), Stobsiade 17 (31), January 1918, 4. 70. ‘Lagerchronik’ (Camp Chronicle), 3–4, Stobsiade 4 (18), December 1916, 3; ‘Vorträge’ and ‘Lichtbildervorträge’ (Lectures and Slide Shows), Stobsiade 16 (30), December 1917, 2; ‘Die Lagerschule’ (The Camp School), Stobsiade 20 (34), April 1918, 2. 71. It can be assumed that ‘England’ is here used interchangeably with ‘Britain’, which is common in the German language; I have not modified the translation on this occasion. ‘Lagerchronik’ (Camp Chronicle), Stobsiade 3 (17), 26 November, 1916, 3. 72. ‘Lagerchronik’, Stobsiade 3 (17), 3. ‘das Land, in dem so mancher unter uns schon über zwei Jahre lebt und von dem ihm [sic] der Stacheldraht doch nur herzlich wenig sehen lässt’. The translation has been modified slightly. 73. ‘Grantham’, Stobsiade 12 (26), July 1917, 1. The translation has been modified slightly. The German original includes the phrase ‘he can’t understand’ in English: ‘Anfänglich steht der Nichtfachmann der neuartigen Beschäftigung etwas hilflos gegenüber und weiss [sic] nicht, wie er es anfangen soll, insbesondere, weil “he can’t understand” die in Englisch erteilten Anweisungen, aber schon nach wenigen Tagen hat er’s den Berufsarbeiten [sic] abgespickt.’ 74. ‘An einer Arbeitsstelle werden Baumwurzeln durch Sprengungen ausgerodet, dort sieht man “Fred”, den englischen oder, besser gesagt, schottischen Pionier und Leiter der Sprengungen Hand in Hand arbeiten mit Reinhard, einem deutschen, langbärtigen Landsturmmann. “Fred” spricht, bis auf einige deutsche Kraftausdrücke, kein Wort Deutsch und Reinhard ebenso wenig englisch [sic]; aber beide verstehen sich ausgezeichnet. Nachdem der Baumstumpf angebohrt und mit einer Sprengladung versehen ist, ertönt ein kurzer Pfiff, alle in der Nähe arbeitenden Kameraden suchen Deckung, die Zündschnur wird angebrannt, und Fred und Reinhard verschwinden katzenartig hinter den nächsten Baumstümpfen. Ein sekundenlanges Warten, ein mehr oder weniger kräftiger Knall, “That was a good shot” sagt Fred, Reinhard antwortet verständnisvoll: “Yes, allright”, und die Arbeit geht weiter.’ ‘Gestalten’ (Personalities), Stobsiade 14 (28), September 1917, 2. 75. Heather Jones, Violence Against Prisoners of War in the First World War: Britain, France and Germany, 1914–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 8, 249. 76. ‘Das Lazarett’ (The Camp Hospital), Stobsiade 12 (26), July 1917, 2; ‘Ausstellung fuer [sic] Handwerk, Kunstgewerbe u. Schule Juni 1918’ (The Exhibition for Crafts, the Decorative Arts and the School, June 1918), Stobsiade 22 (36), July 1918, 2; ‘Grantham’, 2. 77. ‘Wir marschierten durch das Dörfchen wo wir natürlich grosses [sic] Aufsehen erregten. Einzelne Kameraden hatten noch die selbstgebauten Mandolinen und Geigen umgehängt.’ ‘Die Fahrt nach Dalmellington’ (The Journey to Dalmellington), Stobsiade 13 (27), August 1917, 1. 78. ‘Nur die obersten Ränge sind für gewöhnliche Zuschauer zugänglich; Sperrsitz und 1. Platz werden von khaki-uniformierten Wächtern streng für sie verschlossen gehalten. Wie die Fürstenloge in einem Hoftheater. Aber oben wimmelt es: zumeist schottische “Tommys” im Sonntagsröckchen mit ihrer Ailie, Jenny, Lizzie – . Ach ja! . . .’ ‘Aus den Aufzeichnungen eines Neulings’ (From the Notes of a Newcomer), Stobsiade 1 (15), 15 October 1916, 2. 79. ‘Die Lagerschule’ (The Camp School), Stobsiade 5 (19), January 1917, 1. I have chosen a literal translation of ‘folkdom’ to emphasise the term’s connotations more clearly; ‘Die Arbeitsraeume’ [sic] (The Study Rooms), Stobsiade 5 (19), 3; ‘Die Prinzipien der Phalakrologie’ (The Principles of Phalacrology), Stobsiade 10 (24), May 1917, 2; ‘Lagerchronik’ (Camp Chronicle), Stobsiade 10 (24), May 1917, 3; ‘“Chr. Verein junger Maenner” [sic],

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“Gesellschaft der Freunde” und unser Lager’ (The YMCA and the Society of Friends and our Camp), Stobsiade 7 (21), March 1917, 3. For an analysis of the military edition’s ironic engagement with Germany’s cultural leadership in ‘The Principles of Phalacrology’, see Schwan, ‘German Military Internees’. Kewley Draskau offers a detailed critique of conceptions of cultural leadership in civilian internment camp papers in ‘Kulturkrieg and Frontgeist’. 80. Dylan Rodríguez, ‘Against the Discipline of “Prison Writing”: Toward a Theoretical Conception of Contemporary Radical Prison Praxis’, Genre 35 (fall/winter 2002): 407–28, here 409. 81. Rodríguez, ‘Against the Discipline of “Prison Writing”’, 407, 409. 82. Rodríguez, ‘Against the Discipline of “Prison Writing”’, 410.

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21 Hospital Journals Jessica Meyer

I

n October 1915 the 3rd London General Hospital, Wandsworth, produced a ‘new literary venture’ in the form of a journal entitled the Gazette of the 3rd London General Hospital (hereafter the Gazette, 1915–19).1 The first edition contained a range of material: the first episode in a serialised history of the hospital by the commanding officer, a matron’s account of ‘My First Day at the 3rd’, two poems ‘Dedicated to the Night Nurse’ and ‘Anecdotes from the Ward’, and etchings and cartoons from at least three different contributors. It was priced at threepence. The journal, edited by Ward Muir (1878–1927), a well-known journalist and sometime Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) orderly in the hospital, would go on to publish monthly editions with a similar mix of content and at a similar price until the closure of the hospital in July 1919. Muir was not the only well-known name in London arts and media circles associated with the Gazette. The illustrations in that first edition included cartoons by Stephen Baghot de la Bere (1877–1977) and an etching by C. R. W. Nevinson (1889– 1946), both of whom, like Muir, were serving as RAMC orderlies in the hospital.2 This notability of its contributors, the result of an association between the hospital and the Chelsea Arts Club, was, however, the only thing that set the Gazette apart as a hospital journal during the war. Across Britain, military general and auxiliary hospitals produced journals throughout the war. Some, like the Gazette or the ‘Southern’ Cross: The Journal of the 1st Southern General, Birmingham (1916–18), were edited by hospital staff; some, like the Hydra (1917–18), the journal of Craiglockhart War Hospital, were edited by patients. All contained a miscellaneous selection of contributions, including factual information, hospital news, poetry, humorous fiction, cartoons, illustrations and photographs produced by both staff and patients. In many ways, the hospital journals were similar to the trench journals produced by units overseas, which contained ‘an inextricable muddle of propaganda and personal testimony’.3 As with trench journals, hospital journals served an important purpose in boosting unit morale and serving as an outlet for complaints by rankers and patients in a way that avoided outright insubordination and insurrection.4 In this, they played a central role in shaping what Jeffrey Reznick has termed ‘the culture of caregiving’ in First World War Britain.5 In using the term ‘hospital journal’, it is worth bearing in mind that not all hospitals were alike. Base hospitals at major French and Belgian ports and in Alexandria, and other medical units, such as Casualty Clearing Stations and field ambulances, produced their own journals, which John Pegum distinguishes from the trench journals of combatant units, because they were ‘tainted inevitably by the implications

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of [. . .] the areas in which they operated. [. . .] The Base as seen from the Front is the repose of those shirkers and slackers who have wangled their way to safety and idleness.’6 The journals of ‘home’ hospitals, that is, those of the military general and auxiliary hospitals based in Britain, differed in a further significant respect: Whereas the distribution of trench journals remained largely limited to the front lines, hospital magazines were sold in the recreation rooms of sponsoring institutions and in those of affiliated hospitals. Editors also often made their publications available to local booksellers and railway news stalls where they could be purchased by the public. Other editors offered postal subscriptions to ‘all interested in the Hospital, whether directly connected with it or not.’7 While trench journals also circulated on the home front, sent home by soldiers to their families and even, in the case of larger journals, offered for sale at London newsstands, the dissemination of home hospital journals as a form of fundraising meant that they were additionally used by hospitals to provide entertainments and ‘soldiers’ comforts’, work that was officially the responsibility of the British Red Cross Society (BRCS) during the war.8 These journals thus formed an extension of the medical voluntarism which was a necessary adjunct to the work of the military medical services throughout the war. In addition, the sale of journals shaped their content. Where trench journals tended to look inward, providing space for shared jokes designed to boost morale, hospital journals also looked outward, seeking to inform the public about the work undertaken in home military and auxiliary hospitals at war.9 In doing so, they bridged the divide between civilian support and military authority in much the same way that hospitals, as both spaces of medical care and military discipline, did themselves. In this chapter I will consider a number of home hospital journals to explore this bridging function as a reflection of the complex liminal space of military medical care in wartime. Looking at the organisation, content and function of these home hospital journals, this chapter will show how this important subsection of wartime periodicals reflected a very specific area of the war effort, one where civil society encountered the mobilised state, caregiving encountered the effects of violence, and military and medical discipline were forced to interact. Using a range of journals produced by different types of institution, including general hospitals, auxiliary hospitals and specialist hospitals, I will examine the multiple roles played by these periodicals, as rehabilitative tools, pressure valves and sites of public communication.

Types of Hospital To understand the wider significance of hospital journals, it is worth considering in more detail the institutions in which they were produced. All the examples discussed in this chapter were published by ‘home’ hospitals, the military general and auxiliary hospitals in Britain that were not merely distanced from the dangers faced by frontline combatant units but also had to contend and even actively engage with public scrutiny of the work they were doing.10 They represent three types of hospital established in Britain during the war. These were the military general hospitals, which were staffed by the RAMC and Territorial Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC(T)), with nursing staff drawn from the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military

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Nursing Service (QAIMNS) and the Territorial Forces Nursing Service (TFNS) and supplemented by volunteers supplied by the BRCS; specialist hospitals, which were similarly staffed but treated only those with particular forms of illness or injury; and auxiliary hospitals, which were staffed predominantly by nurses and volunteers provided by the BRCS and overseen by RAMC medical officers. Prior to the war, the armed services had been served by a number of military and naval hospitals, with most attention focused on the Cambridge Hospital, Aldershot, which was the site of RAMC training. With the outbreak of the war, the number of military hospitals expanded rapidly, divided into regional commands, often reflected in the hospital’s title. Initially staffed by the RAMC(T), these units requisitioned institutional spaces such as training colleges and Poor Law infirmaries, and recruited local medical expertise as part of the expansion of the RAMC. As the war continued, many developed particular areas of specialism, either at departmental or institutional level. Thus the 3rd London General was home to the ‘tin nose department’, overseen by the sculptor Francis Derwent Wood (1871–1926), where facial prosthetics were designed and fitted.11 No. 2 Northern General Hospital in Leeds was designated a specialist orthopaedic hospital at its Beckett’s Park campus, although the East Leeds campus, on the site of the city’s former Poor Law infirmary, continued as a general hospital.12 At institutional level, Queen Mary’s Hospital, Sidcup, specialised in facial injury, Roehampton in London and Erskine in Scotland in limb fitting for amputees, and the Maudsley Hospital and Craiglockhart in psychological wounds. The military hospitals, either general or specialist, were the first sites of care that ill and wounded men were taken to on transfer back to Britain from base hospitals overseas. In these institutions, they remained under military discipline, wore distinctive ‘hospital blues’ uniforms and were treated and cared for by the Army Medical Services.13 Men could be discharged directly from military hospitals, particularly when their injury was so impairing that they were no longer fit for military service. For most injured men, however, the military medical system was one of recycling, designed to rehabilitate them for return to military service. These men would be discharged to auxiliary hospitals which supported the work of general hospitals on a regional basis. These were often located in stately homes, donated to the war effort by their owners. The chatelaines of these estates would sometimes play a part in hospital administration, seeing it as a form of war service, although day-to-day authority lay with a BRCS matron and medical oversight was provided by RAMC medical officers. Staff for these hospitals was also provided by the BRCS in the form of Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) volunteers, both nursing and general service.14 The primary work of auxiliary hospitals was convalescent and rehabilitative care, although those associated with the medical services of the Dominion forces in Britain, such as the 1st Australian Auxiliary Hospital Harefield, could ‘act as a depot for collecting individuals for return to Australia’.15 Military and auxiliary hospitals thus served a range of purposes in caring for and rehabilitating sick and wounded servicemen within wartime military structures.

Organisation Both military and auxiliary hospitals produced hospital journals, but the nature of each institution shaped the way each journal was organised and run. Editing was usually undertaken by the military medical staff, reflecting the fact that their positions

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in the institutions were more permanent in comparison with soldier patients, whose associations with the hospital were temporary. The commanding officer of a general hospital could be given honorary editorship, with the same being the case for matrons of auxiliary hospitals. The actual labour of soliciting contributions, compiling and editing each issue tended to be undertaken by medical service personnel of lower rank. In auxiliary hospitals, where the staff could be made up entirely of women, editing was undertaken by VAD or other non-medical volunteers. Once edited within the institution, journals were sent to be printed outside.16 Even if the labour of editing the journal was undertaken by lower ranks, usually non-commissioned officers of the RAMC or BRCS volunteers, the nominal editorship by the institutions’ military medical command demonstrates the extent to which these journals were considered official publications. In this, they can be seen to differ from combatant trench journals, which were produced by both men from the ranks and junior officers but often without official approval, although this changed in the course of the war.17 Hospital journals were official, and officially sanctioned, periodicals from the start. This was further reinforced by the extent to which editors censored the material they received for publication which, Reznick argues, ‘reveals the true propagandistic function of hospital magazines. [. . .] [C]ensorship was intended as a means of encouraging all inhabitants of the hospital to work towards the official goals of efficiency, economy and social harmony.’18 Such propaganda was not, however, aimed solely inward, towards the institution’s inhabitants. The official imprimatur given to the journals by their organisation worked alongside and was reinforced by the sale of the journals to the general public. This practice developed connections between the hospitals and the communities in which they were placed. While the location of a hospital in a community could serve as an important source of local wartime pride, enabling a community to demonstrate its devotion to the war effort and the sacrifices of the military, hospitals could also be a source of local tension, drawing resources away from the civilian population and introducing a perceived source of social and sexual disorder in the form of the convalescing soldier.19 Maintaining connections with such communities through officially sanctioned communications was thus important. This was particularly true of institutions such as the 1st Australian Auxiliary Hospital Harefield, where patients were far from home and domestic support. The hospital’s journal, the Harefield Park Boomerang (hereafter Boomerang, 1916–18), aided the integration of military medical authority and civilian-inflected domesticity through its reports on marriages between patients and women from the local community.20

Contents As the example of the marriage announcements in the Boomerang indicates, the official nature of hospital journals was reflected in some of their content. Senior staff and officers contributed factual articles, such as the two-part history of the 3rd London General, written by the hospital’s commanding officer, Lt.-Col. Bruce Porter (1869–1948). Journals also include notices relating to staff co-option to and promotion within other units, with the ‘Southern’ Cross running a regular series of ‘News from Old Friends’ about men who had worked in the hospital serving with the RAMC overseas. As the war went on, in addition to the wedding notices published

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in the Boomerang, obituaries began to appear, both of men killed in action serving in overseas units and those who fell ill and died while serving in the hospitals themselves.21 Other regular items included reports on entertainments held at the hospital, including those given by visiting performers as well as those put on by the patients and staff, notices of forthcoming events and items of news of interest to hospital residents. To this extent, hospital journals functioned as newspapers for the institution, circulating information and publicising a range of aspects of hospital life. Not all contributions were factual, however. Like much of the popular press of the day, hospital journals contained a heterogeneous range of material, including more creative contributions such as artwork, poetry and short stories.22 Most of these related specifically to hospital, or sometimes military, life, although there were also seasonal offerings, particularly around Christmas. Many contributions were sentimental, such as the poem attributed to the wife of a soldier patient and addressed to the nursing staff in the ‘Southern’ Cross: They say your work is angels’ work; It’s more than that – we others know; It takes a woman not to shirk The duties that distress us so.23 Less poetically, but equally sentimentally, ‘A Mere Man’ wrote in his ‘First Impressions of the 1st Southern’: The morning I arrived I was confronted by a R.A.M.C. soldier, who asked ‘what I wanted’ in a very polite way. He wore the South African ribbon, which alone spells a soldier, service, and a touch of the ‘real thing.’ Whilst I was waiting I was greatly impressed by the kind way he spoke to all, especially to the sisters of the nursing service. He recognised the real, true position of the heroic nurses, and showed them that respect which is their due.24 Nor was it only women whose caregiving work was praised in the pages of the journal. ‘Orderly’s’ poem in the same issue compared the stretcher-bearer to St Christopher: ‘The Red Cross Knight the stretcher bears, / The “MASTER” carries he. / “As ye did unto one of these, / Ye did it unto “ME”.’25 W. H. Atkins, meanwhile, praised both nursing orderlies and stretcher-bearers for ‘doing their bit, / Of V.C.’s not many they score, / Yet are earned every day in a quiet sort of way / By the “Royal Army Medical Corps.”’26 The contents of hospital journals were not, however, entirely anodyne. Alongside the factual and sentimental were humorous articles and images contributed by staff. Many of these were self-deprecating, with contributors mocking their own roles and social status. The cartoon of ‘Our Youngest Lance-Corporal’ in the Gazette, for example, which appears to be a portrait of the journal’s editor, Ward Muir, mocks the physical insufficiency of the military medical service ranker serving on the home front (Figure 21.1).27 Similarly, the ‘Southern’ Cross included a range of jokes mocking orderlies’ pretensions to the status of soldiers: ‘What is the difference between a soldier and a ward orderly? A matter of “a-pinny-on”.’28 Journals thus functioned as spaces in which men engaged in forms of war work that might open them up to criticism on

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Figure 21.1  ‘Our Celebrities. No. 4: The Youngest Lance-Corporal’, Gazette of the 3rd London General Hospital (Territorial Force), Wandsworth, December 1915, 55. Wellcome Library, RAMC/1313/1.

the grounds that such labour was women’s work were able to define, celebrate and defend their wartime roles. Equally, women were able to use journals to justify their work outside the home and in close proximity to damaged male bodies as necessary and appropriate war work.29 The targets of mockery in hospital journals were not, however, necessarily selfreferential. Patients were also contributors, using journals as spaces in which they could articulate a range of emotions about their experiences of care. Such contributions could be appreciative of the safety and cleanliness hospitals offered after the dirt and danger of the front, with feelings of gratitude for the care received evident in contributions such as Atkins’s. However, emotions of pain, fear and frustration were also well represented, with patients using hospital journals as spaces to criticise aspects of hospital life, ranging from the imprisonment of bed rest through the infantilisation of the ‘soft’ diet to the fear of surgery and the pain of various therapies.30 Cartoons depicting doctors wielding large syringes, as in ‘Curing the hero by means of a serum’ by Captain C. Rhodes Harrison for the Gazette (Figure 21.2) spoke to men’s fears about medical treatment and the pain and loss of control it could entail. Poems made a similar point, as in ‘A Day at the 4th AGH’: ‘At 10 came the doctors – a matter of form. / They make you wish sometimes you’d never been born.’31 Doctors, however, were not the only target of patient anxiety and complaint. Nursing orderlies also came in for critique for the mechanical ways in which they provided care, as in another cartoon by Harrison, ‘3rd L.G.H. Labour-saving Devices for the Reception of the Wounded’, where nine panels show a patient fed, undressed, washed, dried, clothed and sent to the ward via a series of Heath Robinson-esque contraptions

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Figure 21.2  C. Rhodes Harrison, ‘Labour-Saving Devices (continued)’, Gazette of the 3rd London General Hospital (Territorial Force), Wandsworth, April 1916, 186. Wellcome Library, RAMC/1313/1. worked by an orderly.32 However, as Harrison’s cartoon ‘For maintaining order in a “Convalescent Ward”’ (Figure 21.2) makes clear, after the male nursing orderlies, the principal targets of mockery and anxiety in hospital journals were the female nursing and caring staff. While women served in home hospitals from the start of the war, and the conversion of stately homes into auxiliary hospitals associated military medical care provision in Britain explicitly with domesticity, their presence and roles expanded dramatically as the war went on.33 With male medical service personnel combed out for service overseas or in combatant units in response to the manpower crisis which dogged the British military throughout the war, their roles were filled by women, sometimes on a straight substitution basis, although more commonly at a dilution level of three women for every one position held by a man. As a result, women’s roles in hospitals expanded from nursing and cleaning to include clerical and administrative work, as well as specialist medical services such as massage and anaesthetics.34 This increased feminisation of hospitals turned them into spaces which threatened to undermine servicemen’s wartime masculine identity, whether they were orderlies or patients. This was expressed in the comic representations of women in the pages of hospital journals. Whether in the form of domineering matrons, pain-inducing masseuses, incompetent nursing VADs or ignorant hospital visitors, women in hospitals were the subject of extensive mockery in the pages of hospital journals, usually in pieces created by men, but as in the case of the ‘Southern’ Cross, which was produced by its female-dominated staff, also in works by women. Baghot de la Bere’s cartoons for the Gazette were particularly vicious in their depictions of the masculinised figure

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Figure 21.3  Stephen Baghot de la Bere, ‘Things We May Hope to See – If the War Lasts till Next Christmas’, Gazette of the 3rd London General Hospital (Territorial Force), Wandsworth, December 1915, 62. Wellcome Library, RAMC/1313/1.

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of a matron domineering the insignificant figure of the male ‘orderlim’. The ‘orderlim’s’ female equivalent, meanwhile, was the ‘orderlette’, an attenuated flapper too weak to undertake her duties and reliant on her sexual attraction to woo recuperating soldiers into doing her work for her (Figure 21.3).35 The cartoons in the ‘Southern’ Cross were less brutal than those in the Gazette, but the mockery of female nursing staff was evident in humorous articles such as ‘Femina Felina (Var. TFNS)’, written after a period of rapid dilution of the hospital workforce: One must not suppose, however, that women now perform the work of the hospital – such occupation would be quite ‘infra dig’. Section C of our long-suffering Corps was captured with the building, and these unfortunate men ‘carry on’ under the imperative direction of the new comers, whose time is divided between researches in modern fiction and playing parlour games with frequent intervals for tea and chocolate.36 In the Gazette, meanwhile, A. Pirie imagined a scenario involving ‘the last R.A.M.C. orderly left in the hospital’: The war was over, and when at last labour could be spared to take down the huts there crept from the wreckage a gaunt figure with long, grey hair and beard. ‘Is the war over?’ ‘Years ago’, they answered. ‘Are they all gone?’ ‘Who?’ ‘The women.’ ‘Years ago. Who are you?’ A look of triumph came in his face. ‘I am the last orderly, the Rip van Winkle of Wandsworth. Lead me to the office of the Daily Chronicle.’37 Female staff can thus be seen to have been the butt of a number of jokes in hospital journals. They did, however, have a right of reply in the pages of these periodicals, both through their own self-deprecating representation and their open mockery of the orderlies. ‘Who vanishes beyond our ken’ asked ‘Auxiliary Hospital’ in the ‘Southern’ Cross, ‘– most immaterial of men – / Whene’er we want him? Who is he? / Our Orderly.’38 An article offering ‘Requisition Hints’ provided a guide to requesting ferrets which recommended distinguishing between male, female and orderly when specifying the sex to be supplied.39 Less fortunate were the civilian women from the local communities who visited bed-bound men as part of programmes for the entertainment and rehabilitation of the wounded. However well-intentioned, these women’s visits were relentlessly mocked. According to Reznick, ‘soldier patient interactions with upper-class women who visited the hospital [. . .] promoted feelings of assault or insult. Hospital magazines portray these women as purveyors of more irritation than consolation, as persons who tended to gawk at the bedridden soldier.’40 Cartoons such as B. Howell’s ‘People who Ought to Be “Strafed”’ in the ‘Southern’ Cross, in which an upper-class matron instructs a bed-bound soldier with his mouth bandaged to ‘Now chatter away, and tell me all about it’, or the reported ‘Wit from the wards’, in the First Eastern General Hospital Gazette (1915–17), which commented, ‘I was in the Expeditionary Force; I

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seem now to be in the Exhibitionary’, were typical of the responses of wounded men to the frustration of being objectified by civilians who were perceived as being wilfully ignorant of the horrors of war and patronising with it.41 The regular inclusion of such images in hospital magazines, alongside the other critiques of the care provided by doctors, nurses and nursing orderlies, has led Reznick to conclude that hospital magazines confirm views of the military hospital as a brutal rather than a caring space. Carden-Coyne similarly argues that ‘[d]epicting the hospital administration as dehumanizing, the doctor as incompetent, the nurse enjoying the infliction of pain and the orderly as an insensitive “leadswinger” (slacker) helped patients to come to terms with their hospitals’ shortcomings’.42 Yet these representations by patients were part of a wider critique of hospital life produced not only by wounded soldiers but also by the medical caregivers who were on the receiving end of so much criticism. While hospital magazines did, therefore, ‘reflect a continuation of [soldiers’] anger in homefront environments of healing’, their role in the war effort was more multilayered and complex, showing a variety of responses on different sides.43

Function While the journals of the general hospitals display the complexity of these periodicals as documents of wartime life through the range of contributors and types of contribution they encompass, the complexity of purpose of hospital journals can perhaps best be seen in those produced by specialist hospitals. In particular, the Hydra, the journal of Craiglockhart War Hospital, most famously edited by Wilfred Owen (1893–1918), demonstrates the multifaceted role that hospital journals could play. On the one hand, the journal was, like those already discussed, a space in which soldiers were able to express mockery of the civilian society they had returned to. In one draft editorial, for instance, Owen wrote that [m]any of us who came to the Hydro slightly ill are now getting dangerously well [. . .] In this excellent Concentration Camp we are fast recovering from the shock of coming to England. For some of us were not a little wounded by the apparent indifference of the public and the press, not indeed to our own precious selves – but to the unimagined durances of the fit fellows in the line.44 Owen’s irony fits easily with the tone of many trench journals being produced at this time. Yet even as the Hydra was the site of Owen’s ironic complaint about the complacency of civilian Britain, it also formed the basis of his treatment and a method by which he got ‘dangerously well’. Dr A. J. Brock (1879–1947), Owen’s doctor at Craiglockhart, was a proponent of ‘ergo-therapy’, or occupational therapy. According to Meredith Martin, Brock’s treatment practices were ‘ordered activities [which] provided a reconnection to a unique kind of social world and formed a methodology of healing through which shell-shocked officers were efficiently “cured” so that they could return to the front’. While Martin focuses on poetic composition as providing patients with a form of control, with ‘the therapeutic measures of meter [. . .] used as a method of reordering a neurasthenic patient’s chaotic psyche’, the journal itself, and indeed other hospital journals, provided space in which patients could engage with a

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range of creative activities.45 Artwork, storytelling, poetic composition, even the making of jokes all had the potential to act as a form of rehabilitation which formed part of the social care provided by hospitals, particularly auxiliary hospitals.46 Engaging with the journals as contributors could not only keep the soldier patient entertained but also had the potential to help return him to fitness for discharge. Such rehabilitation was not only psychological, as in the case of Owen, but physical as well. The editor of the First Eastern General Hospital Gazette described how one drawing, ‘Suggestions for the curative gymnasium process’, ‘was done with the left hand (the artist’s right arm being wounded). He has taught himself to draw with his left hand since admission to the hospital.’47 While the distraction of the creative process might also have been a necessary form of therapy for men producing trench journals at the front, the specifically rehabilitative nature of the activities, as ascribed by both Brock and the First Eastern General Hospital Gazette’s editor, was a particular function of journals produced in hospitals, where such rehabilitation was a necessary and acknowledged role of the institution.48 It was not only as a rehabilitative tool, however, that hospital journals served the war aims of the British military. As already noted, they also had a role similar to that of trench journals in acting as pressure valves by providing a platform for complaint. Whether in the form of Owen’s complaint about the indifference of the public, Howell’s mockery of the inquisitiveness of hospital visitors, or Baghot de la Bere’s derisive images of hospital staff, the expression of the tensions and anxieties of hospital life through literary and artistic media provided a space for dissent that, importantly, was authorised and approved of by the military medical hierarchy. Indeed, the official sanction and active support given to hospital journals demonstrates the extent to which the necessity of such an outlet was acknowledged by the authorities throughout the war. This implicit official sanction for complaint, subversion and even resistance to wartime authority and organisation presents something of a paradox, however, when taking into account Reznick’s point that ‘the true propagandistic function of hospital magazines [. . .] [was] to encourage the “community to obey the unwritten rules of common sense and good form”’.49 The inclusion of more sentimental items may have helped to present the hospital as a ‘complex world of patients, sisters, nurses, officers, orderlies and miscellaneous staff [throughout which] there is a bond of friendly cooperation and mutual comradeship which makes for the pleasantest sense of discipline without stringency’, and that of factual items to help justify the journals as historical documents.50 However, the breadth of the mockery included in these periodicals indicates the extent to which it was accepted, at least implicitly, as having a necessary function in the journal and therefore in the hospital itself. Not just ignorant civilians or military medical authorities were the subject of complaint and mockery, but also the officiousness of nurses, the insufficient manhood of orderlies and the ineffectiveness of VADs. This humour was often gendered, reflecting the social anxieties that wartime policies of substitution and dilution created for men and women alike. Thus the subversive humour of hospital journals did more than just reflect soldiers’ anger at civilian complacency or resistance to medical authority. It ensured that hospital journals, in addition to all the other acknowledged roles they played, also served as sites of social negotiation, between soldiers and civilians, patients and doctors, men and women, in the social chaos that was British society at war.

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Conclusion Hospital journals had a specific and important role to play in the media landscape of British wartime society. Combining the roles of organ of communication, rehabilitative tool, psychological pressure valve, historical record and site of social negotiation, their work was as complex and significant as that of the trench journals and popular press which have received more attention from historians.51 Sitting as they do between these two other types of periodicals, between the front line and the home front, they act as a bridge across the liminal space of military medical care provision which sick and wounded men found themselves in when hospitalised. Wounded men were not the only service personnel who occupied the hospital space. Doctors, trained nurses, nursing and general service VADs and nursing orderlies also lived and worked in hospitals in various roles. They, too, contributed to hospital journals, in many cases running them, providing the continuity that the more fluid population of patients could not. Their contributions demonstrate the breadth and complexity of the function of hospital journals as a form of wartime communication, which was as often between different categories of caregiver as it was between patient and carer or the hospital and the outside world. The hospital was the site of negotiation of all these social relationships during the war, and the journals reflect this fact. Hospital journals form an important source in the social history of medicine in the First World War, as works by Reznick, Carden-Coyne and Moncrieff demonstrate. Yet their richness as a source means that much remains to be done in exploring and analysing the wealth of material they contain. As such, hospital journals will remain an important source for understanding the history of the First World War for years to come.

Notes  1. Digitised by the Wellcome Library, , accessed 24 April 2022.   2. Both de la Bere and Nevinson would also serve overseas, de la Bere as a lieutenant in the Royal Garrison Artillery and Nevinson with the Friends Ambulance Unit in France and later as an official war artist.  3. Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Men at War: 1914–1919: National Sentiment and Trench Journalism in France during the First World War, trans. Helen McPhail (Providence, RI: Berg, 1992), 20.  4. J. G. Fuller, Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies, 1914–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 13.   5. Jeffrey Reznick, Healing the Nation: Soldiers and the Culture of Caregiving in Britain During the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004).   6. John Pegum, ‘British Army Trench Journals and a Geography of Identity’, in Publishing and the First World War: Essays in Book History, ed. Mary Hammond and Shafquat Towheed (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 142.  7. Reznick, Healing the Nation, 67.  8. Reznick, Healing the Nation, 67. On the work of the British Red Cross Society in the First World War, see Reports by the Joint War Committee and the Joint War Finance Committee of the British Red Cross and the Order of St John of Jerusalem in England on Voluntary Aid Rendered to the Sick and Wounded at Home and Abroad and to British Prisoners of War, 1914–1919, with Appendices (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1921).

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  9. On the more inward-looking nature of trench journals, see Fuller, Troop Morale and Popular Culture, 12–13. 10. Reznick, Healing the Nation, 87–9. 11. Suzannah Biernoff, ‘The Rhetoric of Disfigurement in First World War Britain’, Social History of Medicine 24, no. 3 (2011): 666–85, here 677–8, . 12. William Herbert Scott, Leeds in the Great War, 1914–1918: A Book of Remembrance (Leeds: Libraries and Arts Committee, 1923), 204–18. 13. Ana Carden-Coyne, The Politics of Wounds: Military Patients and Medical Power in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 215–17; Reznick, Healing the Nation, 99–115. 14. Jessica Meyer, An Equal Burden: The Men of the Royal Army Medical Corps in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 149–50. 15. Alexia Moncrieff, Expertise, Authority and Control: The Australian Army Medical Corps in the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 113. 16. Reznick, Healing the Nation, 67. 17. Pegum, ‘British Army Trench Journals’, 129–30. 18. Reznick, Healing the Nation, 70. 19. Reznick, Healing the Nation, 111. 20. Moncrieff, Expertise, Authority and Control, 123–5. The Boomerang is digitised at , accessed 24 April 2022. 21. See, for example, ‘Obituary of Cpl. Ernest Horton, R.A.M.C.’, ‘Southern’ Cross: The Journal of the First Southern General Hospital, November 1916, 250; ‘Obituary: No. S509 Pte. W. Clark, R.A.M.C.T. of Dudley Road Section’, ‘Southern’ Cross, April 1917, 104–5. 22. Adrian Bingham, Family Newspapers? Sex, Private Life, and the British Popular Press, 1918–1978 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 14. 23. T.S.S., ‘From his Wife (A Woman’s Appreciation of the Woman who Nursed her Husband)’, ‘Southern’ Cross, April 1916, 83. 24. ‘A Mere Man’, ‘First Impressions of 1st Southern’, ‘Southern’ Cross, December 1916, 271. 25. ‘Orderly’, ‘The Red Cross Knight’, ‘Southern’ Cross, October 1916, 231. 26. W. H. Atkins, ‘The R.A.M.C.’, ‘Southern’ Cross, July 1917, 148. 27. Meyer, An Equal Burden, 157–60. 28. ‘Southern’ Cross, April 1916, 87. 29. Janet S. K. Watson, ‘Wars in the Wards: The Social Construction of Medical Work in First World War Britain’, Journal of British Studies 41, no. 4 (2002): 484–510, . 30. Reznick, Healing the Nation, 71–6; Carden-Coyne, The Politics of Wounds, 287–97. 31. ‘A Day at the 4th A.G.H.’, quoted in Carden-Coyne, The Politics of Wounds, 295. 32. C. Rhodes Harrison, ‘3rd L.G.H. Labour-saving Devices for the Reception of the Wounded’, The Gazette, February 1916, 131. 33. Moncrieff, Expertise, Authority and Control, 116–18. 34. Meyer, An Equal Burden, 58; Moncrieff, Expertise, Authority and Control, 129–32. 35. Meyer, An Equal Burden, 164. 36. P.A. and S.D., ‘Femina Felina (Var. T.F.N.S.): The Woman of the Moment’, ‘Southern’ Cross, July 1916, 150. 37. A. Pirie, ‘The Last Orderly’, The Gazette of the 3rd London General Hospital, Wandsworth, October 1917, 20–1. 38. ‘Auxiliary Hospital’, ‘The Longer V.A.D. Catechism’, ‘Southern’ Cross, August 1916, 174. 39. ‘Requisition Hints’, ‘Southern’ Cross, August 1916, 179. 40. Reznick, Healing the Nation, 87.

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41. B. Howells, ‘People Who Ought to Be “Strafed”’, ‘Southern’ Cross, August 1916, 188; ‘Wit from the Wards’, First Eastern General Hospital Gazette, June 1915, 64. Digitised by the Wellcome Library, , accessed 24 April 2022 42. Carden-Coyne, The Politics of Wounds, 295. 43. Reznick, Healing the Nation, 89. 44. Wilfred Owen, draft editorial, 1917, ms., Hydra (501), The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, University of Oxford (www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit); The English Faculty Library, University of Oxford/The Wilfred Owen Literary Estate. 45. Meredith Martin, ‘Therapeutic Measures: The Hydra and Wilfred Owen at Craiglockhart War Hospital’, Modernism/modernity 14, no. 1 (2007): 35–54, here 37, . 46. Reznick, Healing the Nation, 68–9; Moncrieff, Expertise, Authority and Control, 132–3. 47. ‘Editorial’, First Eastern General Hospital Gazette, July 1916, 2. 48. On the importance of rehabilitation to wartime hospital culture, see Carden-Coyne, The Politics of Wounds, 4; Moncrieff, Expertise, Authority and Control, 110–12. 49. Reznick, Healing the Nation, 70. 50. The quotation is from ‘Editorial Notes: Freedom and Discipline’, The Gazette, October 1915, 3–4; for the point on factual items, see Reznick, Healing the Nation, 68. 51. Cedric Van Dijck, Marysa Demoor and Sarah Posman, ‘Between the Shells: The Production of Belgian, British and French Trench Journals in the First World War’, Publishing History 77 (2017): 161–78; Audoin-Rouzeau, Men at War; Pegum, ‘British Army Trench Journals’; Stephen Badsey, The British Army and its Image (London: Continuum, 2009); George Robb, British Culture and the First World War, Social History in Perspective, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Sabine Steffanie Grimshaw, ‘Representation and Resistance: The Representation of Male and Female War Resisters of the First World War’, PhD dissertation, University of Leeds, 2017.

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22 Pacifist Journals Grace Brockington, Sarah Hellawell, Daniel Laqua

D

uring the First World War, peace activists faced public disapproval, censorship and prosecution, as well as disrupted systems of travel and communication. Under these circumstances, pacifist journals and newspapers became all the more important as conduits for debate about the conflict and the international order of the future. Such publications merit renewed scholarly attention as they reveal the broad spectrum of pacifist dissent and help us uncover unofficial histories of the war. The first parts of this chapter set pacifist periodicals in relation to wider developments in the peace movement, with a focus on Britain and mainland Europe as centres of anti-war publishing. Three case studies then highlight the international outlook and transnational ties of such publications: the Cambridge Magazine (1912–23), a British periodical that served as a forum for information and opinion from opposing sides of the conflict; Internationaal (1916–50, renamed in 1919, 1920 and 1925), which connected feminist pacifists from different countries; and, finally, various publication projects that the Austrian sociologist Rudolf Broda (1880–1932) led from neutral Switzerland. Taken together, these examples illustrate how activists sought to foster transnational cooperation in an era of closed borders and heightened xenophobia.

The International Peace Movement on the Eve of War While its origins can be traced back to the early nineteenth century, the organised peace movement first gathered momentum in the 1880s and 1890s, with Universal Peace Congresses taking place almost annually from 1889 onwards. In 1891 the International Peace Bureau began to coordinate such events; it also launched its journal Correspondance bi-mensuelle (1892–1912; thereafter Le Mouvement pacifiste, 1912–40) to promote exchanges between numerous national peace societies. Rather than seeking mass mobilisation, many peace activists focused on persuasion and education, which meant that journals had an important role to play. The historian Sandi Cooper has noted the diversity of such periodicals, which ranged from ‘simple propaganda tracts’ to ‘serious journals of opinion, news, and criticism’.1 Some publications maintained close ties with specific peace associations. The US-based Advocate of Peace emerged in 1823–24 and soon came under the wing of the American Peace Society (founded in 1828); it appeared in various guises until 1932, when it turned into World Affairs, which exists to this day. In France, La Paix par le Droit (1891–1940) was issued by the eponymous French association; by the early twentieth century it had around 3,000 subscribers.2 Pacifist journals tended to have three strands to their coverage: news

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from the peace movement, international politics, and broader questions of international law and global order. On the eve of the war, Die Friedens-Warte (1899–) was ‘the central and most sophisticated pacifist organ’ published in German, with funding from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a circulation of around 10,000.3 Its founding editor, the Austrian pacifist Alfred Hermann Fried (1864–1921), effectively operated as a ‘professional peace journalist’ from the mid-1890s onwards.4 His journal followed his collaboration with the pacifist writer Bertha von Suttner (1843–1914): the two had issued Die Waffen nieder! (1892–99), a journal named after von Suttner’s bestselling anti-war novel. Die Friedens-Warte’s masthead featured an appeal to ‘organise the world’. To this end, Fried documented international agreements and congresses as well as the formation of new institutions and associations.5 Such endeavours intersected with those of two Belgians, Henri La Fontaine (1854–1943) and Paul Otlet (1868–1944), whose periodical La Vie Internationale (1912–14, 1919) aimed to demonstrate the extent of global interconnectedness. The Nobel laureates Suttner, Fried and La Fontaine were central to the peace movement: Suttner in particular was one of the most famous pacifists of the era. In 1891 she had established the Austrian Peace Society, which inspired Fried’s creation of a German counterpart in 1892.6 La Fontaine became president of the International Peace Bureau in 1907. Under his leadership, the bureau backed Fried’s plan for an International Union of the Peace Press in 1909. While the practical impact of the Union remained limited, it demonstrated ambitions to provide a counterweight to the nationalist coverage or national orientation of other papers.7

Pacifists and the Great War The outbreak of war signalled a crisis for the peace movement, both because it had failed to prevent the conflict and because peace activists disagreed on their response to it.8 Internal ruptures reflected the movement’s diversity: the term ‘pacifist’ – itself a neologism from the early twentieth century – indicated a commitment to the cause of peace, yet it did not necessarily denote a rejection of all wars. To some campaigners, ‘pacifism’ therefore remained compatible with support for the war policies of their own governments.9 While the reckoning of August 1914 did not destroy the peace movement, it did compel a change of direction. Existing peace societies gave way to new ventures that seemed more attuned to the political issues of the day: feminists who argued that women were naturally pacifist (as discussed in our second case study), liberals who campaigned for the creation of a League of Nations (for instance, the Dutch Nederlandsche Anti-Oorlog Raad, founded in 1914), radicals who demanded a democratic basis for the peace settlement (including the German Bund Neues Vaterland, also founded in 1914), socialists who argued that war exploited the proletariat (as articulated at the Zimmerwald Conference of 1915) and anarchists whose anti-militarism informed their fight against conscription (the US-based No-Conscription League, founded in 1917). Several pacifist periodicals were suspended or collapsed during the war. For instance, the International Arbitration and Peace Society’s Concord (launched from London in 1887) ceased publication in the winter of 1915/1916. Otlet and La Fontaine’s La Vie Internationale went on hold and was later relaunched for a solitary post-war issue.

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Other journals survived: the American Advocate of Peace and the French La Paix par le Droit were in business throughout the war, while the German Peace Society’s VölkerFriede (founded in 1910) was suppressed in 1915 but revived again between 1917 and 1919. Die Friedens-Warte was censored from November 1914 onwards; by 1916 it was banned in both Germany and Austria-Hungary, reflecting wartime measures against pacifism in the German Empire.10 Fried safeguarded the journal by moving it to neutral Switzerland in 1915, where it offered a forum for voices from different countries and debated the preconditions for a more peaceful future.11 The relocation reflected Switzerland’s role as a destination for political exiles, including Rudolf Broda, the subject of our third case study.12 Well before 1914, the country had hosted pacifist periodicals. Some of these continued during the war, for instance the Lugano-based Coenobium (1906–19).13 They were joined by new publications, for example Demain (Geneva, 1916–18), which published pacifist texts in translation, and the anarchist Les Tablettes (Lausanne, 1916– 19). Some German exiles founded the Freie Zeitung (Bern, 1917–20), which maintained ties with the radical wing of the German peace movement and viewed the defeat of the Central Powers as necessary for a more peaceful future.14 In Britain, journals were integral to the wars of propaganda between peace campaigners and the government. Some publications spoke for particular organisations. For example, the Union of Democratic Control (UDC, 1914–66), which pushed for public scrutiny of foreign policy and a negotiated peace, had an eponymous periodical (1915–19, retitled Foreign Affairs, 1919–31). The League of Nations Society (founded 1915–18, then incorporated into the League of Nations Union) issued a Monthly Report for Members throughout 1918. A third association, the socialist NoConscription Fellowship (1914–19), published the weekly Tribunal (1916–20). The Tribunal disseminated information and advice about the Military Service Act for men who faced conscription tribunals, alternative service and occasionally even imprisonment; and for the many women who worked for the Fellowship or were affected by the experiences of male friends and family. It created a community for conscientious objectors who might otherwise have taken their stand in isolation, and distribution of the journal peaked at over 10,000 copies. Conditions of production were at times extremely difficult: the publishers engaged in a running battle with the censors, who repeatedly raided the journal’s offices, stole printing type and eventually destroyed the presses themselves; yet printing resumed on a secret press and continued until the Fellowship itself disbanded in November 1919.15 The Tribunal was one of several periodicals that forged links between the peace movement and the labour movement, and examples from the British Dominions further illustrate such ties. In New Zealand, the Maoriland Worker (1910–60) campaigned against conscription and the war as imperialist exploitation of the working classes.16 In South Africa, the War on War League (WoWL) challenged the dominant positions within the South African Labour Party – which had swung behind the war effort – and published The War on War Gazette (11 editions, closing in November 1914 under pressure from the censor).17 This short-lived journal relied on the British, American and Italian socialist press for war-related news. It also published extracts from the classics of pacifist literature across the political range, from conservatism at one end to anarchism at the other. As Jonathan Hyslop observes, the Gazette sought to call on ‘as wide a range of authorities as possible against the legitimacy of war’.18 Like

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the WoWL at large, it drew on the same eclectic canon as pacifists in other countries and ‘needs to be understood as part of the global anti-war movements of the time’.19

The Cambridge Magazine The Cambridge Magazine exemplified the commitment to internationalism among pacifist journals, although it was not attached to a pacifist organisation and had no prior connection to the peace movement. Before the war it was an obscure university journal with little or no readership outside Cambridge. But for C. K. Ogden (1889–1957), its founding editor, the conflict presented an opportunity to create something more significant. He insisted that the Magazine should continue to feature a diversity of opinion: he gave space to those speaking both for and against the war; and he published translations of wartime news and opinion from European periodicals that had otherwise become inaccessible in the UK.20 The Magazine put into practice the principle of freedom of debate and information at a time when both were in short supply. As a result, it came under considerable pressure, as demonstrated by the collective letter of support that it published on its front cover in March 1917 (Figure 22.1). Other papers accused it of promoting pacifism and supporting Germany. It lost advertising revenue and was attacked in parliament. But it was also enormously successful, attracting the attention of modernists such as T. E. Hulme (1883–1917), Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) and Harold Monro (1879–1932), as well as established authors such as George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) and Arnold Bennett (1867–1931). During the war, it moved to larger premises in Cambridge at 6

Figure 22.1  ‘Fighting with the Right People’, Cambridge Magazine 6, 36th vacation number, 24 March 1917, 445. Classmark Cam.b.31.25.6. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

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King’s Parade, and opened two antiquarian bookshops, named Fightright House and the Butchery in ironic tribute to particularly memorable attacks on the magazine.21 Its circulation swelled to over 20,000 nationwide and extended overseas – although the overseas copies did not always reach their destination.22 Ogden stepped into the gap left by the collapse of some pre-war internationalist organisations, and by wartime restrictions on travel and the circulation of printed material. In particular, the Magazine’s foreign press survey functioned as a sort of virtual European tour for cosmopolitans who were otherwise trapped in the British and Irish Isles, and who valued its efforts to counter the biased coverage of other British papers. However, it was not Ogden who produced the survey, but Dorothy F. Buxton (1881–1963), a social activist in her own right and the wife of Charles Buxton (1875–1942), a Liberal MP who joined the Independent Labour Party in 1917. Dorothy Buxton’s parliamentary connections gave her privileged access to the European press, and she imported over 100 different papers via neutral Scandinavia, a quarter of them from enemy countries.23 Her home in north London became the headquarters of a major translating operation: her sister Eglantyne Jebb (1876–1928), who managed the French, Swiss and Italian papers, had twenty-three people working for her on the French press alone.24 They produced regular summaries in English, which Buxton published first in pamphlet form, then from October 1915 as a section of the Cambridge Magazine – a partnership which massively expanded her readership and enabled Ogden to showcase an even broader range of opinion. Indeed, during the university vacations, he committed the Magazine entirely to the foreign press survey, aligning the journal with Buxton’s ambitious campaign against censorship and partisan journalism. The foreign press survey set out to be scrupulously even-handed, with themed sections presenting both sides of a given controversy, for instance contrasting ‘Reasons for Not Continuing the War’ with ‘Reasons for Continuing the War’.25 It carefully classified its sources, giving the name of the paper, its country of origin and its political orientation, whether ‘liberal, pro-ally’, ‘extreme militarist’ or ‘popular, anarchist’. However, there was also a clear tendency in its selection of material – it never set out to be comprehensive – to highlight the international peace movement rather than military developments.26 For this reason, the Morning Post (1772–1937) denounced it as ‘a subtle and powerful instrument of Pacifist suggestions’, although the Manchester Guardian (1821–1959, continuing to this day as the Guardian) – which had initially opposed Britain’s involvement in the war – welcomed it as a supplement to ‘the necessarily incomplete and popularising extracts which appear in most papers’.27 Buxton’s survey offered otherwise unobtainable information about the censoring of foreign and pacifist publications, both in Britain and Europe. One edition of the survey, entitled ‘The Restriction of Knowledge’, juxtaposed extracts from the debate on censorship in Germany, Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United States, including American criticism of British practices.28 The Magazine also drew attention to the difficult conditions for pacifists in Germany. Florence Stawell (1869–1936), a Cambridge don who worked as a translator for Buxton’s foreign press survey, wrote about the suppression of the liberal Berliner Tageblatt (1872–1939), while Ogden drew attention to criticisms of German military policy in the weekly German newspaper Die Zukunft (1892–1923).29 He made an early case for pacifism by publishing Romain Rolland’s (1866–1944) polemic ‘Au-dessus de la mêlée’ (23 September 1914) as ‘Above the Battle’

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(14 November 1914), with a preface celebrating Rolland’s anti-war stand: ‘here at least is one man of world-wide fame who has risen superior to the petty jealousies of race, and at the same time kept his feet firmly planted on earth’.30 However, Ogden balanced this celebration of pacifism by publishing in the next issue an indignant riposte by a Frenchman living in Cambridge, who commented that it was less easy to rise above the battle for those who were fighting in it.31 Ogden’s coverage of wartime opinion was profoundly cosmopolitan, in the sense that it adopted an attitude of detachment from the partisan, nationalistic politics of the war. Perhaps it was this refusal to commit to the national cause that incensed his critics, as much as the pacifist bias that they attributed to him. When Cambridge students celebrated Armistice Day by rioting through the city, they singled out the Cambridge Magazine’s premises for an attack that was vividly described in the local paper: After a moment’s hesitation the ringleaders of the mob charged at the door and burst their way inside, followed by the mob. Alas for the peace and quiet! Tables were over-turned, books thrown about with terrific force. Smash went a window, the signal for a general onslaught. Smash went more windows. Books flew through the windows on to the road. The crowd outside danced with joy; the crowd inside destroyed everything with grim enthusiasm.32 On the other hand, Ogden’s intellectual independence was highly attractive to some of Britain’s leading writers and thinkers – to people such as Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), Jane Harrison (1850–1928), Laurence Housman (1865–1959) and Rebecca West (1892–1983), all of whom signed the letter of support in 1917. It was a stance that they associated with Cambridge, and it connects with an argument that was emerging from the university at this time, against national or territorial warfare and in favour of a sort of cosmopolis of the intellect.33 Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) – the Cambridge philosopher and at one point chairman of the No-Conscription Fellowship – summed it up at a conference on the ‘Pacifist Philosophy of Life’ in 1915, when he stated: ‘The only things worth fighting for are the things of the spirit; but these things are not subject to force, and can be defended without the help of armies and navies.’34 The fact that Russell was twice convicted under the Defence of the Realm Act and served six months in prison for pacifist agitation demonstrates how threatening supporters of the war felt such arguments to be.

Internationaal When the outbreak of war compelled the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance to postpone the conference that it had planned to stage in Berlin in 1915, Dutch suffragists organised a congress in its place. Held in The Hague in May 1915, this event attracted 1,200 delegates from twelve nations, reflecting a concerted effort to ‘protest against the horrible war’.35 One of its outcomes was the formation of the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace (ICWPP), which subsequently expanded its reach through its national sections; since 1919 it has been known as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). The ICWPP’s creation marked a new chapter for feminist pacifism. Its roots can be found in the earlier women’s movement, as illustrated by the International Council of Women’s

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decision to form a sub-committee on international arbitration in 1899.36 Similarly, women were active in auxiliaries of the nineteenth-century peace societies.37 Yet, as a transnational women’s peace organisation established during wartime, the ICWPP was a distinct venture. Journals were important for the women’s movement, not only as tools to circulate ideas, but for building networks outside the formal political sphere.38 Maria DiCenzo’s chapter in this volume illustrates how suffrage and labour women used journals during and after the Great War. Journals were also crucial to sustaining feminist pacifist networks across the Western world.39 In Germany, Die Neue Generation (1906–32), the journal of the German-based Bund für Mutterschutz, adopted a pacifist stance in response to the war. In France, La Mère éducatrice (1917–39) argued that education was key to eliminating war. In the United States, feminist pacifists from the Women’s Peace Party issued Four Lights: An Adventure in Internationalism (January–November 1917).40 In Australia, the pacifist monthly Peacewards (1915–42) – founded by the Revd Dr Charles Strong (1844–1942) as a platform for peace news from home and abroad – appeared in association with the Sisterhood of International Peace (founded in 1915), which in 1919 became the Australian branch of the ICWPP.41 The British ICWPP section launched a Monthly News Sheet in 1916 (continued until 1952).42 At the international level, Jus Suffragii (1906–24), the journal of the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance, provided a platform for feminist pacifism at the beginning of the war. However, it toned down its pacifist content from November 1915 in response to opposition from some of its readership.43 This left a gap which was filled by the ICWPP’s periodical Internationaal. From January 1916, and well beyond the war, Internationaal helped to create and sustain a transnational network of activists. When Internationaal launched with an optimistic New Year’s message – ‘may 1916 see the hatred between the nations give way to international goodwill’ – it signalled a commitment to internationalism which remained its trademark throughout the war.44 Initially, the ICWPP had circulated a brief News-sheet for its members, and the format of Internationaal remained simple: a news bulletin, appearing first monthly, then from March 1916 bi- or tri-monthly, depending on funds and the extent of material available for publication, and ranging from six to ten pages with no advertisements and very few images. However, for its editors – the Dutch suffragists Rosa Manus (1881–1942) and Aletta Jacobs (1854–1929), who had organised the Hague congress of 1915 – it carried a larger significance as the voice of an imagined international community that persevered in the face of considerable practical, legal and financial obstacles.45 Internationaal drew its content from across its international membership. Alongside reports from the ICWPP’s Central Bureau in Amsterdam, it featured news from sections and supporters in other countries. These tended to come from western Europe, the USA and Australia, although there were occasional items from further afield – for instance, a report from the South African Peace and Arbitration Society and an article on ‘Japanese women and peace’ from Heiwa Jihō (Peace News, 1912–19), published jointly in Japanese and English by the Japan Peace Society and the American Peace Society of Japan.46 Language was a central consideration. The original aim was to issue the journal in separate English, French and German editions, but financial constraints meant that only one edition was produced. News and reports sent from national sections were printed in the language of origin,

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with some articles printed bilingually, in both English and German – although most appeared solely in English. The Dutch spelling of the title was intended to overcome ‘the difficulty of finding a title common to English, French and German’ and to reflect the association’s internationalism.47 Despite concerted efforts to maintain transnational links between feminist pacifists, the circumstances of the war made communication difficult.48 As the British ICWPP section commented in late 1918: ‘we are longing for the time when postal communications and travelling facilities will be resumed and when we can all get in touch with one another’.49 In spring 1916 the journal reported that ‘our communications with our French members are interrupted’.50 A year later, some issues lacked news from national sections because ‘sometimes we have to wait several months before letters reach us’.51 Censorship was a particular problem. In February 1916 Manus reminded members to make an ‘allowance of several days’ as ‘censorship may cause delay’ in some countries.52 Some of these restrictions were avoided by producing Internationaal in the neutral Netherlands, yet Manus also made editorial decisions to avoid complications. In spring 1917, for instance, she withheld a report from Italy because she ‘dare[d] not quote anything as long as the war lasts’.53 That summer, in a more positive gesture, she replaced the section of national reports with illustrated biographies of ICWPP leaders from different countries. Her aim, she explained, was to allow members to make the ‘acquaintance of some of our international women’, thereby emphasising the function of Internationaal as a virtual forum for feminist pacifists.54 Despite financial and logistical support from the ICWPP, Internationaal struggled to survive. In the first year of publication, the ICWPP absorbed the costs of printing and circulation by distributing copies to ‘individuals, societies, or newspapers likely to give publicity to its news or otherwise make good use of it’.55 In April 1917 Manus called on readers to contribute towards the printing and postage costs through an annual subscription of 2.5 florins (about £17 in today’s money).56 Yet by early 1918 there were only 100 paying subscribers and the ICWPP encountered financial difficulties. Internationaal’s value as a vehicle for building community was a key theme in fundraising campaigns. The journal encouraged readers to donate so that ‘Internationaal will continue to be a link between women pacifists of the world’.57 In 1918 the ICWPP turned to donations from its wealthier US section to fund both the journal and the organisation’s wider work, including rent and a secretary’s wages, asserting that ‘it would be a calamity if the want of money would break the chain, which held together women of all nations during these critical times’.58 Yet the journal did survive well beyond the war, albeit with some rebranding. When, in 1919, the ICWPP turned into the WILPF, Internationaal became first the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom News-Sheet; then, from 1920, Pax et Libertas; and from 1925, Pax International (suspended 1940–49, ceased 1950). Although it did not achieve a mass readership during the war, it made an important psychological contribution to the cause of feminist pacifism by helping to maintain communications between members of the ICWPP. It created a sense of international community at a time of enforced insularity, an achievement which the journal celebrated after the Armistice when it published a letter from Jane Addams (1860–1935), the ICWPP president, who congratulated the editors on sustaining a publication ‘which has done so much to hold us together’.59

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Rudolf Broda’s Wartime Periodicals Internationaal was not unique in being conceived as an international journal. Before the war, the Austrian sociologist Rudolf Broda initiated a particularly ambitious project of this kind: between 1907 and 1914 he edited a journal that appeared in three versions: Les Documents du Progrès (produced in Paris), Dokumente des Fortschritts (Berlin) and The International: A Review of the World’s Progress (London). These publications formed part of a ‘transnational network of social reformist reviews and associations’, in which Broda played a leading role.60 His efforts highlighted the wider momentum for internationalism in the Belle Époque, as reflected in a growing number of international congresses and associations.61 The war directly affected Broda. Until 1914 he had taught at the Collège Libre des Sciences Sociales, a progressive educational institution in Paris. When the conflict turned him into an enemy alien, he moved to Switzerland. Subsequent events prevented him from returning to his native Austria: in 1916 the Austrian authorities confiscated his property and issued an arrest warrant, accusing him of ‘high treason’.62 Despite these personal setbacks, Broda remained dedicated to promoting international exchange. In Switzerland, he edited two new periodicals that had emerged in response to the war: Die Menschheit (1914–30), which was published from Bern, and La Voix de l’Humanité (1914–21), whose office was based in Lausanne. Both journals promised to offer impartial coverage of war events, to document violations of international law and to counter nationalist representations of the conflict.63 While Die Menschheit and La Voix de l’Humanité shared some articles with one another, many of their pieces were distinct. This dual publication strategy made it possible to tailor the message to, respectively, German-speaking and Francophone audiences. Both publications confined themselves to two pages per week, but notwithstanding their limited scale, they highlighted the desire to forge connections between activists. From their inaugural issue in September 1914 until June 1915, the journals appeared in conjunction with La Libre Pensée internationale (founded in 1911), the organ of the International Freethought Federation, which had moved its operations from Brussels to Lausanne after the German attack on Belgium.64 Freethinkers maintained links to various reformist causes. Accordingly, when La Libre Pensée internationale announced its partnership, it noted that their periodicals shared many principles despite being edited separately.65 Such comments resonated with Broda’s project of integrating different causes into a broader vision of social change. As early as January 1915, Broda led a Swiss committee that continued his pre-war endeavours to run an association dedicated to ‘human progress’.66 In June 1915 these efforts resulted in the creation of the Bund für Menschheitsinteressen und Organisierung menschlichen Fortschritts (League for the Interests of Humanity and the Organisation of Human Progress, known in French as La Ligue pour la Défense de l’Humanité et pour l’Organisation de son Progrès). The League’s local membership included several Swiss dignitaries, whereas its international comité de patronage also featured more radical figures, for example the French socialist Jean Longuet (1876–1938), the German pacifist educator Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster (1869–1966) and the British Labour politician Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937).67 Both Internationaal and Broda’s publications were connected to organisations with an international remit. However, while Internationaal represented campaigners from

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a growing movement with lively national branches, Broda’s efforts revolved around intellectual exchange, which made the essays published in Die Menschheit and La Voix de l’Humanité a central component of his activism. At the same time, there were direct links between these ventures. Even before the war, feminism had played an important role in Broda’s efforts for social reform.68 Lida Gustava Heymann – who had already cooperated with Broda before 1914 – discussed the women’s movement in Die Menschheit and reported from the Women’s Peace Congress at The Hague.69 Soon after this event, one of its organisers, Aletta Jacobs, attended the founding meeting of Broda’s League in Bern. There, Jacobs stressed the role of women’s suffrage in building peace and the meeting passed a resolution on political equality between the sexes.70 While associational efforts were important for Die Menschheit and La Voix de l’Humanité, so was the analysis of the ongoing conflict and its implications for the peace movement. An early article in La Voix de l’Humanité discussed the question of war guilt. While featuring strong comments on the responsibility of Austria-Hungary and Germany, it concluded that the principal blame had to be ‘the juridical anarchy of Europe’ (l’anarchie juridique de l’Europe).71 According to this interpretation, the war had validated pacifists’ arguments about the need for better international organisation. ‘We have not lost heart’ (On n’a pas perdu courage), one contributor insisted in La Voix de l’Humanité in November 1914, while in the same week, Die Menschheit carried an article in which Alfred Fried articulated his vision for the movement.72 Subsequent coverage of pacifist texts sought to highlight the ongoing relevance of pacifist thought.73 At the same time, peace activists acknowledged the substantial challenges for their cause. Broda himself speculated whether the conflict might be the beginning of ‘a series of world wars’.74 He argued that any imposed settlement would merely generate fresh conflicts.75 His interest in post-war planning culminated in the creation of a new periodical, Die Versöhnung (Reconciliation, 1917–19), which aimed to foster a spirit of understanding across different nations.76 Launched in Zürich in August 1917, it temporarily absorbed Die Menschheit in November and incorporated La Voix de l’Humanité as a fortnightly supplement.77 This combined publication grew to around eight pages, issued on a weekly and later fortnightly basis. Proposals for a League of Nations featured prominently in the new journal. Its coverage illustrates how discussions on a future world organisation became a central feature of wartime debates within activist, academic and political circles in different countries.78 At times Die Versöhnung cast itself as the ‘International Tribune for the League of Nations Movement’ and as the organ of the Swiss Committee for the Preparation of a League of Nations, whose proposal for the constitution of a League of Nations it published in 1918.79 Die Versöhnung suggested that visions of a League of Nations had both history and momentum on their side. In doing so, the journal drew on the contributions of Leopold Katscher (1853–1939), a German-speaking pacifist and journalist from Budapest who, like Broda, spent most of the war in Swiss exile. Between January and August 1918, Katscher published over twenty articles that covered different visions of world organisation and thus sought to provide an intellectual genealogy for the idea of a League of Nations.80 With examples stretching back to the Middle Ages, Katscher’s series exemplified the teleological narratives crafted by some pacifists. Such accounts represented the war as either a temporary setback or, in a peculiar way, as accelerating the movement towards greater international integration. In a similar

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vein, another series in Die Versöhnung documented the vitality of efforts to promote a League of Nations in different countries – a theme that Die Menschheit continued after Die Versöhnung ceased publication in 1919.81 While Broda’s publications involved cooperation with authors from different countries, his own Central European background evidently mattered. His periodicals acknowledged how much post-war planning was entwined with the future of the Habsburg Monarchy. In March 1916 Die Menschheit presented a peace proposal in which the Austro-Hungarian Empire would cede Ruthenia, some Italian-speaking territories, the Bukovina and Bosnia, but keep Dalmatia and Transylvania, and acquire Congress Poland, which would become an independent state under the Habsburg Crown.82 In June 1918 Die Versöhnung pondered various scenarios. It favoured the idea of a confederation (including Poland) and expressed the hope that Austria might achieve ‘the exemplary realisation of the idea of a League of Nations within its own state territory’ (vorbildliche Verwirklichung des Völkerbundsgedankens im eigenen Staatskreise).83 Such coverage resonated with debates on the reform of the multinational empire, at a time when the concept of national self-determination was becoming increasingly prominent in discussions about the post-war order.84 These examples suggest that for a long time, Broda did not contemplate a dismantling of Austria-Hungary. Indeed, in launching Die Versöhnung, he praised Charles I – who had ascended the Habsburg throne in December 1916 – as ‘a modern and humane personality’ (eine moderne und humane Persönlichkeit) who had demonstrated his dedication ‘to these ideas of reconciliation’ (zu diesen Gedanken der Versöhnung).85 Broda urged the different Habsburg nationalities to set an example of understanding and thus deprive other countries of the need to meddle in their affairs. Only in the final stages of the war did he change his stance and, rather than contemplating a continuation of the multinational empire, plead for the Austrian Germans’ right to join the post-war German state.86 His publications thus allow us to trace intellectual trajectories from the old world of multinational empires to a new order in which principles of national self-determination featured at least rhetorically.87

Conclusion The three case studies in this chapter should not be seen in isolation. Instead, they highlight the entangled nature of pacifist publishing during the war. For instance, Eglantyne Jebb and Dorothy Buxton contributed both to the Cambridge Magazine and to the feminist pacifist associations that sustained Internationaal. Meanwhile, feminist pacifism received favourable coverage in Broda’s journals, from the congress at The Hague in 1915 to the efforts of specific ICWPP branches.88 Likewise, Die Versöhnung featured the writings of Norman Angell (1872–1967) and E. D. Morel (1873–1924), who were key figures in the UDC – an organisation whose work was covered favourably in the Cambridge Magazine.89 The Cambridge Magazine also acknowledged Broda’s journals in its press survey.90 The post-war trajectories of some pacifist periodicals and the people associated with them indicate the different directions in which peace activism developed after the First World War. One strand focused on new international institutions and legal frameworks, as illustrated by Die Friedens-Warte which, after Fried’s death in 1921, strengthened its focus on international law. Broda’s post-war work for

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the International Labour Organisation could also be cited. By contrast, Die Menschheit moved to Germany and, under new leadership, became associated with the growth of more radical pacifist currents.91 The WILPF and its publications increasingly focused on the promotion of disarmament, which was the subject of substantial transnational mobilisation.92 The study of these and other pacifist periodicals enables new insights into wartime imaginings of the post-war future. It shows how the journals helped to maintain channels of communication between activists, politicians and intellectuals, laying the foundations for subsequent debates about war, cooperation and the possibilities for a more peaceful future.

Notes   1. Sandi E. Cooper, Patriotic Pacifism: Waging War on War in Europe 1815–1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 77.  2. Cooper, Patriotic Pacifism, 64.  3. Friedrich-Karl Scheer, ‘Die Friedens-Warte’, in Die Friedensbewegung: Organisierter Pazifismus in Deutschland, Österreich und in der Schweiz, ed. Helmut Donat and Karl Holl (Düsseldorf: Econ, 1983), 151.  4. Andreas H. Landl, ‘Alfred Hermann Fried – Wegbereiter des Friedensjournalismus’, in Alfred Hermann Fried: ‘Organisiert die Welt’. Der Friedens-Nobelpreisträger – sein Leben, Werk und bleibende Impulse, ed. Guido Grünewald (Bremen: Donat-Verlag, 2016), 100.   5. Daniel Laqua, ‘Alfred H. Fried and the Challenges for “Scientific Pacifism” in the Belle Époque’, in Information Beyond Borders: International Cultural and Intellectual Exchange in the Belle Époque, ed. W. Boyd Rayward (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 181–99; Karl Holl, Pazifismus in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 77–9.  6. On the Austrian Peace Society, see Daniel Laqua, ‘Pacifism in Fin-de-Siècle Austria: The Politics and Limits of Peace Activism’, The Historical Journal 51, no. 1 (2014): 199–224.   7. Landl, ‘Alfred Hermann Fried’, 115–9; Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and a World Without War: The Peace Movement and German Society, 1892–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 189.  8. Cooper, Patriotic Pacifism, 185–203.   9. Martin Ceadel, ‘Pacifism’, in The Cambridge History of the First World War, vol. 2: The State, ed. Jay Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 576–7; Chickering, Imperial Germany, 15; Holl, Pazifismus, 107–12. 10. James D. Shand, ‘Doves among the Eagles: German Pacifists and their Government during World War I’, Journal of Contemporary History 10, no. 1 (1975): 95–108. 11. On Die Friedens-Warte during the war years, see Petra Schönemann-Behrens, Alfred H. Fried: Friedensaktivist – Nobelpreisträger (Zürich: Römerhof, 2011), 338–49. 12. Nicole Billeter, ‘Literature (Switzerland)’, in 1914–1918 online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer and Bill Nasson (Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin, 2014), , published 4 April 2017, accessed 28 June 2021. 13. Claudio Giulio Anta, ‘“War to War!”: The Pacifist Propaganda of Coenobium (1913–1919)’, History of European Ideas 47, no. 4 (2021): 591–603. 14. Dieter Riesenberger, ‘Alfred Hermann Fried im Schweizer Exil’, in Grünewald, ed., Alfred Hermann Fried, 182; Lothar Wieland, ‘Die Freie Zeitung’, in Donat and Holl, eds, Die Friedensbewegung, 133–4; Holl, Pazifismus, 106.

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15. The Peace Pledge Union, ‘The Tribunal: A Court of Justice’, in Remembering the Men Who Said No: Conscientious Objection, 1916–1919, , accessed 1 May 2021. 16. Susann Liebich, ‘Press/Journalism (New Zealand)’, in 1914–1918 online, , accessed 1 May 2021; R. L. Wietzel, ‘Pacifists and Anti-Militarists in New Zealand, 1909–1914’, New Zealand Journal of History 7, no. 2 (1973): 128–47. 17. Jonathan Hyslop, ‘The War on War League: A South African Pacifist Movement, 1914–1915’, Scientia Militaria 44, no. 1 (2016): 25–8. Hyslop notes a second socialist anti-war journal published in South Africa during the war, entitled Eastern Record (1914–15). 18. Hyslop, ‘The War on War League’, 28. 19. Hyslop, ‘The War on War League’, 32. 20. See Ogden’s correspondence with E. B. F. Wareing (foreign correspondent, translator and military censor) concerning access to European journals (German, Dutch and Swiss), as discussed in Grace Brockington, ‘Translating Peace: Pacifist Publishing and the Transmission of Foreign Texts’, in Publishing in the First World War, ed. Mary Hammond and Shafquat Towheed (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 50. 21. The new premises are mentioned in the Cambridge Magazine 6, 35th vacation extra number (17 March 1917): 433; Fightright House in vol. 6, no. 21 (19 May 1917): 603; and the Butchery in vol. 7, no. 6 (17 November 1917): 123. 22. The circulation figure is stated in J. W. Scott and W. Terrence Gordon, ‘Charles Kay Ogden’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, revised version 21 May 2009, . 23. Buxton obtained a licence from the Board of Trade to import 26 enemy papers (from Germany, Austria and Hungary). See Francesca M. Wilson, Rebel Daughter of a Country House: The Life of Eglantyne Jebb (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1967), 168–72. 24. Wilson, Rebel Daughter, 171. 25. Cambridge Magazine 6, no. 4 (4 November 1916); 6, no. 7 (25 November 1916). 26. ‘Notes for the Foreign Press’, Cambridge Magazine 5, no. 1 (6 October 1915): 11, states that it did not aim ‘to offer a comprehensive survey of the opinions in the press of any country, but to supplement what may be found in English papers’. 27. ‘Insidious Pacifist Propaganda’, Morning Post, 24 February 1917, 6; ‘Government Advertisements in the “Cambridge Magazine”’, Manchester Guardian, 17 November 1917, 6. 28. ‘The Restriction of Knowledge’, Cambridge Magazine 6, no. 2 (21 October 1916): 38–40. 29. F. Melian Stawell, ‘The Political Situation in Germany’, Cambridge Magazine 6, no. 3 (28 October 1916): 65–69; Cambridge Magazine 6, no. 9 (20 January 1917): 216. 30. ‘Romain Rolland’, Cambridge Magazine 4, no. 6 (14 November 1914): 107. Rolland’s paper was first published as ‘Au-dessus de la mêlée’, printed as a supplement to the Journal de Genève, no. 261 (23 September 1914). It was published in the Cambridge Magazine 4, no. 6 (14 November 1914): 114–17, as Romain Rolland, ‘Above the Battle’, trans. E. K. Bennett. Later in November 1914, the Cambridge Heretics debating society (1909–32), which Ogden had co-founded, republished ‘Above the Battlefield’ as a pamphlet with an introduction by Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (1862–1932). In 1916 Ogden reissued it in a collection of essays: Romain Rolland, Above the Battle, trans. C. K. Ogden (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1916); first published in French as Au-dessus de la Mêlée (Paris: Ollendorf, 1915). 31. Cambridge Magazine 4, no. 7 (21 November 1914): 143. 32. Cambridge Daily News, 11 November 1918, 3. 33. On pacifist views in wartime Cambridge, see Tomás Irish, The University at War, 1914–25: Britain, France, and the United States (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015), 70–3.

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34. Bertrand Russell, ‘The Philosophy of Pacifism’, in Towards Ultimate Harmony: Report on Conference on Pacifist Philosophy of Life, ed. The League of Peace and Freedom (London: Headley, 1915), 9. 35. ‘Call to the Women of all Nations’, Jus Suffragii 9, no. 6 (March 1915): 245; Leila Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of the International Women’s Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 13. 36. International Council of Women, Report of the Transactions of the Second Quinquennial Meeting, London, July 1899 (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1900), 23. 37. Jill Liddington, The Long Road to Greenham: Feminism and Anti-Militarism in Britain since 1820 (London: Virago, 1989); Heloise Brown, ‘The Truest Form of Patriotism’: Pacifist Feminism in Britain, 1870–1902 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003); Regina Braker, ‘Bertha von Suttner’s Spiritual Daughters: The Feminist Pacifism of Anita Augspurg, Lida Gustava Heymann and Helene Stöcker at the International Congress of Women at the Hague, 1915’, Women’s Studies International Forum 18, no. 2 (1995): 103–11. 38. Maria DiCenzo, Lucy Delap and Leila Ryan, eds, Feminist Media History: Suffrage, Periodicals and the Public Sphere (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011). 39. Several of these journals are discussed in Bruna Bianchi, ‘Towards a New Internationalism: Pacifist Journals Edited by Women, 1914–1919’, in Gender and the First World War, ed. Christa Hämmerle, Oswald Überegger and Birgitta Bader Zaar (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), 176–94. 40. For Four Lights, see Rachel Schreiber, ‘A Women’s War against War: The Socialist-Feminist Pacifism of Four Lights: An Adventure in Internationalism’, Radical Americas 3, no. 1 (2018): 5–12; Erika Kuhlman, ‘“Women’s Ways in War”: The Feminist Pacifism of the New York City Woman’s Peace Party’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 18, no. 1 (1997): 80. See also Maria DiCenzo’s essay in this volume. 41. Malcolm Saunders, ‘An Australian Pacifist: The Reverend Dr. Charles Strong, 1844–1942’, Biography 18, no. 3 (1995): 245, 247; Kate Laing, ‘World War and Worldly Women: The Great War and the Formation of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in Australia’, La Trobe Journal 96 (2015): 123. 42. On journals produced by ICWPP sections, see Women’s International League, Monthly News Sheet 1, no. 1 (April 1916); and Four Lights 1, no. 1 (27 January 1917): 1. On the British ICWPP section, see Sarah Hellawell, ‘Antimilitarism, Citizenship and Motherhood: The Formation and Early Years of the Women’s International League (WIL), 1915–1919’, Women’s History Review 27, no. 4 (2018): 551–64. 43. For pacifism in Jus Suffragii, see Sybil Oldfield, ‘Mary Sheepshanks Edits an Internationalist Suffrage Monthly in Wartime: Jus Suffragii 1914–19’, Women’s History Review 12, no. 1 (2003): 121; and Ingrid Sharp, ‘Love as a Moral Imperative and Gendered Anti-War Strategy in the International Women’s Movement 1914–1919’, Diplomacy & Statecraft 31, no. 4 (2020): 631. For objections to such pacifist content, see Millicent Garrett Fawcett, ‘Correspondence’, Jus Suffragii 10, no. 2 (November 1915): 29. 44. Rosa Manus, ‘Editorial’, Internationaal 1, no. 1 (1 January 1916): 1. 45. For Manus, see Mineke Bosch, ‘Rosa Manus, Katharina von Kardoff-Oheimb and the Bonds of High-Financial Womanhood’, in The International Life and Legacy of a Jewish Dutch Feminist, ed. Myrian Everard and Francisca de Haan (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 112. 46. ‘South Africa’, Internationaal 1, no. 5 (August–October 1916): 46; ‘Japan’, Internationaal 2, no. 3 (July–September 1917): 98. 47. Rosa Manus, ‘Editorial’, Internationaal 1, no. 1 (1 January 1916): 1. 48. WIL, ‘Raid upon the Office’, Monthly News-Sheet 2, no. 9 (December 1917): 4. 49. ‘Great Britain’, Internationaal 3, no. 4 (October–December 1918): 137. 50. ‘France’, Internationaal 1, no. 3 (March–April 1916): 26. 51. ‘Central Bureau Notes’, Internationaal 2, no. 2 (January–March 1917): 63.

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52. ‘Editorial’, Internationaal 1, no. 2 (1 February 1916): 14; ICWPP, ‘Raid upon the Office’, Monthly News-Sheet 2, no. 9 (December 1917): 4. 53. ‘Central Bureau Notes’, Internationaal 2, no. 2 (January–March 1917): 63. 54. ‘Board’, Internationaal 2, no. 3 (July–September 1917): 92. 55. ‘Central Bureau Notes’, Internationaal 1, no. 2 (February 1916): 14. 56. ‘Finance’, Internationaal 2, no. 2 (April–June 1917): 73. 57. ‘Central Bureau Notes’, Internationaal 3, no. 3 (July–September 1918): 123. 58. ‘Central Bureau Notes’, Internationaal 3, no. 1 (January–March 1918): 103. 59. Letter by Jane Addams on the front page of Internationaal 3, no. 4 (October–December 1918): 131. 60. Christophe Verbruggen and Julie Carlier, ‘Laboratories of Social Thought: The Transnational Advocacy Network of the Institut International pour la Diffusion des Expériences Sociales and its Documents du Progrès (1907–1916)’, in Rayward, ed., Information Beyond Borders, 125. 61. See, for example, Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); and Martin Geyer and Johannes Paulmann, eds, The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 62. ‘Tagesnachrichten’, Linzer Tages-Post, 18 March 1916, 3; ‘Haftbefehl gegen einen Hochverräter’, Linzer Volksblatt, 8 April 1916, 7. 63. ‘Unsere Gewissenspflicht’, Die Menschheit 1, no. 1 (26 September 1914): 1; ‘Notre mission’, La Voix de l’Humanité 1, no. 1 (26 September 1914): 1. 64. Jeffrey Tysses and Petri Mirala, ‘Transnational Seculars: Belgium as an International Forum for Freethinkers and Freemasons in the Belle Époque’, Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 90, no. 4 (2013): 1367. 65. ‘A nos abonnés’, La Libre Pensée internationale, no. 39 (26 September 1914): 3. On freethinkers’ links with other movements, see Carolin Kosuch, ed., Freethinkers in Europe: National and Transnational Secularities, 1789−1920s (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020); Daniel Laqua, ‘Kosmopolitisches Freidenkertum? Ideen und Praktiken der Internationalen Freidenkerföderation von 1880 bis 1914’, in Bessere Welten: Kosmopolitismus in den Geschichtswissenschaften, ed. Bernhard Gißibl and Isabella Löhr (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2017), 193–221; Daniel Laqua, ‘Laïque, Démocratique et Sociale? Socialism and the Freethinkers’ International’, Labour History Review 74, no. 3 (2009): 257–73. 66. ‘Auszug aus dem Protokoll der konstituierenden Sitzung des Schweizer Aktionskomités des Bundes für Organisierung menschlichen Fortschritts’, Die Menschheit 2, no. 1 (20 February 1915): 1. 67. ‘Appel’, La Voix de l’Humanité 3, no. 3 (26 January 1916): 1. 68. Verbruggen and Carlier, ‘Laboratories of Social Thought’, 134. 69. Lida Gustava Heymann, ‘Internationaler Frauenkongress im Haag’, Die Menschheit 2, no. 18 (19 June 1915): 1. For her earlier contributions, see Lida Gustava Heyman, ‘Eine Frage: Frauen Europas, wann erschallt Euer Ruf?’, Die Menschheit 2, no. 6 (27 March 1915): 2; and Heyman, ‘Internationaler Frauenkongress’, Die Menschheit 2, no. 8 (10 April 1915): 2. 70. ‘Konferenz für die Zukuftsinteressen der Menschheit’, Die Menschheit 2, no. 17 (19 June 1915): 1. 71. ‘A qui incombe la responsabilité de la guerre?’, La Voix de l’Humanité 1, no. 2 (2 October 1914): 2. 72. Pacificus, ‘La phase actuelle du mouvement pacifiste’, La Voix de l’Humanité 1, no. 7 (7 November 1914): 2; and Alfred H. Fried, ‘Das Ziel’, Die Menschheit 1, no. 7 (7 November 1914): 1–2, which was also published in Die Friedens-Warte 16, no. 10 (October 1914): 321–3.

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73. See, for example, Leopold Katscher, ‘Der “Pazifismus” vernichtet?’, Die Menschheit 2, no. 45 (29 December 1915): 2; ‘Le mouvement pacifiste pendant la guerre’, La Voix de l’Humanité 3, no. 40 (8 November 1916): 1. 74. Rudolf Broda, ‘Stehen wir am Eingang einer Serie von Weltkriegen?’, Die Menschheit 2, no. 10 (29 May 1915): 1–2. 75. ‘Die Lehren des 21. Kriegsmonats’, Die Menschheit 3, no. 14 (10 May 1916): 1. 76. Rudolf Broda, ‘Unsere Aufgabe’, Die Versöhnung 1, no. 1 (4 August 1917): 2. 77. ‘An unsere Leser’, Die Versöhnung 1, no. 14 (3 November 1917): 1. 78. On such debates, and paths not taken, see Stephen Wertheim, ‘The League of Nations: A Retreat from International Law?’, Journal of Global History 7, no. 2 (2012): 210–32. 79. ‘Vorentwurf einer Verfassung des Weltvölkerbunds’, Die Versöhnung 2, no. 28 (14–16 February 1918): 1–6. 80. Leopold Katscher, ‘Der Staaten- und Völkerbundsgedanke einst und jetzt’, Die Versöhnung 2, no. 24 (12 January 1918): 3–4; Katscher, ‘Die Entwicklung des Völkerbundgedankens’, Die Versöhnung 2, no. 25 (26 January 1918): 3–4; regular instalments until August 1918, then sporadically until Katscher, ‘Der Staaten- und Völkerbundgedanke einst und jetzt’, Die Versöhnung 3, no. 76 (8 February 1919): 3–4. 81. Leopold Katscher, ‘Aus der Völkerbundbewegung’, Die Versöhnung 2, no. 52 (10 August 1918): 3–4, and further instalments until June 1919; Katscher, ‘Weltchronik der Völkerbund-Bewegung’, Die Menschheit 6, no. 49 (22 June 1919): 4. 82. ‘Grundlagen eines dereinstigen Ausgleichsfriedens’, Die Menschheit 3, no. 10 (15 March 1916): 1–5. 83. Rudolf Broda, ‘Wege zur Versöhnung in Oesterreich’, Die Versöhnung 2, no. 44 (8 June 1918): 3. 84. Jan Vermeiren, The First World War and German National Identity: The Dual Alliance at War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 270–328. 85. Broda, ‘Unsere Aufgabe’, 2. 86. Rudolf Broda, ‘Soll Oesterreich zu ewigem Leben verurteilt sein?’, Die Menschheit 6, no. 2 (9 January 1919): 1–2. 87. Glenda Sluga, The Nation, Psychology, and International Politics, 1870–1919 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), 37–66. 88. ‘Eine Stimme aus der Frauenbewegung’, Die Versöhnung 2, no. 25 (26 January 1918): 6–7. 89. Norman Angell, ‘Der politische Häretiker als Retter der Gesellschaft’, part 1, Die Versöhnung 1, no. 16 (17 November 1917): 4–6, and part 2, Die Versöhnung 1, no. 18 (1 December 1917): 4–5; E. D. Morel, ‘Deutschfreundlich!’, Die Versöhnung 1, no. 21 (22 December 1917): 4. For positive comments on another UDC activist, namely Henry Noel Brailsford (1873 –1958), see Leopold Katscher, ‘Ein nüchterner englischer Friedensfreund’, Die Versöhnung 2, no. 45 (22 June 1918): 1–2. Affinities between the UDC and the Cambridge Magazine are noted in Neil Hollander, Elusive Dove: The Search for Peace during World War I (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014), 103. 90. See, for instance, the survey in Cambridge Magazine 6, no. 11 (31 March 1917): 464. 91. Hans Gressel, ‘Die Menschheit’, in Donat and Holl, eds, Die Friedensbewegung, 268. 92. Thomas Richard Davies, The Possibilities of Transnational Activism: The Campaign for Disarmament between the Two World Wars (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

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23 Women’s Suffrage and Labour Journals Maria DiCenzo

I have only one message for all Suffragists: – Keep the flag flying. The fact that so many of the smaller groups of Suffragists have done so, and have held together and kept their little journals published, gives hope and heart and help to us all.1

T

he myth that suffrage campaigners dropped their banners and pamphlets for bandages and knitting needles during the First World War remains surprisingly persistent, in spite of the concerted efforts of feminist historians to demonstrate how women’s rights advocates responded to the war in highly diverse ways.2 The idea that the British suffrage movement came to a halt or suspended all activities out of patriotic duty is largely the product of the truce declared by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, on behalf of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), in a period of heightened tensions over the imprisonment and forcible feeding of militant suffragettes. The disproportionate historical emphasis on the militants has obscured the workings of a complex and dynamic women’s movement during the war. As in all things, the Pankhursts were the exception, not the rule; their brand of patriotic, anti-German, pacifist- and union-bashing fervour was rejected by some of their own members who formed splinter groups or joined other organisations to keep the suffrage cause alive. Rather than halting women’s activism, the crisis exposed and exacerbated existing forms of injustice and hardship, serving to reinforce arguments for the equality of rights and opportunities between the sexes. Patriotism did not preclude a commitment to women’s rights; even patriotic women found ways to press the case for the status of women in different sectors of the movement and remobilised quickly when franchise reform returned to the parliamentary agenda in Britain in 1916. Print media remained the chief vehicles for communicating, organising and mobilising, as well as for celebrating and commemorating women’s war service. The focus of this chapter is on periodicals produced by and for women as part of suffrage and labour campaigns because they offer a compelling point of entry into debates about women’s rights and changing roles during and after the war at the national and international levels. These publications, addressed both to target readerships and the wider public, mediated developments from women’s perspectives across the political spectrum and underscore the historical significance of the periodical press for understanding how the war fuelled feminist legislative, workplace and social welfare policy reforms. Periodicals reveal layers of complexity and challenge the official, propagandist framing and representations of women’s roles during and after the war. To read a single periodical is to arrive at a distorted sense of how and why women’s groups responded to the crisis of war, which is why this chapter takes a different approach.

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Contexts, Periodisation and Genres Defining and selecting from the feminist press for this volume involves either identifying publications which began and ended with the war or situating the years 1914–18 in the broader history of women’s movements and the periodical press. This chapter chooses the second strategy, since a broader focus on the feminist press during the First World War which takes Edwardian and interwar feminist production into account illuminates the problems of periodisation that this volume sets out to address – continuity, new developments, intensification of earlier tendencies, temporary arrangements and long-term effects. Women’s suffrage, labour and war service publications cover all the possible categories: some existed before and continued or morphed into new titles during the war; some began during and either ended or continued in different forms after the war; and some developed later to preserve communities formed during the war. The suffrage press alone complicates periodisation by pre- and post-dating the war itself, but also because the end of the war and the Representation of the People Bill coincided in 1918. The immediate post-war years, given demobilisation and post-war reconstruction, constituted a period of transition in their own right, but for women these developments were inflected by the implications of their changing status. For some, the partial franchise represented a victory and end point, but for many it was the beginning of ten more years of fighting for equal franchise and a host of welfare and equal rights goals. This chapter focuses on women’s campaigning journalism, rather than women’s domestic and commercial magazines or representations of women and war in the mainstream and popular press of the period. The goal is to highlight the range of publications which are either taken for granted or go missing altogether, even in the scholarship on women’s activism and contributions during the war. These periodicals remain obscured either because they are not deemed important enough to examine in their own right, or because they are hard to find (if they have survived at all). The concept of ‘discoverability’ – literally ensuring content can be found – has gained currency in the information sciences and digital scholarship because it captures the problems of rendering content visible and accessible for potential users.3 In periodical studies, discoverability is linked not only to the practical and material considerations of digital and paper archives, but also to historiography – to the narratives that inform processes of recovery in any given period. The discourses of marginalised groups are the most likely to be overlooked or erased. Omission is not always deliberate; if you assume something does not exist, you will not look for it. The recovery of women’s periodicals has contributed to a more comprehensive history of women’s movements and contributions during the First World War. Research on women and the war has grown exponentially, spurred most recently by the suffrage and war centenaries, while large-scale digitisation projects have ensured that many of the periodicals produced by suffrage societies are more widely available than ever before.4 But collections are selective and risk obscuring smaller or sporadic publications that represent significant developments and dissident voices. Because they are used primarily as evidence in historical studies, these periodicals have not received the attention they deserve.5 The methodological challenge in this chapter is to shift the emphasis – to foreground the role and significance of suffrage and labour periodicals in the processes of political and strategic communication, self-representation and community building, without becoming a history of those campaigns and the war per se.

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The Suffrage Press and the First World War The suffrage campaign, still the best-known women’s campaign of the early twentieth century in Britain, never recaptured the levels of pre-1914 insurgency during or after the war, but after fifty years of tireless effort, not even a world war was going to erase the progress to date and the expectations of eventual success. By 1914 the movement included a wide range of organisations representing different social, political and denominational constituencies, pursuing different goals (in terms of the scope of the franchise) and using different methods to achieve them (constitutional and militant). This diverse movement developed, from the mid-nineteenth century, out of and in relation to other reform efforts devoted to women’s rights to education, work, equal status under the law, equal moral standards and citizenship rights. ‘Votes for women’ served as a concentrated focus encompassing not only the franchise but also what voting rights might enable; the movement was a hub and the vote was a means to a wider set of ends. The suffrage press survived the outbreak of war and actually proliferated as new groups emerged and published their own papers. While the war intensified existing conflicts with rivals and opponents, it also encouraged new alliances. This section offers an overview of how suffrage periodicals served strategic roles for organisations during the war, mediating diverse and complex reactions to the crisis on a variety of levels. Responses to the war spanned the political-ideological and socio-economic feminist spectrum. If the WSPU, with Emmeline (1858–1928) and Christabel Pankhurst (1880–1958) at the helm, represented the conservative pole, then daughter/sister socialist and pacifist Sylvia Pankhurst (1882–1960) and her East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS) constituted the other, while numerous societies fell somewhere in between. When the WSPU joined the war effort, its official organ was Suffragette, started in 1912 after the Pankhursts split with Emmeline (1867–1954) and Frederick Pethick-Lawrence (1871–1961), who had overseen the WSPU’s first official organ, Votes for Women, since 1907. The Pankhursts’ about-face was evident from the eightmonth gap between the last 1914 and the first 1915 issue of Suffragette. In August 1914 Christabel claimed that the war was ‘God’s vengeance upon the people who held women in subjection’, and ‘humanity’s one hope of release’ depended on women’s ‘emancipation and participation in the government of the world’.6 The war statements were situated among reports of forcible feeding, government attempts to suppress the paper, promotional work and details of the campaign throughout the country. But these topics had disappeared by the next April 1915 issue which focused on the war and assured readers that ‘Our Country is our Temple’, ‘We will not be Prussianized’.7 By 15 October 1915 Britannia (‘For King. For Country. For Freedom’) had replaced Suffragette as the official organ of the WSPU. Finally, on 2 November 1917, Britannia became the official organ of the Women’s Party, replacing the WSPU in name and programme, but not in leadership. The WSPU re-entered the suffrage fray when franchise reform resurfaced, and reports of Mrs Pankhurst’s speeches and deputations began to punctuate the anti-German vitriol by April 1917. Britannia ceased publication in December 1918, concluding with news of Christabel’s campaign in the general election, a bid she lost as the first and last candidate to run for the Women’s Party. This whirlwind tour of WSPU papers illustrates some key problems related to historical recovery (changing titles and affiliations), interpretation and context.

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Methodologically, I have chosen to offer a cursory treatment of a range of papers to illustrate what we gain by reading them relationally – in this case situating individual titles in relation to the wider suffrage press. The WSPU papers give no indication of how the ‘suffragette’ banner was taken up by some of their own members in two breakaway groups, the Suffragettes of the Women’s Social and Political Union (SWSPU) in 1915 and the Independent Women’s Social and Political Union (IWSPU) in 1916, who formed with the express purpose of continuing the campaign, in what Alexandra Hughes-Johnson describes as a ‘striking act of political resistance against a government which sought to co-opt them into defending a country, while refusing to grant them citizenship’.8 The SWSPU’s Suffragette News Sheet (1915–17) described the ‘abandonment’ of the movement as the ‘deepest disloyalty’, even as ‘anti-patriotic’, and argued that ‘because there is a war [. . .] women should not only assert their just claims, but strengthen them’.9 The IWSPU published the Independent Suffragette (1916–18) and used it to appeal to anyone who believed ‘in the supreme importance of the Vote, and that women cannot cease to demand it and to work for it until it is won’.10 These papers were short-lived, but the fact that these groups chose to allocate limited resources to their own journals underscores the importance of these media at the time. For readers now, these periodicals chronicle the bold, dissident WSPU voices who opposed the war and were critical of those who, from their point of view, had deserted the cause. The United Suffragists (US), who formed in February 1914, are also relevant in this context because votes for women remained their main goal throughout the war. Unlike other societies, the US had a non-exclusionary membership policy, serving as a meeting point for a collection of career suffragists, including ex-WSPU members and prominent men in the movement. On 10 July 1914 the Pethick-Lawrences announced with some fanfare that they would be handing their paper, Votes for Women, one of the best-known papers of the movement, over to the US in ‘early autumn’ to be used as their official organ (Figure 23.1). The arrangement was mutually beneficial – the paper would have the support of an organisation and its reputation and profile would offer the US an effective vehicle for communicating, recruiting and fundraising. The Pethick-Lawrences created the paper in 1907 as the official organ of the WSPU and ran it until the split with the Pankhursts in 1912. It then became an independent journal, under the Votes for Women Fellowship banner, offering ‘equal prominence to the activities of every section of the movement’.11 This wider scope changed with the handover to the US in 1914. As Krista Cowman explains, once the war began, the US was noteworthy for its single-issue focus to ‘keep the suffrage flag flying’ and its decision not to undertake relief work; this mandate allowed it to function as ‘a genuine bridging association between suffragists of different political viewpoints’ who wanted to keep campaigning, but the focus on the franchise alone meant that its work was done when the franchise bill was passed in 1918.12 In the last issue, February 1918, editor Evelyn Sharp (1869–1955) announced ‘Victory’ and the paper offered retrospectives and notices for suffrage celebrations. The leader, entitled ‘The Future’, underscored the US’s achievement in being the first suffrage society to have women and men in equal numbers on the executive, while it bid farewell to readers and expressed hope for world peace and women’s freedom. Votes for Women’s dates, 1907–18, belie the complicated history of affiliations and editorial policies it represented and the diverse coverage it provided over that period.

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Figure 23.1  Cover, Votes for Women, 7 August 1914. Courtesy of the Women’s Library (digital collection), London School of Economics.

Situated between the WSPU and active campaigners were a host of other suffrage societies which redirected energies and resources to engage in the war effort and relief work, but whose policies suggested a mixed and even strategic response.13 The largest of these were the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) and the Women’s Freedom League (WFL); both had broad reform agendas before the war and faced internal divisions in their responses to the crisis, the most consequential of which were the tensions between pro-war and pacifist members. The scope of these societies was both a problem (as democratic bodies they were compelled to consider the views of their diverse memberships and could not satisfy some without alienating others) and an advantage (their size and resources made it possible to engage in war service while maintaining a commitment to the suffrage cause). Not surprisingly, they were the most prominent organisations to continue their work after the war (the NUWSS became the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship, NUSEC) by campaigning for equal franchise and a wide range of other reforms. The organs of these societies make for some of the most interesting and unexpected reading. It is widely assumed that the NUWSS, under the leadership of Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847–1929), stopped campaigning to join the war effort. Fawcett’s appeal to the membership in the Union’s paper the Common Cause (1909–20) in August 1914 seemed clear; she acknowledged that ‘[a]s long as there was any hope of peace most members of the National Union probably sought for peace’ but asserted that their ‘duty now’ was to ‘help our country’, concluding ‘[l]et us show ourselves worthy of citizenship, whether our claim to it is recognised or not’.14 The final sentence is often quoted, but also noteworthy is the fact that on the next page of this spread is a

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report of the ‘Great Women’s Meeting at Kingsway Hall’, initiated by leading women’s labour groups and joined by major suffrage societies, including the NUWSS, to express ‘women’s attitude to war in general’.15 The report indicates that most of the women (many of them working-class) had come to protest with all the strength that was in them against war, and, above all, against the participation of Britain in a European war. The speakers who spoke of resignation and acceptance of the burden were coldly received. All the enthusiasm and response of the meeting was for those who denounced war.16 The tensions and conflicts between the positions expressed in these two pages alone are important to understanding the developments in the NUWSS’s leadership and activities in the years to follow. 1915 saw the resignations of high-profile pacifist and socialist members from the executive branch over the war policy. Ideological divisions pre-dated the war and played a major role in the history of the organisation.17 These factors inform how we read papers such as the Common Cause. The organisational records and private correspondence offer evidence of what was being said and done behind the scenes, but the public-facing official organs indicate whether or not, and how, editors tried to mediate conflicting attitudes. The departure of these members and, more importantly, the involvement in relief work did not constitute an abandonment of the suffrage cause. It is important to consider what the ‘suspension of political activities’ actually meant in practice and how it was framed for the membership. The Common Cause played a crucial role in mediating and communicating new directions, while trying to keep 52,000 women and men in 602 member branches and societies on board.18 Clearly the war strategy required clarification even at the time. A few weeks later a notice on the front page complained that Votes for Women and the Irish Citizen (1912–20) had reported that the NUWSS had ‘dropped all political work’ and was ‘abandoning all its Suffrage propaganda’, calling these ‘mis-statements’ and urging members to correct them: The National Union has ‘abandoned’ nothing. It has announced that it has temporarily ‘suspended ordinary political work’, but it is doing a good deal of extraordinary political work, and with excellent results. The Union is not made of cast iron, and when the political situation changes in a way utterly incalculable, a movement that is alert and living like ours will change its work to meet the situation. But Suffragists do not change their minds, or lower their flag.19 The leader in the next issue elaborated by explaining how social service was by its very nature political and a form of suffrage work, asserting that to alter the NU’s activities at such a cataclysmic time was not a contradiction or disavowal of their basic principles.20 The NUWSS did not halt but pivoted. It remained relevant and stayed in the business of suffrage and the emancipation of women while adapting to a new set of conditions, harnessing its elaborate infrastructure to facilitate work on different fronts. It is worth underscoring how much the country benefited from the administrative networks and mobilising capacity that suffrage societies had in place by the time the

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war started. The periodicals are valuable if only to reveal the countless initiatives that women’s groups undertook. The NUWSS contribution was considerable. They funded the Scottish Hospitals initiative to provide medical units staffed entirely by women in war zones and used their existing Active Service League in collaboration with organisations such as the Women’s Co-Operative Guild to engage in a host of relief and work schemes designed to address the needs of refugees, maternal and child welfare, and the economic distress of unemployed women. They were not supporting the government per se, but mitigating the devastating effects of the war and continuing to assert their cause at the same time, through work consistent with feminist and even pacifist stances. The Kingsway meeting anticipated that ‘[i]n addition to all the horrors of slaughter, women are to see their countries impoverished, their homes broken up, and their children and their friends dying of starvation and disease’.21 They urged ‘Women’s Societies to use their organisations for the help of those who will be the sufferers from economic and industrial dislocation caused by the European War’.22 The Common Cause’s coverage in the early months of the war was dominated by news of employment schemes, strong feminist concern for the economic well-being of women and children, and criticism of state regulations targeting women. In other respects, the coverage remained typical of the pre-war years: branch activities, suffrage issues and book reviews, alongside parliamentary and war news. The paper kept women’s issues front and centre by drawing attention to familiar and new inequities generated by the exigencies of war (especially concerning women in industry and the professions). Developments in suffrage movements internationally played a central role, due in part to the NUWSS’s membership in the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) and their official organ Jus Suffragii (1906–40), which reported on developments in suffrage movements in member nations, including news from belligerent countries.23 Organisations such as the IWSA and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) facilitated forms of transnational activism after the war and their periodicals showcased feminist activity around the world.24 The NUWSS actively promoted the Common Cause during the war; they used volunteers and paid unemployed women for street selling and even sent copies of the paper to British soldiers in France.25 Significantly, it preserved a correspondence section through which the paper embraced controversy by publishing letters and reactions to policies and events from different perspectives. The government’s discussion of franchise reform in 1916 (prompted by the need for a Registration Bill to enfranchise soldiers) had a mobilising effect on suffrage societies. In October 1916 the Common Cause used the sight of Australian women casting ballots to state in unequivocal terms: the women of Great Britain should also have a voice. Through their deeds they have spoken [. . .] Gagged and bound, the women of these islands are, in spite of themselves, a source of weakness in the country. To plead that it is better to keep them gagged and bound ‘because it is wartime’ is folly. Now is the time to put forth all our strength. The national need for the enfranchisement of women has never been so great as NOW.26 The NUWSS campaigned actively in the process which led to the Representation of the People bill. They may have settled for too little in accepting a partial franchise, but they had far from renounced the suffrage cause.

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The Women’s Freedom League (WFL) also experienced internal tensions over the response to the crisis. President Charlotte Despard (1844–1939) was a committed socialist and pacifist, but her peace agenda met with resistance. Having suspended militant activities, the WFL asserted ‘the urgency of keeping the Suffrage flag flying, and, especially now, making the country understand the supreme necessity of women having a voice in the counsels of the nation’, while accommodating members who wanted to ‘render service to their country’ by organising the Women’s Suffrage National Aid Corps to provide help for women and children.27 Maintaining a focus on the goal of equal suffrage was a way to deal with conflicting attitudes towards Britain’s involvement in the war. Claire Eustance notes that an official policy of neutrality eventually emerged and chronicles the decentralisation and reduction of the organisation during the war years.28 The official organ, the Vote (1909–33), remained a crucial link between members and, in spite of reducing the number of pages, Despard insisted it would continue to publish news for ‘women who are determined to show that every service they render in this crisis is rendered as Suffragists, who still insist on their demand for recognition as citizens in their own country’.29 The WFL was committed to challenging moral double standards and the sexual exploitation of women in wartime by protesting the 40D clause of the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA), a measure which effectively revived the Contagious Diseases Acts. This work intersected with that of other, non-suffrage groups such as the Association of Moral and Social Hygiene which took up the rights of prostitutes and renewed publication of the Shield (1870–1933) in 1916 as part of their campaign against solicitation laws, while also supporting the suffrage cause.30 The broadening of causes and affiliations was also evident in Sylvia Pankhurst’s ELFS, formed in early 1914 when she was ousted from the WSPU. Woman’s Dreadnought (1914–17) was an enduring publication, spanning not only the war, but also a series of affiliations. Its title changed to the Workers’ Dreadnought (1917–24) after the ELFS became the Workers’ Suffrage Federation (WSF) in March 1916. It represented the Workers’ Socialist Federation and eventually became the first official paper of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Coverage was dominated by issues concerning poor and working-class women, highlighting social class in what is often assumed to have been a middle-class movement. Woman’s Dreadnought was noteworthy because it was socialist, strongly anti-war, and endorsed adult suffrage (another major source of conflict among suffragists), keeping company with labour groups, in addition to other suffrage societies. Angela Smith observes that the ‘Dreadnought carried [Sylvia Pankhurst’s] message with a power equal to that of her sister’s in Britannia’.31 The paper’s commitment to adult suffrage foregrounds the implications of the absence of official organs; the campaign for adult suffrage did not have a dedicated paper (or at least not one that survives) and this has affected the recovery of this strand of suffrage history. Karen Hunt addresses the marginalisation of these discourses in the scholarship and examines the adult suffrage campaign in the war years to demonstrate how it effected a reconfiguration of suffrage politics by forcing ‘the architecture of power (both class and gender) to be exposed to a much wider audience than ever before’.32 The challenges of negotiating the demands of suffrage activism with the exigencies of a national crisis were faced by all groups, regardless of the different choices they made, and their periodicals offer a public (if partial) record of how they reconciled

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conflicting goals and obligations. The Irish Citizen, organ of the Irish Women’s Franchise League, argued the case for women’s suffrage in the context of both the war and the Irish nationalist struggle.33 Some papers did not survive the war (the Conservative & Unionist Women’s Franchise Review, founded in 1909, stopped publication in 1916), while new ones formed (the Catholic Suffragist, edited by Alice Meynell [1847–1922], issued a first number in 1915 because ‘the Committee came to the decision that every organised body of women should have the means of expressing their views at this crisis, when the honour and liberties of women are threatened on every side’).34 However, all the examples above demonstrate how responses to the war were shaped by a variety of internal and external factors, both pre-dating the war and influencing the ability or willingness of some groups to continue their work after 1918. The continued presence of the antis and their official organ the Anti-Suffrage Review (1909–18) reinforces the extent to which the suffrage cause remained viable and posed a threat to reactionary interests.

Beyond Suffrage The suffrage campaign served as a hub for an array of other groups which made up the larger women’s movement, some of them overtly feminist and activist, others less so but women-defined with advocacy dimensions to their work. The dialogue and collaboration between different sectors of the women’s movement can be found in the periodicals, in the reports of activities, as well as in the advertisements for other publications (Figure 23.2). For instance, there was considerable overlap between the suffrage and women’s labour movement press, at the levels of content and personnel. Issues of women’s work and unemployment were regular concerns in the suffrage press during the war, but women’s labour organisations remained active and published their own journals, as well contributing to socialist and labour organs such as the Labour Leader (1894–1987), the Clarion (1891–1934) and Justice (1884–1925). The influx of women into new and male-defined jobs during the war – occupations in industry and the professions which they had never had access to before – exacerbated the problems the women’s labour movement was already struggling with. The war created opportunities but also generated new problems related to conditions of work, wages, the needs of working mothers and long-term considerations regarding employment status and rights after the crisis. Labouring women not only challenged social conventions, but their demands for equal pay posed a problem for government and capital, and the practices of dilution and lower wages posed a threat to the interests of men’s trade unions. As Gail Braybon notes, ‘[w]omen, their work and wages were therefore seen as a social problem, even in the midst of the successful war effort, and as such were a suitable subject for discussion and criticism at all levels of society’.35 But working women and their advocates had their own analysis of these developments and we find them in a variety of publications. The women’s labour movement deserves more detailed treatment than space allows, but I want to point to key publications to emphasise the scope of socialist and feminist protest in the period to expand on women’s complex responses to the war. These periodicals have been central to the scholarship on early women’s labour movements, but they have not received the same level of attention as the suffrage press.

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Figure 23.2  Advertisements, Woman Worker, September 1916. Courtesy of the Women’s Library (digital collection), London School of Economics.

Women’s labour periodicals were in place before the war, some dating back to the nineteenth century, all run by women, including leading figures in women’s rights activism, such as Clementina Black (1853–1922), Gertrude Tuckwell (1861–1951) and Mary Macarthur (1880–1921). The historical focus on women’s war service obscures the numbers of women already in the workforce and the long-standing efforts to secure their rights to fair labour practices. Two of the oldest publications were the Women’s Trade Union Review (1891–1919), organ of the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), and the Women’s Industrial News (1895–1919), organ of the Women’s Industrial Council (WIC).36 What is most striking about the Women’s Trade Union League’s annual reports and the Women’s Industrial News during the war years is how little they say about the war except in terms of the implications for the exploitation of women. There are no patriotic gestures, only concern that the new opportunities also brought with them the loosening of regulations, all of which had adverse effects on women workers. The focus implies a decentring of the war in the interests of women’s well-being. The Women’s Industrial News featured long research articles devoted to topics as diverse as the appalling conditions and wages of sweated workers and shop assistants, and resistance to, and future prospects for, women clerks and civil servants. These publications were adversarial in their stance towards the government and employers, and they stressed vigilance, social welfare and the need to unionise women workers to protect their interests during and after the war. The details they chronicle offer a sobering counter to the propagandist images of energetic women war workers giving their all for the nation. Accounts of labour action also appear in the Woman Worker (1907–21), a socialist feminist paper, organ of the National Federation of Women Workers (NFWW), closely

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associated with its founder, prominent union activist Mary Macarthur.37 Cathy Hunt describes the Woman Worker as a popular publication ‘for working-class women’ to distinguish it from the investigative approaches in the WTUL and WIC journals which were ‘about’ industrial matters affecting working women.38 Before the war, the paper offered a mix of strong messages about socialism and trade unionism, reports of strikes and labour demonstrations, and news of women’s and adult suffrage, alongside lighter fare such as biographical sketches, literary contributions, home notes and a children’s page. A new series began in 1916 in response to war work, edited by Susan Lawrence, and this iteration, ‘a paper for women trade unionists’, had more of the edge one would expect, given the NFWW’s brand of activism. The Woman Worker ran a regular column from the Women’s Labour League (WLL) before it formed its own paper, the League Leaflet (1911–13), which became the Labour Woman (1913–71). The WLL described itself as a self-governing organisation of working women affiliated to the Labour Party.39 The paper was strongly pro-suffrage (women’s and adult suffrage), anti-war and anti-conscription, and internationalist (expressing solidarity with working women in all nations, even publishing exchanges of support with German socialist women).40 Before the war, the coverage, intended for working women/mothers and the wives of working men, included issues ranging from wages, working conditions, trade unionism and solidarity with sisters internationally to housing, birth control, and infant and maternal health. Once the war began, the league’s priorities were to mitigate the immediate impact of the war for women who lost their jobs by distributing goods, addressing food shortages and creating make-work projects to ensure wages and training, funded through the league’s Work for Women scheme. It also monitored and analysed developments in occupations such as munitions work and urged women to demand equal conditions and equal wages. In 1918 the paper expressed disappointment over the limited franchise measure and growing concern that women, in spite of enfranchisement, were being left out of the post-war reconstruction process. The WLL maintained faith in the Labour Woman as one of its key ‘weapons’ in the ‘war of women, war for equality of rights for all the people, rights political and economic, the right to work, the right to vote, the right to happiness and health, in the fight for these, as the voice of the women of the Labour Party’.41 All of the periodicals noted above were larger, organisationally based organs covering the interests of diverse occupational groups. But new women-defined occupational and voluntary groups (civilian and military) that emerged as part of the war effort – munitionettes, land girls, VADs, WRENs – were reflected in some of the specialised papers. Claire Culleton offers one of the only detailed discussions of the magazines produced by munitions workers, featuring ironic titles such as Bombshell, Shell Magazine and Shell Chippings.42 She suggests that these factory newspapers were motivated by men’s service and trench newspapers and describes them as cultural documents that chronicled munitions work from the perspective of those doing it – women war workers ‘writing themselves’ – noting the tensions between their function as morale boosters and the more political dimensions of the magazines, which recorded the dangers, unfair labour practices and social attitudes that these workers confronted.43 Copies were shipped to soldiers in the trenches and souvenir issues were published at the end of the war. These tensions are also present, if less overt, in the Landswoman (1918–20), the official monthly magazine of the Women’s Land Army and the Women’s Institutes.44

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Founded in the spirit of being a ‘companion’ for these pioneering women and a means for isolated land workers to ‘talk to one another through its pages’, this magazine also gave these ‘land workers’ and ‘landswomen’ (not land girls) an opportunity to represent themselves.45 The concept of a ‘land demonstration’ in this publication (a show of skills in a ploughing match) may have been a far cry from the militant demonstrations documented in the labour periodicals, but the politics of women’s agricultural work should not be dismissed as benign.46 The issues of wages, work conditions and longterm status for the landswomen were taken up by the suffrage and labour press and find expression in the desire to pursue agricultural careers beyond the limits of war service.47 These occupationally defined papers, like some of the war-service publications which emerged after the war (Old Comrades Association Gazette, 1920–42, and the Wren, 1921–), served the needs of advocacy by challenging professional barriers, even if their primary goal was to facilitate the formation of associational cultures.48 These groups used periodicals to preserve and celebrate what they had achieved and to express expectations for the future.

The Women’s Movement and the Aftermath of War In 1918 Mary Macarthur proclaimed: ‘Of all the changes worked by the war none has been greater than the change in the status and position of women [. . .] a revolution has taken place.’49 For all its devastation, the war played a significant role in the struggle for women’s emancipation at all levels – social/moral, economic and political. As research on the interwar years demonstrates, responses to enfranchisement, demobilisation and reconstruction involved a plethora of issues affecting women in the domestic sphere, in the institutions of public life and in international politics – including guardianship rights, the nationality of married women, maternal health, birth control, endowment of motherhood, equal pay and equity in industry and the professions, protective labour legislation, abolition of the marriage bar, higher education, equal moral standards, policing, sex trafficking, promoting peace, the international rights of women and ensuring a role for women in the League of Nations – to mention only the most obvious. Newspapers from all sectors of the women’s movement speculated about what the end of the war would bring for women. Helena Swanwick (1864–1939) declared that women were ‘half humanity’ not an ‘auxiliary sex’, leading the Common Cause to warn as early as February 1915 that women risked being exploited and then disregarded anew when men returned: If they are able to do the work and willing to do the work, is it right to take them on only to turn them out afterwards? It is impossible to suppose that a suggestion so glaringly unjust should ever have been made about men; and yet women are equally human beings with them, needing food, needing employment [. . .] The fact is, the whole economic position of women needs to be reconsidered, and the war has only brought to light injustices and cruelties from which they have always suffered, although mostly unobserved.50 These concerns signal why women were willing to defend their gains in the face of demobilisation and post-war measures that ignored their needs, at home and internationally.

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The partial franchise satisfied some and disappointed others, but it also provided the impetus to keep campaigning for equality of rights and opportunities after 1918. The idea that the franchise was a reward for a valiant war effort is overstated; the hard-won ‘half a loaf’ and the reluctance to grant it revealed the continued resistance to women’s emancipation and reminds us that it would take another ten years to achieve equal voting rights (notably for women under thirty who had given so much during the war).51 The vote and subsequent legislative victories such as the Sex Disqualification Act of 1919 were only granted on the heels of the war because women campaigned hard for these measures. The women’s activist press offers a rich repository of feminist assessments of and responses to the war. The commitment to publishing in spite of logistical and economic challenges is significant. Weekly or monthly publications served the obvious functions of communication and mobilisation, but they also facilitated dialogue within and between groups and the wider press, and forged solidarities among otherwise disparate groups and geographical regions. They kept advocacy issues at the fore, providing a regular space in which to interpret developments for their readers. They did this consciously and deliberately. The Common Cause noted: ‘The daily Press is less fully open for news of our work [. . .] if we may claim to be historians-in-chief to our Hospitals abroad, we are first and foremost the chroniclers of the work of the National Union itself during these great and critical days.’52 Omission from the mainstream press had always been a problem and war news inevitably took precedence. Attempts to expose the inequities and problems disadvantaging women were not newsworthy, except to be cast as subversive and anti-patriotic. Having a press of their own allowed campaigners to express themselves in their own terms. The language of these publications, often unconditional and forthright, reveals much about the feminist assumptions informing the actions and expectations they documented, even if the approaches to immediate problems varied. Some periodicals were overt and bold, and those that seemed more measured in their language need to be read in the context of a climate that was even more hostile to women’s grievances and demands than usual. The proliferation and diversification of the women’s movement in the interwar years was a product of changes wrought by women’s movements before and during the war and can be traced in the continuity and evolution of pre-war titles (Workers’ Dreadnought, Catholic Citizen, Church Militant, Woman’s Leader, Vote, Jus Suffragii), the emergence of new titles, most notably the feminist review Time and Tide (1920–79), and publications dedicated to professions and occupational groups (Woman Engineer [1919–], Woman Teacher [1919–61], Woman Clerk [1919–31], Taxette [1920–23], Opportunity [1921–40]), as well as voluntary groups or associations with diverse mandates (Woman’s Outlook [1919–67], Home and Country [1919–2002]). The Pankhurst narrative invoked at the opening of this chapter has served many purposes historically by reinforcing ideas about capitulation or failure and of the social and political conservatism of the suffrage campaign. Their story made it easier to dismiss the scope and force of women’s rights activism and obscures their opponents and the relentless efforts of women’s suffrage and labour organisations who fought to prevent short-term exploitation of women in wartime and to secure long-term (legal, political and economic) measures for women. The periodicals highlighted here provide a key to rendering those voices and sites of struggle visible. They ask us to rethink the scope and evolving nature of feminism and socialism in the early twentieth century, movements for which the First World War was a transformational event along the way.

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Notes   1. C. Nina Boyle, ‘New Year’s Greetings’, Suffragette News Sheet, January 1917, 3.   2. These efforts span over thirty years if we consider early contributions by historians such as Sandra Holton, Joanna Alberti and Cheryl Law. For an analysis of the role of newspapers during the war, see Angela K. Smith, Suffrage Discourse in Britain during the First World War (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); and Michelle Tusan, Women Making News: Gender and Journalism in Modern Britain (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005).   3. Amy Ballmer and Siân Evans, ‘Alternative Access Models: Enhancing the Discoverability of Small Press and Avant-Garde Art’, Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America 32, no. 1 (2013): 20–32.   4. The main open-access source is the Women’s Library at the London School of Economics, while subscription-based sources include the British Library Newspaper Collections and Gale/Proquest Nineteenth-Century Collections Online (Transnational Networks).   5. Key exceptions of studies which focus on the women’s advocacy press in the war years include Tusan, Women Making News; Smith, Suffrage; and Barbara Green, Feminist Periodicals and Daily Life: Women and Modernity in British Culture (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).   6. Christabel Pankhurst, ‘The War’, ‘Review of the Week’, Suffragette, 7 August 1914, 301, 295.  7. Suffragette, 16 April 1915, 4, 6.   8. See Alexandra Hughes-Johnson, ‘“Keep your eyes on us because there is no more napping”: The Wartime Suffrage Campaign of the Suffragettes of the WSPU and the Independent WSPU’, in The Politics of Women’s Suffrage: Local, National and International Dimensions, ed. Alexandra Hughes-Johnson and Lyndsey Jenkins (London: University of London Press, 2021), 129–60.   9. ‘Why We Work for the Vote in War Time’, Suffragette News Sheet, March 1916, 1. 10. ‘The Independent Women’s Social and Political Union’, Independent Suffragette, September 1916, 8. 11. ‘The Outlook’, Votes for Women, 10 July 1914, 625. 12. Krista Cowman, ‘“A party between revolution and peaceful persuasion”: A Fresh Look at the United Suffragists’, in The Women’s Suffrage Movement: New Feminist Perspectives, ed. Maroula Joannou and June Purvis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 77–88. 13. For an analysis of the strategic attempts to redefine women’s citizenship in terms of patriotic service, see Nicoletta F. Gullace, ‘The Blood of Our Sons’: Men, Women and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship During the Great War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 14. ‘To Members of the National Union’, Common Cause, 7 August 1914, 376. 15. ‘What War Means’, Common Cause, 7 August 1914, 377. 16. ‘What War Means’, Common Cause, 7 August 1914, 377. 17. For a full-length study of these issues in the war years, see Jo Vellacott, Pacifists, Patriots and the Vote: The Erosion of Democratic Suffragism in Britain During the First World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 18. These figures appear regularly on the cover page, from 14 August 1914 onwards. 19. ‘Keeping the Flag Flying’, Common Cause, 28 August 1914, 401. 20. ‘What the National Union is Doing’, Common Cause, 4 September 1914, 418. 21. ‘What War Means’, Common Cause, 7 August 1914, 377. 22. ‘What War Means’, Common Cause, 7 August 1914, 377. 23. The journal underwent changes in the main title (International Woman Suffrage News eventually became the International Women’s News). In 1940 it ceased as ‘the monthly organ of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance’. The LSE Digital Archive contains

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issues for 1906–38 and the British Newspaper Archive contains issues for 1913–45. See also Sybil Oldfield, ‘Mary Sheepshanks Edits an International Suffrage Monthly in Wartime: Jus Suffragii 1914–1919’, Women’s History Review 12, no. 1 (2003): 119–31. 24. WILPF did not form until 1915 with the women’s peace congress in The Hague. See the chapter on pacifist journals in this volume for a more detailed discussion. 25. See ‘“The Common Cause” – Unemployed Women as Sellers’, Common Cause, 2 October 1914, 465, and ‘“The Common Cause” for Our Soldiers’, Common Cause, 13 November 1914, 533. 26. ‘Now’, Common Cause, 27 October 1917, 363. 27. ‘Women’s Freedom League and the National Crisis’, The Vote, 14 August 1914, 278. 28. See Claire Eustance, ‘“Daring To Be Free”: The Evolution of Women’s Political Identities in the Women’s Freedom League, 1907–1930’, PhD dissertation, University of York, 1993. 29. ‘To our Readers’, The Vote, 14 August 1914, 278. 30. Eustance, ‘“Daring To Be Free”’, 282. See also Julia Ann Laite, ‘The Association for Moral and Social Hygiene: Abolitionism and Prostitution Law in Britain (1915–1959)’, Women’s History Review 17, no. 2 (2008): 207–23. 31. Smith, Suffrage, 37. 32. Karen Hunt, ‘Class and Adult Suffrage in Britain During the Great War’, in The British Women’s Suffrage Campaign: National and International Perspectives, ed. June Purvis and June Hannam (New York: Routledge, 2021), 136–54. Hunt notes an advertisement for a journal called the Adult Suffragist in July 1914, but there is no evidence that it ever appeared. 33. See Louise Ryan, Winning the Vote for Women: The Irish Citizen Newspaper and the Suffrage Movement in Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts, 2018). 34. ‘Notes and Comments’, The Catholic Suffragist, 15 January 1915, 3. Denominational groups combined their support for suffrage with advocacy for women’s status in religious organisations and carried those feminist agendas into the interwar period. The Catholic Suffragist became the Catholic Citizen in 1918 and the Church League for Women’s Suffrage (1912–17) became the Church Militant (1918–28). 35. Gail Braybon, Women Workers in the First World War (London: Croom Helm, 1981), 109. 36. The WIC annual reports which feature news of the journal are available in the Gale collection. 37. The Gale online collection contains issues for 1908–10 (including February–June 1910 when the journal was reissued as Women Folk). Some issues of the journal are available on open access in the LSE Collection. 38. Cathy Hunt, ‘Binding Women Together in Friendship and Unity? Mary Macarthur and The Woman Worker, September 1907 to May 1908’, Media History 19, no. 2 (2013): 139. Hunt’s valuable study of the NFWW also includes a chapter on the war: The National Federation of Women Workers, 1906–1921 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 39. I have not been able to verify the end date or other changes after 1919. The dates listed here are from David Doughan and Denise Sanchez, Feminist Periodicals 1855–1984: An Annotated Critical Bibliography of British, Irish, Commonwealth and International Titles (New York: New York University Press, 1987), 35. 40. ‘The Women of Germany to the Women of Great Britain’, Labour Woman, January 1915 (cover page). 41. ‘An Urgent Appeal to Our Readers’, Labour Woman, April 1916 (cover page). 42. Claire Culleton, Working-Class Culture, Women, and Britain, 1914–1921 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). Culleton does not provide start and end dates for individual titles, but she focuses on munition factory newspapers published between 1914 and 1919. 43. Culleton, Working-Class Culture, 134. 44. Available at the British Newspaper Archive and on open access at The Women’s Land Army and Timber Corps, . 45. R. E. Prothero, ‘The Women’s Land Army’, The Landswoman, January 1918, 2.

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46. ‘Land Demonstration at Maidstone’, The Landswoman, January 1918, 3–4. 47. Examples include a letter from a land worker, ‘Correspondence’, Labour Woman, May 1918, 11, and a competition on ‘What I long to do after the War’, Landswoman, June 1918, 120. See also Bonnie White, The Women’s Land Army in First World War Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 48. Jane Clarke, ‘Feminism and Legacy of the First World War in the Journals of the Old Comrades Associations, 1919–1935’, Women’s History Review 28, no. 7 (2019): 1177–99. 49. Mary Macarthur, ‘The Women Trade Unionists’ Point of View’, in Women and the Labour Party, ed. Marion Phillips (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1918), 18. 50. ‘The “Auxiliary” Sex’, Common Cause, 19 February 1915, 718. 51. Karen Hunt notes the repeated use of this metaphor: Hunt, ‘Class and Adult Suffrage’, 137. 52. ‘Our Paper’, Common Cause, 9 March 1917, 634.

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24 Avant-garde Journals Andrew Thacker

T

he impact of the First World War on the publication of modernist and avantgarde journals was considerable. Some magazines were halted or amended by the war, while others commenced publication during the period 1914–18. By 1914 the first flourishing of cultural modernism across North America and Europe could be readily noted in the periodical publications that had sprung up, producing a print ecosystem that transmitted experimental and avant-garde voices far and wide. As Robert Scholes and Cliff Wulfman have stated: ‘Modernism began in the magazines.’1 This chapter offers a broad overview of how the European periodical press was affected by the war, before concentrating on two examples in more detail, magazines edited by Harold Monro (1879–1932) and Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957). It shows the variety of ways in which the war impacted on the new artistic movements of the early twentieth century, as well as the way in which the magazines responded to the war, by embracing, critiquing or mocking war rhetoric.

Avant-garde Journals in Europe: An Overview In Britain the two most important little magazines for promoting modernism did not cease publication when the war started. The New Age (1907–38), edited by A. R. Orage (1873–1934), was styled as a ‘Weekly Review of Politics, Literature, and Art’, and by 1914 it had a reputation for sophisticated critical debate around modernism, publishing writers such as T. E. Hulme (1883–1917), Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound (1885–1972), as well as including considerable discussion of developments in modern art, such as Cubism and Post-Impressionism. During the war years coverage of art and literature continued, but the attention granted to politics, particularly relating to the war, became much more prominent. For example, a representative issue for 12 October 1916 has an article in a series by Ramiro de Maeztu (1875–1937) entitled ‘A Visit to the Front’, which begins: ‘When you have seen one ruined town you have seen them all.’ Another article is ‘Extracts from a Soldier’s Diary’ by Herbert Read (1893–1968), later to become a famous art historian. There are also translations of letters home by German soldiers, and a pastiche (a form common to the New Age) of a letter from a Zeppelin commander about to bomb Britain.2 The other significant magazine was the Egoist (1914–19), which since the start of 1914 had changed from a dissident feminist magazine, the New Freewoman (June– December 1913), into a magazine split between the philosophical anarchism of its founder editor, Dora Marsden (1882–1960), and promotion of modernism by Pound and fellow Imagists, such as Richard Aldington (1892–1962), who had been installed

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as assistant editor. After Britain entered the war in August 1914 there were some brief articles acknowledging the event in subsequent issues, such as ‘Notes on the Present Situation’ by Aldington, which deplores the mob mentality introduced by the war, which he finds inimical to the individualism of art.3 However, overall, there were very few changes in the content of the Egoist, in comparison to the New Age: a special issue devoted to Imagism appeared in May 1915; serialisation of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man continued, followed by Lewis’s novel Tarr (1918).4 Occasionally Marsden’s editorial essays made passing reference to the war, but mostly her concerns with philosophy, language and individualism remained the same. Editorial changes did occur, however, when Aldington went to the Western Front in 1916 and his then wife, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886–1961), took over as assistant editor. Perhaps the main impact of the war was upon the ever-perilous finances of the magazine, when the wartime economy led Marsden to reduce it from publishing fortnightly to monthly in 1915, a periodicity it continued until its close in 1919. Significantly, neither the New Age nor the Egoist gave uncritical support to the war effort, disliking much of the jingoism and xenophobia directed towards all things German that became prevalent in Britain at the time. Given that the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a profound influence upon the editors of both magazines, this resistance to simplistic Anglophile nationalism was understandable. In Germany two of the most significant magazines promoting modernism and the avant-garde also continued throughout the war years. These were Der Sturm (1910– 32), founded by Herwarth Walden (1878–1941), and Die Aktion (1911–32), edited by Franz Pfemfert (1879–1954), two magazines based in Berlin that were crucial to the development and promotion of Expressionism as a movement across the arts. These two rival magazines (the two editors and their circles would occupy opposing areas of the famous Café des Westens in Berlin) developed in tandem, with Die Aktion coming to focus on poetry and Der Sturm on the visual arts. When war broke out, the immediate effect of paper rationing disrupted them both: Die Aktion moving from weekly to fortnightly publication, Der Sturm from fortnightly to monthly. In terms of content and attitude during the war, the two magazines differed: as Douglas Brent McBride argues, Die Aktion managed to keep publishing even though the editor Pfemfert and many contributors opposed the war, using various strategies of subterfuge to communicate their views to readers.5 One method was by publishing letters from fictional readers containing material that was critical of the war. By contrast, Walden’s Der Sturm printed little explicit political content and, indeed, there is some evidence that the magazine and its attendant gallery space received support from the propaganda offices of the German state.6 So it was not surprising that when the Germans were defeated and the German revolution of 1918–19 commenced, Pfemfert turned Die Aktion into an Expressionist voice supporting the cause and published statements by its leaders Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) and Karl Liebknecht (1871–1919); on the other hand, Walden and Der Sturm at first ignored the politics on the streets before tentatively showing support for them.7 The continuation of both magazines during wartime is an impressive testament to the work of the two editors and their commitment to promoting the Expressionist movement, which was to continue to be a significant presence in German modernism into the 1920s. In France the most obvious effect of the outbreak of war on the avant-garde was the closure of the influential magazine devoted to promoting the ‘esprit nouveau’ in

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art and letters, Les Soirées de Paris (1912–14). The lead editor of Les Soirées was Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918), whose influential 1913 volume of poems, Alcools, was extensively serialised in the magazine, as were some of his experimental calligramme works.8 As the magazine developed, it began to cover avant-garde activity both in France and abroad, reporting on the Italian Futurists and the German Expressionists, and drawing in many international contributors. The war brought an immediate close to Les Soirées as magazine publishing in Paris was initially halted due to the threat of German invasion. Apollinaire, though born in Italy, enlisted to fight for his adopted country and continued to write and read while at the front: it is said that he was wounded in the head by a shell while reading a new issue of the long-running review Mercure de France (1890–1965).9 In particular, Apollinaire was to be a key presence in a new magazine started in April 1915, L’élan (1915–16), founded by Amédée Ozenfant (1886–1966). As Willard Bohn notes, L’élan was ‘unabashedly patriotic’ and supported French military action as much as l’esprit nouveau.10 This support for the war is notable from the first issue of the magazine, whose cover, by Ozenfant, featured an image of a woman’s head superimposed upon a map of the Western Front, and whose necklace traces out the front line between the Allies and the Germans (Figure 24.1). In the following issue we find an image of a German peacock being attacked by a French rooster. The opening editorial statement confirmed that the magazine saw no contradiction between art and war: ‘The foreigner may believe that in France art belongs only to Peace. Those who fight, our friends, tell us how much war has attached them to their art: they would like pages where this is realized.’ (L’étranger croit peut-être qu’en France l’art n’appartient qu’à la Paix. Ceux qui se battent, nos amis, nous écrivent combien la guerre les a attachés davantage à leur art: ils aimeraient des pages où le réaliser).11 However, as Bohn notes, the eighth issue of the magazine signalled a slight change of direction, when Ozenfant committed the magazine’s focus more towards Cubism. In it, he published Apollinaire’s poem, ‘Guerre’, written on the front line, which attempted to copy the Cubist technique of collage to represent the experience of war.12 However, Ozenfant’s claim that the magazine would now be ‘an avant-garde journal of research in Art & the Mind’ (L’elan s’affirme ainsi la revue d’avant-garde des recherches de l’Art et de l’Esprit) was still embedded in the context of war: L’élan would thus ‘witness that the war has not diminished creative vitality in France’ (témoigne que la guerre n’a pas ralenti en France).13 The fortunes of the avant-garde journal during the war can also be traced by considering Italian Futurism, perhaps the leading new movement in the period. Often cited as the first avant-garde movement, Futurism had already established several magazines before the outbreak of the war. Futurism was established in 1909 with the publication of its first manifesto, composed by F. T. Marinetti (1876–1944). Marinetti, however, had been running a little magazine devoted to poetry, Poesia (1905–09), from 1905 onwards in the city of Milan; in the last few issues of 1909 the words ‘Il Futurismo’ were added to its cover and it also published the founding manifesto of Futurism.14 The Futurist movement spread rapidly across Italy (and then worldwide), with a number of magazines appearing in Florence that trumpeted its vanguardist attitudes. One key magazine was Lacerba (1913–15), founded by Giovanni Papini (1881–1956) and Ardengo Soffici (1879–1964) in 1913, which ran until 1915, becoming allied to the Futurist movement by its sixth issue in which it included some poetry by Marinetti.

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Figure 24.1  L’élan, 15 April 1915. Over the next year the magazine published many key statements of Futurist thinking, including Marinetti’s ‘Wireless Imagination and Words in Freedom’ manifesto (June 1913) and Boccioni’s ‘Futurist Sculpture’ (July 1913). It also reproduced paintings and drawings by Futurist and non-Futurist artists, such as Gino Severini (1883–1965), Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916), Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and Paul Cézanne (1839– 1906), as well as many ‘words-in-freedom’ poems. Its tone was fundamentally avantgarde, challenging what it perceived as the backward nature of the Italian state, and linking its cultural productions to a wider social and political agenda. In its first issue it proclaimed: ‘This will be an out-of-tune, strident, unpleasant and personal paper. It will be an outlet for us and for those who have not been turned into complete idiots by current idealisms, reformisms, humanitarianisms, christianisms and moralisms’ (Sarà questo un foglio stonato, urtante, spiacevole e personale. Sarà uno sfogo per nostro beneficio e per quelli che non sono del tutto rimbecilliti dagli odierni idealism, riformismi, umanitarismi, cristianismi e moralismi).15 However, as Luca Somigli argues, the outbreak of war fundamentally altered the aims of the magazine and it became more focused on politics, campaigning against Italian neutrality and in favour of supporting the French and British allies against German militarism.16 That Lacerba allied itself with the cause of war is perhaps no surprise given the rhetorical support for violence as a form of action in many pre-war Futurist texts. In the first manifesto, published in Le Figaro in 1909, Marinetti had written: ‘We intend to glorify war – the only hygiene of the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of anarchists, beautiful ideas worth dying for’ (Noi vogliamo glorificare la Guerra – sola igiene del mondo – il militarism, il patriottismo, il gesto distruttore dei libertari, le belle idee per cui si muore).17 Even when Lacerba finally closed in 1915, due to falling subscriptions, its then editor Papini proclaimed victory for the magazine’s political views, as Italy eschewed neutrality and attacked the Austro-Hungarian Empire in May 1915.

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However, for other Futurists, Lacerba’s shift of emphasis to politics over culture after 1914 was rejected. L’Italia Futurista (1916–18), according to Somigli, ‘returned to the cultural struggle abandoned at the outbreak of the war’, but was keenly aware of how the conflict shaped its contents.18 One of its editors, Emilio Settimelli (1891–1954), declared that the magazine ‘will have contributors at the front, [and] subscribers in the trenches’ (avrà dei redattori combatenti, degli abbonati in trincea).19 L’Italia Futurista concentrated on promoting Italian writers and artists, with little engagement with other international avant-garde movements, and was notable for an early interest in the new modernist practice of cinema, publishing a manifesto, ‘Futurist Cinematography’, in November 1916. The almost exclusive focus on Italian artists can be seen as a direct result of the war, whereby the magazine’s support for the Italian nation at war produced a form of cultural nationalism, seen through the lens of Futurist theory. War, in certain respects, thus provided an impetus to existing aspects of the Futurist aesthetic, and the alliance between cultural politics and the nation articulated in certain Futurist magazines was a defining motif.20

Harold Monro and Poetry and Drama (1913–14) Even in magazines such as the Egoist and the New Age coverage of the European avant-garde was somewhat schematic. By 1914 British artists and writers had only just begun to assimilate some of the ideas and approaches introduced by European movements such as Futurism.21 Marinetti’s publicity campaign for Futurism – which at one time looked as if it, rather than modernism, might become the defining term for the new mood of experimentation in the arts – had started to make inroads in cultural circles in London in the pre-war years. Much of this was due to Harold Monro, owner of the Poetry Bookshop and editor of two important pre-war magazines, Poetry Review (1912–13) and Poetry and Drama (1913–14). Monro acted as something of a tour manager for Marinetti, arranging talks and public engagements for the Italian while he was in England in 1913 and 1914 and devoting extensive coverage to Futurism in the September 1913 issue of Poetry and Drama.22 This issue included thirty pages of translations of poetry by Marinetti, Paolo Buzzi (1874–1956) and Aldo Palazzeschi (1885–1974), critical essays on the movement, and the first English publication of one of the most famous Futurist manifestos, ‘Destruction of Syntax-Wireless ImaginationWords in Freedom’.23 The space granted to Futurism by Monro in Poetry and Drama offers an indication that this magazine, in the absence of a war, might have continued to investigate new currents in continental European culture. Monro’s ‘open house’ approach to editing meant that he did not align the magazine to any one of the new isms emerging at the time: Georgians, Imagists and Futurists were all published in its pages. Works of criticism by figures such as Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939), F. S. Flint (1885–1960) and T. E. Hulme also alerted readers to new trends in poetry, particularly with Flint’s coverage of contemporary French poetry. Thus, Peter Howarth comments that subscribers to Poetry and Drama ‘would probably have been better informed about new movements in European modernism than anyone else in the country’.24 However, this impetus to the discussion of modernism and the avant-garde in Poetry and Drama was sharply cut short by the war. When war commenced, Monro’s first instinct was to suspend Poetry and Drama for the duration of the conflict, a quite different attitude

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to that found in the Futurist magazines or of the editors of the New Age or Egoist. He was persuaded to keep publishing, but the September issue (which was much shorter than previous copies at only 72 pages instead of around 130 pages) found Monro’s enthusiasm for his project during wartime waning. In an editorial article ‘Varia’, he apologised for the late appearance of the issue and indicated that his first thought had been to abandon the magazine while the war was happening: ‘Afterwards, however, it became apparent that our duty was rather to co-operate with those who were endeavouring to preserve the more vital activities of peace.’ Monro continued by considering the possible effects of the war upon poetry: unlike our daily, weekly and monthly contemporaries, we find ourselves at this moment almost unprovided with verse that we should care to publish. The sentiment of patriotism has never produced much poetry. Modern warfare will be likely to produce less [. . .] Thus, few of the poems now appearing in the press can be taken seriously. The majority are in the nature either of music-hall songs or of rhymed leading articles.25 In Monro’s view, the jingoism and propaganda that had emerged in Britain in the leadup to war would produce nothing good in poetic terms. Unlike the nationalism that fuelled Futurism, Monro’s more internationalist outlook recoiled from poetic expressions of patriotism, partly because they clearly lacked any sense of originality: We get an impression of verse-writers excitedly gathering to do something for their flag, and as soon as they begin to rack their brains how that something may be done in verse, a hundred old phrases for patriotic moments float in their minds, which they reel into verses or fit into sonnets – and the press is delighted to publish them.26 For Monro, then, the poetic experiments of modernism would struggle to flourish in a wartime environment where nostalgia dominated verse productions; this was a very different view to that espoused by the Futurist magazines discussed above, where the avant-garde credentials of Futurist verse could be more easily employed to support the Italian war effort. It is interesting to consider the selection of poetry published in the September issue of Poetry and Drama: aside from including T. Sturge Moore (1870–1944) and Amy Lowell (1874–1925), the first poem in the volume was by the Belgian symbolist Émile Verhaeren (1855–1916), a poem in French called ‘Aéroplanes sur Bruxelles’. Here we find no ‘patriotic moments’ but rather a bleaker image of modern warfare, where the ‘roses of summer’ are displaced by aeroplanes that terrify the inhabitants of the city, symbols of a war that ‘frightfully emblazon the sky’.27 It is a powerful rebuke to the verse that Monro was reading in other English magazines. Monro only brought out one further issue of Poetry and Drama, in December 1914. It still included some excellent contributions: the second part of an article by Ford, ‘On Impressionism’; reviews by Edward Thomas, Flint and others; and new poetry by, inter alia, Robert Frost (1874–1963), Flint, Ezra Pound, Iris Barry (1895–1969), D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) and Richard Aldington. There was another war poem in French by Verhaeren at the head of the section, ‘Un soir

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d’Hiver’, remarkable for its reference to the ‘dark and fatal and bloody’ role of German Zeppelins engaged in aerial bombardment (a phenomenon not witnessed in Britain until the following year).28 However, this grim view of the war was somewhat tempered by the appearance of a poem by Ernest Rhys (1859–1946) that exemplified the sort of patriotic pap that Monro had earlier decried. ‘March of the Recruits’ presents an image of new recruits marching through the streets of London, boys now ‘born again’ as men who are said to be ‘spoiling for the fight’. The poem concludes: Whitehall in the morning, they hum the Marseillaise, And in every lad that hears, a little drummer plays, – March Britain! March France! Till Belgium is free,      March! Marchons! We go to war, to end the war that murders Liberty.29 Perhaps by the end of 1914 Monro felt under pressure to offer some support to the war effort and thus allowed verse like this to appear in his magazine. However, two critical articles considering poetry and war struck a different, more complex, tone: Remy de Gourmont’s ‘French Literature and the War’ and ‘War Poetry’ by Edward Thomas (1878–1917). De Gourmont (1858–1915) noted how the outbreak of war had suppressed literary activity in France, with most literary reviews ceasing ‘to appear, or [. . .] only published in a much smaller form’.30 The impact on literature is mournfully noted in an afterword: ‘The first number of the “Bulletin des Ecrivains, 1914–15” [. . .] which I have just received, informs us that of French writers actually soldiers, twenty have already been killed in the war, more than thirty have been wounded.’31 Thomas’s article considers the range of poetry produced in England by the war and, like Monro, he is somewhat sceptical that any of this efflorescence of patriotic poetry will last. However, Thomas concludes by saying that he expects ‘the work of other real poets to improve as the war advances, perhaps after it is over, as they understand it and themselves more completely’.32 It is melancholy to read this with hindsight, given that poets such as Wilfred Owen (1893–1918), Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918) and Thomas himself were among those who produced this better verse, but who did not live to ‘understand it and themselves more completely’. Monro, however, could not imagine continuing with his magazine any longer, announcing a suspension for one year but hoping that it would reappear in 1916. Monro gave his reasons as follows: As the weeks pass [. . .] it becomes increasingly evident that the attention of the public must inevitably remain fixed on one issue only – the preservation of National Liberty. The consideration and, indeed, the production of literature require leisure of mind. The suspension of this periodical is designed to last until we have been so fortunate as to regain that leisure.33 The leisure of mind that Monro sought took longer than a year to arrive. Sadly, Poetry and Drama never reappeared, with Monro spending the war years keeping the Poetry Bookshop open. After the war, however, Monro started a new periodical, the Monthly Chapbook (1919–25), which shared similar aims to Poetry and Drama, but with a

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somewhat different format.34 The Chapbook was one of the many new literary magazines launched in Britain in 1919, including titles such as the Owl (1919–23), Coterie (1919–21), Voices (1919–21) and the London Mercury (1919–39). Many of these magazines, in complex ways, tried to come to terms with and understand, as Edward Thomas had suggested, what the war represented to Britain and English literature.35

Wyndham Lewis and Blast (1914–15) The most famous English modernist magazine which did try to continue after the war commenced was Wyndham Lewis’s Blast. Blast acted as the mouthpiece for the Vorticist movement, the only original ‘English’ avant-garde movement to appear in this period.36 Lewis and the Vorticists were originally known as English Futurists, but decisively broke away from Marinetti prior to the appearance of Blast in June 1914, just a few months before war broke out. This first issue featured aggressive rhetoric, typographic experiments and liberal use of the manifesto format, arguably derived from Marinetti’s movement, along with influences from other European avantgarde groups. However, there are also several articles critiquing Futurism as passé and obsessed with automobiles, part of a calculated strategy to position Vorticism as an original and leading avant-garde ism associated with a certain form of English cultural nationalism. It was to be over a year before Blast 2 appeared in July 1915 (the magazine was intended as a quarterly). Lewis’s opening editorial addressed the changed world in which the magazine now operated: BLAST finds itself surrounded by a multitude of other Blasts of all sizes and descriptions. This puce-coloured cockleshell will, however, try to brave the waves of blood, for the serious mission it has on the other side of World War. The art of Pictures, the Theatre, Music etc., has to spring up again with new questions and beauties when Europe has disposed of its difficulties [. . .] We will not stop talking about Culture when the War ends!37 From such words the reader might have expected that, like Monro’s Poetry and Drama, Lewis was going to announce a suspension of Blast. However, rather than wait until the war was over, Lewis instead offered Blast 2 as an explicit ‘War Number’ and attempted to suggest that the war with Germany was part of a continuing struggle of the modernist avant-garde against reactionary cultural forces. ‘Germany’, writes Lewis, ‘has stood for the old Poetry, for Romance [. . .] German nationalism [. . .] is more saturated with the mechanical obsession of history, than the nationalism of England or France.’38 Blast, argues Lewis, is ‘rigidly opposed’ to this ‘Poetry of a former condition of life’ as displayed by ‘official Germany’, and instead will epitomise the ‘as yet unexpressed spirit of the present time, and of new conditions and possibilities of life’.39 Elsewhere Lewis claims that ‘the Kaiser, long before he entered into war with Great Britain, had declared merciless war on Cubism and Expressionism’.40 Blast and Vorticism, in Lewis’s account here, thus position themselves in support of the war, viewing the conflict as something of a continuation, in another arena, of the modernist struggle. If the Kaiser ‘attacked’ Cubism and Expressionism, movements akin to Vorticism, then war against the Kaiser was something modernists should support. This is clearly not the same as Marinetti’s glorification of war as a form of aesthetic ‘hygiene’,

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but there are resemblances between the two movements: both Vorticism and Futurism attempt to articulate a complex relationship between the avant-garde, nationalism and the war. Blast 2 is, in many ways, a quite different production to Blast 1. There are no manifestos in Blast 2, whereas there were multiple instances in the first issue; the list of people and things ‘blasted’ and ‘blessed’, which was such a key component of the opening manifesto in Blast 1, is now reduced to a limp two pages towards the end of Blast 2. Almost half of the second issue is explicitly by Lewis, an increase on the first issue; and the war becomes the focus for around half of the material, particularly noticeable in the visual arts. C. R. W. Nevinson’s (1889–1946) ‘On the Way to the Trenches’ is perhaps the most explicit example of war art, along with Lewis’s cover which depicts soldiers in a semi-abstract urban setting. And while Blast 1 was unsparing in its attacks on Futurism, using satire and humour to good effect, in Blast 2 Lewis is rather more measured in his critique of the Italian movement. For example, he praises the Futurist painters Balla (1871–1958) and Severini (1883–1965) as being of ‘more importance’ than ‘their poet-impresario’ Marinetti.41 Thus, in ‘A Review of Contemporary Art’, Lewis offers a detailed analysis of Cubism, Futurism and Expressionism as the most influential movements in European modernism, partly as a way to explain how Vorticism differs from them. Lewis also speculates upon the possible effects of the war on art. England after the war, he notes in ‘Constantinople Our Star’, is unlikely to produce an ‘organised intellectual life’ as already appears in other European countries, although he suggests ‘that the war may slightly modify for the better the lethargy, common and practical spirit that is the curse of this country’.42 However, in other articles Lewis argues that the war will change very little: in one he states that ‘it seems to me that, as far as art is concerned, things will be exactly the same after the War as before it’; while in another he writes ‘Life after the War will be the same brilliant life as it was before the War.’43 There are those, he writes in ‘Artists and the War’, who might wish for the avant-garde to be curtailed by the war (‘that the war will kill off every Cubist in Western Europe’), but Lewis argues against this view: that ‘the war will in any way change the currents of contemporary art, I do not believe: they are deeper than it’.44 In this respect Lewis was mistaken, something that he himself came to recognise later. However, one should perhaps acknowledge that his comments were made very early on in the war: there were to be over three more years before the Armistice and, like Monro and many others, Lewis might well have expected the war to end sooner. Thus, though Blast 2 does contain much material pertaining to the war, there is also much here in which the effect of war is not felt. For example, the poems by T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) – ‘Preludes’ and ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ – were drafted before the war and bear no trace of the conflict. Likewise, the poetry by Jessica Dismorr (1885–1932) and Ezra Pound also ignores the war, and Pound’s critical article ‘Chronicles’ barely mentions it. Even Helen Saunders’ (1885–1963) poem, ‘A Vision of Mud’, does not refer to conditions on the Western Front but to a treatment in a spa. Among the poetry, only Ford Madox [Ford] Hueffer’s ‘The Old Houses of Flanders’ addresses the conflict directly. One reason for this, of course, was that very few of the Vorticists and their associates had yet experienced the war directly. Nevinson had joined up in November 1914 as an ambulance driver, only to return in January 1915 due to ill-health, becoming an official war artist in 1917. The only Vorticist on the Western Front when Blast 2 was being planned was the sculptor

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Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891–1915). Lauded by both Pound and Lewis in Blast 1 (and given his own manifesto statement there), barely a month before the next issue appeared Gaudier-Brzeska died at the front on 5 June 1915. The fact was noted mournfully in a short memorial with a black border in Blast 2. Gaudier-Brzeska’s contribution to Blast 2 was subtitled, ‘Written from the Trenches’, and was a peculiar mixture of war reportage and Vorticist theorising. Utilising the capitalisation of Blast 1 in his text, Gaudier-Brzeska writes of ‘THE BURSTING SHELLS, the volleys, wire entanglements, projectors, motors, the chaos of battle DO NOT ALTER IN THE LEAST, the outlines of the hill we are besieging.’45 Taking the landscape of the front as his subject, Gaudier-Brzeska emphasises how Vorticist ideas inform his vision: ‘I SHALL DERIVE MY EMOTIONS SOLELY FROM THE ARRANGEMENT OF SURFACES, I shall present my emotions by the ARRANGEMENT OF MY SURFACES’, and gives the example of an enemy rifle that he obtained and into which he carved a design to express his feelings.46 It is a peculiar, somewhat disturbing piece to read, particularly in the knowledge of the author’s death, but it is also the closest first-hand encounter with the war that we find in the magazine, only matched by Nevinson’s image of men marching to the trenches. Even the closing pages of the issue, devoted to Lewis’s fictional sketch, ‘The Crowd-Master’, is a representation of the weeks leading up to the outbreak of war and mobilisation. A note in Blast 2 promised that the next issue would contain ‘Notes from the Front’ by Wyndham Lewis. Blast 3, however, never appeared. Lewis enlisted in 1916 and then served on the front in a battery division in spring 1917. It was an experience that clearly changed some of his views about the impact of war on modernism and its magazines, if we look at the account presented in his later work of autobiography, Blasting and Bombardiering (1937). Lewis now acknowledges that the war has changed ‘the currents of contemporary art’ and much else besides. The war, he writes, was such a ‘tremendous landmark’ that ‘pre-war’ and ‘post-war’ can be compared to the birth of Christ and after: ‘With me war and art have been mixed up from the start.’47 Looking back on publishing Blast, Lewis notes that with ‘the sublimest misunderstanding of the sort of situation I was confronted with I decided on “business as usual”’ and brought out the war issue, which was ‘surprisingly intelligent considering. And everyone else being as stupid as I was, it went quite well.’48 Lewis now seems to have reached the same view that Monro held when suspending Poetry and Drama, that continuing with such a modernist magazine during wartime was something of a mistake, or at least unsustainable for any length of time. Lewis’s general observations on the impact of war on modernism in this autobiography also reveal a new tone of regret. Writing of his modernist companions, Pound, Joyce (1882–1942), Eliot and Ford – the ‘men of 1914’ – Lewis claims that ‘We are the first men of a Future that has not materialized. We belong to a “great age” that has not “come off”. We moved too quickly for the world. We set too sharp a pace.’49 Commenting on this famous acknowledgement of how the war, and other factors, impacted upon European modernism, Paul Edwards astutely argues that here Lewis combines ‘utopianism with timely disillusion’ and that his key regret was that ‘art was no longer meshing with revolutionary change’.50 The English avant-garde challenge of Vorticism that was represented in Blast was clearly curtailed by the war, and Lewis made no real attempt to revive the magazine after 1918. He did edit two further little magazines in the 1920s: two issues of the Tyro (1920–21) and the three issues of the

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Enemy (1927–29). However, as Edwards notes, unlike the more collective project of Blast, these two publications were ‘vehicles for Lewis’s personal campaigns for viable forms of modernism at particular historical moments’.51

Coda: Dada in Zurich While countries such as Italy, France and Britain saw the rise of modernist magazines that viewed the war through the prism of nationalism, in other places the war encouraged a more internationalist approach. This was most noticeably felt in Zurich, in neutral Switzerland, which saw a flourishing periodical press and the founding of the avant-garde movement Dada. As Debbie Lewer notes, many European publishers relocated to Zurich after the outbreak of war, particularly from Germany, where there were severe restrictions on starting new journals.52 Magazines such as Der Mistral (1915) and Sirius (1915–16) were strongly linked to German intellectuals in exile, but it was the single issue of Cabaret Voltaire (1916), edited by German exile Hugo Ball (1886–1927), that witnessed the most significant manifestation of the international avant-garde in Zurich. Linked to the cabaret club of the same name, where performance art was pioneered, the magazine brought together modernist contributors from across Europe in a challenge to the national borders at the centre of the war. Nine different nationalities were listed as contributing to the magazine, with the German-born Emmy Hennings (1885–1948) listed as ‘homeless’ (sans patrie).53 The magazine included Italian ‘words in freedom’ poems from Marinetti, poems by French poets Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961), a poem by Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), and an etching by Picasso. Ball noted in his diary that the magazine represented ‘the first synthesis of the modern schools of art and literature. The founders of expressionism, futurism, and cubism have contributions in it.’54 His introduction to the magazine, which was printed in both French and German versions, rejected the nationalist politics evident in the war, praising the ‘independent’ voices that lived ‘beyond the war and the fatherlands’ (über den Krieg und die Vaterländer hinweg an die wenigen Unabhängigen zu erinnern, die anderen Idealen leben).55 He ended the editorial with a claim in both French and German: that the goal of the artists gathered in the magazine will be to produce an international review with the title, DADA. It was the first appearance in print of the name of the new movement. The multilingualism of Cabaret Voltaire was a clear retort to war and nationalist politics, a policy designed to breach linguistic borders. Perhaps the most striking example was the appearance of the ‘simultaneous poem’, ‘L’Amiral cherche une maison à louer’ (The Admiral Is Looking for a House to Rent), a rendering in print of a piece performed in the cabaret, by Richard Huelsenbeck (in German), Marcel Janco (in English) and Tristan Tzara (in French). A later discussion on the nature of Dada by Tzara (1896–1963) and Huelsenbeck (1892–1974), ‘Dialogue entre un cocher et une alouette’ (Dialogue Between a Coachman and a Lark), was conducted in German and French. Just in case the point was not clear enough to readers, Ball’s concluding editorial notes states: ‘To avoid a nationalist interpretation, the editor of this magazine declares that he had no relation with the “German mentality”’ (Pour éviter une interprétation nationaliste l’éditeur de ce recueil déclare qu’il n’a aucune relation avec la mentalité allemande).56 Cabaret Voltaire was followed by Dada magazine, published in Zurich between 1917 and 1919, before the movement

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spread across Europe and America in the following years. Arguably its internationalism and multilingual aims could only have flourished during wartime in the neutral space provided by Zurich.

Notes  1. Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman, Modernism in the Magazines: An Introduction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).   2. Ramiro de Maeztu, ‘A Visit to the Front’, Herbert Read, ‘Extracts from a Soldier’s Diary’, ‘Home Letters from German Soldiers’, ‘Pastiche’, The New Age, 12 October 1916. For an account of the magazine during the war, see Paul Jackson, Great War Modernisms and The New Age Magazine (London: Bloomsbury, 2012).   3. Richard Aldington, ‘Notes on the Present Situation’, The Egoist, 1 September 1914, 326–7.  4. Joyce’s A Portrait was serialised in the Egoist between February 1914 and September 1915. Lewis’s Tarr was serialised from April 1916 until November 1917.   5. Douglas Brent McBride, ‘A Critical Mass for Modernism in Berlin: Der Sturm (1910–1932), Die Aktion (1911–1932), Sturm-Bühne (1918–1919)’, in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Vol. III: Europe 1880–1940, ed. Peter Brooker, Sascha Bru, Andrew Thacker and Christian Weikop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 785.   6. McBride, ‘A Critical Mass for Modernism in Berlin’, 788–9.   7. McBride, ‘A Critical Mass for Modernism in Berlin’, 792–4.  8. For an interesting discussion of Apollinaire’s writing from the trenches, see Birgit Van Puymbroeck and Cedric Van Dijck, ‘Apollinaire’s Trench Journalism and the Affective Public Sphere’, Texas Studies in Language and Literature 60, no. 3 (2018): 269–92.   9. Guillaume Apollinaire, Selected Writing of Guillaume Apollinaire, trans. Roger Shattuck (New York: New Directions, 1971), 8. 10. Willard Bohn, ‘Apollinaire and “the New Spirit”: Le Festin d’Esope (1903), Les Soirées de Paris (1912–June 1913; Nov. 1913–July 1914), L’élan (1915–Feb 1916; Dec. 1916)’, in Brooker et al., eds, Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Vol. III, 120–42, here 135. For another account of L’élan and the war, see the essay by Anna-Louise Milne in Revues Modernistes Anglo-Americaines: Lieux d’échanges, lieux d’exil, ed. Benoît Tadié (Paris: Ent’revues, 2006). 11. L’élan, 15 April 1915, 2. 12. Bohn, ‘Apollinaire and “the New Spirit”’, 138–9. 13. Amédée Ozenfant, L’élan, January 1916, inside cover. 14. For a short account of Poesia, see Eric Bulson in Brooker et al., eds, Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Vol. III, 515–19. Five more issues of Poesia were published later in 1920. 15. Giovanni Papini and Ardengo Soffici, ‘Introibo’, Lacerba, January 1913, 1. Cited in Luca Somigli, ‘Past-loving Florence and the Temptations of Futurism: Lacerba (1913–15), Quartiere Latino (1913–14), L’Italia futurista (1916–18), La Vraie Italie (1919–20)’, in Brooker et al., eds, Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Vol. III, 469–90, here 474. Trans. by Somigli. 16. Somigli, ‘Past-loving Florence’, 477. 17. F. T. Marinetti, ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’ (1909), reproduced in Futurism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi and Laura Wittman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 51. 18. Somigli, ‘Past-loving Florence’, 482. 19. Emilio Settimelli, ‘L’Italia futurista’, L’Italia futurista, 1 June 1916, 1; cited in Somigli, ‘Past-loving Florence’, 482.

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20. Two other Futurist magazines that began during the war years, both in Rome, were Noi (1917–25) and Avanscoperta (1916–17). 21. For more on this, see Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). 22. Dominic Hibberd suggests that Marinetti viewed Monro as ‘one of his principal British allies’; see Dominic Hibberd, Harold Monro: Poet of the New Age (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 135. 23. See Poetry and Drama, September 1913. 24. Peter Howarth, British Poetry in the Age of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 28. 25. Harold Monro, ‘Varia: Notes: News’, Poetry and Drama, September 1914, 250. 26. Monro, ‘Varia’, 251. 27. Emile Verhaeren, ‘Aéroplanes sur Bruxelles’, Poetry and Drama, September 1914, 273. The first verse reads: ‘Les roses de l’été – couleur, parfum et miel – / Peuplent l’air diaphane, / Mais la guerre blasonne effrayamment le ciel / De grands aéroplanes.’ 28. Émile Verhaeren, ‘Un soir d’Hiver’, Poetry and Drama, December 1914, 347. ‘Face à face, les vaisseaux sautent; / Les Zeppelins armés volent sur la mer haute; / La fureur se rassemble et la haine s’accroît; / Plaines, canaux, vallons, et bois, / Tout est sombre et funeste et sanglant à la fois’. 29. Ernest Rhys, ‘March of the Recruits’, Poetry and Drama, December 1914, 355. 30. Remy de Gourmont, ‘French Literature and the War’, Poetry and Drama, December 1914, 335. Trans. by Richard Aldington. 31. De Gourmont, ‘French Literature and the War’, 340. 32. Edward Thomas, ‘War Poetry’, Poetry and Drama, December 1914, 345. 33. ‘Announcement’, Poetry and Drama, December 1914, 322. 34. On the Chapbook, see Mark Morrisson, ‘The Cause of Poetry: Thomas Moult and Voices (1919–21); Harold Monro and the Monthly Chapbook (1919–25)’, in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Vol. I: Britain and Ireland 1880–1955, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 405–27. 35. For an account of two such magazines, see Andrew Thacker, ‘Aftermath of War: Coterie (1919–21); New Coterie (1925–27); Robert Graves and the Owl (1919–23)’, in Brooker and Thacker, eds, Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Vol. I, 462–84. 36. Several members of the Vorticists were, of course, not English, including the American Ezra Pound and the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. 37. ‘Editorial’, Blast 2, July 1915, 5. Elsewhere in the magazine Lewis notes that the war and illness had delayed the appearance of the issue, but promised that two further numbers would appear by the end of the year. However, Blast 2 was the last issue. 38. ‘Editorial’, 5. 39. ‘Editorial’, 5. Lewis distinguishes between the ‘official Germany’ of the Prussian state waging war and the ‘unofficial Germany’ of the arts and sciences, which he acknowledges greatly influenced the modernism of Blast. German Expressionism in particular was one powerful influence on Lewis; see Scott W. Klein, ‘How German Is It: Vorticism, Nationalism, and the Paradox of Aesthetic Self-Definition’, in Vorticism: New Perspectives, ed. Mark Antliff and Scott W. Klein (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 68–86. 40. Wyndham Lewis, ‘The God of Sport and Blood’, Blast 2, July 1915, 9. 41. Wyndham Lewis, ‘Marinetti’s Occupation’, Blast 2, July 1915, 26. 42. Wyndham Lewis, ‘Constantinople Our Star’, Blast 2, July 1915, 11. 43. Wyndham Lewis, ‘A Super-Krupp – or War’s End’, Blast 2, July 1915, 13; ‘The Exploitation of Blood’, 24. 44. Wyndham Lewis, ‘Artists and the War’, Blast 2, July 1915, 23.

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45. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, ‘Vortex Gaudier-Brzeska’, Blast 2, July 1915, 33. 46. Gaudier-Brzeska, ‘Vortex Gaudier-Brzeska’, 33. 47. Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering (London: Calder and Boyars, 1967), 1, 4. 48. Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, 64. 49. Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, 256. 50. Paul Edwards, ‘Blast and the Revolutionary Mood of Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticism’, in Antliff and Klein, eds, Vorticism: New Perspectives, 212. 51. Paul Edwards, ‘Cultural Criticism at the Margins: Wyndham Lewis, The Tyro (1920–1), and The Enemy (1927–9)’, in Brooker and Thacker, eds, Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Vol. I, 552–69, here 552. 52. Debbie Lewer, ‘The Avant-Garde in Swiss Exile 1914–20’, in Brooker et al., eds, Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Vol. III, 1032–56. 53. ‘Editor’s Notes’, Cabaret Voltaire, 1916, 31. 54. Cited in Emily Hage, ‘A “Living Magazine”: Hugo Ball’s Cabaret Voltaire’, The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 91, no. 4 (2016): 395–414, here 399. 55. Hugo Ball, untitled, Cabaret Voltaire, 1916, 5. 56. ‘Editor’s Notes’, Cabaret Voltaire, 1916, 31.

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Part V: Global Perspectives

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25 German Colonial Africa Daniel Steinbach

T

he First World War affected Africa profoundly: no continent outside Europe saw as much active warfare, and as many military and civilian deaths, as Africa. Yet as much as warfare deeply impacted the lives of ordinary Africans, the pre-existing political, economic and social structures of European colonial control generally remained firmly in place despite the conflict.1 The exception to this pattern was the occupation of German colonies by the Allied powers during the war. Indeed, this was both the only example of an armed conflict between colonial powers in Africa and the only German territory occupied during the First World War. In this dynamic and changing setting, newspapers provide an important source of insight into how the inhabitants of the colonies processed both war and change. However, newspapers – like most written sources from the colonial period in Africa – provide only a limited window into these issues, the window of European perspectives. While several newspapers in African languages did exist by the outbreak of the war, only very few scattered copies and reprints survived, making a systematic analysis of these sources – and the alternative perspectives they might have contained – impossible. Even among the German-language newspapers, which were systematically collected prior to 1914, production ended by spring 1916 and only selected copies of the war year issues survived. The limitations inherent in the source base bracket the kinds of questions that can be asked, and the kind of analysis that can be conducted, about this unique period in colonial history. Prior to the outbreak of war in 1914, Germany controlled four territories in Africa, each differing significantly in its geographical, social and economic make-up. In West Africa, Togo was a trading colony with no permanent European population beyond missionaries. Likewise, Kamerun (present-day Cameroon) had nearly no permanent white settlement as the climate and plantation economy made it difficult for individual settlers to establish themselves there. On the other hand, German Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia) contained nearly 10,000 white residents and regarded itself as Germany’s foremost settler colony, with several towns dominated by Europeans. German East Africa (present-day mainland Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi) also had a sizeable white population, but there Africans and Indians dominated the cities. Irrespective of its size, in all these colonies any white population was far outnumbered by colonised inhabitants. By 1914 all four colonies had an active press culture which catered almost exclusively to white inhabitants. Kamerun and Togo shared just one regular paper, KamerunPost (1912–14), which appeared twice a week. In comparison, both German East Africa and German Southwest Africa had a varied press landscape that was defined by

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both regional differences (all major towns had a paper) and the presence of diverging socio-economic interests within the colonies – in particular, the opposition between the colonial government and the local settler interest. In German East Africa the DeutschOstafrikanische Zeitung (1899–1916) from the capital Dar es Salaam appeared twice a week and the Usambara Post (1904–16) from Tanga appeared weekly. In German Southwest Africa the Deutsch-Südwestafrikanische Zeitung (1898–1914) and Südwest (1910–15) were published bi-weekly in the port city of Swakopmund, while Südwestbote (1910–15) appeared in the capital Windhoek. Additionally, the more modest Lüderitzbuchter Zeitung (1909–37, but interrupted during the war) and Keetmanshoper Zeitung (1913–14) appeared weekly in the south of the colony. The papers aimed to be a forum for the colonial population or specific interest groups within the colony and additionally to reflect their concerns back to the metropole. Hence copies of the papers were not only circulated within the colonies but also shipped to Europe. In 1907, for example, a total of 24,000 copies of settler newspapers arrived in Germany for individual readers, colonial organisations and public institutions.2 Several libraries collected newspapers from the colonies systematically, with the most complete series available at Senckenberg Universitätsbibliothek in Frankfurt, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg. However, the outbreak of war swiftly disrupted shipping to and from the colonies, which severely limited the transport of printed newspapers. Issues of the various colonial papers that appeared after July 1914 can be found scattered across German library collections, but these are patchy, with some numbers lost. Colonial newspapers have been utilised by many historians of the German colonial period, but to date there is no comprehensive contemporary publication dealing with these. In the interwar period, the topic of the press in the ‘lost’ colonies inspired a string of doctoral dissertations which – despite their often blatantly racist and revisionist ideology – remain important sources as they had access to newspaper issues and archival materials that were lost in the subsequent war.3 More recent publications have analysed the often fraught relationship between the German colonial press and the local colonial government.4 Corinna Schäfer has explored the importance of the press in creating and shaping a settler identity and its role in controlling African writing and political participation.5 Publications on the history of the press in the nation-states that developed out of the German colonies often omit the German period or discuss it very broadly.6 The only publication that specifically deals with the role of the colonial newspapers in the First World War is a detailed study by Krista Molly O’Donnell on the press in German Southwest Africa and the colony’s occupation by South African troops.7 Against this backdrop, this chapter will explore the role of the German-speaking press in Africa as the main medium of information and communication among the European settler communities. As the German colonies were largely cut off from postal connections after the beginning of hostilities, these newspapers are the main source of written material produced during the war, as only few diaries and letters from that period survived. Editorials, other opinion pieces, letters to the editors and readers’ poems permit a close analysis of the different phases of public mood in the colonies. Aside from insight into dynamics on the ground, the content of these papers can also be connected to larger questions about the mobilisation of racial and national identities, the experience of occupation, and the shift of colonial power

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by force. Following an overview of the local press landscape in 1914, this chapter explores press content around four key themes: the outbreak of war in August 1914, the fear of an African uprising, military and civilian mobilisation, and the occupation that ended the German press in 1915–16. As the only newspaper for Kamerun and Togo ceased publication in summer 1914, the discussion will focus on the situation in German East Africa and German Southwest Africa. Across these themes, I highlight the crucial role of newspapers in helping German residents of the colonies to process the various fears and anxieties they had both before, during and after the war. While a similar role was, of course, played by newspapers published in Germany, the particular tension that the war created in the colonial sphere becomes clear from the outbreak of hostilities. Colonialism itself contained ideological tensions between competition – and associated ideas of progress, science and commerce – and cooperation between the European powers. War threatened to disrupt both the intertwined world of colonial economies and the ideological foci, and colonials were attendant to the tension created by this. As stated by Anne Rasmussen in the context of the mobilisation in Europe: If citizens were aware of entering into a national conflict comparable to those of the 19th century, from the outset they also attributed to it a greater ideological value. It immediately became clear, in both camps, that two concepts of international society were at stake, and even more fundamentally that each camp intended to defend a concept of ‘civilisation’ or ‘culture’.8 In Europe the division between ‘civilisation’ on the side of the Entente and ‘culture’ on the side of the Central Powers emerged swiftly in August 1914. In the colonial setting both terms were closely linked to the idea of a shared European ‘civilising mission’ of bringing peace and order to uncultured and uncivilised Africa. In addition to addressing the more concrete war-related fears and anxieties in the colonies, one can therefore also see press content speaking to more abstract fears and anxieties about the colonial project disrupted by the war.

The Press Landscape of German Colonial Africa in 1914 In both German Southwest Africa and German East Africa the first newspapers were published in 1898, and by 1914 the number of publications had risen to ten local and regional newspapers in each major settlement. These newspapers were produced by white colonials and for white colonials. In content and layout, they modelled themselves on newspapers in Germany. They contained editorials, letters to the editors, local news (including events), political and economic coverage of events in the colonies, national and international news as well as practical advice about living in subSaharan Africa, farming and housekeeping. From their very beginning, these newspapers played an important role in shaping the identity of the colonial settlers and were guided by the explicit goal of creating a sense of community. Founded by middle-class editors, they reflected the social and cultural norms of the German ‘Bildungsbürger’ with a distinct conservative political outlook, who not only believed in sharp differences between the races, but also between classes and sexes. These similarities aside, the diversified press landscape in German

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Southwest Africa and East Africa included publications that were targeted at different audiences, including specific industries and professions such as mining, planters and small farmers. Editorials, invited articles by members of the public and letters to the editors shaped discourses about identity and debates on social, economic and political questions. In German East Africa, the Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Zeitung was founded in 1899 and published in Dar es Salaam, and the Usambara Post was founded in 1904 and published in Tanga. The latter regarded itself as the mouthpiece of the planters and was often in direct opposition to the colonial government, which it accused of not supporting the white population enough. In German Southwest Africa the two most important papers were the Deutsch-Südwestafrikanische Zeitung, which was founded in 1898 and published in coastal Swakopmund. Its competitor was the Südwestbote, which was founded in 1910 and published in the capital Windhoek. The latter functioned as the outlet for farmers and settlers critical of the government. Additionally, the paper Südwest appeared in Windhoek from 1910, and around the same time two smaller papers appeared, the Lüderitzbuchter Nachrichten from 1909, representing mining interests, and the Keetmanshooper Zeitung from 1913 (with neither having any surviving editions after July 1914). In their first decade, the newspapers were largely unregulated, leading to frequent conflicts between editors and the local government about issues ranging from the colonies’ economy and investment in infrastructure to the treatment of the colonised Africans.9 After many years of debate, the German parliament passed the Colonial Press Law that specifically regulated the boundaries of what could be published in the colonies. When the law came into effect in April 1912, colonial governments had a mechanism for controlling and censoring German-language and African-language newspapers and publications. For example, the law stipulated that any publication that could potentially ‘incite natives to commit violence against Whites’ was to be banned. It also made it possible for the governor to ban any publication by Africans without consulting a court, in an attempt to prevent the development of an independent African press.10 As a result, African-language papers remained firmly in the control of Europeans.

Colonial Tensions in August 1914 ‘The mobilisation of minds in 1914 as the final stage in the process of the nationalisation of European cultures’ was to a large extent driven by the press.11 In Europe, the beginning of hostilities in August 1914 was not met with widespread exultation, but instead – as numerous studies have shown – with ambiguous and fearful emotions.12 In this setting, people turned to their trusted newspapers for guidance about how to process the unfolding events. A similar picture emerges in the German colonies where the announcement of war triggered contradictory sentiments.13 On the one hand, the middle-class editors of all newspapers enthusiastically affirmed the loyalty of the colonies to the metropole and whipped up nationalistic sentiments. As one paper declared: ‘when the old homeland sent news that [. . .] our fatherland walks the path of honour and duty with an iron, indomitable consistency, our hearts rejoiced!’ (Als die alte Heimat [. . .] Tatsachen übermittelte, aus denen hervorging, daß unser Vaterland mit eiserner, unbeugsamer Folgerichtigkeit den Weg der Ehre und der Pflicht

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geht, da jubelte es in unseren Herzen!)14 Similarly, another writes that despite seeing ‘Europe in flames’ and ‘despite the heavy worries that weigh on us, it will be like a deep, trembling sigh of relief through the whole German people in these days’ (Trotz der schwer drückenden Sorgen, die auf uns lasten, wird es doch in diesen Tagen wie ein tiefes zitterndes Aufatmen durch das ganze deutsche Volk gehen) that a victorious war would be a clearing of the air.15 On the other hand, all newspapers warned about the impact the war would have on the image and status of the colonisers.16 Any war fought with the aid of African soldiers against a European power would inevitably lead to a loss of ‘white prestige’, which was generally regarded as the underlying principle of colonial rule, and might threaten the future of European colonialism altogether.17 The very idea of indigenous soldiers capturing and killing Europeans on the battlefield, or conquering and plundering European property, disconcerted settlers, administrators and missionaries alike. Torn between feelings of patriotic loyalty to their nation and broader sentiments of ‘white solidarity’ with their fellow colonials, the majority in the colonial society and the local press hoped that the African colonies would remain neutral. As the Deutschostafrikanische Zeitung wrote: In principle it would be deeply regrettable if a war were unleashed here in Africa in which whites and natives would fight side by side against each other; we cannot hide the fact that this will undermine the foundations of European rule in Africa and destroy moral values which can never be reconstructed. (Es wäre ja im Princip tief zu bedauern, wenn hier in Afrika ein Krieg entfesselt würde, in dem auf beiden Seiten Weiße und Eingeborene Seite an Seite gegeneinander kämpfen würden; wir können uns nicht verhehlen, daß man damit beginnt, die Grundlagen europäischer Herrschaft in Afrika zu untergraben, und moralische Werte zu vernichten, die überhaupt nicht wieder einzubringen sind.)18 Similarly, the Usambara Post declared that the colony should stand dutifully by its fatherland, but also that ‘true patriotism is neither shown in ill-considered action, nor expressed in senseless and useless death, but its opposite’, by protecting the economic value of the colony (wahrer Patriotismus besteht nicht in unüberlegten Handeln, äußert sich nicht in sinn- und nutzlosen Draufgehen, sondern in dessen Gegenteil).19 Likewise, in German Southwest Africa, Südwest declared that ‘abandoning work that is necessary in the general interest, to enlist unsolicited, is also a kind of damnable desertion!’ (Ungebeten und ungerufen aber die im Allgemeininteresse notwendige Arbeit zu verlassen, ist auch eine Art verdammungswürdiger Fahnenflucht!).20 These concerns were generally shared by the civilian authorities in all colonial capitals, which only reluctantly followed the military commanders and prepared their colonies for active war. Despite the arguments against war presented by the German colonial press, one should not mistake these for expressions of pacifist sentiment.21 Pacifism and colonialism were unlikely bedfellows, even in peaceful times. In times of crisis, nearly all Europeans relied on, and expected, swift and harsh military action against any real or perceived enemy. The typical enemy in a colonial context was, however, the ‘black’ and not a fellow white. As such, the demands to keep the colonies out of the war can be seen to be rooted in the strong desire to keep the colonial order intact, rather than opposition to war per se.

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In the first weeks of the war, the newspapers played an important role in managing the deep-rooted fear among the German colonials that an uprising of the colonised would be unavoidable should the German colonies be threatened by an external enemy. The experience of the brutal Herero War in German Southwest Africa and the Maji Maji War in German East Africa fought just ten years previously against the African population was still very much alive.22 Articles containing stories about the loyalty and devotion of African staff to their German employers appeared, reassuring the white population that while the world at large might be in turmoil, the colonial order remained intact. On the other hand, the papers also reminded readers about the importance of keeping their staff on the payroll, despite the difficult and uncertain economic circumstances, in order to avoid discontent among the Africans.23 However, when the feared revolts did not materialise, the papers no longer discussed the topic of the African population with any regularity, and if they did, they positively stressed the faithfulness of the African soldiers and servants.24 With concerns regarding the Africans’ loyalty largely settled, the two newspapers in German East Africa, and by implication their readers, were mostly concerned about the colony’s sizeable Indian population.25 Given that the attempted – but failed – British conquest of the colony in November 1914 was largely carried out by troops shipped in from India, questions regarding the loyalty of local Indians, who were mostly British subjects, created a flurry of letters to both papers. These letters either asked that ‘the authorities sharply prohibit any attempt by the foreign [Indian] inhabitants, who derive extraordinary profit through unjustified price gouging’ (daß behördlicherseits jeden Versuch der landfremden Einwohner, etwa aus der jetzigen schweren Lage durch unberechtigte Preistreibereien außergewöhnlichen Nutzen zu ziehen, ganz besonders scharf entgegengetreten wird) or even demanded the outright ‘expulsion of the Indians, those vampires that pollute the colony’ (die Heraustreibung der Inder, dieser das Land verseuchenden Vampire).26 Yet others pointed out that the Indians ‘suffer under England’s whip’ (unter der Knute Englands) and that Germany should seize the opportunity to show the Indians that ‘they are treated better here than in their English homeland’ (daß sie bei uns besser als in ihrer englischen Heimat behandelt werden) to gain their support.27 In parallel, the papers regularly published notices of donations made by the Indian community in German East Africa to the German war effort. Even though no article or letter by an Indian resident was published during the war, their presence in the public domain was nonetheless revealed on the pages of the newspapers. Thus, the colonial press provided an outlet for discourse and debate over the Indians’ place in the colony, reflecting an ambiguity that already existed before the war and that became more pronounced after August 1914.

Cultural Mobilisation in Africa As in Europe, newspapers played an active role in cultural mobilisation and the transformation of the civil society into a war society.28 Similar to what occurred in the newspapers in Germany, where some ten thousand poems were published within the first few months of the war, all colonial newspapers received and published a flurry of poems written by their readers.29 While the papers aimed to cover the news of the military mobilisation in a factual and dispassionate style, these poems formed a counterbalance with their bombastically patriotic language. All appear to have been written

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by men, some of whom sent regular contributions. To provide one short, representative example from a reader-poet in German Southwest Africa: Encircled by enemies, in distant Africa Surrounded with deceit, no help near or far. But here no German heart gets weak We stand as firm as ore for the Reich. (Von Feinden rings beenget, im fernen Afrika Mit Hinterlist umstellt, kein Hilfe fern und nah. Doch zittert hier kein deutsches Herz Wir sehn für’s Reich so fest wie Erz.)30 The themes of masculine determination, duty and loyalty to colony and fatherland, as well as the blood of fallen German soldiers soaked in the African soil, recur in nearly all the poems that were published by the papers. Through poems, letters to the editor and editorials, togetherness and manliness were regularly promulgated as the duty of every German resident of the colony. Contrasting to the concept of colonial masculinity is, of course, the role of white women in Africa. The colonial image of the European woman has always existed between two somewhat contradictory poles. Women were foremost a symbol of civilisation (or in the German case Kultur), but they were also signifiers of the danger and sacrifice that Europeans were suffering in Africa: a delicate body exposed to a harsh climate and environment and the fear of an African attack both in physical and sexual form. Newspapers were full of stories, both real and fictionalised, of the vulnerability of European women in the harsh African landscape.31 As a result of war, the majority of white men – in both German East and German Southwest Africa – had to leave the towns, farms or plantations for military training or service at the front. Gender roles shifted accordingly, with women becoming responsible for managing farms and businesses and supervising their African staff. In one of the few articles written by a colonial woman during the war, this shift in roles is not addressed directly. Instead, the author stresses the pragmatism expected of colonial women, her sacrifice for the war effort and foremost her acceptance of the patriarchal hierarchy: Are we women today worthy of living in these great times? Or have our nerves and our education made us the caricature of a German woman? [. . .] Most of the women here in the colonies are definitely German women who know how to live in great, difficult times, who take care of their children, house and yard, seriously and courageously, according to the circumstances of the time. Most women whose husbands have not yet joined up [. . .] cannot suppress a slight feeling of shame that their own husbands are still walking in civilian clothes: the feeling that in these times a man belongs on the front is too strong and natural [. . .] The best woman is one who is not talked about [. . .] So, let’s stay brave – and quiet! (Sind wir Frauen von heute wert in einer großen Zeit zu leben? – sind wir zeitgemäß? – oder haben unsere Nerven und unsere Bildung uns zum Zerrbild einer deutschen Frau gemacht? [. . .] Die meisten Frauen hier im Schutzgebiet sind durchaus deutsche Frauen,

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die in großer schwerer Zeit zu leben verstehen, die ernst und mutig, den Verhältnissen der Zeit entsprechend, für ihre Kinder, für Haus und Hof sorglich schalten und walten. Auch die meisten Frauen, deren Männer noch nicht eingezogen sind [. . .] können ein leises Schamgefühl nicht unterdrücken, daß ihre eigenen Männer noch im Kleide des Bürgers gehen: das Gefühl: in dieser Zeit gehört der Mann ins Feld – ist zu stark und natürlich [. . .] Die beste Frau ist die, von der man am wenigsten spricht! [. . .] Seien wir also mutig – und still!)32 The German residents of both East Africa and Southwest Africa were able to celebrate unexpected military successes in autumn 1914. In the battles of Tanga and Sandfontein respectively, German forces were able to repel an Allied occupation. Despite these victories, morale in both German colonies was declining when it became clear that the war in Europe would not be ‘over by Christmas’ and when a decisive German triumph on the Western Front did not materialise. The feeling of being ‘cut off’ from Germany and the world, with only sporadic postal contact via neighbouring neutral Portuguese colonies, heightened the sentiment among many colonials of being neglected or ignored by their compatriots in Germany. This trope of disregard by the fatherland featured regularly in the colonial press before the war, often with a defiant tone. The war and the threatening situation called for a milder tone, however, stressing reassuringly that Germany and its colonies were fighting together in this global conflict. In the 1914 Christmas issue of Südwest this emphasis on inseparability becomes very clear: The icy floods of the North Sea, like the tepid waves of the tropical sea, the African steppe, like the ground in France and the swamps in Poland have become the grave of many a German man [. . .] A sacrifice on the altar of the people, of the fatherland and – ultimately – a sacrifice for the necessary penetration of the world with a German spirit. The fatherland may well demand such sacrifices for a higher purpose, but at home in quiet rooms, in farmhouses, in castles in Germany, in Tsingtau, in East Africa, in Cameroon, in Togo and here in German Southwest, the bereaved cry bitter, bitter tears. (Doch die eisigen Fluten der Nordsee, wie die laue Woge des Tropenmeeres, der afrikanischen Steppe, wie der Boden in Frankreich und die Sümpfe in Polen sind das Grab so manchem deutschen Mannes geworden [. . .] Ein Opfer auf dem Altar des Volkstumes, des Vaterlandes und letzten Endes ein Opfer für die notwendige Durchdringung der Welt mit deutschem Geist. Wohl darf das Vaterland solche Opfer des höheren Zweckes wegen fordern, doch daheim in stiller Kammer, in Bauernhäusern, in Schlössern Deutschlands, in Tsingtau, in Ostafrika, in Kamerun, in Togo und hier im deutschen Südwest, da weinen die Hinterbliebenen bittere, bittere Tränen.)33 By embedding the colonies in a concept of a ‘greater Germany’, the newspapers created reassurance for their readers, even though the fate of the colonies would be decided by the fate of Germany as a whole. Even with the threat of local military defeat – as witnessed in Togo and Kamerun – the colonies should be regarded as an integral part of the nation-state. Combined with the theme of German blood that had soaked the

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African soil in previous wars and in the current war, these African lands had to be regarded as German land. Nature – rather than culture – became the bond that linked all parts of Germany together.

African-language Newspapers As has been already noted, the newspapers discussed so far were produced by and for European colonials. As such, they provide an exclusively European view of the issues and events surrounding the disruptive time of war in the colonies. It is impossible to assess whether and how much of this content was read by the colonised population, and how they might have reacted to the discourses running through the European press. Newspapers for Africans were mostly mission-run and controlled, and therefore also reflected European interests, even though most of the journalistic staff were African.34 But as they were published in indigenous languages they drew on an increasing number of African contributors. The tendency of these papers to steer clear of ‘political topics’ changed with the outbreak of war. Regular updates on the successes of German troops in Europe appeared on their pages. It is unclear how much the government was aware of these papers or able to use them as active propaganda tools. As they were typically printed on cheap paper, unfortunately nearly no issues have survived. This is also true for the only explicit propaganda paper published in German colonial Africa during the war: a newspaper for the East African troops which appeared in Swahili.35 Unfortunately, as none of the issues survived, we do not know about its scope and content. An exception to the general picture of mission-owned papers for the African population is the first secular newspaper Kiongozi (The Leader), which was launched in 1904 at the Government School in Tanga in German East Africa and appeared in Swahili.36 The school, as the colony’s first state-run and secular educational institution, aimed to produce Swahili-speaking African bureaucrats to facilitate colonial administration and commercial trade in the territory. Kiongozi was intended to support this by being a source of information for Africans and to promote government agendas. It was subsidised by the government and, after acquiring a high-speed press in 1905, issues were released monthly. It reached a print run of 3,000 copies and became the most influential newspaper of the period as it crossed religious lines in reaching both Christian and Muslim readers. Hilde Lemke, in her doctoral thesis of 1929, mentions a private collection of the war issues of several African-language papers held in Berlin. However, these have subsequently been lost, leaving only a poem by Ramazan Saidi which appeared in Kiongozi in February 1915 and which was reprinted by Lemke with a German translation.37 Titled ‘Kwa Siku Kuu ya Kaiser Wetu’ (For Our Great Kaiser Day) it contains in ten verses an overview of the events of the war combining traditional Swahili poetry with colonial propaganda. The themes that appear in this poem appear to reflect the general stand the newspapers took on the war, mirroring the propaganda themes established by the colonial government. The first stanza stresses that the war was being forced on Germany from the outside and that Britain was the aggressor:

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August ni mwanzo, wa kuenezewa vita. Yakatujia mawazo, nyoyo zetu zikijuta. Adui mzo kwa mzo, kuja kwetu kutupita. Mungu atawalani, kwa baa la kujitakia. [. . .] Wangereza wasikiri, araza ya jermani. Walizani mahodari, jamii ulimwenguni. Kumbe, ni chao kiburi, pambo lao mwilini. Mungu atawalani, kwa baa la kujitakia. (In August was the beginning of the spread of the war Realisation came to us while our hearts regretted it Very many enemies came to conquer us God will curse them for the misery that they created. The English failed to heed the Germans’ warning Regarding themselves the world’s most capable Yet it is only their haughtiness that decorates their bodies God will curse them for the misery that they created.) When celebrating early German military successes in an attack on neighbouring British East Africa (present-day Kenya), the just cause of the war and the theme of punishment are central: Wadachi wakauzika, wakaanza kuwapiga: Taveta wakaiteka, pamwe na muji wa Vanga Hata Gasi wamefika, mnyororo kuwatunga. Mungu atawalani, kwa baa la kujitakia. (The Germans were angry and began to fight They captured Taveta and the town of Vanga; They also reached Gasi, shackled and chained [prisoners] God will curse them for the misery that they created.) The poem ends by praising and celebrating the Kaiser, stressing his might: Kaiser wetu mpole, mshujaa wa wadachi. Uishi wewe milele, jamia kila nchi. Kokote utawale, uzistawishe nchi. Siku yako kufika, salam nakuletea. (Our gentle, dear Kaiser, hero of the Germans, May you live forever, in every land. May you rule everywhere, and let the lands bloom. Your birthday has come, I bring you my greetings.) It is unfortunate that it is impossible to dig deeper into the early print culture of German colonial Africa. Yet, as is clear from this poem, the range of acceptable topics and the

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interpretation of current events were very limited for African journalists and writers in the German colonies – more so than in British or French territories and more so in times of war than in peace.38

Conquest and the End of German Colonial Africa The German-language newspapers initially played an important part in managing the occupation by Allied troops in German Southwest Africa in 1915 and in German East Africa in 1916. As the enemy troops arrived on horseback or marching on foot, the editors mostly had an opportunity to publish a final issue the day before the handover of power. Among these, the most pointed is the last editorial of Südwest in May 1915, in which the German population of Windhoek was reassured not to fear the British, ‘who are not Russians or French without discipline, but a related Germanic cultural nation’ (keine Russen oder disziplinlose Franzosen seien, sondern eine verwandte germanische Kulturnation).39 This editorial acknowledged the good treatment that the civilian population had received from the troops in other occupied towns and encouraged readers’ cooperation with the military. However, it also warned against fraternising and predicted only a short occupation that would be ended by an imminent German victory in Europe. Yet in both German Southwest and German East Africa, the Allied conquest meant the end of the independent German-language newspapers. However, the military occupation did not mean an absolute halt to newspaper publishing for the remainder of the war. In German Southwest Africa the South African military authorities allowed Der Kriegsbote (1916–19) to be published. Heavily censored, this thin paper contained mainly German translations of foreign articles and very short news items from the colony, yet it signalled the lenient attitude of the South African occupiers towards the white German population. In German East Africa, with its significantly smaller German population, the British occupiers saw no need for any German-language papers, especially as they were still fighting against German forces in a remote part of the colony. Yet in September 1916, British troops published the first newspaper after the German defeat, The Morogoro News (1916), a typical soldiers’ newspaper. The leading article of the first edition was dedicated to the ‘liberation’ of Morogoro and stressed the peaceful transfer of power between two white colonial powers: There was none of the ‘Hoch! Hoch!! Hoch!!!’ effervescence, familiar to readers of German jubilatory speeches, nothing, indeed, that even deserved the epithet ‘bad taste’, much less rape and pillage; in fact the defeated were treated much in the same spirit as the unsuccessful opponents in a football or cricket match – and the town breathed a deep sigh of relief.40 The Morogoro News contained humorous poems, sketches and practical information for soldiers, but disappeared after only five issues. More successful was Doings (1917–18), which was published by the ‘Motor Transport Depot’ in Dar es Salaam for fifteen issues.41 It contained, like other soldier newspapers, genre-typical stories about military adventures or conflicts between soldiers and officers, but also contributions on European–African relations. The articles stressed the racial hierarchy, with the Africans depicted as intellectually inferior and unreliable. The last issue of Doings,

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which appeared in December 1918 and provided a sentimental perspective on the war, is an example of a reaffirmation of white supremacy which sidelined the contribution of African soldiers and minimised their suffering along with that of African civilians. The end of the war and the transition of the four territories from German colonies to League of Nations Mandates run by victorious Entente powers did not mark the end of German-language newspapers in Africa. The returning German mission societies were allowed to produce their own publications, and in Southwest Africa the wartime Der Kriegsbote became the Allgemeine Zeitung, which is still published in Windhoek today.

Conclusion The First World War marked the end of Germany as colonial power. Across the four territories in Africa, this transfer of power did little to change the lives of the ordinary African population, lives that were still defined by colonial structures. But the white German colonials felt the change deeply: to be defeated by a fellow colonial power, and to be expelled from the colonial sphere, was experienced as a personal and national humiliation. This humiliation was immediately mythologised and utilised by right-wing politicians and organisations, which made colonial revisionism an important political narrative for the interwar years. The study of colonial newspapers across this important period not only provides important insights into the cultural dynamics of mobilising the colonies for war; the themes presented in the press also provide a window into the intersection of colonialism and militarism, an intersection that made the First World War much more than a conflict between national powers but also a war for ‘civilisation’ itself.

Notes   1. Melvin E. Page, ed., Africa and the First World War (London: Macmillan, 1987); Hew Strachan, The First World War in Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Bill Nasson, ‘More Than Just von Lettow-Vorbeck: Sub-Saharan Africa in the First World War’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 40, no. 2 (2014): 160–83.   2. Adolf Dresler, Die deutschen Kolonien und die Presse (Würzburg: Triltsch, 1942), 18.   3. Gallus, ‘Die afrikanische Presse’, Zeitschrift für Kolonialpolitik, Kolonialrecht und Kolonialwirtschaft 10 (1908): 789–842; Fritz Lange, ‘Zur Geschichte des Pressewesens in den deutschen Kolonien’, Zeitungswissenschaft 4 (1929): 355–8; Hilde Lemke, ‘Die SuaheliZeitungen und -Zeitschriften in Deutsch-Ostafrika’, PhD thesis, University of Leipzig, 1929; Dietrich Redeker, Journalismus in Deutsch-Ostafrika 1899–1916. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Presse in den frühren deutschen Kolonien (Frankfurt am Main: Diesterweg, 1937); Dresler, Die deutschen Kolonien und die Presse.  4. Rainer Pöppinghege, ‘“Mit mittelmässigen Geistesgaben und Vorkenntnissen ausgerüstet”: Über das Verhältnis von kaiserlichen Behörden und Presse in den deutschen Kolonien, 1898 bis 1914’, Jahrbuch für Kommunikationsgeschichte 3 (2001): 157–69. For the German colonies in the Pacific, see Dirk H. R. Spennemann, ‘Government Publishing in the German Pacific, 1885–1914’, The Journal of Pacific History 52, no. 1 (2017): 68–95. For a particularly heated conflict, see Heike I. Schmidt, ‘Colonial Intimacy: The Rechenberg Scandal and Homosexuality in German East Africa’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 17, no. 1 (2008): 25–59. For a comparison, see Andreas Osterhaus, Europäischer Terraingewinn in Schwarzafrika.

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  5.

  6.

 7.   8.   9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

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Das Verhältnis von Presse und Verwaltung in sechs Kolonien Deutschlands, Frankreichs und Großbritanniens von 1894 bis 1914 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1990). Corinna Schäfer, ‘The Right to Write in German Colonies of the Early Twentieth Century: Pugnacious Settler Newspapers, Anxious Governors and African Journalism in Exile’, Cultural and Social History 15, no. 5 (2018): 681–98; Corinna Schäfer, ‘Discursive Colonialism: German Settler Communities, Their Media and Infrastructure in Africa, 1898–1914’, in Representing Communities. Discourse and Contexts, ed. Ruth Sanz Sabido (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 77–93. Two exceptions are the excellent Martin Sturmer, The Media History of Tanzania (Mtwara: Ndanda Mission, 1998), based on Martin Sturmer, Sprachpolitik und Pressegeschichte in Tanzania (Vienna: Afro-Pub, 1995); and Carsten von Nahmen, Deutschsprachige Medien in Namibia: Vom Windhoeker Anzeiger zum Deutschen Hörfunkprogramm der Namibian Broadcasting Corporation: Geschichte, Bedeutung und Funktion der deutschsprachigen Medien in Namibia, 1898–1998 (Windhoek: Namibia Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft, 2001). Krista Molly O’Donnell, ‘“The public danger of rumor-mongering”: News in German Colonial South West Africa during the First World War’, Journal of Namibian Studies 19 (2016): 69–89. Anne Rasmussen, ‘Mobilising Minds’, in The Cambridge History of the First World War, Vol. III, ed. Jay Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 390–417. Pöppinghege, ‘Über das Verhältnis von kaiserlichen Behörden und Presse’. Schäfer, ‘The Right to Write in German Colonies’; Schäfer, ‘Discursive Colonialism’. Rasmussen, ‘Mobilising Minds’, 392. Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth and Mobilization in Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Catriona Pennell, A Kingdom United: Popular Responses to the Outbreak of the First World War in Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Daniel Steinbach, ‘Defending the Heimat. The Germans in South-West Africa and East Africa during the First World War’, in Untold War: New Perspectives in First World War Studies, ed. Heather Jones, Jennifer O’Brien and Christoph Schmidt-Supprian (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 179–208. ‘Deutschland im Kriege’, Südwest, 4 August 1914. Access to the archives was not possible because of the Covid-19 pandemic. The author was unable to trace page numbers for quotations taken from colonial newspapers. ‘Europa in Flammen’, Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Zeitung, 12 August 1914. Steinbach, ‘Defending the Heimat’; Kent Forster, ‘The Quest for East African Neutrality in 1914’, African Studies Review 22, no. 1 (1979): 73–82. For a general overview, see Michael Adas, ‘Contested Hegemony. The Great War and the Afro-Asian Assault on the Civilizing Mission Ideology’, Journal of World History 15, no. 1 (2004): 31–63. ‘Der Krieg in den Kolonien’, Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Zeitung, 19 August 1914. ‘Vom Weltkrieg’, Usambara Post, 15 August 1914. ‘Die Pflichten des Farmers’, Südwest, 14 August 1914. Forster, ‘The Quest for East African Neutrality in 1914’; Thomas Morlang, ‘“Keine Schonung”. Der Naulila-Zwischenfall und die deutsche Strafexpedition gegen das neutrale Portugiesisch-Angola 1914/15’, Militärgeschichte NF 8, no. 3 (1998): 43–8. For a discussion of the military press and these wars, see Susanne Kuss, German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 233–60. See ‘Die Pflichten des Farmers’. ‘An die deutschen Frauen im Schutzgebiet über unsere deutsche Sprache im Umgang mit den Eingeborenen’, Südwest, 22 March 1915.

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25. John Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 240–72. 26. ‘Eingesandt’, Usambara Post, 5 December 1914; Franz Ranninger, ‘Zur Frage der Behandlung der Inder und der anderen englischen Untertanen’, Usambara Post, 24 December 1914. 27. Franz Ranninger, ‘Behandlung der Inder’, ‘Maßnahmen gegen Inder’, Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Zeitung, 30 December 1914. 28. For the concept of cultural mobilisation, see John Horne, ed., State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 29. For an overview, see Elizabeth A. Marsland, The Nation’s Cause: French, English and German Poetry of the First World War (London: Routledge, 1991). 30. Peter Peters, ‘Die Landsturmreiter von Süd-West’, Südwest, 1 December 1914. 31. Lora Wildenthal, ‘“She is the Victor”: Bourgeois Women, Nationalist Identities and the Ideal of the Independent Farmer in German Southwest Africa’, in Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870–1930, ed. Geoff Eley (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 371–95. 32. ‘Der deutschen Frau’, Südwest, 8 April 1915. 33. ‘Weihnacht’, Südwest, 24 December 1914. 34. Sturmer, The Media History of Tanzania, 38–41; Lemke, ‘Die Suaheli-Zeitungen und -Zeitschriften in Deutsch-Ostafrika’, 65–6. 35. Katrin Bromber, Imperiale Propaganda: Die ostafrikanische Militärpresse im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Berlin: Zentrum Moderner Orient, 2009), 79–81. 36. For a recent study, see Fabian Krautwald, ‘The Bearers of News: Print and Power in German East Africa’, Journal of African History 62, no. 1 (2021): 5–28. 37. Lemke, ‘Die Suaheli-Zeitungen und -Zeitschriften in Deutsch-Ostafrika’, 46–8. 38. For an example from the Gold Coast, see Stephanie Newell, ‘Newspapers, New Spaces, New Writers: The First World War and Print Culture in Colonial Ghana’, Research in African Literatures 40, no. 2 (2009): 1–15. 39. ‘Der Einmarsch der Briten in Windhuk’, Südwest, 3 May 1915. 40. Morogoro News, 11 November 1916. 41. See also ‘Doings’, in Cultural Exchange in a Time of Global Conflict, , accessed 24 April 2022.

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26 India Santanu Das

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ntimations of a global war reached Ramji Lal, a civil servant in Punjab, India’s main recruiting ground for its soldiers, through a local newspaper. On 29 July 1914 he wrote in his diary: ‘Read the [English-language daily] Panjabee. There is fear of war between Austria and Serbia.’1 The next day, the Urdu-language Zamindar, the largest Lahore daily, prophesied with a combination of trepidation and relish: War will not be confined to Austria and Serbia but will be a universal war in which all the great empires of Europe will be involved; for having partitioned Asia and Africa, they have no hunting grounds left, and will now descend into the arena and hunt each other. The result of it all will be that the giant which has so far been ruining Asia will now be engaged in ruining himself; the materials of war which have so far been used to destroy Orientals will now be employed in the destruction of Europeans.2 Four years later, as the Paris peace talks began, Ramji Lal’s illustrious friend, the prominent nationalist Lala Lajpat Rai (1865–1928) who had left for the United States in 1917 – published on the first page of his influential journal Young India a map of the world: India, Ireland, Korea, parts of Southeast Asia and almost all of Africa were shaded black and termed ‘dependencies’; for South Africa, he wrote ‘Nominally republic; Whites free; natives dependent.’ The map was titled: ‘Here Are the Oppressed Nations of the World; What Will the Peace Conference Do for Them [. . .] Europe is not the only place that is to be made safe for democracy.’3 The majority of India’s population might have been non-literate but the country was a textual battlefield, with one of the most diverse, cosmopolitan and vibrant periodical cultures anywhere in the world. Of all the colonies of the French, German and British empires, undivided India (comprising present-day Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Myanmar) contributed the highest number of men for the war effort. Between August 1914 and December 1919, it recruited 1.5 million men and sent overseas 622,224 soldiers and 474,789 non-combatants, who served in places as diverse as the Western Front, East Africa, Mesopotamia, Persia and Gallipoli.4 In the ‘global’ turn in First World War studies, attention has focused rather narrowly, if powerfully, on the Indian soldiers or ‘sepoys’ on the Western Front almost as an extension of ‘European history’ (since they were largely non-literate, there was no trench print culture around them, as with the Wipers Times, though a number of European and British journals feverishly charted their progress). On the other hand, if we shift the focus to periodical culture in wartime India, our lens immediately expands from the Eurocentric conflation of the First World War with trench combat to a global

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conflict which resonated in the furthest reaches of the empire with a very different set of concerns: political, sociocultural, economic, literary. It should be acknowledged at the outset that periodicals, even in vernacular forms, were largely limited to the educated middle classes and urban centres, even if the textual and the oral often intersected and occasionally infiltrated village communities. In recent years there has been interest in the history of early printing and periodical culture in colonial India.5 If printing was introduced to India by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, it was Augustus Hickey, an idiosyncratic Irishman, who printed the first newspaper – the Bengal Gazette, Or Original Calcutta Advertiser, a two-sheet newspaper with a print run of 200 – in Calcutta on 29 January 1780. It was soon followed by a clutch of other English newspapers. An early lead in vernacular, particularly Bengali, periodicals was provided by the establishment of a printing press in 1800 in Shrirampur, a small Danish enclave in Bengal, which soon became one of the most important centres of print in South Asia. In their excellent article, ‘The Newspaper and Periodical Press in Colonial India’, Deeptanil Ray and Abhijit Gupta provide a succinct account of the next hundred years in the career of periodicals: Printing in the Indian subcontinent was introduced by Portuguese missionaries; later, newspapers in the Indian languages were the preferred vehicles of the Christian missionaries for introducing the ‘civilising mission’ project to the native populations. The press policy of the East India Company, and later the Crown, was a mixture of pragmatic situational deterrents and a general view of newspapers and periodicals as natural appendages to imperial authority, culture and control in the colony, without the need for sustained intervention. As we will see, during the early half of the nineteenth century, the native newspapers and periodicals thrived [. . .] because they set about to pursue their own ethnocentric religious and social agenda with the tools borrowed from the European printers.6 If Ray and Gupta focus on the proliferation of periodicals in Bengal, scholars such as N. G. Barrier have examined their career in Punjab, showing how, at the turn of the century, 186 vernacular newspapers and periodicals were being published in this province in a variety of languages, particularly Urdu.7 While the vernacular newspapers in the nineteenth century concerned themselves with sociocultural and religious issues, they became largely political at the turn of the century with the rise of a range of anti-colonial and nationalist imaginaries, from the Marathi-language Kesari and English-language Mahratta, to the Tamil-nationalist Swadeshimitram and the Bengalilanguage Sandhya, to the English-language Bande Mataram founded by Aurobindo Ghosh (1872–1950), to whom we shall return.8 As Britain declared war on 4 August 1914, Lord Hardinge (1858–1944), the Viceroy of India, declared that India too was at war. There was widespread support, from the princely native states to political parties, including the Indian National Congress leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) and the middle-class bourgeoisie. Dailies, weeklies, monthlies, gazettes, journals and magazines buzzed with excitement. ‘On the question of loyalty to the British Government all people are united’, declared the Tribune from Lahore, while the Calcutta-based Amrita Bazaar Patrika softened its anti-colonial stance and reported ‘spontaneous expressions of loyalty’.9 Articles in the monthly Indian Review cried in unison: the ‘key to the

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whole situation is Loyalty’.10 Even the ‘extremist’ nationalist leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1853–1920) issued a pledge of ‘loyalty’ in October 1914 in the pages of the Mahratta, adding that ‘Indian hearts will be thrilled to know that Indian troops have landed in France’, while, later in the war, the recruitment speeches of Mahatma Gandhi would be printed in the Bombay Chronicle: ‘Voluntary recruiting is a key to Swaraj and will give us honour and manhood.’11 However, not all Indian periodicals were limited to the territorial confines of India: they ranged from the British propagandist bulletin Akbari I Jang produced to boost the morale of the Indian sepoys on the Western Front to exercises in German counter-propaganda, such as the camp newspaper Hindostan, published in Hindi and Urdu between April and August 1915 for South Asian prisoners of war in Wünsdorf and Zossen camps in Germany, a collaborative act between the German Foreign Office and members of the revolutionary India Independence Committee based in Berlin.12 More widespread and powerful was the incendiary San Francisco-based weekly Ghadr (meaning ‘rebellion’ or ‘mutiny’), the mouthpiece of the revolutionary ‘Ghadr’ movement started in 1913 by a group of socialist and anti-colonial Indian migrants, largely Sikhs, based in North America. It published poems and songs, later collected into the wartime Ghadr ki Gunj (1916). ‘Oh men in arms why are you supporting my oppressors’, queries ‘Mother India’ in a poem called ‘The Cry of the Motherland to her Soldiers’, first published in 1914.13 The present chapter is not meant to be a ‘history’ or even a ‘survey’ of Indian wartime periodicals. Instead, it focuses on a few, selected periodicals amid hundreds published in India to provide a taste of what lay within their pages: to examine the intensity and expansiveness of their arguments; to showcase their capacious range and cosmopolitan sympathies; and to investigate the ways they tunnel into, intervene in and above all evoke the various cross-currents on the Indian home front. I focus on three groups: a selection of Punjabi newspapers, read alongside a recruitment gazette; three elite English-language journals; and, finally, a number of post-war Bengali periodicals which published the first accounts of the Indian war experience in Mesopotamia. Together, they bridge the gap between high and low culture, the regional and the (inter)national, the imperial and the anti-colonial. Does colonial periodical culture put pressure on the very conceptualisation of the ‘wartime periodical’, as it flourished in Europe? Does it reorient our understanding of the now conventional sepoy-centric understandings of ‘India and the First World War’? When does a periodical become a ‘war periodical’ or, to ask the question differently, what does a war periodical, like a war poem, contain beyond the war?

The Punjabi Public Sphere: Newspapers and Gazettes Of the over one million Indians who served abroad, some 480,000 came from Punjab.14 This was because of the prevalence of the ‘martial race theory’ – a combination of Victorian racial ideology and political strategy – which deemed that only particular ethnic groups were ‘warlike’ and could thus be allowed to join the army. Consequently, discourses around the war took on a particular intensity here. At the same time, Punjab also had a burgeoning periodical culture. In the excellent introduction to his selection of Punjabi newspapers, War News in India: The Punjabi Press During World War I, Andrew Tate Jarboe notes how the main cities in Punjab

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boasted a variety of English, Urdu and Gurmukhi language newspapers at the outbreak of the war. Lahore was the epicentre of this industry, where readers could choose from more than seventy titles in August 1914. That same month, Amritsar housed no fewer than twenty-eight newspapers, Rawalpindi had at least seven and Jullunder offered three.15 In fact, it was in the offices of Lahore’s largest Britishowned daily, the Civil and Military Gazette, that Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) had his apprenticeship. In 1914 the two most popular Urdu-language newspapers in Lahore were the daily Zamindar and the weekly Hindustan, each with a circulation of 15,000; there were also dailies with smaller circulations, such as the Indian-owned English-language Tribune and Panjabee, and a range of vernacular periodicals.16 The newspapers were subject to intense colonial surveillance from 1896, with articles collected, translated and commented upon by the Criminal Investigation Department; a compilation of these translated extracts today helps us to reconstruct this rich periodical culture. During the war years, the Punjab government could additionally shut down particular newspapers under a battery of anti-sedition laws, including the wartime Defence of India Act, passed in March 1915.17 Some newspapers openly protested, as did the Zamindar on 8 March 1916, about the ‘deplorable restrictions’ which included being ‘forbidden to publish translations, extracts and comments of all kinds relating to the war, except the telegrams sent by Reuters Agency and Secretary of State’.18 However, many of the newspapers were feisty organs which refused to be silenced. By 1917 the Criminal Intelligence Department had classified Panjabee as ‘Hindu, advanced nationalist’, the bi-weekly Observer as ‘Muhammedan, All-India Muslim Leaguer’ and Desh as ‘Hindu, sectarian with Arya leanings’, even though all these newspapers were pro-British and pledged their support for the war.19 It is important to note that the periodicals were largely an urban phenomenon and had a limited presence in the non-literate rural areas, which had a robust oral culture. However, the textual and the oral interacted in complex ways: for example, the Lahore-based Paisa Akhbar had a weekly sale of 13,500 but the effective readership would have been higher as the newspapers would often be read out to the illiterate villagers.20 What these newspapers do is to plunge us into the daily variety and complexity of wartime discourses. While today we might wonder why India supported the imperial war effort, the newspapers reveal very different concerns: in 1914 the question was not so much whether India should join in the war effort as whether it would be allowed to do so. For a colour ban was in force which prevented non-white subjects from fighting against ‘white races’.21 ‘Will British statesmanship rise to the height of the occasion and permit India to do her duty to the Empire?’, asked the Panjabee on 8 August 1914.22 The end of racial discrimination rather than a nationalist agenda emerges as the immediate goal: ‘It is a step towards the eventual obliteration of existing racial prejudice, so essential to India’s self-fulfilment as a nation and an integral part of the Empire.’23 Nation and empire had not emerged as antithetical terms. While we sometimes retrospectively read a nationalist agenda behind India’s phenomenal war effort or insist on a sharp division between ‘empire’ and ‘nation’ in postcolonial discourses, what the historical archive of Punjabi periodicals reveals is a far more complex structure of feeling: the war, these newspapers suggest, caught the Indian national psyche at a fragile moment between

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a certain continuing loyalty to the empire and a burgeoning nationalist consciousness which had not yet defined itself in terms of a territorial nation-state. Elsewhere, I have called this the ‘imperialist-nationalist conjunction’.24 Consider the following extracts from the Panjabee and the Zamindar respectively: The question is one not so much of sending the Indian volunteers, as soon as they are recruited, to the front, as of enabling the Indian community to feel that they too can have their rightful share in the defence of the Empire [. . .] To them the question is, above everything else, one of national self-respect.25 The war has its advantages and disadvantages [. . .] Our sepoys who have gone to the front will see Europe with their own eyes. They will see European institutions and will see that there is no difference – except in colour – between Indians and Europeans. Their ideas will broaden and this will naturally have some effect on their fellow countrymen. We hail with joy the approaching day of our liberty and we feel that it is not far distant.26 ‘Psychological damage’, the postcolonial theorist Ashis Nandy has argued, was one of the most insidious features of colonialism.27 Rather than constantly being made to feel inferior before the ‘superior’ powers of the West, Indian battlefield experience in Europe was viewed by the educated middle classes as a way of salvaging racial and national pride, of removing the ‘wrong impression [. . .] that Indian soldiers are not equal to European soldiers’.28 Such sentiments were by no means limited to India. Thus, The Federalist and Grenada People in the West Indies noted in 1915: ‘As Coloured people we will be fighting [. . .] to prove to Great Britain that we are not so vastly inferior to the white.’29 What is remarkable about these newspapers is the way they move between different levels: the regional, the national and the global. Thus, a list of ‘fantastic rumours’ circulating in the countryside and published in the pages of the Amritsar-based Vakil takes us deep into the villages and its underworld of fears, anxieties and uncertainties: in November 1914 a fair in neighbouring Lucknow was reportedly disrupted by ‘German soldiers’; oral reports beset the villages in August 1915 that German soldiers had been carrying ‘syringes [. . .] filled half with air and half with oil’ which threw ‘a current of fire’, a reference to the gas attack at the Second Battle of Ypres on 22 April 1915 or the novel use of Flammenwerfer by the Germans.30 Without any reporting staff to provide first-hand accounts, reporting of the Indian combat experience on the Western Front, in Mesopotamia or in Gallipoli was severely limited or misinformed, dependent on Reuters, foreign newspapers and reports issued by the British and Indian governments, which heightened the sense of anxiety. While reports of rumours served as lightning rods into the half-articulate fears and fantasies of the rural folk, the newspapers reported with equal enthusiasm the Easter Rising of 1916 and the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and their ramifications for India’s self-rule. ‘The appetite Punjabi newspapers showed for reporting war news’, notes Jarboe, ‘ebbed and flowed between late 1914 and the close of 1918’; after 1917 the coverage increasingly moved from battlefront to discussions of Home Rule.31 On 12 April 1917, when Lloyd George commended America’s entry into the war, calling it a ‘struggle for freedom’, the English-language Tribune immediately seized upon it:

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People of India welcome this great speech of the British Premier [Lloyd George], on the value of democracy [. . .] The next question is that after the war this principle of freedom should be extended beyond Europe to Asia and Africa [. . .] Will they say that sugar tastes sweet in European mouths but will cause dyspepsia to Asiatics?32 If the ‘Wilsonian moment’ of 1918–19 provided a crucial impetus to the Indian nationalists, an analysis of the Punjabi press shows how such claims were deep in the making in the public sphere long before 1919.33 Along with such city newspapers, there existed a range of local periodicals that mined deeper into the local village culture. A prominent one was the Jat Gazette, a Punjabi weekly which was started in 1916. Here is a representative entry: 25 December, 1917 Recruitment drive at Rithal: A recruitment drive was held at Rithal (Tehsil: Gohana) which was attended not only by government officials but also Nambardars [heads], Zaildars, Safed-Posh, Kurshi-nasheen [chair-holders] and Zamindars [land-owners]: Molad Singh, hermit, played instrument and sang a folk song that narrated a tale of war. Bhagwan Das, teacher, encouraged youths to enlist for the war through a hymn. Officers too encouraged people to enlist in the army. People contributed the following for the wounded and other soldiers: 1 Chaudhari Sriram, Zaildar, Thaska Tobacco 2 Chaudhari Deshram, Rithal     " 3 Captain Gugan Singh Bahadur     "

– 38 packets – 4 packets – 1 packet34

Considered alongside images and posters from the Imperial War Museum, the Jat Gazette provides tantalising insights into the cultural and literary dimensions of war mobilisation: it tells us how local poets and singers were hired, performances were organised and it even prints some of the recruiting songs: Get enlisted, the recruits who stand out there, Here you get broken slippers, there you’ll get full boots, get enlisted, Here you get torn rags, there you’ll get suits, get enlisted, Here you get dry bread, there you’ll get biscuits, get enlisted, Here you’ll have to struggle, there you’ll get salutes, get enlisted.35 What we have is a direct appeal to the economic and social incentives of military service, without any mention of the imperial ‘loyalty’ or ‘gallantry’ which runs through poems printed in the same journal: ‘Duty’, ‘The Spirit of Bravery’, ‘The Flag-bearers of George V’ or ‘The Bravery of the Jats’.36 Even in a vernacular recruitment journal we have a discursive tension between the conceptualisation of First World War military service as a quasi-mercenary occupation and one prompted by imperial loyalty, which provides a new framework to understand sepoy experience and letters from the

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battlefront – neither an izzat-driven loyalist impulse nor an anti-colonial insurgent imaginary but with a more complex and needful relationship to military service which, above all, was a source of livelihood.

English-language Journals: India Review War Book, Indian Ink and Arya While the dailies evoke the texture of everyday debates, we seem to enter a more exclusive and specialised world with journals and magazines, from the important monthly English-language Modern Review and its Bengali cousin Prabasi, both established just before the war for the nationalist intelligentsia, to a variety of women’s magazines in vernacular languages.37 Here we consider three very different journals with strong links to the war – the monthly Indian Review from Madras, the annual Indian Ink: Splashes from Various Pens, published from Kolkata, and finally Arya: A Philosophical Review from Pondicherry.38 The first two were self-consciously elite publications and give fascinating insights into the complex nexus of colonial patronage, war and publishing in India; the third, as the title suggests, was a far more radical and intellectually ambitious enterprise. In 1915, all war-related articles from back issues of the monthly Indian Review, alongside war-related items and pieces freshly commissioned or selected from other periodicals, were compiled in a unique anthology, All About the War: The India Review War Book (IRWB). This remarkable 440-page anthology of periodical articles was published by G. A. Natesan & Co., one of the main publishing houses based in Madras, and was available at the price of four rupees. Described as ‘a comprehensive and authentic account of the War’, it was also one of the most compendious (Figures 26.1, 26.2, 26.3).39 In addition to the articles, the IRWB comprised ‘numerous illustrations, portraits, cartoons, maps and diagrams contributed by officers of the Indian Civil, Military and Medical Services, Ministers of Native States, Engineers, Educationalists, Journalists, Lawyers, Publicists and other Specialists’.40 This extraordinary range of contributors was matched by the equally extraordinary scope of the contributions. The ‘Detailed Contents’, which run into eight pages, list articles ranging from the philosophical (‘The War and Western Civilisation’, ‘What Is War? Will It Ever Cease’ and ‘Underlying Causes of the War’) to the military (‘Aircraft in War’, ‘Zeppelin’, ‘The Navies of the Powers’ and ‘The Use of Asphyxiating Gases’) and the political (‘The Vicissitudes of Belgium’, ‘Turkey and the War’, ‘Ireland and the War’ and ‘Why America is Neutral’) to the literary (‘The Poetry of the War’, ‘The Influence of War on Art’, ‘Nietzsche and the War’ and ‘A Dictionary of Military Terms’); it even has an article on ‘Women in War’ by ‘A Hindu Woman’. Unsurprisingly, the most interesting parts of the IRWB for us today are those that engage with the broad topic of ‘India and the war’, including an introductory preface by the editor G. A. Nateson (1873–1948). Here we revisit some of the arguments already witnessed in the pages of the Punjabi newspapers, particularly on the ‘imperialistnationalist conjunction’, but with some crucial differences: the contributors constitute a roll call of the most important decision makers, from Lord Pentland, the Governor of Madras (1860–1925) and Lord Crewe, Leader of the House of Lords (1858–1945), to nationalists such as Mahatma Gandhi, Annie Besant (1847–1933) and Surendranath

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Figure 26.1  Cover of All About the War: The Indian Review War Book.

Figure 26.2  Detailed contents page from All About the War. Banerjea (1848–1925). The IRWB shows most clearly how, among the educated elite and political bourgeoisie, Indian support for Britain was recast as one of liberalism against the forces of fascism, foregoing the contradictions of empire. Dadabhai Naorji (1825–1917) – a founding figure of the Indian National Congress and, in his words, ‘more of a critic than a simple praiser of the British rule in India’ – noted that ‘the vast

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Figure 26.3  Prominent men in All About the War.

mass of humanity of India will have but one desire in his heart viz. to support [. . .] the British people in their glorious struggle for justice, liberty and honour’.41 Similarly, Annie Besant, Irish theosophist, nationalist and founder of the ‘Home Rule’ movement in India during the war years, went a step further in saying that ‘when the war is over [. . .] we cannot doubt that the King-Emperor will, as reward for her glorious defence of the Empire, pin upon her breast the jewelled medal of Self-Government within the Empire’.42 The pages of the IRWB remind us how empire and nation had not yet defined themselves as antithetical terms: in fact, during the war years, the demand was not yet for purna swaraj or full independence but for greater self-representation and ‘Dominion’ status for India within the empire. The literary and artistic impulses of the IRWB find their realisation in Indian Ink: Splashes from Various Pens, published and printed by Messrs Thacker, Spink and Co. in Calcutta. Priced at Rs 1 and published annually, it was aimed at ‘the well-to-do and generous classes [. . .] to raise funds to relieve the distress caused by the war’.43 ‘A Record of Progress’ in 1916 claimed a readership of 20,000. Indian Ink was the quintessential colonial journal, with articles projecting a particularly idyllic vision of colonial ‘life in India’ where men recount their tales of derring-do and Kiplingesque adventures while the memsahibs write ‘The Truth about Darjeeling’.44 Yet the journal was remarkable for a number of reasons. First was its lavish production values. ‘When Indian Ink appeared for the first time’, the 1916 issue claims, ‘that first appearance marked a point of departure in Indian magazine production’ for its use of colour-plates on a ‘large and prodigal scale’.45 This was made possible through commercial advertising which created ‘a world record’: ‘we invited comparison with any periodical published anywhere in the world’.46 This issue is marked by 120 pages of advertising and some 44 pages are in colour, including photographs, war cartoons, sketches and paintings,

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with some of the most enduring visual material coming from prominent Indian painters such as Abanindranath Tagore (1871–1951) and Nandalal Bose (1882–1966). Second, it was possibly the only literary war journal with an Indo-British list of contributors: it remains a classic example of the collaboration and exchange between the ‘sahibs’ and ‘babus’ – the British colonial class and the upper echelons of Bengali society – showing how privileges of class, education and wealth trumped racial prejudice. Indian Ink contained much apart from the war, including travelogues, poems, science fiction and articles on Pathan honour, suttee and Tommy Atkins; the war-related works range from war elegies such as ‘The Tirailleur’, to poems such as ‘India to England’ in which the author, Shirley Hodginson, ventriloquises on behalf of Indian troops: ‘Proud Rajputs, gallant Gurkhas . . . / Thy soldiers are we, England’, a colonial literary device which culminated in Rudyard Kipling’s work of literary propaganda The Eyes of Asia (1917), in which he imagines himself to be an Indian soldier writing letters home extolling the virtues of Europe.47 The brightest star in Indian Ink was the Bengali writer and Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) who contributed four poems: ‘The Season’, ‘Verse’, ‘The Trumpet’ and ‘Crossing’. Of these, ‘The Trumpet’ was the most popular, first appearing in ‘War Poems from The Times’, which also included poems by Kipling and Thomas Hardy (1840–1928); it was reprinted as the first poem in the 1914 issue of Indian Ink. ‘The Trumpet’ begins with its discovery of a ‘trumpet’ (‘When I found thy trumpet lying the dust’). Rather surprisingly for the anti-war Tagore, he seemingly issues a call to arms (‘Come fighters carrying your flags’) and gradually reaches a crescendo: Sleep is no more for me – my walk shall be through the showers of arrows. Some shall run out of the houses and come to my side – some shall weep, Some in their beds shall toss and groan in dire dreams: For tonight thy trumpet shall be sounded. From thee I had asked peace only to find shame. Now I stand before thee – help me to don my armour! Let hard blows of trouble strike fire into my life Let my heart beat in pain – beating the drum of thy victory. My hands shall be utterly emptied to take up thy trumpet.48 The poem, when read alongside the heroic images on the front cover (that of the ‘martial’ Sikh sepoy [Figure 26.4]), neatly fits with the rhetoric of Indian ‘loyalty’. As Simon Featherstone notes, ‘the trumpets, drums and armour and exclamatory mode are of a kind with the verse of Henry Newbolt and William Watson’.49 Yet examination of the textual history points to a different story. First, the Bengali original was written before the war on 26 May 1914.50 In the original, Tagore does draw on martial images (rana-shajjya – ‘war decoration’, jaya-danka – ‘the trumpet of victory’) but they are used as metaphors to suggest a drama of spiritual conflict and purification (hobo nishkalanka); moreover, they are juxtaposed with a parallel stream of images: ‘pilgrims’, ‘temples’, ‘evening’s offerings’, ‘garments washed white’ and the ‘lamp’.51 Interiority is what is lost in this translation: the sacred shankho (‘conchshell’) is changed into the bellicose ‘trumpet’; questions (‘Who will fight today with the banners’ [Larbi ke aaye dhyoja beye]) are changed to exhortations (‘Come fighters,

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Figure 26.4  Cover of Indian Ink: Splashes from Various Pens in Aid of the Imperial Indian War Fund.

carrying your flags’); touch (sparsha) becomes ‘strike’ (‘Strike my drowsy heart with the spell of youth’) while the blood-red oleanders (rakta-jaba), associated with prayer, morph into ‘poppies’. A spiritual herald becomes a battle-cry: a Hopkins-like dialogue with the Creator gets almost translated into a rallying cry for Pax Britannia. Has one of the empire’s staunchest critics been co-opted into imperial propaganda? Tagore’s personal comments, in Bengali, to a friend point in a different direction: he referred to the ‘trumpet’ as ‘god’s herald’ through which the war must be announced, but it was ‘with ill-will, with sin, with wrongness’ (akalyaner shonge, paaper shonge, anyaer shonge).52 For him, the shankho heralded ‘the first rays of the blood-stained dawn of a new age’ faintly visible in the east.53 If both the IRWB and Indian Ink were largely pro-imperial publications, a periodical of a wholly different political colouring and intellectual calibre was Arya: A Philosophical Review. This was a 64-page monthly periodical with English and French editions, founded jointly by the Indian political revolutionary, intellectual and mystic Aurobindo Ghosh and the French writer Paul Richard (1874–1967), who was living in Pondicherry, India. Though sharing its birth-pangs with the war itself – Arya was founded in August 1914 – it was not primarily a war journal, publishing essays on literature, poetry, political thought, religion and, above all, philosophy that clearly went beyond the war. However, in 1916 Richard was called by the French government to serve in the war and left; the French edition was discontinued and the task of editing fell upon Aurobindo. One of the most brilliant intellectuals of colonial India, Aurobindo was educated at St Paul’s in London and then at Cambridge, where he was introduced at once to nationalism and spiritualism. After returning to India, he founded a secret revolutionary group in 1900 and the English-language newspaper

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Bande Mataram, a veritable ‘international compendium of political insurgency’.54 At a time when the Indian National Congress was arguing for dominion status, he issued a call for full independence – ‘Our ideal is that of Swaraj or absolute autonomy free from foreign control.’55 During a period of solitary confinement, he had a series of mystical experiences whereupon he famously retired from public life and lived the rest of his life as a religious recluse, absorbed in German philosophy, the Gita and the practice of yoga. In the pages of Arya, which continued until 1921, Aurobindo published a series of extraordinary articles on the First World War, collected into the booklet War and SelfDetermination in 1920. The very first essay, ‘Passing of War’, is a representative tour de force. He starts with the political – an examination of liberalism, arguing that the ideal of peace as cherished by nineteenth-century Europe was itself a form of imperial greed (‘the idea is to have peace and security for the maintenance of past acquisitions and an untroubled domination’), only to move to the psychological as he describes war as a ‘psychological necessity’ (‘what is within us, must manifest itself outside’), which deeply resonates with what Freud was writing at the same time (‘[War] strips us of the later accretions of civilisation and lays bare the primal man in each of us’).56 If the war made Freud move beyond the pleasure principle, it encouraged Aurobindo to shift from the psychological to the spiritual and insist on an ‘inner change’ – ‘War and violent revolution can be eliminated [. . .] on the condition that we get rid of the inner causes of war.’57 In a subsequent article, he refers to the metaphysical: As this great materialistic civilisation of Europe to which the high glowing dawn of the Renaissance gave its brilliant birth and the dry brazen afternoon of nineteenth-century rationalism its hard maturity, is passing away and the bosom and the soul of man heave a sigh of relief at its going, so whatever new civilisation we construct after this evening of the cycle, yuga-sandha, on which we are entering.58 Arya was an exceptional journal but nonetheless it shows the remarkable intellectual sophistication and seriousness in the ‘provincialisation’ of Europe and the ‘Great War’ that was already happening in India in its periodicals during the war years, a point to which we will shortly return.

Bengali Periodicals: War Experiences in Mesopotamia If the above publications examined the various discourses around the war, what about the actual experience of troops serving in different parts of the world? While the focus has rested firmly on Indian combatants on the Western Front, it was Mesopotamia that was India’s largest field of action: some 588,717 men, including 7,812 officers, 287,753 other ranks and 293,152 non-combatants (often forming porter and labour corps), served there between 1914 and 1918.59 The campaign, initially planned as a limited defensive operation, soon developed into an ambitious attempt to capture Baghdad, only to result in catastrophic failure. The lowest point in this traumatic desert ordeal was the six-month siege of the city of Kut-al-Amara by the Ottoman army (7 December 1915–29 April 1916), which was marked by starvation, disease and death. At the time of surrender, the number of Indians captured was around 10,440, including 204 officers, 6,988 rank and file and 3,248 followers.60 However, we have no

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letters from this front; with the exception of Sisir Prasad Sarbadhikari’s memoir Abhi Le Baghdad, there are no personal testimonies, and the non-combatant experiences remain in the shadow. A number of post-war Bengali periodicals break the silence. Calcutta was the leading publishing centre in South Asia in the early twentieth century, and the Bengali periodical was a remarkably popular, varied and vibrant genre, consumed by the educated Bengali bourgeoisie, that particular creation of the British Raj. Periodicals had played a key role during the ‘Bengal Renaissance’ in the nineteenth century, that extraordinary period of creativity from Bengali writers, painters, artists, philosophers, scientists, educationalists and reformers marked by contact and exchange with leading British and European intellectuals. The Bangiya Sahitya Parishat library in Calcutta has the largest repository of nineteenth-century Bangla periodicals in the world; the guide to the digitised archive, called Hiteshranjan Sanyal Memorial Collection, gives a succinct account of its origin and the popularity of these periodicals: The first Bangla periodical, Digdarshan, edited by J. C. Marshman (1794–1877), was published by the Serampore Baptist Mission from its own press in 1818 [. . .] The first newspaper edited by a Bengali appeared in June that year: Bangal Gajeti, edited by Gangakishore Bhattacharya. From that time, the publication of Bangla periodicals steadily increased. The following table shows the number of new periodicals published each decade between 1821 and 1930: 1881–90 295 1891–1900 224 1901–10 225 1911–20 262 1921–30 552 Total number of periodicals published between 1821–1930: 2080.61 It was in the pages of these periodicals – from Tatthavabodhini Patrika which continued for a hundred years and Bharati which continued for fifty years, to shorterlived ones such as Bharatbarsha, Prabashi, Kalpataru, Manashi O Marmadhwani and Chaturanga – that the experiences of the substantial Bengali contingent of noncombatants began to appear for the first time. These periodicals carried a diverse range of reports, articles, memoirs, photographs and sketches on the war, showing how thoroughly and intimately it had infiltrated the cultural consciousness. The articles range from the lavishly illustrated account of the ‘Brighton Royal Palace’ where the wounded sepoys were looked after, to the role of the princely states in the conflict, to a rare account of a post-war tour of the Western Front taken by a Bengali woman.62 The focus though is on ‘Bengali’ identity, showing how a global conflict resonated, and was appropriated, at a regional level. For there were in Mesopotamia, exceptionally, two Bengali contingents.63 The first was the Bengali 49th Regiment, a ‘Double Company’ of educated middle-class Bengali citizensoldiers raised through a special request; in 1916 the Bengali newspapers, journals and magazines were all abuzz with the news of its formation, preparation and eventual journey. However, the regiment would go on to have a rather inglorious record: the

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Bengali men fell ill in Mesopotamia and fought among themselves, including shooting a fellow-soldier, and did not get to see any action. But the experience of the other Bengali unit was very different. It was a medical unit, the Bengal Ambulance Corps, which comprised four British commissioned officers, three VCOs, sixty-four NCOs and privates and forty-one followers, including cooks, water-carriers and cleaners. They reached Amara on 15 July and set up the Bengal Stationary Hospital, where they were stationed for the first two and half months.64 In September some thirty-six of them were chosen to be sent to the firing line as part of the 12th Field Ambulance of the 16th Brigade, where they experienced warfare, the siege of Kut and captivity for the next two years. What was remarkable about this group – and set them apart from the North Indian peasant-soldiers on the Western Front – was that they were an educated middle-class group of Bengalis and, on their return, they set out to write about their experiences in these periodicals through a series of articles in Bengali: ‘Amaader Juddho Jatra’ (‘Our Journey into Battle’), ‘Amar ‘Juddho Jatra’ (‘My Journey into Battle’), ‘Jaddobandhir Atmakatha’ (‘Autobiography of a POW’), ‘Bengal Ambulance Corp-er Katha’ (‘The Story of Bengal Ambulance Corps’), ‘Kut Juddhey Turkihastey and Bandi Bagalir Atmakahini’ (‘The Autobiography of Bengalis Held Hostage by the Turks in the Battle of Kut’). In the process, they open up the history of the Mesopotamia campaign from below. Consider, for example, the ‘Autobiography of a POW’ by Ashutosh Roy, which was serialised in the pages of Bharatbarsha. Along with the recently unearthed Abhi Le Baghdad, it is the only full-length narrative we have of an individual’s war experience in Mesopotamia: it starts with his leave-taking in Kolkata on 14 April 1915 and records his travels through Qurna, Aden, Abadan and Basra; it then shows him bearing witness to various battles and finally being taken as a POW and dragged across different parts of the Middle East. In one of the early instalments, accompanied with photographs, sketches and maps, he tries to evoke Basra and connect with his readers: The town reminds me of our own towns. The shops are well-decorated. The market is covered [. . .] At the entrance of the canal that leads from Shat-el-Arab to Basra is another market, called ‘Ashar.’ The well-to-do live around here and the market is not small [. . .] At every lane here, you will find ‘Kawakhana’ or Coffeeshops; they can be compared to the street-side tea-shops in our country. The big difference is that in our country, only in the morning and in the evening, people crowd around these places to have tea; here, there are crowds of coffee-drinkers at all times of the day.65 Neither the fantasy-town of Haroun al-Rashid nor the site of dereliction as in British accounts, Basra emerges here as bustling, stratified, familiar: the imperial conflict is reconceptualised as one not of East–West but of lateral encounter and curiosity, as Roy describes Arabs, Armenians and Turks in detail, with description of physical characteristics, dress and food habits. If the Bengali periodical thereby becomes a space that allows Roy to blend travelogue, ethnology and military adventure, his fellow-Bengali and colleague Prafulla Chandra Sen (1897–1990), in ‘The Story of the Bengal Ambulance Corps’ serialised in six parts in Manasi O Marmadhwani, provides one of the first Indian eyewitness accounts of the Battle of Ctesiphon (November 1915):

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It is the endurance of the severely wounded soldiers that is remarkable. Some have had their rib-cage shattered, some have lost part of their jaw, and yet there was not a moan or a cry. After the intense excitement of battle, the wounded soldiers were stunned and silent [. . .] Among the wounded we had collected, there was a British captain who had part of his leg, below the right knee, wholly smashed. When we gave him some water and salaamed him before lifting him to the stretcher, he gave us a wan smile that I remember vividly even today, after eight years [. . .] A bit after the evening, we were amazed when Havildar Khubi Singh was brought in wounded. He was one of the first people who had taught us how to drill.66 At once reportage, memoir and testimony, such visceral descriptions reached the home front not through a Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) or Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970), not via lyric poetry or memoir or fiction, but within the pages of the periodicals that knit writers and readers into an affective community.

Conclusion While the articles in this selection of newspapers, magazines and journals evoke the various ways in which the war resonated in different parts of the Indian subcontinent, they are equally a testimony to the ‘cosmopolitan thought-zones’ of the newly emergent, educated and culturally confident Indian middle classes in the early twentieth century, facilitated by the webs of empire, increased opportunities of travel, colonial education and the expanding world of print.67 Together, they serve to ‘provincialise’, to use that resonant phrase of Dipesh Chakravorty, many a European war periodical, with their Western Front combat-centric focus or nationalist colouring; they show equally powerfully how there was no one monolithic or homogeneous ‘Indian war experience’.68 Indeed, it is in these Indian periodicals that we have one of the earliest examples of our contemporary expansive understanding of the war not as one of European trench combat but as a global conflict that resonated in the furthest reaches of the empire in an infinite variety of ways.

Notes   1. Unpublished diary of Dr Ramji Lal, written in English, Haryana Academy, Gurgaon, New Delhi. In this chapter, I draw on some of the research for my book India, Empire and First World War Culture: Writings, Images and Songs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), juxtaposing it with fresh material and placing it in a new framework. Due to the Covid-19 crisis, the author has had to rely on his notes; not all details could be added or verified.  2. Zamindar, 30 July 1914, India Office Records, British Library, London (henceforth IOR), in Punjabi Newspapers Reports (PNR), L/R/5/195, 914.   3. Quoted in Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 20.  4. Das, India, Empire and First World War Culture, 11; see also Gajendra Singh, The Testimonies of the Indian Soldiers and the Two World Wars: Between the Self and the Sepoy (London: Bloomsbury, 2014); and George Morton-Jack, The Indian Army on the Western Front: India’s Expeditionary Force to France and Belgium in the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). For contemporary records, see Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire during the Great War, 1914–1920 (London: War Office, 1920), 777.

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 5. Jeffrey Masten, Peter Stallybrass and Nancy J. Vickers, eds, Print Culture and Literary Markets in Colonial India (London: Routledge, 1997); Stuart H. Blackburn, Print, Folklore and Nationalism in South India (Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2006).   6. Deeptanil Ray and Abhijit Gupta, ‘The Newspaper and the Periodical Press in Colonial India’, in Journalism and the Periodical Press in Nineteenth-century Britain, ed. Joanne Shattock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 245–62, here 247.   7. See N. G. Barrier and Paul Wallace, The Punjabi Press, 1880–1905 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1970), 159.   8. Ray and Gupta, ‘The Newspaper and the Periodical Press in Colonial India’, 255.  9. Tribune, 26 August 1914, IOR, PNR, L/R/195, 822; Amrita Bazaar Patrika, 7 August 1914, National Library Kolkata. 10. G. A. Natesan, ed., All About the War: The India Review War Book (Madras: Natesan, 1915), 269 (henceforth IRWB); India’s Contribution to the Great War (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1923). 11. Mahratta, 4 October 1914, quoted in Bal Ram Nanda, Three Statesmen: Gokhale, Gandhi and Nehru (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 447; The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Ahmedabad: Government of India, 1965), 380. 12. See Heike Liebau’s excellent chapter, ‘Hindostan: A Camp Newspaper for South-Asian Prisoners of World War One in Germany’, in ‘When the War began, We heard of Several Kings’: South Asian Prisoners in World War I Germany, ed. Franziska Roy, Heike Liebau and Ravi Ahuja (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2011), 231–49. 13. Ghadr di Gunj (San Francisco: Hindustani Ghadr Press, 1916), British Library, IOR, Mss Eur E288, 16. 14. M. S. Leigh, The Punjab and the War (Lahore: Punjab Government Printing, 1922), 40. See also Das, India, Empire and First World War Culture, 75–115. 15. Andrew Tait Jarboe, ed., War News in India: The Punjabi Press during World War I (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), 7. 16. See Sanjay Joshi, Fractured Modernity: Making of a Middle Class in Colonial North India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 16–43. 17. Jarboe, ed., War News in India, 10. 18. Zamindar, IOR, PNR, L/R/5/197. 19. Jarboe, ed., War News in India, 12. 20. Barrier and Wallace, The Punjabi Press, 159. 21. See Morton-Jack, The Indian Army, 134–9. 22. Panjabee, 8 August 1914, IOR, PNR, L/R/5/195, 782. 23. Panjabee, 5 September 1914, IOR, PNR, L/R/5/195, 853. 24. Das, India, Empire and First World War Culture, 39–44. 25. Panjabee, 8 August 1914, IOR, PNR, L/R/S/195, 808–9. 26. Zamindar, 16 October 1914, IOR, PNR, L/R/5/195, 945–6. 27. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of the Self under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). See also Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth [1961] (London: Penguin, 1991). 28. Desh, 4 December 1915, IOR, PNR, L/R/5/196, 728. 29. The Federalist and Grenada People, 27 October 1915, quoted in Glenford Howe, Race, War and Nationalism: A Social History of West Indians in the First World War (Kingston: James Currey, 2002), 17. 30. Vakil, 3 October 1914, PNR, IOR/L/R/5/195, 947; Dipak, 12 November 1914, PNR IOR/ L/R/5/195, 1011; Shahid, 11 August 1915, PNR IOR/L/R/5/196, 471. 31. Jarboe, ed., War News in India, 8. 32. Tribune, 17 April 1917, IOR, RNN, L/R/5/199, 315. 33. Manela, The Wilsonian Moment, 77–98.

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34. Jat Gazette, December 1914, as extracted in Jat Gazette: A Selection (Gurgaon: Haryana Academy, 2014). 35. Jat Gazette, November 1914, as extracted in Jat Gazette: A Selection (Gurgaon: Haryana Academy, 2014). Translated by Arshdeep Singh Brar. 36. These are some of the texts sung which were extracted in Jat Gazette on 1, 8 and 22 January; 27 August; 17 and 24 September 1918. 37. Mytheli Sreenivas, ‘Emotion, Identity, and the Female Subject: Tamil Women’s Magazines in Colonial India, 1890–1940’, Journal of Women’s History 14, no. 4 (2003): 59–82. 38. See also Santanu Das, ‘Sepoys, Sahibs and Babus: India, the Great War and Two Colonial Journals’, in Publishing in the First World War: Essays in Book History, ed. Mary Hammond and Shafquat Towheed (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 61–77. 39. IRWB, back cover. 40. Advert, appearing on back cover of the IRWB. 41. Quotes appear opposite the Analytical Contents page. 42. IRWB, 267. 43. Indian Ink: Splashes from Various Pens (Calcutta: Thacker and Spink, 1914), ‘Foreword’, n.p. 44. Indian Ink, 1915, 51. 45. Indian Ink, 1916, ‘A Record of Progress’, n.p. 46. Indian Ink, 1916, ‘A Record of Progress’, n.p. 47. Indian Ink, 1915, 12. 48. Indian Ink, 1914, 4. 49. Simon Featherstone, ‘Colonial Poetry of the First World War’, in Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the First World War, ed. Santanu Das (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 180. 50. The title of the poem is taken from the first line ‘When I found thy trumpet lying in the dust’, which is a faithful rendition of the Bengali original, Tomar shankho dhulay pore, to be found in Balaka (Kolkata: Visva-Bharati, 1942), 8. The poem was translated by Tagore himself. 51. For the Bengali original, see Balaka, 11 (‘Ebar je oi elo sharbonashe go’). 52. See Rabindranath Tagore, Rabindra Racanaboli (Kolkata: Visva-Bharati, 1988), vol. 16, 256. 53. ‘Balaka II’, in Rabindra Racanaboli, vol. 2, 255. My translation. 54. Kris Manjapra, Age of Entanglement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 46. 55. ‘An Open Letter to My Countrymen’, in Essential Writings of Sri Aurobindo, ed. Peter Heehs (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 5. 56. ‘The Passing of War’ was first published in Arya and later collected in Social and Political Thought, Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library [SPT] (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 1971), vol. 15, 587. Sigmund Freud, ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), vol. 14, 297, 299. 57. ‘Foreword’, SPT, 577. 58. ‘The Unseen Power’, SPT, 589. 59. India’s Contribution to the Great War, 97. 60. The figures are quoted in Major E. W. C. Sandes, In Kut and Captivity (London: John Murray, 1919), 261. 61. Abhijit Bhattacharya, A Guide to Hiteshranjan Sanyal Memorial Collection (Calcutta: Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, 1998), , accessed 24 April 2022. 62. ‘Brighton Royal Palace’, Bharatbharsha 2, no. 1 (December 1916): 100–8; Shobhana Devi, ‘A Bengali Woman in the Battlefield’, Chaturango, date not available. 63. See Das, India, Empire and First World War Writing, 68–70, 256.

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64. See ‘The Bengal Ambulance Corps’, Confidential File 312/16, West Bengal State Archives, Kolkata for detailed information. 65. Ashutosh Roy, ‘The Autobiography of a POW’, Bharatbharsha 2, no. 2 (January 1920, Part II, Year 7): 195. 66. Prafulla Chandra Sen, ‘The Story of Bengal Ambulance Corps’, Manashi o Marmabani 1, no. 2 (March 1925): 177. My translation. 67. Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra, eds, Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 68. Dipesh Chakravorty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

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27 Australia and New Zealand Patricia Thomas

Teacher: What is it that binds us together and makes us better than we are by nature? Marion (eight years old): Corsets, ma’am.1

I

n 1870 a Frenchman, Paul Dutoict, established his Royal PD Rustless Corset factory in Belgium’s capital, Brussels.2 A predominantly industrial country, Belgium had good transport networks, a large, relatively cheap labour force, and offered little of the competition that he would have faced in Paris, the ‘fashion centre of the world’.3 By the beginning of the First World War, the factory employed thousands of women as machine stitchers and finishers. The German occupation of Belgium in August 1914 halted much of Belgium’s industrial activity – including PD production – which was crucial to its pre-war economy. Brussels became an ‘atypical home front’, an occupied territory unsupported by industry or a war economy.4 Concerned about the welfare of women who suddenly had no means of support, feminists Jane Brigode, Marguerite Nyssens and Louise van den Plas formed the Patriotic Union of Belgian Women.5 It was quickly integrated within the Comité National de Secours et d’Alimentation (the National Relief and Food Committee). Both Union and Comité initiatives were then subsumed into the American Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB).6 The CRB negotiated with the German Governor-General to import food, clothing and raw materials, and export manufactured products through Rotterdam in the neutral Netherlands. I have found no evidence that the PD corset factory operated under the CRB system.7 Nevertheless, since newspaper advertisements indicate that the corsets were manufactured in and exported from Brussels, this may simply indicate that I have yet to discover it. It is difficult to see how the PD corsets would otherwise have reached Australian and New Zealand women, to whom they were advertised widely in the wartime press.8 On 5 August 1914, one day after German troops marched into Belgium as a corridor into France, Australians and New Zealanders learned that they were at war.9 Bound by the 1839 Treaty of London by which all the European powers guaranteed to protect Belgium’s neutrality, Britain – and consequently her dominions and colonies – declared war on Germany. Though responses varied, newspapers throughout both dominions reported enthusiastic demonstrations of patriotism.10 Neither Australia nor New Zealand had fulltime military capacity, but both quickly raised volunteer expeditionary forces. While this first total war required combatants for the front, for its supply systems and for rallying support it depended on home-front citizen participation. Newspapers reported on the many practical measures being taken by ‘women-powered patriotic societies’.11 Women’s

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enthusiastic voluntary work became the cornerstone of these home-front endeavours to help ‘brave little Belgium’, a country unfamiliar to many of them prior to the war.12 This chapter offers a different way to understand home-front wartime participation by drawing attention to a hitherto undocumented account of war-related advertising. It examines advertisements for the PD corset – largely in regional rather than metropolitan Australian and New Zealand newspapers – to explore how they employed the Belgian situation as a strategy to encourage antipodean women to engage with and support Belgian workers.13 Recurring references to the plight of Belgian women and children in the Allied press indicate that newspaper reports were implicitly addressed to women to enlist their sympathies.14 To loosen their purse-strings, home-front advertisements were more explicit, more particular and thus are more revealing. Such war-related consumer advertising was not confined to Australian or New Zealand newspapers, but is also evident in the newspapers on both sides of the conflict.15 Such newspaper advertising was as ubiquitous during the First World War as it was in the Second. Yet less critical attention has been paid to how it worked in the Great War to encourage women to further their war effort through purchasing the consumer goods of Allied countries.16 Designed to encourage readers’ engagement with a product through a framework of prior understanding, wartime advertisements – no matter how tenuous the association – embodied an ‘aura of official authority’.17 The advertisements in Allied countries played a significant role in helping to shape public opinion towards the hostilities, the enemy and Belgium. While historians are beginning to employ advertisements, and the newspapers that carried them, as more than passive reflections of the societies that produced them, many still use them as evidence for their own arguments rather than complex discursive entities in themselves. This neglects the specific knowledge that the interpretative analysis of advertisements as source material can bring to an understanding of historical ‘lived experience’.18 Therefore, to cast light on women’s war experiences, I analyse these newspaper advertisements as evidentiary documents that responded, and bore witness, to home-front circumstances.19 Also traditionally sidelined by Second World War narratives have been home-front stories of the First World War.20 Gwen Parsons commented in 2013 on the need for locally focused studies to understand the range of experience, and scholars, including Parsons, have responded to that prompt in the New Zealand context.21 The First World War centenary preparations also saw an upsurge in scholarship on, and thus a recuperation of, home-front experiences in contexts as diverse as Australia and Belgium.22 Scholars, though, have tended to examine home fronts as homogeneous, less often as discrete enclaves within national territories. Belgium, for example, does not fit comfortably within the battleground/home front model of Great War historiography. Tammy Proctor argues that it was at once a ‘symbol of war-time proaganda’ and a ‘landscape of war’.23 More particularly, occupation gave ‘unique character’ to the war experience of Brussels’ citizens.24 Australian and New Zealand home fronts were equally mixed; the metropolitan experience, as Parsons and John McQuilton note, differed from the provincial.25 Women’s experience was similarly diverse. Antipodean women were never at the front; Belgian women lived ‘in a theatre of confrontation’.26 The wartime, Belgian-made PD came to signify, beyond its traditional ‘competing significations’, the home-front struggle for survival in which Australian, New Zealand and Belgian women in particular were linked through practices of production/consumption in newspaper advertisements.27

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My focus here is less on how women responded, and more on understanding how the antipodean PD agents used multimodal print advertising to effect a commercial and political end. Theo van Leeuwen argues that text is ‘inherently multimodal’. It uses visual and textual resources – language modes – ‘for making signs in a sociocultural group’.28 Thus it renders text comprehensible within the group and allows us to see what the group saw.29 I contend, therefore, that it is more useful to begin with the visual and textual resources of the advertisements to elicit from them their own arguments and allow them to tell their own stories within the contexts of their own circumstances.

Newspapers and Advertising Historically, a newspaper’s value as an advertising medium lay in its ability to reach wide audiences, a factor newspapers often pointed out to their readers.30 They produced a body of discrete readers whose responses to editorials, cable reports or advertising messages transformed household units into larger reading communities through circulation networks. Australian and New Zealand newspapers had traditionally served news-hungry, largely British immigrant populations far away from the ‘mother-country’.31 Jim Traue notes that both countries were ‘deficient in monographs [but] enriched by the newspaper printing press’.32 They shared a similar cultural background which connected them through the press to the world beyond.33 The rapid establishment of towns beyond the metropolis inevitably heralded the founding of a newspaper, which led to a noteworthy number of low-circulation and often short-lived regional newspapers. Each served a socially and politically diverse community, so they were often necessarily non-partisan. Working proprietors – who were also jobbing printers – published these newspapers bi- or tri-weekly. Many eventually progressed to daily publishing or folded. The metropolitan newspapers were more often dailies, owned and controlled by a company or a family. Although the early newspaper archives are incomplete (see note 1), they nevertheless indicate that there were at least 49 titles in New Zealand – 39 in the regions – and 128 titles in Australia, of which 103 were regional.34 There is some evidence in the distribution of New Zealand newspapers that a wartime scarcity of paper compelled ‘every paper in the Dominion [. . .] to reduce its size’.35 Nevertheless, strict censorship on private letters and public utterances meant that newspapers in both countries became the dominant source of war news.36 Most newspapers supported the war and so were crucial to home-front mobilisation ‘for the stubborn work that confronted it’.37 Reportage, commodity advertising, patriotic appeals and government propaganda were interdependent in the wartime cultural landscape and on newspaper pages alike.38 Evidence on the newspaper pages themselves points to a disparity between the advertising content of wartime Australian and New Zealand titles. Australian newspapers tended towards the less visually arresting classified advertisements. New Zealand newspapers, always dependent on advertising, published page after page of illustrated and typographic display advertisements. This had the effect of providing New Zealand advertisers with more opportunities to advertise their goods, mostly to women, through the rhetoric of war. ‘German barbarism’ became as much a trope as ‘brave little Belgium’

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in newspaper reports and provided a context for the advertising that explicitly or implicitly referenced both.39

Advertising the PD Corset in the Australian and New Zealand Press The performance of citizenship is different for men than it is for women. Examining women’s relationships to the First World War offers different ways of thinking about war and civic duty beyond the conventional master narratives. Gendered approaches point to, for example, the expanded opportunities for civic participation that the war offered women.40 With the CRB the only legitimate means of exporting Belgium’s manufactured products, Belgian women became part of a ‘vast philanthropic network’ which contributed to the wartime survival of Belgium’s populace.41 Like their antipodean sisters, they were not party to the decisions that took them into war, but war drew them all together in a collective enterprise. The women of Brussels made corsets as a means of survival; antipodean women purchased them as markers of patriotism that, as young Marion noted in the epigraph to this chapter, had the capacity to make them better than they were. Prior to the war, Australian and New Zealand PD corset advertisements claimed to render women ‘anatomically correct’ and comprised images of slim, corseted women, decorative typefaces and a series of PD logotypes.42 They did not reference the corset’s origin. From the onset of the war, the PD advertisers instrumentalised what they saw as women’s susceptibility to emotional appeals, expanding the ‘war of meaning’ that newspaper reports created about Belgium in the early years of the war itself.43 Newspapers such as Australia’s Southern Mail (1889–1954) or New Zealand’s Marlborough Express (1868–) located the factory in Belgium, specifically Brussels. This gave the PD advertisers an opportunity to construct a sophisticated, war-related rhetorical strategy to position the corsets as symbolic of something other than comfort and correctness. In a survey of Allied newspapers, I found no evidence of comprehensive or sustained war-related advertising for corsets beyond a few requests to buy British.44 This suggests that Australia and New Zealand may have been the only countries to do so. Their wartime PD advertisements became refracted through stories of outrage and appeals for empathy from women whose newspapers had familiarised them with the discourses of ‘poor little Belgium’. Linguistic forms of ‘communicative and practical significance’ told first of the plight of Belgian workers and then required that women do something about it.45 They gave women a patriotic reason for consuming by conferring new meaning on the correcting power of the corset. Materially the same as the pre-war corset, the PD became symbolically different through its war-related advertising. One hundred and eighteen one-column PD advertisements ran in sixteen southeastern Australian newspapers between 30 September 1914 and 27 August 1915, most of them only once or twice. These included Melbourne’s Herald (1861–1954) and Bathurst Times (1909–25), the Robertson Advocate (1894–1923) from New South Wales and the Cairns Post (1909–54) of Queensland.46 Textual similarities among them indicate that copy was likely provided by the manufacturer’s local agents and then typeset by the individual newspapers. They invariably address ‘Patriotic Women’ and emphasise the plight of Belgian women workers; sartorial appeals are negligible.

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Most newspapers reported on the distress, privation and hunger of the Belgian people during the invasion of Belgium, noting heavy German casualties but speaking little of Belgian losses. Advertisements were less ambiguous: ‘Many men of Belgium are dying bravely [. . .] help the women and children who are in great distress. Relieve the suffering by providing work for women.’47 These words tell of dead men, distressed women and a dire situation. They demand that patriotic Australian women act to alleviate suffering, not through charity, but by becoming instruments of Belgian women’s economic survival. A failure to comply is implicitly unpatriotic. Some advertisements conflate the patriot/consumer dualities explicitly. ‘It may not be generally known that the citizens of brave little Belgium have not only proved themselves splendid defenders of their country’, a Herald advertisement reads, ‘but have, for many years past, proved themselves fashion creators of the world.’48 Pitching the purchase of the PD as a ‘splendid’ practical opportunity rather than a demand, the Herald advertisement shares the page with news from another ‘Defiant Belgian City [. . .] under the thunder of invisible German guns’. It notes that many factories in Brussels had been ‘forcibly closed [by] those who are at the present time in possession of that city’. Nevertheless, the ‘enterprising’ PD manufacturer was ‘exceedingly anxious to alleviate [. . .] some of the distress’ of the thousands of women who worked in its factories. It had ‘made arrangements’ – perhaps those negotiated through the CRB – to carry on with their manufacturing. Nine newspapers, ranging from the metropolitan Argus (1848–1957) to the regional Daily Mercury (1906–54) ran textually identical advertisements.49 From 30 September 1914 to 26 February 1915, under the headline ‘Aiding Belgian Women’, these advertisements told their readers of ‘the awful distress’ of Belgian women (Figure 27.1). Although the same graphic resources are evident in many of the advertisements – composition, underlining and small capitals, for instance – the newspapers deployed a variety of typefaces. This indicates that each newspaper again set supplied copy, possibly following the agents’ visual templates and using the typographic resources at its disposal. Assuming that ‘every Australian woman is desirous at this time of assisting Belgian women to overcome the awful distress prevailing in their country’, the advertisements reiterate that the ‘corsets are made in Brussels by leading French and Belgian corsetières’. Two newspapers from the Southern Highlands of New South Wales ran two advertisements that were notably ubiquitous. The Robertson Advocate and the Southern Mail were bi-weekly newspapers from a stable published by James White. This accounts for the textual and graphic uniformity of the advertisements. One promotes the ‘touch of style and snap that women desire’ and ran fifty-two times from 23 March to 22 June 1915. It directs ‘the women of Bowral and Mittagong’ to help their ‘sisters of Belgium’ by obtaining a PD corset ‘wholly made in Belgium by Belgian workers’. From 25 June to 27 August (a total of thirty-eight times), these two newspapers ran in all but two issues a second, but similar, advertisement addressed more widely to the ‘women of Australia’. Completely different to all the small, one-column Australian advertisements are those addressed to the women of New Zealand. The geographical distribution, number of newspaper insertions, content, design and mise en page of the three-column display PD advertisements in New Zealand newspapers constituted a visually coherent, consistent and nationally comprehensive campaign. These may reveal the hand of the Ilott advertising agency, which would have sent the advertisements to newspapers as

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Figure 27.1  Australian advertisements for PD Corsets showing examples of textual congruence and graphic difference. These feature in Argus, Daily Telegraph, Brisbane Courier, Bundaberg Mail and Burnett Advertiser, Maryborough Chronicle, Wide Bay and Burnett Advertiser, Cairns Post, Daily Mercury, Morning Bulletin and Townsville Daily Bulletin from 30 September 1914 to 26 February 1915. finished copy.50 Echoing distribution patterns evident prior to the war, the PD advertisements appeared predominantly in regional newspapers throughout every region of the country. Their impact in newspaper pages already replete with display advertisements was created by the highly visible ‘differential salience’ of size, white space and the visual manifestation of the brand (Figure 27.2).51 By 1914 a single logotype appeared on all the New Zealand PD advertisements, but not on any Australian advertisements before, during or after the war. Copywriter Owen Gellert and artist Wal Burge, employed by Ilott in 1911, were likely responsible for replacing the variety of PD visual identifiers with a consistent visual identity. As a tangible sign, it denoted the PD manufacture of the corsets. Symbolically, however, it embodied the intangible, connotative qualities of ‘identity, associations and personality’.52 The visual branding of the PD was part of a growing phenomenon of product merchandising that functioned as a business practice designed to immerse consumers in a brand to achieve competitive advantage. Usually associated with brands such as Nike in the twenty-first century, this use of immersive strategies in Great War commodity advertising takes the practice of building strategic capital back nearly a hundred years.53 Through repeated exposure of the brand identity, this strategic approach expressed the quality of the product and the values of its maker. In further associating the PD logotype with Belgium, the advertisements symbolically positioned the manufacturer and the product beyond mere competitive advantage. Continuing to function as the sign and symbol of a pragmatic business practice, the PD logotype was now attached to a larger, idealistic purpose.

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Figure 27.2  Advertisement for PD Corsets in Nelson Evening Mail, 17 March 1915, 2. The New Zealand PD advertisement is highly visible on the page.

Readers experienced the new logotype in part through the ubiquity of its substantial multimodal presence in newspaper advertisements. The Australian advertisements were multimodal only to the extent that they were visually accessed graphic representations of speech. The difference in the New Zealand advertisements lay in their design. The urgent task at hand prompted a visual approach that could not be addressed adequately by images of slender women or mundane one-column texts. It called for a gravitas that could only be articulated through a combination of alert and restraint, and by ‘foreground[ing] visuality’ throughout the texts.54 These advertisements starkly configure typefaces in white space to both signify and draw attention to the urgency of the situation through their significant and sober presence on the newspaper page. While a variety of PD advertisements appear occasionally in a number of newspapers, a typographically consistent series of four advertisements ran a total of 296 times across sixteen newspapers throughout 1915 and into 1916 (Figure 27.3). The first was on page 13 of the Timaru Herald (1864–) on 9 January 1915, and the last on page 7 of the Manawatu Times (1877–1963) on 17 January 1916.55 Understanding that the public was unlikely to respond to a single advertisement, and taking advantage of a newspaper’s relatively inexpensive production costs, Ilott placed each advertisement repeatedly: weekly, monthly and in one example of the Thames Star (1874–1998), on nineteen consecutive days.56 The first advertisement, which ran 112 times and first in the Timaru Herald, is visually emphatic and compositionally symmetrical, with separate blocks of type that lay out the situation in Belgium (Figure 27.3 top left).57 Underlined for emphasis, the headline was designed to attract attention through key words that circulated within war

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Figure 27.3  Advertisements selling the PD corset through space and graphic marks, and appeals to empathy and patriotism.

discourses: women, Empire and Belgium. ‘Every woman should’ is a directive strategy that draws each woman into those discourses.58 It reminds her that she belongs to a global community, a collective endeavour that is duty-bound to support Belgium’s workers. There is a stipulated quality of conspiratorial you know why you should about it that encourages women’s investment in Belgium’s salvation. As a woman of the Empire, supporting Belgium’s workers puts her patriotism on display while allowing her to enjoy the style and comfort of the PD.59 If that was insufficient incentive, the more forceful imperative ‘Buy P.D. Corsets’ steps firmly into the space between the two bodies of text through which the Belgian narrative unfolds.60 The advertisement echoes the – by now familiar – newspaper narratives about ‘brave, battle-scarred little Belgium’ and the price it is paying for its ‘heroic fight [. . .] suffering, poverty and unemployment’. It introduces the individual New Zealand woman – who was involved in various collective fundraising efforts on behalf of the Belgian people – to the Belgian woman, one of a ‘large number of operatives’ in the

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Brussels factories.61 It offers her the opportunity for an individiual empathetic response to her troubled sister’s plight. Assuring her that there is ‘nothing German in the PD corset’, it reminds her repeatedly that it was the product entirely of the Empire’s allies: Belgium/Brussels appears six times, France four and Empire/Allies five. Final notations reinforce the origins of the PD, ‘Made in Belgium’ to the left and ‘Designed in Paris’ to the right buttressing the PD logotype. Compositionally and thus symbolically, they attach the new brand values to the PD. The second PD advertisement ran fifty-six times, appearing first on page 7 of the Thames Star on 4 February 1915 (Figure 27.3 top right).62 It visually constructs an association between the brand and France and Belgium through the positioning – each offset from the main text – of the PD logotype and the heading above it. Claims that the PD flies under ‘the Allies’ colours’ makes the relationship explicit, while implicitly associating the PD with Allied values. For New Zealanders, who thought of themselves as British, this embodied the Anglo-Saxon values of ‘unbending rectitude’, energy and fortitude needed to prevail against what they saw as the ‘barbaric, bestial adversary’.63 Nationalistic and militaristic, this was also a cultural war in which civilised people fought to hold back the incursions of the ‘barbaric “other”’.64 The advertisement offers a vision of the other’s antithesis in the PD corset-makers who, in spite of the extreme war conditions, toil ‘in the heart of the Belgian turmoil’. The corporeal facets of brains and fingers breathe life into the somewhat abstract notion of Parisian designers and Belgian workers. French designers had long been part of the manufacturer’s pre-war advertising, conjuring up visions of London and Parisian sophisticates and prompting the New Zealand woman to emulate her cosmopolitan sisters.65 ‘Belgian fingers’ prompts her to consider herself a co-conspirator with the manufacturers in a confederacy to aid her ‘needy’ Belgian sisters, to affiliate herself with the ‘enterprising company’, its identity, its workers and its present, urgent mission. Fever-pitched discourses of Belgian gallantry in the face of privation featured in the third advertisement in the Pahiatua Herald (1893–1943), for example (Figure 27.3 bottom left).66 Through a number of newspaper columns, bread – the ‘bread of tears’ – became a symbol of the plight of Belgium’s ‘stricken people’.67 While casting Belgium, in history and historiography, as victim is reductive, it was nonetheless how it was understood on the Australian and New Zealand home fronts.68 Reports throughout the early months of 1915 told of Germany’s refusal to feed the Belgian people, forcing them to seek help from the wider world through the CRB. The Marlborough Express reported that, in a bid to control bread distribution, the German army forbade its direct sale. Rather, it issued vouchers that were redeemable for bread.69 The import of such restrictions were likely not completely understood by well-fed New Zealanders. Bread, as one journalist explained, for the poor of Belgium (and most of them had become so) was not simply what one had with a meal, but was the meal itself.70 The CRB also used newspapers to appeal to the ‘chivalry of [a] virile young nation’ to make ‘still greater efforts’, to give more to ‘that little race’ which lined up each day to receive their ration of a ‘half-pound of bread and litre of soup’. Were the Belgians ‘to starve [. . .] to die for lack of bread?’71 The PD advertisement, which ran fifty-four times, conflated ‘the battle-line’ and ‘the bread-line’ within this discourse of bread. Like a German lancer, the headline pierces a rectangular border which echoes the ‘line of steel’ behind which the Belgians were contained. Faced with a breadline existence, ‘brave little Belgium’ again claims ‘the support of every woman in the Empire’. The large PD logotype

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breaches the line of steel, connecting the product which would provide assistance to ‘some worker who surely needs it’ with the information that the PD factory ‘is still manufacturing, and it is intended to run with the full staff throughout the War if possible’. This, the advertisement tells the woman, ‘deserves YOUR interest . . . You can help with your patronage.’ Then it directly addresses an implicit you that constructs a relationship between the advertisement and the woman. It requires responsive action – ‘buy P.D. corsets . . . don’t buy German corsets . . . give your trade to our Allies’. The final advertisement in the series ran seventy-five times and tells the reader exactly why she should focus sharply on the issue of the pathos of the Belgian situation. The compositional structure of these advertisements has much to add to the message of the words imprinted in them.72 While the layouts of all four advertisements guide their readers through the content, the spatially directional composition of the advertisement in the Southland Times (1862–) at the bottom right of Figure 27.3 is particularly adept at structuring elements in the same space to subvert the orthogonal structure of the newspaper and operate as a visual device for focusing attention.73 Conforming to Western reading paths, the design of this advertisement directs women’s attention to the relationship between the headline at the top left and the PD logotype on the bottom right. The phrase, ‘Belgium’s cry for help’, littered newspaper pages across the country. Its elaboration in the enclosed text tethers it to the solution: the response to the cry is thus the PD corset. The Belgian narrative unfolds within the space between them: a diagonal border-confined space that is both a symbol of Belgium’s occupation and an active, tension-filled expanse. This advertisement has an urgent, energetic dynamism not quite so evident in the previous three. While it repeats the provenance of the PD corset, it builds on the familiar trope of ‘brave little Belgium’. The ‘heroism and patriotism’ displayed throughout the ‘splendid defence’ of their country, which has caused ‘very great [. . .] suffering and poverty’, is within the power of the New Zealand woman to alleviate. No longer ‘every woman in the Empire’, she is now the more focused ‘woman in New Zealand’. The ‘whole world’ admired the Belgian workers’ fortitude against such ‘tremendous odds’. Using a second-person address that compels the woman to make herself a part of that sentiment leaves little room for her to avoid engagement with it. ‘Should’, ‘surely’ and a visually emphatic ‘YOUR’ – Belgian workers ‘surely deserve [. . .] YOUR help’ – make the directive difficult to ignore. Axiomatically, ‘YOUR next purchase should surely be a PD.’ These four advertisements were replaced in 1916 by a series of six pictorial advertisements that appeared a total of 164 times in fourteen New Zealand newspapers. The first ran on page 2 of the Marlborough Express on 13 January 1916 and the last on page 3 of the Dominion (1907–2002) on 14 September 1916.74 The emphasis in these advertisements shifted from the Belgian workers to the qualities of the corset. They returned to the pre-war model of extolling the virtues of the PD for correcting the incorrect figure and providing the ‘charm of slimness and girlishness’. Only then do they indirectly allude to women’s responsibility to the Allies. In Figure 27.4 left (this ran fifty-seven times) ‘Your duty toward your figure’ implies another duty, especially when accompanied by the more overt admonishment to ‘never forget France’ – and how could she when the gift-wrapped box bears the words ‘PD Paris’ – and ‘never forget the workers from Belgium’. Women were to ‘wear the P.D. corset because they are produced by our Allies!’ Reiterating the Allied connection, the advertisement in Figure 27.4 right ran fifty-three times and explains the simplicity of the task. French

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Figure 27.4  Two of six pictorial advertisements that ran 164 times in all from 17 January until 5 September 1916. They represent a shift in attention from Belgium to the corset itself.

artists – ‘the foremost corsetières in the world’ – design them and Belgian workers produce them, ‘so, in specifying the P.D. Corsets you afford signal help to the Allies’. Harking back to the patriot/consumer argument in favour of the PD, the advertisement ends with ‘Assist our Allies and serve yourself [. . .] by insisting upon’ the PD. ‘Serve’ is perhaps a carefully chosen word here. Although a few newspapers ran the odd PD advertisement – war-related and otherwise – until the end of 1916, these six pictorial advertisements signal the end of the consistent series. There were likely a number of reasons for the disappearance of the Belgian-related PD corset advertisements from Australian and New Zealand newspapers after 1916. By the end of 1915 news of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign had overtaken concerns about Belgium. The changing situation in Belgium itself was also a likely factor. An advertisement in Australia’s Maitland Weekly Mercury (1904–31) announces that PD corsets ‘were made in Belgium but are now made in France’.75 This suggests that this was close to the point when the policy of allowing Belgian industry to operate fell victim to Germany’s own needs.76 The advertisements were also related to supply, which was affected by constrained manufacturing, shipping delays and erratic distribution networks. Wairarapa Age (1906–38) and Wairarapa Daily Times (1879–1938) advertisements throughout November 1916 announce what may have been the last ‘big shipment’ to reach antipodean shores. PD advertisements only reappear in antipodean newspapers well after the end of the war. A 1921 Argus advertisement, for example, notes the return of ‘the celebrated P.D. corset [. . .] after an absence of nearly 7 years’.77 Similarly, an Otago Daily Times (1861–) advertisement heralds the arrival in Otago of ‘the first lot of this Belgian-made corset since the war began’.78

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Conclusion This chapter provides insights into how newspaper advertising intervened in women’s lives to achieve commercial, philanthropic and patriotic ends in Belgium, Australia and New Zealand. Most of these advertisements ran in regional newspapers, related perhaps to local availability of the corsets. Globally, newspaper advertisements themselves provide some evidence that the marketing of commodity products through a patriotic lens in the Great War was commonplace. However, I found no evidence of this kind of advertising for the PD beyond Australia and New Zealand. Whether or not the PD corset was part of the CRB enterprise, it was nevertheless available in Australian and New Zealand drapers and advertised to antipodean women for whom ‘poor little Belgium’ had become familiar through newspaper reports. Each countries’ advertising strategies were identical in intent, but very different in scope, presentation and distribution. Australian advertisements were narrowly distributed in towns along the south-east and, with the exception of the Robertson Advocate and the Southern Mail, few in number. Newspapers appear to have used the manufacturer’s local agents’ copy and then set the advertisements in a single column and with type they held in stock. On the other hand, the New Zealand advertisements were greater in number, wider in distribution and considerably more varied in graphic style and textual argument. Possibly the work of the Ilott advertising agency, they constructed a more consistent and sophisticated visual discourse. Designed to securely entangle New Zealand women in the lives of the Belgian workers, the strategy of multimodal messaging built on women’s familiarity with the tragedy of Belgium gleaned from months of newspaper reports from Europe and from their own involvement in Belgian fundraising activities. The ubiquity and salience of the New Zealand advertisements added a highly visible dimension to the pervasive war news that was a considerable feature of newspapers during the hostilities. The Belgian-made PD stories in the newspapers of both countries, as told through advertisements, became an additional, and more personal, prism through which women could understand others’ experiences of the war and respond accordingly. Once they bought the stories, they were primed to buy the corset.

Notes  1. Taranaki Herald (1852–1989), 11 March 1916, 2. I sourced the newspapers in this chapter from the digital repositories of Trove: National Library of Australia, , and Papers Past: National Library of New Zealand/Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa, . Neither archive holds every historical title, but both are sufficiently comprehensive to allow for meaningful analysis.   2. Sylvie Lausberg, ‘C’était au temps où Bruxelles inventait (IX): la Bonneterie Dutoict Tant d’élégantes acquises au bon goût bruxellois’, Le Soir, 13 August 1999, , accessed 24 April 2022.  3. Nelson Evening Mail (1866–), 14 February 1913, 7.   4. Éliane Gubin, Els Flour and Marie Kympers, ‘Women’s Mobilization for War (Belgium)’, 1914–1918 online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer and Bill Nasson (Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin, 2014), 4, last modified 21 September 2016, , accessed 24 April 2022.

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  5. Éliane Gubin and Catherine Jacques, Encyclopédie d’histoire des femmes: Belgique XIXe– XXe siècles (Brussels: Racine, 2018). I thank Dr Wendy Wiertz of KU Leuven for pointing me in the direction of the Union.   6. Jeffrey B. Miller, WWI Crusaders: A Band of Yanks in German-occupied Belgium Help Save Millions from Starvation as Civilians Resist the Harsh German Rule. August 1914 to May 1917 (Denver, CO: Millbrown Press, 2018).   7. The Covid-19 pandemic prevented archival access and the literature on wartime Belgian industry does not mention corsets.   8. An advertisement in the Manawatu Standard (1881–), 18 August 1915, 6, notes that a shipment had been ‘brought out from Belgium despite the war that harasses that plucky little country’.  9. Sydney Morning Herald, 6 August 1914, 7; Evening Post, 5 August 1914, 8. 10. Gwen Parsons, ‘Challenging Enduring Home Front Myths: Jingoistic Civilians and Neglected Soldiers’, in Endurance and the First World War: Experiences and Legacies in Australia and New Zealand, ed. David Monger, Sarah Murray and Katie Pickles (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2014), 62–85. See also Megan Hutching, ‘The Moloch of War: New Zealand Women Who Opposed the War’, in New Zealand’s Great War: New Zealand, the Allies and the First World War, ed. John Crawford and Ian McGibbon (Auckland: Exisle, 2007), 85–95. Māori women and men did not have a uniform response to the war. Some felt that their best interests would not be served by supporting the colonising institution that had taken their land. 11. Steven Loveridge, ‘“Sentimental Equipment”: New Zealand, the Great War and Cultural Mobilisation’, PhD dissertation, Victoria University of Wellington, 2013, 208. 12. Manawatu Times, 17 November 1914, 2. 13. For brevity, I have characterised both Australia’s rural and New Zealand’s provincial newspapers as regional. 14. Leanne Green, ‘Advertising War: Picturing Belgium in First World War Publicity’, Media, War and Conflict 7, no. 3 (2014): 309–24. 15. Most Great War scholarship concentrates on government propaganda rather than commercial advertising. Exceptions are David Clampin, ‘Commercial Advertising as Propaganda in World War One’, World War One, British Library, 29 January 2014, , accessed 24 April 2022; Green, ‘Advertising War’; Stephen L. Harp, Marketing Michelin: Advertising and Cultural Identity in Twentieth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 16. Australian and New Zealand exceptions are Steven Loveridge, ‘“They’ll Go Like British Shells!”: A Historical Perspective on Commercial “Anzackery” in New Zealand’, Journal of New Zealand Studies 32 (2021): 134–52; Andrew Francis, To be Truly British We Must be Anti-German: New Zealand, Enemy Aliens and the Great War Experience 1914–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), ch. 6; Robert Crawford, But Wait, There’s More: A History of Australian Advertising 1900–2001 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2008), 23–30; Robert Crawford, ‘Selling Modernity: Advertising and the Construction of the Culture of Consumption in Australia 1900–1950’, Australian Cultural History 24–5 (2006): 115–43, here 115. 17. Green, ‘Advertising War’, 3. 18. Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (London: Verso, 1996), 7. 19. Theo van Leeuwen, ‘Ten Reasons Why Linguists Should Pay Attention to Visual Communication’, in Discourse and Technology: Multimodal Discourse Analysis, ed. Philip Levine and Ronald Scollon (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2004), 7–20. 20. Bruno Benvindo and Benoît Majerus, ‘Histories and Memories: Recounting the Great War in Belgium 1914–2018’, in Writing the Great War: The Historiography of World War I from

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1918 to the Present, ed. Christoph Cornelissen and Arndt Weinrich (New York: Berghahn, 2021), 50–94. 21. See, for example, Gwen A. Parsons, ‘The New Zealand Home Front during World War One and World War Two’, History Compass 11, no. 6 (2013): 419–28; Gwen A. Parsons, ‘Debating the War: The Discourse of War in the Christchurch Community’, in Crawford and McGibbon, eds, New Zealand’s Great War, 550–68; Graham Hucker, ‘The Rural Home Front: A New Zealand Region and the Great War 1914–1926’, PhD dissertation, Massey University, 2008. 22. See, for example, Felicity Rash and Christophe Declercq, eds, The Great War in Belgium and the Netherlands: Beyond Flanders Fields (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Monger, Murray and Pickles, eds, Endurance and the First World War; Sophie De Schaepdrijver, ‘Belgium’, in A Companion to World War I, ed. John Horne (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 386–401; Tammy Proctor, ‘Missing in Action: Belgian Civilians and the First World War’, Journal of Belgian History 35, no. 4 (2005): 547–72; Bobbie Oliver, War and Peace in Western Australia: The Social and Political Impacts of the Great War 1914–1926 (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1995). 23. Proctor, ‘Missing’, 547 (italics in original). 24. Serge Jaumain et al., ‘The Traces of World War One in Brussels’, Brussels Studies: the e-journal for Academic Research on Brussels 102 (2016), , accessed 24 April 2022. 25. Parsons, ‘New Zealand Home Front’; John McQuilton, Rural Australia and the Great War: From Tarrawingee to Tangambalanga (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1997). 26. Sophie De Schaepdrijver, ‘A Civilian War Effort: The Comité National de Secours et d’Alimentation in Occupied Belgium, 1914–1918’, in Remembering Herbert Hoover and the Commission for Relief in Belgium: Proceedings of the Seminar held at the University Foundation, October 4, 2006 (Brussels: Fondation Universitaire, 2007), 9 (italics in original). 27. Alanna McKnight, ‘Damsels in this Dress: Female Agency and the Demise of the Corset’, in Fashion: Tyranny and Revelation, ed. Damayanthie Eluwawalage (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 221–9; Valerie Steele, The Corset: A Cultural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). 28. Theo van Leeuwen, ‘Typographic Meaning’, Visual Communication 4, no. 2 (2005): 137–43, here 138. 29. Van Leeuwen, ‘Typographic Meaning’, 138. 30. Ross Harvey, ‘Newspaper Archives in Australia and New Zealand’, Media History 5, no. 1 (1999): 71–80. 31. Hannah Barker, Newspapers, Politics and English Society 1695–1855 (London: Routledge, 2000), 1. 32. James Edward Traue, New Zealand Studies: A Guide to Bibliographic Resources (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1985), 12. 33. Harvey, ‘Newspaper Archives’. Harvey suggests that nineteenth-century Australia and New Zealand should be understood as a single entity in relation to the nature of their newspaper publishing. 34. Harvey, ‘Newspaper Archives’. 35. ‘Local and General’, Wairarapa Age, 3 April 1916, 4. 36. Victor Isaacs, John Russell, Rod Kirkpatrick and Patricia Clarke, Australian Newspaper History: A Bibliography, First Supplement (Middle Park: Australian Newspaper History Group, 2005); Ian F. Grant, Lasting Impressions: The Story of New Zealand’s Newspapers 1840–1920 (Masterton: Fraser Books, 2018). In New Zealand, newspapers and political parties put aside their differences in favour of patriotism. 37. Adrian Gregory, ‘A Clash of Cultures’, in A Call to Arms: Propaganda, Public Opinion and Newspapers in the Great War, ed. Troy R. E. Paddock (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004),

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38. 39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

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15–49, here 23. The Maoriland Worker (1910–24), a labour union monthly, was a notable exception to those that supported the war. Green, ‘Advertising War’. Sophie De Schaepdrijver, ‘Champion or Stillbirth: The Symbolic Uses of Belgium in the Great War’, in How Can One Not Be Interested in Belgian History? War, Language and Consensus in Belgium since 1830, ed. Benno Banard et al. (Dublin and Gent: Trinity College and Academia Press, 2005), 55–82. For perspectives on the reporting of German atrocities, see Emily Robertson, ‘Propaganda and “Manufactured Hatred”: A Reappraisal of the Ethics of First World War British and Australian Atrocity Propaganda’, Public Relations Inquiry 3, no. 2 (2014): 245–66; John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). Susan R. Grayzel and Tammy M. Proctor, eds, Gender and the Great War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Melanie Oppenheimer, ‘Opportunities to Engage: The Red Cross and Australian Women’s Global War Work’, in Australians and the First World War: Local–Global Connections and Contexts, ed. Kate Ariotti and James E. Bennett (New York: Palgrave-Springer, 2017), 85–101; Anna Rogers, While You’re Away: New Zealand Nurses at War 1899–1948 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2003). Gubin, Flour and Kympers, ‘Women’s Mobilization’. Oamaru Mail (1876–), 6 June 1913, 3. Image and text indicate that the corsets were for the middle-class woman who did not do ‘her own work’. Timaru Herald, 5 July 1913, 3. De Schaepdrijver, ‘Champion or Stillbirth’, 55. My searches were somewhat constrained by my Covid-related inability to access undigitised archives. Mark Jary and Mikhail Kissine, Imperatives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 2. Others were Argus, Age (1854–1954), Register (1901–21), Tamworth Daily Observer (1910–16), Daily Telegraph (1883–1930), Southern Mail, Brisbane Courier (1864–1933), Bundaberg Mail and Burnett Advertiser (1892–1917), Maryborough Chronicle, Wide Bay and Burnett Advertiser (1860–1947), Daily Mercury, Morning Bulletin (1878–1954), Townsville Daily Bulletin (1907–54). Tamworth Daily Observer, 30 November 1914, 3. ‘Aiding Belgian Women’, Herald, 2 October 1914, 5. The others were Daily Telegraph, Herald, Age, Brisbane Courier, Bundaberg Mail and Burnett Advertiser, Maryborough Chronicle, Wide Bay and Burnett Advertiser and Cairns Post. The pre-war pictorial advertisements bear Ilott’s name, but the overall design consistency in the typographic advertisements also argues persuasively for Ilott’s involvement. Theo van Leeuwen, ‘Multimodality, Genre and Design’, in Discourse in Action: Introducing Mediated Discourse Analysis, ed. Rodney H. Jones and Sigrid Norris (London: Routledge, 2005), 73–93, here 82. Wilson Bastos and Sidney J. Levy, ‘A History of the Concept of Branding: Practice and Theory’, Journal of Historical Research in Marketing 4, no. 3 (2012): 347–68, here 349. Vencat Ramaswami, ‘Co-creating Value Through Customers’ Experiences: The Nike Case’, Strategy and Leadership 36, no. 5 (2008): 9–14. Van Leeuwen, ‘Multimodality, Genre and Design’, 74. A group of one-column advertisements ran throughout January 1915 in a number of newspapers, but they are not examined here. Jack Ilott, The Story of Ilott Advertising, New Zealand 1892–1982 (Auckland: Ray Richards, 1985). See also Margaret C. Campbell and Kevin Lane Keller, ‘Brand Familiarity and Advertising Repetition Effects’, Journal of Consumer Research 30, no. 2 (2003): 292–304. Timaru Herald, 9 January 1915, 4. Others are Taranaki Herald, Thames Star, Feilding Star (1879–1939), Gisborne Times (1901–38), Pahiatua Herald, Manawatu Times, Wairarapa

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Daily Times, Marlborough Express, Waikato Times (1872–), Nelson Evening Mail, Oamaru Mail, Otago Witness (1851–1932), Greymouth Evening Star (1901–, under Greymouth Star). 58. Unless otherwise referenced, this and each following quotation refer to this advertisement, until I move on to discuss further advertisements which follow the same pattern. 59. David Monger, ‘Tangible Patriotism during the First World War: Individuals and the Nation in British Propaganda’, War & Society 37, no. 4 (2018): 244–61. 60. See John M. Swales, Ummul Ahmad, Yu-Ying Chang, Daniel Chavez, Dacia DressenHammouda and Ruth Seymour, ‘Consider This: The Role of Imperatives in Scholarly Writing’, Applied Linguistics 19, no. 1 (1998): 97–121. 61. In contrast to the Australian advertisements, none of these refer to the workers as women. Perhaps the New Zealand distributors were unaware that the PD workers were largely female. 62. The others are those in note 57 minus Taranaki Herald and plus Wanganui Herald. 63. Floriane Reviron-Piégay, ‘Introduction: The Dilemma of Englishness’, in Englishness Revisited, ed. Floriane Reviron-Piégay (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), 1–26, here 19. Conversely, the English also claimed Saxon, that is German, cultural heritage. Steven Loveridge, ‘A German is Always a German: Representations of Enemies, Germans and Race in New Zealand c. 1890–1918’, New Zealand Journal of History 48, no. 1 (2014): 51–77, here 51. 64. Loveridge, ‘Always a German’, 51. 65. Oamaru Mail, 20 October 1913, 2. 66. Pahiatua Herald, 19 February 1915, 6. This also ran in each of the newspapers outlined in note 62. 67. ‘Starving Belgians’, Mataura Ensign (1883–, under Ensign), 22 February 1915, 4. Bread, beyond its nutritional value, is also politically and culturally significant in the histories of a wide variety of peoples. Among the many editions that ran the PD advertisements along with the reports are: ‘Stricken People’, Pahiatua Herald, 9 April 1915, 2; ‘Anguish of Hunger’, Marlborough Express, 5 March 1915, 6; ‘Are the Belgians to Starve?’, Gisborne Times, 8 July 1915, 4. 68. Antoon Vrints, ‘Beyond Victimization: Contentious Food Politics in Belgium during World War 1’, European History Quarterly 45, no. 1 (2015): 83–107. 69. ‘Food Supplies in Belgium’, Marlborough Express, 22 January 1915, 5. 70. ‘Help the Belgians’, Wanganui Herald, 16 April 1915, 4. 71. ‘Famished Belgium’, Evening Star (1863–1979), 4 March 1915, 7. 72. Jana Pflaeging and Hartmut Stöckl, ‘Tracing the Shapes of Multimodal Rhetoric: Showing the Epistemic Powers of Visualization’, Visual Communication 20, no. 3 (2021): 1–18. 73. Southland Times, 11 June 1915, 14. The other newspapers include those outlined in note 57. 74. The others were those outlined in note 62 plus Hawera and Normanby Star (1880–1924), Taranaki Herald, Otago Daily Times. 75. Maitland Weekly Mercury, 20 May 1915, 1. 76. Vrints, ‘Beyond Victimization’. 77. Argus, 5 September 1921, 9. 78. Otago Daily Times, 22 November 1921, 3.

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28 China Elisabeth Forster

C

hina declared war on Germany in August 1917, thereby officially entering the First World War on the side of the Entente countries.1 Subsequently, China did not send soldiers but workers, the Chinese Labour Corps, to help the British and French armies with their everyday labour in France, such as building roads, barracks or trenches.2 China entered the war as it wanted to regain Germany’s former colonial concessions in China’s Shandong Province, a hope that was thwarted by the Treaty of Versailles, but fulfilled by the later Washington Conference (1921–2).3 China’s vibrant press commented on the war from the very beginning. But as this chapter argues, the way it interpreted the war changed dramatically over the years. While the conflict was ongoing, from 1914 through much of 1918, the press saw the war in the spirit of Carl von Clausewitz’s (1780–1831) famous statement as being ‘a mere continuation of politics by other means’ (eine bloße Fortsetzung der Politik mit andern Mitteln).4 Declaring war on Germany was discussed in terms of implementing the long-standing political goal of ridding China from imperialism and gaining a more prestigious position on the international stage. The war itself was seen as a value-neutral conflict between European powers pursuing their respective interests. However, as the war drew to a close and the Paris Peace Conference convened at Versailles, narratives changed. The war was now retrospectively reinterpreted as a just war on the side of the Entente, which was fighting for democracy, and an unjust one on the side of the Central Powers, which had been guided by militarism. This reflected a development in international thinking about war, away from Clausewitzian views to what Stephen C. Neff has called ‘a reversion to the medieval just-war outlook’ at the end of and after the hostilities.5 Imbuing the war with new political and emotional meaning came to a height when protests broke out on 4 May 1919 in Beijing about the treatment of the Shandong issue at Versailles. These anti-imperialist and anti-government protests soon morphed into wider cultural debates, fought out in journals, about a broad range of themes, from language reform and advocacy of science and democracy, to feminism and communism. This is known as the May Fourth or New Culture movement. One of its results was the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. As this chapter goes on to show, two continuities persisted throughout these changes. First of all, China’s press never considered the war a Chinese problem. Instead it was only interested in the side-effects of the war that affected China (such as regaining colonial concessions as a result of the entry into the war). Consequently, they usually called it the ‘European War’ (Ouzhan 歐戰).6 Expressions such as ‘world war’ (shijie dazhan 世界大戰 or shijie zhanzheng 世界戰爭) were used only rarely.7 Secondly, the Chinese press hardly ever mentioned the workers who were actually

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participating in the war on behalf of China, focusing instead on the potential political consequences. Academic literature on Chinese journals’ coverage of the First World War is sparse. Among the few works on the topic are articles by Gao Qiang, arguing that the famous newspaper New Youth (Xin qingnian 新青年, 1915–26) used coverage of the war to draw lessons for China.8 Luo Gang and Long Xiaoli discuss a growing interest in communism that was reflected in journals as a result of the war.9 Some work has also been done on journals targeted at the Chinese Labour Corps itself.10 What has mostly drawn scholars’ attention are the May Fourth demonstrations and the New Culture movement, as well as the development of newspapers and journals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.11 The reason, one suspects, is that May Fourth and New Culture have been written into history as a watershed moment in modern China, to which the war was only a background.12 Since the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party was arguably one of the outcomes of the May Fourth movement, this interpretation is also supported by official Chinese Communist Party historiography.13

The Periodical Landscape during the First World War By the time the First World War broke out in 1914, China had developed a rich periodical landscape. This was a new development. Before the late nineteenth century, information about political affairs did not circulate widely outside of the court. Memorials, texts that officials submitted to the emperor to make policy suggestions, were largely secret.14 The content of court gazettes (jingbao 京報) was shaped by the court and used to promulgate official information on matters such as appointments, memorials or edicts.15 But the press was revolutionised through various ramifications of Western imperialism. European and later American and Japanese incursions into China began with the First Opium War of 1839–42 and continued with a series of other wars, in the wake of which China not only lost its foreign spheres of influence, but also had to conclude a range of unfavourable treaties with essentially all the imperialist powers. These unequal treaties gave the imperialist powers favourable trading rights, the right to establish foreign concessions on Chinese soil and to exercise extraterritoriality in them, and to have Christian missionaries operating in China. This also triggered the political goal that China would pursue through its entry into the First World War: the desire to rid itself of imperialism and raise its status on the international stage. Under the influence of imperialism, China’s press transformed, and newspapers that took inspiration from their Western counterparts were founded by foreign and Chinese nationals.16 China’s first new-style magazine was launched in 1815 by missionaries and a Chinese national in Malacca.17 In 1872 the British businessman Ernest Major (1841–1908) founded one of China’s most famous commercial newspapers, the Shanghai News (Shenbao 申報, 1872–1949), in Shanghai’s International Settlement (that is, the British and American concession).18 In 1912 the Shanghai News was taken over by Chinese owners and then run by Shi Liangcai 史量才 (1880–1934).19 Christian missionaries published journals too, such as the All Nations Gazette (Wanguo gongbao 萬國公報, 1868–1907) founded under the aegis of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South 监理会.20 Additionally, Chinese nationals founded publications. The Chinese government launched the New Paper (Xinbao 新報) in 1876.21 The famous scholar and reformer Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873–1929) was editor of the bi-monthly

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Current Affairs (Shiwubao 時務報, 1896–8) and involved in the publication of another epoch-making newspaper, the Eastern Times (Shibao 時報, 1904–39).22 The influence of imperialism is also evident in the ideas that these newspapers disseminated. Suspecting that Western imperialist strength was derived not only from weaponry, but also from ideas, many Chinese scholars in the late nineteenth century grew interested in Western science, political thinking, philosophy, literature and so on.23 Such ‘Western learning’ was often disseminated in this new press. Among the most famous journals used in this context was Liang Qichao’s New Citizen (Xinmin congbao 新民叢報, 1902–7), which contained one of China’s earliest mentions of Marx.24 Another was Eastern Miscellany (Dongfang zazhi 東方雜誌, 1904–48).25 By the 1910s many groups, from political parties to educational institutions, ran their own journals and newspapers. For example, the political party Research Clique had Morning Post (Chenbao 晨報, 1916–28).26 China’s top academic institution, Beijing University, ran the Beijing University Daily (Beijing daxue rikan 北京大學日 刊, 1917–32).27 Intellectual groups of different stripes had their journals. The most famous was New Youth, launched by Chen Duxiu 陳獨秀 (1879–1942) in 1915.28 Chen Duxiu would be one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. New Youth’s writers advocated language reform, feminism and communism, and this set of ideas would later be known as the New Culture movement. There were also outlets for more conservative points of view, such as National Heritage (Guogu 國故, March–October 1919), a student journal at Beijing University, and Critical Review (Xueheng 學衡, 1922–33).29 In addition, essentially every study or hobby society had a magazine.30 Journals specifically dedicated to the war were also founded, but they had very limited influence. Among them was European War Reports (Ouzhan shibao 歐戰實報, 1915–18), which covered various technical aspects of the war, such as battles, military analysis, budgets or related political decisions.31 Journals targeted at the Chinese Labour Corps itself were also founded by Chinese nationals seeking to educate the workers.32

In the Shadow of Clausewitz: Press Coverage before 1918 When the First World War broke out in the summer of 1914, China declared neutrality, and the declaration was reprinted in the press.33 A problem, however, was that Japan, which the Chinese press dubbed ‘Britain’s ally in the East’ (英之同盟國), declared war against Germany.34 Soon it emerged that China’s neutrality was not serving its national interests very well, since Japan occupied Germany’s colonial concessions in China’s Shandong Province.35 Germany had obtained these concessions in 1898 as part of the imperialist ‘scramble for China’.36 As Germany returned to its policy of unlimited submarine warfare in early 1917, the United States started to be drawn into the war and gradually China would follow the Americans’ suit.37 Imitating the steps taken by the US, China protested against Germany’s unlimited submarine warfare in February 1917.38 In March 1917 it broke diplomatic relations with Germany.39 In August 1917 China declared war, citing, as the US had done, Germany’s unlimited submarine warfare.40 Unlike the United States, China did not send soldiers to the front, but workers instead.41 From 1914 until just before the end of the war in 1918, the Chinese press across the political and intellectual spectrum talked about the war in Clausewitzian terms

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as a value-neutral ‘continuation of politics by other means’.42 One manifestation of this was that the press was not particularly morally judgmental about the war. Newspapers and journals did not ponder whether the war was just or who was to blame. They referred to the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, and they described how it had triggered various alliances and interests in Europe and Asia, and what the battle lines were.43 According to some journals, the war was a power competition between Britain and Germany, since both countries were competing for colonies, or a clash between ‘pan-Slavism’ (da Silafuzhuyi 大斯拉夫主義) and ‘pan-Germanism’ (da Rimanzhuyi 大 日曼主義).44 While some articles lamented the war as an ‘ill-conceived plan’ (feiji 非計), others found it exciting.45 New Youth, for example, featured stories about Germany’s submarines, which had cunningly broken through British blockades and had turned up at the American coast.46 All of this chimed with the name the Chinese press usually gave the conflict: the ‘European War’. It was, after all, not really China’s problem. If the ‘dispassion[ate]’ tone of the press coverage of the First World War was one hallmark of Clausewitzian attitudes in the Chinese press, the belief that participation in the war would further China’s long-standing political agenda of anti-imperialism was another.47 Again, publications of all political and intellectual stripes agreed. They argued that entry into the war would raise China’s international status and enable the country to participate in the post-war peace conference.48 They also claimed that this was particularly promising since an Entente victory was likely after the United States had joined them in April 1917.49 What costs people were prepared to bear and which benefits had been negotiated was therefore also a matter of discussion when the press complained about China’s own warlord government. Even though a central government existed in Beijing, the country was divided into spheres of influence of numerous ‘military governors’ (dujun 督軍), or warlords, who were either allied or at odds with each other, often in quick succession, and who manipulated Chinese politics. In the run-up to China’s war declaration of August 1917, a lot of criticism was levelled at the warlord government for not getting sufficiently good ‘conditions’ (tiaojian 條件) from the Entente.50 These ‘conditions’ referred to promises that the Entente was making in exchange for China entering the war. Some also did not want China to send soldiers.51 Consequently, journals cited politicians soothing their critics by explaining that China would only have to send workers.52 In all these discussions of the ‘European War’ in the major journals, the fates of the Chinese workers, who were the ones actually participating, were barely ever mentioned.53

The Turn to Just War Rhetoric in 1918–19 The international community was shocked by the unprecedented destructiveness of the First World War.54 Towards its end and in the aftermath of the hostilities, the idea therefore emerged that the ethics of war needed to move away from the Clausewitzian notion that war was ‘a continuation of politics by other means’.55 While the obvious answer would have been pacifism, national interests (such as the maintenance of European empires) propelled the international community to instead declare some wars to be just and others unjust, and to only ‘delegitimise’ the unjust wars.56 The Chinese press participated in this change of attitude and reinterpreted the First World War as a just war on the side of the Entente and an unjust war on the side of the Central Powers. Unemotional narratives about the war did not disappear from the Chinese press. Journals continued

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to discuss battles, China’s international standing or the competition between Britain and Germany as a cause of the war.57 But they also started to introduce the idea that the First World War had been the struggle of a sense of ‘humanism and righteousness of the world’ (世界人道公義) against German militarism, and that it was the fault of Wilhelm II specifically, rather than that of the German people.58 New Youth bought into the just war interpretation particularly enthusiastically. For example, in November 1918 several organisations in Beijing organised events to celebrate the end of the First World War.59 The prestigious Beijing University was among them, and it organised a rally on Tian’anmen Square in the Chinese capital, Beijing, where some of its members of staff gave speeches. Some of the speeches were then reprinted in New Youth.60 Featuring as the first article in the issue was an article by Li Dazhao 李大釗 (1889–1927), who declared the First World War to have been ‘The victory of the common people’ (庶民的勝利). Li’s argument foreshadowed the fact that in 1921 he would be among the founders of the Chinese Communist Party. He declared that what has won this time is not the military power of the Entente countries, [but] a new spirit of mankind of the world. It is not the warlord or capitalist government of any country, [but] the common people of the whole world [. . .] We do not celebrate defeating the German people, [but] we celebrate defeating global militarism. (這會戰勝的，不是聯合國的武力，是世界人類的新精神。不是那一國的軍閥或資 本家的政府，是全世界的庶民。. . . . . . 不是為打敗德國人慶祝，是為打敗世界的 軍國主義慶祝。)61 Li Dazhao went on to declare the war to have been a victory for ‘democracy’ (民主 主義), over ‘pan. . .-isms’ (大. . . . . . 主義), such as ‘pan-Germanism’ (大日耳曼主 義) or ‘pan-Slavism’ (大斯拉夫主義).62 And since ‘the victory of democracy is the victory of the common people’ (民主主義勝利，就是庶民的勝利),63 his interpretation of the war ended with the announcement of a socialist utopia: ‘We must know that the future world will become a worker’s world [. . .] If we want to be a common person in the world, we should be a worker in the world. Everybody! Quickly go and work!’ (須知今後的世界，變成勞工的世界。. . . . . . 我們要想在世界上當一個庶民，應該在世 界上當一個工人。諸位呀！快去作工呵！)64 This emotional, black-and-white depiction was a significant departure from earlier coverage of the exciting adventures of German submarines.

May Fourth and New Culture With the May Fourth demonstrations against China’s treatment in the Treaty of Versailles, feelings about justice and injustice became more emotional, but also acquired new targets, namely imperialism and the Chinese government. The May Fourth demonstrations brought the First World War back into the pull of Clausewitz. Starting on 4 May 1919, these protests were directed against a clause in the Treaty of Versailles which awarded Germany’s former colonial concessions in Shandong Province to Japan, instead of returning them to China. This had happened, among other reasons, because China’s warlords had concluded treaties with Japan, promising Germany’s

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concessions in exchange for loans. Newspapers and journals touted these arrangements as ‘secret’, but they had actually largely been reported in the press.65 The Treaty of Versailles confirmed this deal. As the May Fourth demonstrations gained momentum, they boosted a series of agendas for cultural and social reform, which had emerged in China in the preceding decades. This became known as the May Fourth movement or the New Culture movement.66 These agendas included language reform, marriage reform, women’s liberation, popular education, communism, advocacy of what was called ‘Mr Science’ and ‘Mr Democracy’ and many other ideas.67 They had previously already been debated in journals such as New Youth, but gained wider traction through the enthusiasm surrounding the May Fourth demonstrations. For this purpose urban humanities and educational circles, as well as certain political parties, founded many, often short-lived, new journals in what Fabio Lanza calls an ‘explosion of publications’.68 Contemporaries often claimed that 400 journals had been founded as a result of May Fourth.69 According to one statistic, 487 periodicals and newspapers existed in China in 1913. After May Fourth, this number was between 840 and 2,000.70 An example of the way in which culture was changed is language reform, specifically the baihua 白話 (plain language) movement. Baihua was a form of language based on the vernacular of the Beijing dialect, combined with neologisms designed to imitate Western words and sentence structures.71 The baihua movement demanded that this form of language replace China’s traditional style of written language, Classical Chinese, which was based on the language of the Confucian Classics. New Youth had advocated this idea since a set of famous articles by Hu Shi 胡適 (1891–1962) and Chen Duxiu in 1917.72 But the journal had limited impact at the time.73 However after May Fourth, many of the newly founded journals wrote in baihua as a way to show their allegiance to journals such as New Youth and academics such as Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu.74 In this way, baihua gained so much influence that, a few decades later, it became the basis of modern Mandarin (or Putonghua 普通話).75 May Fourth in this way had a lasting impact on China’s press, and its literature and language more broadly. While the First World War and the Paris Peace Conference continued to be discussed in changing contexts over the next years, it was the New Culture conversation that became famous.76 The Chinese Labour Corps remained a footnote in the story.

Conclusion: Afterlives The First World War reshaped China’s periodical landscape, but only indirectly and thanks to the Chinese press’s focus on those aspects of the war that were relevant to China. The war itself, to China’s press, was the ‘European War’ and had little to do with them. But the war was reframed to become useful for China, first as a Clausewitzian opportunity to continue China’s politics of anti-imperialism by other means, and then as something that introduced the emotional debates of May Fourth and New Culture. This would not be the end of Chinese reinterpretations of the First World War. As the Chinese Communist Party rose to power, Mao Zedong 毛澤東 (1893–1976), its chairman from 1935 onwards, endorsed a new interpretation, which was embedded in broader socialist thinking of the time.77 To him, the First World War was an unjust war on both sides, the Central Powers and the Entente, since both were fighting an

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imperialist war, and imperialist wars were unjust: ‘As for unjust wars, the First World War is an instance in which both sides fought for imperialist interests; therefore, the Communists of the whole world firmly opposed that war’, he wrote in 1938.78 In other words, interpretations of the First World War continued to evolve in China. But the war had inscribed the just war paradigm deeply into Chinese discourses, with implications for how war would be talked about for decades to come. However, what transformed the Chinese press, Chinese culture, ideology and even the Chinese language, was not so much the war, but China’s reactions to the Treaty of Versailles in the form of the May Fourth movement.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Jennifer Bond for her feedback on this chapter.

Notes   1. Chi-jui Tuan, ‘Presidential Proclamation Declaring War on Germany and Austria-Hungary, 14 August, 1917,’ in Declarations of War, ed. US Department of State (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1919), 18–19, , accessed 1 August 2022.  2. Tse-tsung Chow, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 38; Paul J. Bailey, ‘“Coolies” or Huagong? Conflicting British and Chinese Attitudes towards Chinese Contract Workers in World War One France’, in Britain and China, 1840–1970: Empire, Finance and War, ed. Robert Bickers and Jonathan J. Howlett (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 105. The United States employed some of the workers recruited by France; see Chow, The May Fourth Movement, 37. For more information on the Chinese Labour Corps, see Guoqi Xu, Strangers on the Western Front: Chinese Workers in the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Guoqi Xu, China and the Great War: China’s Pursuit of a New National Identity and Internationalization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Dominiek Dendooven, ‘Asia in Flanders Fields: A Transnational History of Indians and Chinese on the Western Front, 1914–1920’, PhD dissertation, University of Antwerp, 2018.  3. 劉景泉 (Liu Jingquan) and 鄧麗蘭 (Deng Lilan), ‘山東問題’ (The Shandong Question), in 民國史紀事本末 (The Complete Chronicle of Republican History), ed. 魏宏運 (Wei Hongyun) (沈陽: 遼寧人民出版社, 1998), CNKI Reference Works Online.   4. Carl von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege: Hinterlassenes Werk des Generals Carl von Clausewitz (Berlin: R. Wilhelmi, 1883), 16.   5. Stephen C. Neff, War and the Law of Nations: A General History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 4.   6. See, for example, 陶履恭 (Chen Lügong), ‘歐戰以後的政治’ (Politics after the European War), 新青年 (New Youth) 5, no. 5 (1918): 439–41; ‘北京方面之歐戰談’ (Talk about the European War in Beijing), 申報 (Shanghai News), 3 August 1914; 梁啟超 (Liang Qichao), ‘歐戰結局之敎訓’ (Lessons at the End of the European War), 每週評論 (Weekly Critic), 22 December 1918, 1 edition; ‘歐戰記要’ (Key Facts of the European War), 四川旬報 (Sichuan Bimonthly) 1, no. 1 (1915): 13–14. In a similar vein: ‘European war’ (Ouzhou zhanshi 歐 洲戰事), in 漸生 (Jian Sheng), ‘紀歐洲戰事’ (Chronicling the European War), 甲寅（東 京） (Tiger [Tokyo]) 1, no. 4 (1914): 1–10; or ‘Great European War’ (Ouzhou dazhan 歐 洲大), 戰 胡學愚 (Hu Xueyu), ‘歐洲大戰中之日本’ (Japan in the Great European War), 東 方雜誌 (Eastern Miscellany) 14, no. 1 (1917): 9. The Shanghai News is available in digital

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form on 申報 1872–1949 (Shanghai News 1872–1949 [database]), http://shunpao.egreenapple.com, accessed 12 January 2016. Unless indicated otherwise, all other cited journals are digitised on 全國報刊索引 (National Index of Chinese Newspapers and Periodicals), http://www.cnbksy.com, accessed 14 April 2021.  7. On the use of these expressions, see 金觀濤 (Jin Guantao) and 劉青峰 (Liu Qingfeng), ‘五四新青年群體為何放棄《自由主義》？——重大事件與觀念變遷互動之研究’ (Why Did the New Youth Community of May Fourth Abandon ‘Liberalism’? – A Study of the Interaction between Big Events and Conceptual Shifts), 二十世紀 (Twenty-First Century), no. 82 (April 2004): 27–8. That they were only used rarely is suggested by a search for these keywords between 1914 and 1918 on Quanguo baokan suoyin.  8. 高强 (Gao Qiang), ‘“盱衡內外之大勢”與塑造“新國民”的窗口——《新青年》“國外大事 記”“國內大事記”專欄研究’ (A Window into ‘Taking Stock of Domestic and Foreign Trends’ and Moulding a ‘New Citizen’ – A Study of the Columns ‘A Record of Events Abroad’ and ‘A Record of Events in China’ in New Youth), 齊魯學刊 (Qilu Journal), no. 2 (2020): 144–52.  9. 羅崗 (Luo Gang), ‘霸權更迭、俄國革命與‘庶民’意涵的變遷——重返‘五四’之一’ (A Change of Hegemony, the Russian Revolution and Changes in the Connotations of ‘Les Damnés’ – Revisiting ‘May Fourth’), 上海大學學報（社會科學版） (Journal of Shanghai University [Social Sciences]) 36, no. 2 (March 2019): 43–61; 龍小立 (Long Xiaoli), ‘五 四新文化派的政治轉向及其思想差異——以《每週評論》時期為 中心的分析’ (The Political Shift of the May Fourth New Culture Faction and Their Ideological Differences – An Analysis with a Focus on the Period of the Weekly Critic), 南京大學學報（哲學·人文科學· 社會科學） (Journal of Nanjing University [Philosophy, Humanities and Social Sciences]), no. 6 (2006): 87–96. 10. Dendooven, ‘Asia in Flanders Fields’, 172–4. 11. Literature on the May Fourth movement and New Culture abounds. Among the key works are Chow, The May Fourth Movement; Rana Mitter, A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Pingyuan Chen, Touches of History: An Entry into ‘May Fourth’ China, trans. Michel Hockx (Leiden: Brill, 2011). A useful bibliography can be found in the Bibliography section of the Resource Centre of the website of the journal Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, , accessed 24 April 2022. Literature on the development of newspapers and journals at the time is also virtually unlimited. A few key works are Barbara Mittler, A Newspaper for China? Power, Identity, and Change in Shanghai’s News Media, 1872–1912 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004); Natascha Vittinghoff, Die Anfänge des Journalismus in China (1860–1911) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2002); Henrietta Harrison, ‘Newspapers and Nationalism in Rural China 1890–1929’, Past & Present, no. 166 (February 2000): 181–204; 彭鹏 (Peng Peng), 研究系與五四時期新文化運動：以1920年前後為中心 (The Research Clique and the New Culture Movement in the May Fourth Period: With a Focus on the Time around the Year 1920) (廣州: 中山大學出版社, 2003); Yutang Lin, A History of the Press and Public Opinion in China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936); Stephen R. MacKinnon, ‘Toward a History of the Chinese Press in the Republican Period’, Modern China 23, no. 1 (1997): 3–32; 龐菊愛 (Pang Ju’ai), 跨文化廣告與市民文化的變 遷:1910–1930年《申報》跨文化廣告研究 (Developments in Cross-Cultural Advertisement and Urbanites’ Culture: Research on Cross-Cultural Advertisement in the Shanghai News, 1910–1930) (上海: 上海交通大學出版社, 2010). 12. For example, Mitter, A Bitter Revolution; Susan Daruvala, Zhou Zuoren and an Alternative Chinese Response to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2000). 13. For example, 金衝及 (Jin Chongji), ‘五四運動：偉大的歷史轉折點’ (The May Fourth Movement: A Great Historical Turning Point), 人民日報 (The People’s Daily), 4 May 2009.

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14. Mittler, A Newspaper for China?, 2–3. 15. Mittler, A Newspaper for China?, 3, 25. 16. Mittler, A Newspaper for China?, 18–23. See also 高, ‘“盱衡內外之大勢”與塑造“新國民” 的窗口——《新青年》“國外大事記”“國內大事記”專欄研究’, 144. 17. Chow, The May Fourth Movement, 45. 18. Mittler, A Newspaper for China?, 2; Rudolf Wagner, ‘The Role of the Foreign Community in the Chinese Public Sphere’, The China Quarterly, no. 142 (June 1995): 423–43, here 432. On the international settlement, see Isabella Jackson, Shaping Modern Shanghai: Colonialism in China’s Global City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 4. 19. 高狄 (Gao Di), ed., ‘申報’ (Shanghai News), in 馬克思恩格斯列寧斯大林毛澤東著作大辭 典 (Great Dictionary of Works by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao Zedong) (長春: 長 春出版社, 2991), CNKI Reference Works Online. 20. ‘文獻導航’ (Documents Guide), 全國報刊索引 (National Index of Chinese Newspapers and Periodicals), http://www.cnbksy.com/, accessed 12 January 2020. 21. Mittler, A Newspaper for China?, 19. 22. Current Affairs: 馬良春 (Ma Liangchun) and 李福田 (Li Futian), eds, ‘時務報’ (Current Affairs), in 中國文學大辭典 (Great Dictionary of Chinese Literature) (天津: 天津人民出版 社, 1991), CNKI Reference Works Online. Eastern Times: Joan Judge, ‘Public Opinion and the New Politics of Contestation in the Late Qing, 1904–1911’, Modern China 20, no. 1 (1994): 65; Joan Judge, Print and Politics: ‘Shibao’ and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). 23. Benjamin Isadore Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1964); Hao Chang, Chinese Intellectuals in Crisis: Search for Order and Meaning (1890–1911) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Lionel M. Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity – China, 1900–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). 24. New Citizen: ‘Quanguo baokan suoyin, qikan daohang’. The mention of Marx: Chow, The May Fourth Movement, 32. 25. 馬良春 (Ma Liangchun) and 李福田 (Li Futian), eds, ‘東方雜誌’ (Eastern Miscellany), in 中國文學大辭典 (Great Dictionary of Chinese Literature) (天津: 天津人民出版社, 1991), CNKI Reference Works Online. 26. 彭, 研究系與五四時期新文化運動：以1920年前後為中心, 173, 183. 27. Timothy B. Weston, The Power of Position: Beijing University, Intellectuals, and Chinese Political Culture, 1898–1929 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 133. 28. Originally, this journal was called Youth Magazine (Qingnian zazhi 青年雜誌), but it was renamed New Youth in 1916. 汪原放 (Wang Yuanfang), 亞東圖書館與陳獨秀 (East Asia Library and Chen Duxiu) (上海: 學林出版社, 2006), 41. 29. National Heritage: Weston, The Power of Position, 170. Critical Review: Liu, Translingual Practice, 250. 30. For some examples, see Weston, The Power of Position, 135–7; Fabio Lanza, Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 115–16. 31. Battles: ‘法炮隊轟擊德陣地’ (The French Artillery Shells the German Position), 歐戰 實報 (European War Report), no. 118 (1917): 2. Military analysis: ‘德國地位之絕望’ (The Hopelessness of the German Position), 歐戰實報 (European War Report), no. 118 (1917): 4–8. Budgets: ‘明年度戰費預算’ (Next Year’s Military Budget), 歐戰實報 (European War Report), no. 118 (1917): 10. Political decisions: ‘美總統揭破德國之欺罔手段’ (The US President Exposes Germany’s Methods of Deceit), 歐戰實報 (European War Report), no. 171 (1918): 5.

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32. Dendooven, ‘Asia in Flanders Fields’, 172–4. 33. On China declaring neutrality: Neff, War and the Law of Nations, 191–4. Coverage in the press: ‘命令’ (Order), 申報 (Shanghai News), 9 August 1914; ‘公布局外中立條規’ (Promulgating the Neutrality Regulations), 東方雜誌 (Eastern Miscellany) 11, no. 3 (1914): 21–4. 34. Britain’s ally in the East: ‘歐洲大戰爭開始’ (The Great European War Begins), 東方雜 誌 (Eastern Miscellany) 11, no. 2 (1914): 12; similar also in 胡, ‘歐洲大戰中之日本’; 端 六 (Duan Liu), ‘戰爭與財力’ (The War and Financial Resources), 甲寅（東京） (Tiger [Tokyo]) 1, no. 6 (1915): 1. On the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, see J. Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of Global Order, 1916–1931 (New York: Viking Penguin, 2014), 94. 35. On neutrality and China’s national interests: 蘭池 (Lan Chi), ‘第一次世界大戰新舊國會 “對 德宣戰案”始末’(The Complete Story of the ‘Declaration of War against Germany’ of the Old and New Parliament in the First World War), 中南大學學報（社會科學版） (Journal of the Central South University [Social Sciences]) 23, no. 1 (2017): 168. 36. Robert A. Bickers, The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832–1914 (London: Penguin, 2012). Germany obtaining the concessions: 劉 and 鄧, ‘山東問題’. 37. Germany’s unlimited submarine warfare: Tooze, The Deluge, 58. China following the US: 蘭, ‘第一次世界大戰新舊國會“對德宣戰案”始末’, 168. 38. 蘭, ‘第一次世界大戰新舊國會“對德宣戰案”始末’, 170. 39. 蘭, 170; International Law Documents: Neutrality, Breaking of Diplomatic Relations, War (1917) (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918), 70–1. 40. ‘命令’ (Order), 申報 (Shanghai News), August 15, 1917. On China’s entry into the war, see also Marie-Claire Bergère, Sun Yat-Sen, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 270–3. 41. 蘭, ‘第一次世界大戰新舊國會“對德宣戰案”始末’, 169. 42. von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 16. 43. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand: 漸, ‘紀歐洲戰事’, 1; ‘歐洲大戰爭開始’, 5. Alliances and interests: ‘歐洲大戰爭開始’, 5; 漸生 (Jian Sheng), ‘再紀歐洲戰事’ (Chronicling the European War Again), 甲寅（東京） (Tiger [Tokyo]) 1, no. 5 (1915): 1–11; ‘歐戰之異觀’ (A Different View on the European War), 申報 (Shanghai News), 11 August 1914; ‘歐戰之 新端倪’ (New Clues in the European War), 申報 (Shanghai News), 10 August 1914. Battle lines: ‘歐戰記要’. 44. The competition between Britain and Germany: ‘漸, ‘紀歐洲戰事’, 2; ‘北京方面之歐戰談.’ Competition for colonies: 漸, ‘紀歐洲戰事’, 4. Pan-Slavism versus pan-Germanism: 漸, 2. 45. 傖父 (Cang Fu), ‘大戰爭與中國’ (The Great War and China), 東方雜誌 (Eastern Miscellany) 11, no. 3 (1914): 7. Another article lamenting the war: ‘北京方面之歐戰談’. 46. ‘德意志潛航艇横斷大西洋’ (A German Submarine Crosses the Atlantic), 新青年 (New Youth) 2, no. 3 (1916): 79; ‘美國沿岸之德人潜艇戰’ (The Germans’ Submarine Warfare off the US Coast), 新青年 (New Youth) 2, no. 4 (1916): 75. 47. ‘[D]ispassion[ate]’: Neff, War and the Law of Nations, 197. 48. China’s international status: 傖父 (Cang Fu), ‘宣戰與時局之關係’ (The Relationship between the Declaration of War and the Current Political Situation), 東方雜誌 (Eastern Miscellany) 14, no. 9 (1917): 5; ‘宣戰發表’ (The Publication of the Declaration of War), 申 報 (Shanghai News), 15 August 1917. On the peace conference: 傖, ‘宣戰與時局之關係’, 5. 49. Describing a speech given by Premier Duan Qirui ‘宣戰案與政潮’ (The Case of the War Declaration and the Political Upheaval), 新青年 (New Youth) 3, no. 4 (1917): 3. 50. ‘對德事件與軍事會議’ (The German Incident and the War Council), 新青年 (New Youth) 3, no. 3 (1917): 4; the ‘conditions’ were also mentioned in ‘閣議中之對德宣戰案’ (The Case of the War Declaration against Germany in the Cabinet Meeting), 申報 (Shanghai News), 6 August 1917; ‘中國大事記：民國六年三月十三日’ (China’s Great Chronicle: 13 March 1917), 東方雜誌 (Eastern Miscellany) 14, no. 4 (1917): 212.

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51. Describing a speech given by Premier Duan Qirui: ‘宣戰案與政潮’, 2–3. 52. Describing a speech given by Premier Duan Qirui: ‘宣戰案與政潮’, 2–3. 53. For a similar comment on the workers playing only a minor role in Chinese public discourses, see Bailey, ‘“Coolies” or Huagong?’, 103; Paul J. Bailey, ‘From “Coolie” to Transnational Agent: The “Afterlives” of World War One Chinese Workers’, in Commemorating Race and Empire in the First World War Centenary, ed. Ben Wellings and Shanti Sumartojo (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), 23; Dendooven, ‘Asia in Flanders Fields’, 149–50. Among the exceptions were these quite technical descriptions: ‘補紀法國招致工 事’ (Afterthoughts on the Matter of France’s Recruitment of Workers), 東方雜誌 (Eastern Miscellany) 14, no. 2 (1917): 203; 羅羅 (Luo Luo), ‘華工赴歐之實況（譯遠東時報)’ (The Real Situation of the Chinese Workers Going to Europe [Translated from the Far Eastern Review]), 東方雜誌 (Eastern Miscellany) 15, no. 6 (1918): 31–7. 54. Neff, War and the Law of Nations, 279. 55. von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 16. 56. ‘[D]elegitimise’: Kirsten Sellars, ‘Crimes against Peace’ and International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 15. On the ‘just war’ turn, see also Neff, War and the Law of Nations, 4. 57. Battles: ‘歐戰最近狀况’ (The Recent Situation of the European War), 戊午 (1918), no. 1 (1918): 1–2. International standing: ‘歐戰與和議我國’ (The European War and Peace Negotiations [in] China), 國際協報 (The International), no. 89 (1918): 5. Competition between Britain and Germany: 傖父 (Cang Fu), ‘歐戰延長之原因及與我國之關係’ (The Reasons for the Prolongation of the European War and the Connection to Our Country), 東方雜誌 (Eastern Miscellany) 15, no. 9 (1918): 1. 58. Humanism versus militarism: 何海鳴 (He Haiming), ‘戰爭之新解釋’ (New Explanations for the War), 東方雜誌 (Eastern Miscellany) 16, no. 1 (1919): 161. Wilhelm’s fault: 何, 161; 梁, ‘歐戰結局之敎訓’, 4. 59. 羅, ‘霸權更迭、俄國革命與“庶民”意涵的變遷——重返“五四”之一’, 43. 60. 張岳年 (Zhang Yuenian), ‘庶民的勝利’ (The Victory of the Common People), in 中華思想 大辭典 (Great Dictionary of Chinese Thought), 1991, 722. 61. 李大釗 (Li Dazhao), ‘庶民的勝利’ (The Victory of the Common People), 新青年 (New Youth) 5, no. 5 (1918): 436. 62. 李, 436–7. 63. 李, 437. 64. 李, 438. 65. Elisabeth Forster, 1919 – The Year That Changed China: A New History of the New Culture Movement (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2018), 65–8. 66. ‘The May Fourth movement’ is often used to describe both the demonstrations and the cultural developments. 67. Chow, The May Fourth Movement, 59. 68. The circles involved in this: Mitter, A Bitter Revolution, 25; Forster, 1919 – The Year That Changed China, 131–4. For an example of such journals, see Shakhar Rahav, The Rise of Political Intellectuals in Modern China: May Fourth Societies and the Roots of Mass-Party Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 97–9. ‘[E]xplosion of publications’: Fabio Lanza, ‘Of Chronology, Failure, and Fidelity: When Did the May Fourth Movement End?’, Twentieth-Century China 38, no. 1 (2013): 57. 69. 繆金源 (Miao Jinyuan), ‘所謂“新文化運動” 的查抄與破產’ (Confiscation and Bankruptcy of the So-Called ‘New Culture Movement’), 批評 (Criticism), 20 October 1920, 2; Philippe de Vargas, ‘Some Elements in the Chinese Renaissance (Manuscript)’ (Beijing, 15 February 1922), 18, Container 221, Lewis Nathaniel Chase Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC; 黎錦熙 (Li Jinxi), 國語運動史綱 (A Survey of the NationalLanguage Movement) (北京: 商務印書館, 2011), 137.

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70. Leo Ou-fan Lee, ‘Incomplete Modernity: Rethinking the May Fourth Intellectual Project’, in The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project, ed. Milena DoleželováVelingerová and Oldřich Král (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001), 52. 71. Edward M. Gunn, Rewriting Chinese: Style and Innovation in Twentieth-Century Chinese Prose (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 217–96; Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 71. 72. 胡適 (Hu Shi), ‘文學改良芻議’ (My Humble Opinion on the Reform of Literature), 新青 年 (New Youth) 2, no. 5 (January 1917): 1–11; 陳獨秀 (Chen Duxiu), ‘文學革命論’ (On Literary Revolution), 新青年 (New Youth) 2, no. 6 (February 1917): 1–4. 73. Forster, 1919 – The Year That Changed China, 10. 74. On these new journals, see Forster, 1919 – The Year That Changed China, 94–6, 121–8. 75. Ping Chen, Modern Chinese: History and Sociolinguistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 24. 76. Discussions of the war and Versailles: 金 and 劉, ‘五四新青年群體為何放棄《自由主義》？ ——重大事件與觀念變遷互動之研究’, 27–8. On comments made by Liang Qichao reflecting his disillusionment with Europe as a result of the war, see Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment, 12. 77. 羅, ‘霸權更迭、俄國革命與“庶民”意涵的變遷——重返“五四”之一’, 53; Marc Mulholland, ‘“Marxists of Strict Observance”? The Second International, National Defence, and the Question of War’, The Historical Journal 58, no. 2 (2015): 615–40. 78. Mao Zedong, Quotations from Mao Tse Tung, ed. David Quentin and Brian Baggins (Beijing: Peking Foreign Languages Press, 1966), ch. ‘War and Peace’, , accessed 24 April 2022.

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29 Canada Tim Cook

T

he Great War generation was the best educated to that point in Canada’s history. Print news was part of Canadians’ daily lives, with news consumed widely and the printed word shaping perceptions of all events, and especially the war that raged overseas from 1914 to 1918. To meet the demand for reading material as the country’s urban population grew from 2 million in 1901 to 3.2 million in 1911, there were 138 daily newspapers at the start of the war in 1914. Every major city and many smaller communities had their own papers and there were also religious, workers’ and ethnic periodicals.1 These periodicals produced a record of the struggle and strain, of the contradictory unifying and divisive effects of the war, of the unprecedented patriotism and support for the soldiers overseas along with the widespread grief and seemingly unending loss resulting from the carnage on the Western Front. There is a significant body of literature related to Canada’s newspapers and journalists in the First World War, but an overarching study is still lacking. Jeff Keshen’s Propaganda and Censorship is the most detailed work, although his primary thesis that censorship clouded the full horror of the overseas fighting has been challenged, primarily by Ian Miller in Our Glory and Our Grief, which argues that Canadians were not denied knowledge of the true cost of the war.2 There are a number of surveys of the nineteenth-century newspaper industry that are useful to situate the war years, while several graduate theses offer important insights into wartime newspapers.3 For much of the twentieth century, research into papers was time-consuming, as researchers tried to decipher blurry microfilm reels or crumbling pages. However, Canadian papers have increasingly been digitised from the early twenty-first century and they remain a staple source for understanding the war on the home front. A useful wartime compendium was compiled by J. Castel Hopkins, well-known journalist, author of forty books and pamphlets, and compiler of the Canadian Annual Review of Public Affairs (CAR) from 1901 to 1923. The CAR is a collection of all major political, economic, cultural, social and military newspaper stories, opinion pieces, speeches and statistical breakdowns arranged annually. His five volumes from 1914 to 1919 are a font of information, containing short summaries of thousands of stories covering almost every aspect of the war effort.4 With this chapter, I will explore how Canada’s Great War effort was interpreted through the periodical press, both in English and French. While there was formal censorship from the start of the war, and it was more stringently imposed from mid-1915, the newspapers nonetheless offered their readers a lens into the struggle at home and overseas. ‘Although there is probably as much going on in the country as at any previous time’, wrote the Toronto Globe (1844–1936) in the summer of 1916, ‘nothing

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seems worth recording except the war . . . there is no news except war news’.5 An analysis of periodicals around key debates and issues – such as dissent and conscription – will examine what was communicated to the reading public, an important means by which Canadians understood the war effort. The chapter also analyses how editors and journalists not only reported the war but also shaped messages for Canadians.

No News Except War News With nineteenth-century papers being deeply partisan, and almost always connected to and financed by one of Canada’s two major political parties – the Liberals and the Conservatives – most large urban centres had at least two papers. Canada’s two largest cities – Montreal and Toronto – had eight and six dailies respectively, as well as more specialised ethnic, labour and religious periodicals. In the case of Toronto, Ontario, the papers had a combined circulation of 433,023 in 1914, representing approximately one paper for each Torontonian in Canada’s second-largest city.6 The country’s most populous city, Montreal, Quebec, with some 600,000 people, was home to the elite of English wealth but was about two-thirds French Canadian. There were also large communities of Irish-Canadian and European immigrants, all of whom tended to live and work in identifiable areas within the metropolis.7 Class, religion and language were great delineators, especially in the provinces of Quebec and Ontario, and occasionally in Canada’s other seven provinces (with Newfoundland a separate Dominion). Almost all groups had their own papers that spoke to the regions, and cross-country travel was rare for most Canadians. While periodicals remained partisan in the early twentieth century, the political influence of papers’ owners had lessened as advertising revenue produced new editorial freedom. Furthermore, Montreal’s Daily Star (1869–1979) and the Toronto Telegraph (1876–1971), as two of the largest papers, belonged to the new popular press that was less entwined with political parties and more interested in presenting sensational news stories and local coverage to attract readers and advertisers. There was no national paper in 1914, although there were regional powers, of which the most influential were Toronto’s Telegram and Globe, Montreal’s Daily Star, Winnipeg’s Manitoba Free Press (1882–1931, when its name changed to Winnipeg Free Press), Ottawa’s Citizen (1845–) and Journal (1885–1980), the Halifax Herald (1874–, Chronicle Herald) and Victoria’s Daily Colonist (1858–, Times Colonist). Grattan O’Leary of the Ottawa Journal characterised the papers as ‘hopelessly parochial’ until the eruption of the First World War, as most papers were turned towards their local readers. Still, some sought to bring the world to Canada and there were news services that alerted readers to stories in Europe and the United States.8 Canada’s journalists had provided advance warning of the coming conflict before Canada went to war on 4 August 1914. Newspapers across the country had been informing readers of the crisis in Europe since the assassination of the Austrian archduke on 28 June 1914. As diplomacy failed and massive armies mobilised, a barrage of editorials, stories, cartoons and statistical breakdowns in the Canadian papers prophesied of a long and costly war. The 27 July edition of the St. John Daily Telegraph and The Sun (1910–23) alerted its readers in New Brunswick with the headline: ‘Austria and Servia Enter Upon War which May Embroil All Europe in One Gigantic Conflict’, while Montreal’s Daily Star asked the next day, ‘Has Armageddon Begun?’9 Papers

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across the country offered detailed commentary on the enormous armies that could be raised from conscripted populations of Europe. How would a war involving millions be over rapidly, as some believed? ‘20,000,000 Men May Fight 14,000,000 in the World’s War’, screamed the Edmonton Daily Bulletin (1880–1951) in one headline. There were many more warnings and alarming prognostications, which accurately predicted a long, drawn-out war.10 While many would look back on August 1914 through the comforting trope of a long, hot summer that was broken, shockingly, by a war that came out of the blue, the coming death struggle had been foregrounded in the country’s papers.11 In the two days before Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August, great crowds of Canadians gathered outside newspaper buildings for news of the coming war from Europe. There was a barrage of information presented on large-scale electronic billboards, baritone speakers spreading the news by megaphone, lantern slides projected on to enormous white boards and print runs with multiple editions. The anticipation created a festival atmosphere, followed by outburst of wild emotion and overt patriotism when war was announced around 9 p.m. in Ottawa on 4 August. Britain was at war with Germany, which meant that Canada as a dominion was at war too. From the start there was a public truce between the partisan papers in order to unite behind the war effort. The leader of the opposition, Liberal leader Sir Wilfrid Laurier (1841–1919), who had been prime minister from 1896 to 1911, made the same pledge in the political arena, while Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden (1854–1937) captured the mood when he said: ‘We stand shoulder to shoulder with Britain.’12 Almost every paper reported on these promises. However, J. Castell Hopkins, in surveying all the publications of the day, assessed that the Conservative and Liberal papers portrayed the war differently from the start. ‘The Conservatives’, he wrote, framed Canada as fighting for ‘the Empire and National life and, incidentally, for high ideals of peace and principles of liberty’. The Liberals were no less supportive of the war, but depicted it as a battle for ‘the liberties and peace of the world and, incidentally, for the British Empire of which the Dominion was a part’.13 Most English-language papers were united behind this war that would soon become a crusade. The war was good for the papers as Canadians turned to them for the latest information. An editorial in the Montreal Witness (1845–1938) on 4 August 1914 even argued that the war overseas ‘is largely a newspaper war’, with the wild passions of the people stoked by irresponsible journalism to ‘sell extras’.14 Some five hundred and fifty kilometres away in Toronto, the Daily Star claimed that 100,000 extras were sold on 4 August 1914. ‘As each edition came off the press it was rushed into the streets amidst a tumult of shouting, and the newsboys were immediately lost in knots of eager buyers.’15 Sales jumped for all papers across the country, and in Victoria, British Columbia, the Daily Colonist told its readers that, because there were not yet any Canadian war correspondents overseas, the news came directly from Britain and would be printed as rapidly as possible in order ‘to gratify the natural and very laudable interest taken by the public in this intensely important subject’.16 The buildings that housed the journalists and printing presses became crucial sites around which to gather, especially during moments of crisis, whether large-scale battles, government announcements or key political events such as the December 1917 federal election. To meet the pressing demand from readers, Canadian newspapers received news of the war via undersea and overland transatlantic telegraphic cables and wireless

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stations from Britain and the United States. Since the laying of the undersea Atlantic telegraph in 1866, information from Britain had been bundled and sold to newspapers that could then select the stories that their readers would consume.17 Later in the century, the Associated Press gradually moved from the United States into Canada and supplied additional American information, while there were also cross-country telegraph services along the Canadian Pacific Railway lines and from the Western Associated Press (a consortium of papers centred in Winnipeg). All of these news services contributed to conquering the challenges of communicating over time and space, and provided a growing mass of international news. Along with the international news that led to much coverage of the global war, journalists reported on and wrote of domestic stories that mattered to readers in their own community. Many of the rural papers, sometimes only four or eight pages long, and put together on a shoestring budget, were associated with a larger, urban paper, from which they obtained some of their stories. But these smaller rural papers also offered a very different view of the war. Patriotic organisations and the tracking of local boys who had gone off to war resonated. A recent study of the rural southern Ontario township of East Flamborough revealed, for instance, that the divisive conscription debate throughout 1917 caused scarcely a ripple in the community, even as it raged in larger cities such as Toronto some seventy kilometres away.18

From Support to Censorship The War Measures Act of August 1914 gave the federal government enormous power over the lives of its citizens. In the name of fully prosecuting the war, citizens could be arrested and held without trial, their civil rights suspended through arbitrary arrest and detention, and their words censored. For the first year of the war there was little need to impose censorship, as the newspapers were almost entirely behind the war effort. For example, the Quebec Morning Chronicle (1764–, Chronicle-Telegraph), a Conservative paper from Quebec City whose owner, David Watson (1869–1922), served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, reported an appeal by Minister of Militia and Defence Sam Hughes (1853–1921) that the Canadian press ‘exercise a wise reticence upon matters affecting military operations’ as a ‘single item may mean the death of thousands of fellow subjects [. . .] Hostile powers are searching for statements as to movements and the dispositions of our troops.’19 Many papers alerted their readers to the necessity of censorship to avoid aiding the enemy, and there was little public protest against this action.20 With 30,000 Canadians going overseas in October 1914, and hundreds of thousands to follow them, the Canadians’ first major engagement was at the Second Battle of Ypres in Belgium. The untested Canadian Division had arrived on the Western Front in February 1915. Two months later the Canadians were holding the line east of Ypres when the Germans unleashed chlorine gas on 22 April 1915. The lethal cloud, six kilometres long, burned the lungs and eyes. Soldiers from two French divisions to the left of the Canadians fled in terror or died in their trenches.21 For three days the outnumbered Canadians fought hard, and they faced another smaller but denser chlorine cloud on the 24th. On the fourth day of battle most of the Canadian survivors limped from the front, having lost over 6,000 who were killed, wounded or captured. Canadian newspapers began to report on the battle from 25 April. In this first trial by fire, the periodicals highlighted the heroic defence, with one Toronto paper noting

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that ‘every single newspaper in London contains the word “Canada”’.22 A United Press story, dated 26 April, was used by the Montreal Daily Star, but ran with a new sub-heading: ‘Though Terribly Sick, Half Blind and Weak From Poisonous Fumes and German Bombs, They Drive Their Charge Home – Magnificent Dash and Spirit’.23 The cost of the battle was high and not hidden from Canadians. For example, the 26 April 1915 lead story in the Calgary Daily Herald (1883–, Calgary Herald) read, ‘Canadians Mowed Down Like Sheep’.24 ‘The news of their heroic stand was received with great pride, and Canadians realised that their country had decisively stepped on the world stage’, recounted Grace Morris, whose brother and fiancé had gone off to war. ‘Then came the casualty lists [. . .] the long list was posted in the window of the telegraph office on Main Street. People stood in the street to read it. There was the silence and deep sorrow.’25 For the large cities, in the aftermath of Second Ypres and all the battles to follow in the coming years, the lists of slain and wounded were agonisingly long as they included name, rank and sometimes street addresses. As one editorial lamented, ‘The achievement of the Canadian force will rank in history with the great deeds of war from Marathon to Waterloo, but glory will not give us back these men.’26 In smaller communities, a rural paper might print one or two names, but that would be enough to gut a village or hamlet. The papers also became keepers of the record, for while the state often delivered news of slain, wounded, captured or missing soldiers (and, in at least fifty-eight cases during the war, killed nurses) to their families through the dreaded hand-delivered telegrams, it was the papers that posted these names on billboards. Gathered around the large signs, weeping women, distraught parents and fretful children studied the lists, kept vigil, looking for updates on the wounded or missing, talking to other people about their loved ones. All bore witness to personal and community losses. J. W. Dafoe (1866–1944) was editor of the Manitoba Free Press and one of the most influential Canadian editors. A prominent Liberal, his pen was wielded as a battle axe against Conservative opponents. However, the imperative of the war changed his partisan opinions. He was a Canadian nationalist of the type who admired the Empire although he believed that Canada must mature within it and claim its own destiny.27 But the unending list of casualties weighed heavily on him. As his countrymen died overseas, Dafoe wrote that no effort at home should be spared: ‘No true democrat, no man who has a due sense of what our present liberties have cost us in human blood would grudge his own in this great struggle. The call of combat is imperative for the issue is clear, well defined, unequivocal.’28 Later in the war, he would turn on the Liberal Party for not fully supporting conscription. The idea of the Allies’ fighting a just war was reinforced by the German use of poison gas. There was mass outrage over the unleashing of diabolical chemicals to choke men to death, and while honour had long exited the killing fields of the Western Front, the use of poison gas was seen as beyond the pale. Canadians were informed of the dastardly weapon in many ways, including letters from the front that passed through several censors. Private E. G. B. Relt wrote home, with his letter published in a Toronto paper, ‘It is deadly poison, and causes the victims to suffer terrible agony.’29 Shortly after the gas attack, on 7 May 1915 a German U-boat sank the passenger liner Lusitania. It was a shocking attack on civilians and it excited new outrage in Canada and the United States, whose citizens were among the 1,198 dead. The newspapers stoked

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the fire. The Winnipeg Tribune (1890–1980), just one of many papers that condemned the German action, proclaimed that ‘This deed of hell will dog their steps for another century.’30 The Lusitania incident was one more indication, Canadians were told in their papers, of wanton German militarism, of which German Zeppelin air attacks against British cities was another despicable example. War was now aimed against innocent women and children, and the papers freely (and sometimes sensationally) presented these dramatic stories, as they helped the war effort and sold papers. Even with overwhelming support in Canada’s newspapers, the state increased its control over the citizenry as the war unfolded, exerting new powers through the introduction of income tax, restrictions on civil liberties and, in late 1917, the conscription of young men for military service. As part of the increasingly unlimited crusade for victory, the state’s censorship function was strengthened with the creation in June 1915 of the office of the chief press censor. This position fell to Lieutenant-Colonel Ernest Chambers (1862–1925), a former militia officer, journalist and historian. In wartime, Chambers believed that information had to be controlled and that Canadians should not be subjected to the full trauma of what was occurring at the front. To do so, he feared, would shake their faith in the war effort. Most of the patriotic press selfpoliced and only occasionally was it necessary to threaten with the full weight of the new law, which included fines of up to $5,000 and five years in jail. Still, most papers did not sanitise their coverage of the war. Many believed that by downplaying the seriousness of the fighting – defeats in the global war or even the cost in soldiers’ lives – the ability of Canadians to be pushed harder and harder and to give more and more was also being diminished. ‘When a man is expected to get out and lift a thousand pounds’, wrote the editor of Canadian Printer and Publisher (1892–, Canadian Printer Magazine) on the subject of Canada’s wartime burdens, ‘the best way to prepare him for the task is to let him know that he has a half-ton ahead of him. It is no use telling him that the thing is easy.’31 While there is ample evidence of soldiers’ letters providing grim details of battle and lists of casualties, it is not easy to determine if the patriotic press modified its messages due to the threat of censorship. However, it is clear that what was printed remained a concern for Chambers, as well as the Borden government. One concrete example was a growing call for a national news service. After years of debate and worry that the American news services did not contain enough pro-Empire news, Borden’s government allocated an enormous grant of $50,000 in 1917 to create the Canadian Press Association (CP). The new CP was also positioned by the state as an agency to unify the country during a period of mounting pressure and conflicting ideals. This nation-building project was just one of many legacies that would emerge from the war, and CP remains to this day. More urgent for Chambers and his staff was the suppression of foreign-language papers. With these periodicals often printed in the German, Austrian or Russian languages, Chambers aggressively banned ‘foreign-language’ papers, but also labour or socialist periodicals after the 1917 Russian Revolution. Of the 253 printed publications banned in Canada, 222 came from the United States and 164 were in a language other than English or French.32 Chambers’ efforts were focused much more on muzzling dissent and what he believed was dissension rather than censoring hurtful messages to Canadians. Despite censorship, most of the mainstream papers offered detailed stories of the war overseas, often with grisly details, and these were complemented by lists of casualties

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and even soldiers’ letters. It is revealing that the exposure of government scandals or even sustained questioning of the war effort from some French-Canadian papers was never censored, partially for fear of making editors and journalists martyrs. While there was censorship, the extent of the war effort and the deep sacrifice required to achieve victory were all documented in the press.

French-Canadian, Ethnic and Religious Papers Henry Bourassa (1868–1952), the editor of Le Devoir (1910–), was the most hated man in English Canada during the First World War. Accused of being the ‘Arch Traitor of Canada’, Bourassa used his newspaper to question and condemn the Canadian war effort.33 French Canada had fewer ties to Britain and more farmers who were influenced by their parish priests not to serve in the army. For some there remained a powerful link to France, but many in Quebec felt that they had been abandoned after the conquest of New France in 1763. While thousands of French Canadians enlisted, their number was far below the national average.34 ‘Let England take care of herself, as she is able to’, Bourassa wrote in January 1915. ‘Why should Canada send her young men to fight the battles of an Empire when she has no voice in the government of that Empire?’35 While Bourassa had initially supported the war, he soon became the voice for many disaffected Quebeckers and Franco-Ontarians, especially when he wrote that there was a more pressing war across the provincial border in Ontario. There, Regulation 17, a pre-war measure to curtail teaching French-speaking students in their own language in schools, was much reviled among French Canadians. In a message he hammered home again and again, he described the language battles in Ontario and the growing hectoring from English Canada that Quebec was not doing its share in the war as part of a campaign similar to ‘Prussian tyranny abhorrent to everything Canadian.’ He added, ‘There are 200,000 French-Canadians today living under worse oppression in Ontario than the people of Alsace-Lorraine under the iron heel of Prussia.’36 With much of English Canada supporting the war effort, Bourassa stirred tremendous anger and vitriol. One critic accused Bourassa of being a ‘preacher of discord and strife, this snarling Ananias, seeking to stir up rebellion in the hearts of his French-Canadian readers by making it appear that everything is wrong, everything is vile, everything corrupt – nothing honest, nothing sincere, nothing worthy’.37 Bourassa took the insults in his stride and often published them in his paper and pamphlets to reinforce his image among French Canadians as an influential champion. While Bourassa has long been seen as French Canada’s voice in print, his impact might not have been in proportion with the bile and venom he generated in English Canada. Because of his clamorous attacks and because he was so hated in the rest of the country, it is easy to overstate his influence. Le Devoir had a readership of 35,000 in 1914, but the French-language La Presse (1884–) of Montreal had a readership of over 100,000.38 Its editor, Trefflé Berthiaume (1848–1915), is less well known to history, but he guided his French-language paper to success until his death in 1915, moving, like most of the mainstream papers, from issue to issue, but often in support of the working class. La Presse could buck against the war effort, but it chose the course of barking and not biting like Bourassa.

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By late 1916, after the costly slaughter of the Battle of the Somme, a growing number of French Canadians were questioning the war, guided by Henry Bourassa. They were joined by segments of organised labour, farmers and members of other ethnic groups. While tens of thousands of recent immigrants enlisted in the CEF, most with only a tenuous tie to the British Empire and instead motivated by payment or in support of their new country, many more wanted no part of the war. Indigenous people, too, were split over service, with some overcoming racist policies that sought to exclude them, while others only wanted to be left alone. There were no Indigenous newspapers, but about 4,000 Indigenous men served in the war effort.39 Black Canadians who wished to serve were usually turned down until 1916, when manpower issues required a lessening of racial barriers. About 1,300 Black Canadians would serve, and several specialised papers from the Black-Canadian community, especially the Canadian Observer (1914–19) and Atlantic Advocate (1915–17), pushed for equality in their editorial pages. Finally, the relatively few moral or religious pacifists were aghast at the organised murder overseas and increasingly vocal about solutions for ending the slaughter.40 It might have been expected that the robust and widespread religious papers would have carried an oppositional message regarding the war. But from the start almost all of the major religious communities – Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Anglican and Jewish – supported the war effort, describing it as just and necessary. The Anglican Canadian Churchman (1898–1988) argued in its pages that God was on the side of the British Empire and that Canadians must pledge to ‘make whatever sacrifice may be necessary for British honour and British freedom’.41 In this sense, British values were Canadian values and, as the paper argued, ‘It is no use to cry Peace! Peace! When there is no Peace . . . War is a hateful thing, but [. . .] We sought no fight. We tried to pacify our enemies. Now we may ask God’s blessing on our arms.’42 Even the Catholic Church supported the war effort, with official Church papers such as the Catholic Register (1893–) reminding parishioners of their duty to Empire and Canada. While the Catholic hierarchy in Quebec also remained firmly committed to the national war effort, it was different in the local parishes where the priests had significant autonomy and influence over their flocks, with most preaching against young Quebeckers leaving their communities and loved ones to fight in an overseas war. However, the IrishCatholic community in English and French Canada, along with their papers, was also firmly in support of the war, even after the 1916 Easter Uprising, although there were more open calls for Ireland’s independence within the British Empire.43

Conscription and New Nationalism In December 1914 Prime Minister Borden had proclaimed ‘there has not been, there will not be, compulsion or conscription. Freely and voluntarily, the manhood of Canada stands ready to fight beyond the seas.’44 Those were heady times when men were aching to join and thousands were turned down because of slight medical ailments. But when the casualties began to mount and when more jobs opened up to supply the war machine, recruiting slowed. In October 1915 Borden publicly called for 250,000 recruits; by 1 January 1916 he had raised the number to half a million. Many wondered how a nation of fewer than eight million, with perhaps only a million and a half men of volunteering age, would reach such figures, although 400,000 had enlisted by the end of 1916.45 More were needed.

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‘Everyone engaged in active recruiting for any length of time becomes a conscriptionist’, claimed J. M. Godfrey, president of the Canadian National Service League, on 4 January 1917: ‘He soon sees that the voluntary system is ineffective, unfair, unequal, undemocratic, wasteful, and not really British.’46 After Britain introduced conscription in early 1916, there was a steady drumroll of pressure on Ottawa to enact conscription in order not to break faith with the soldiers overseas, both the living who were struggling to win and the fallen who had already given everything in the name of victory. The newspapers in English Canada were among the strongest voices demanding conscription, often rising to a shrill of accusation that more had to be done to force the shirkers into uniform. Bourassa, as expected, became the voice of opposition in French Canada and he fought relentlessly against conscription. One such representative story in Le Devoir on 3 July 1917, two days after the fiftieth anniversary of Confederation, told his readers that the nation teetered on destruction because of the role of ‘maniacs and murders [who] glorify a horrible butchery in which people slaughter each other without knowing why’.47 This message jarred violently with the belief among the majority of English Canadians that the war was a necessary crusade and it led, not surprisingly, to further calls for his head. In the summer of 1917, as Liberals and Conservatives debated conscription in acrimonious exchanges in the capital, the fierce clash of opinions was reported on in every newspaper in the country. The former prime minister, the French-Canadian Laurier, who was against conscription, was twinned with Bourassa, with both condemned. Even as tens of thousands of men enlisted from Quebec – albeit not at the level of English Canada – it was increasingly tarred as being disloyal. ‘There is no use beating around the bush or ignoring the self-evident’, raged the Christian Guardian (1829–1925): ‘Quebec constitutes one of Canada’s outstanding problems.’48 Canada’s largest circulation paper, the Montreal Daily Star, with its owner and editor Hugh Graham (1848–1938), a long-time Conservative, wielded much power and influence. Graham was a fierce opponent of Laurier and his paper stridently supported conscription. While Canada had no press barons as in Britain, Graham (later Lord Atholstan) was recognised and hated by his opponents, who accused him of being an English lackey. Attesting to the bitter debate that summer, which saw almost nightly protests by thousands in Montreal, anti-conscriptionist French Canadians dynamited Graham’s summer home on 9 August 1917. No one was hurt, but the attack on his residence in Cartierville, a suburb of Montreal, revealed the high tensions.49 The strains of the war and the crusading demand for victory at any cost forced Canadians to choose whether they were for or against conscription in the December 1917 election. Long-time Liberal J. W. Dafoe of the Manitoba Free Press turned on his party, writing that Laurier was only supported by pacifists, socialists and the unpatriotic: ‘they will come together in the polling booth to stab their country’.50 J. E. Atkinson, another long-time Liberal editor of the Toronto Star, also split with his party, accusing Laurier of having ‘chosen Quebec as his kingdom and Canada can no longer choose him as the man to govern’.51 The defections of Dafoe, Atkinson and other high-profile Liberal editors was a death blow to the party. The December 1917 federal election was the most divisive in Canadian history, with English Canada accusing Quebec of being a cancerous wound on the Canadian body politic, while many in French Canada scoffed at English-speaking Canadians

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and suggested they were British sycophants too willing to bleed the country white for the Empire. The Conservative government of Borden disenfranchised tens of thousands of Germans and other groups who had immigrated from enemy countries – primarily Germany and Austria-Hungary – while enfranchising women with a relationship to a son, husband, or father overseas.52 The Liberals accurately called this vote tampering; the Conservatives shrugged and stood firm in their contention that the ‘foreigners’ would not influence the crusade and that women who had sacrificed so much deserved to be heard at the ballot box. Borden also outflanked Laurier and enticed a number of Liberal English-speaking Members of Parliament to a new Unionist party that supported conscription and had only one goal – to win the war no matter the cost.53 While Borden and the Unionists won the December 1917 election, almost all of French Canada stood behind Laurier and the Liberals. The Unionists continued to prosecute the war to the fullest, but Borden was now leading a country that was imploding. The self-inflicted wounds would only get worse as the strain of the see-saw battles of the Western Front in 1918 led to unimaginable carnage, while at home the pressure culminated in riots in Quebec City over several days in late March that led to the military shooting civilians in the street. All were reported on in the country’s papers. And yet, even as the country was being torn apart, a new national spirit was emerging from the cauldron of war. The newspapers reported on it and contributed to the idea that a bloodied but mature Canada was standing proudly with Britain and no longer a colony but an ally. As early as 11 August 1914, the Toronto Globe wrote that: It is not enough to say that when Britain is at war Canada is at war. That may go with the crowd, but, in so grave an hour and in a choice so momentous, Canada’s moral responsibility is her own [. . .] The significant thing, the unprecedented and very far-reaching thing, alike for Canada and for the Empire, is that now, for the very first time in our history, our people choose to be combatant in a war that is not of our own making . . . It is Canada’s choice.54 The Canadian Corps’ attack at Vimy Ridge on 9 April 1917, months before the December election, was a hard-fought victory amid the general failure of the Arras campaign. Much lauded at the time, and later to become an important symbol of the Dominion’s coming of age, Vimy was reported on in Canada with tremendous pride.55 In an example of papers reporting on papers, many Canadian editors republished an article in the New York Times (1851–) declaring that the battle ‘would be in Canada’s history . . . a day of glory to furnish inspiration to her sons for generations’.56 Then, as now, Canadians bask in the glow of compliments when others recognise their achievements. The Canadian papers played a key role in stirring the hearts of Canadians and in contributing to the formation of a Canadian identity during the war, both reflecting popular opinion and shaping it. But before the Canadian Press Association sent Stewart Lyon (1866–1946), the managing editor of the Toronto Globe, overseas to report from the front for all papers associated with the CP, there was only limited coverage of the Canadian Corps on the Western Front. The British and American news services simply did not care about the Canadians, and the Dominion papers struggled to tell this story before reporters arrived at the battlefield in late 1917. Thereafter, Lyon and

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his successors – J. S. Willison (1856–1927) of the Toronto News and then J. F. Livesay (1876–1944), former president of the Western Press Association – sought to raise the Canadian profile in the war and to tell Canadians what their countrymen were doing in the Allied drive for victory that finally came on 11 November 1918.

Epilogue ‘We are out to win the war’, wrote editor Alex Thomson of the Hamilton Times (1859–1920) of his newspaper’s mission in support of Allied victory; the Windsor Record (1861–1917) agreed, arguing that the daily press should ‘pull together and get on with the war. Nothing else matters.’57 The editors and their papers in English Canada drummed up support for enlistment and patriotic causes. They demonised the enemy and galvanised the public, deepened old divisions and created new fault lines, even as they sang the praise of the Canadian forces that contributed to an emerging nationalism. Journalists and editors reported the news and made it. Papers were weaponised to fight in the country’s crusade or to question, as in the case of Bourassa and less recognisable dissidents, the unlimited war effort. After the Armistice, the papers continued their work, but now in a country that had been transformed by the war, riven and grieving, but also proud of its service, more confident in its distinctiveness from Britain and setting off to create a new destiny. ‘The new democracy is coming, paid for in blood’, said J. E. Atkinson of the Toronto Star at the end of the war; and it would be the editors, journalists and their papers that would play their role in publicising the path forward as Canadians left behind the crimson-stained battlefields of Flanders and France to travel together into a new uncertain future.58

Notes   1. Jeffrey A. Keshen, Propaganda and Censorship during Canada’s Great War (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1996), 11.   2. Ian H. M. Miller, Our Glory and Our Grief: Torontonians and the Great War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002).   3. Minko Sotiron, From Politics to Profit: The Commercialization of Canadian Daily Newspapers, 1890–1920 (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997); Brian P. N. Beaven, ‘Partisanship, Patronage, and the Press in Ontario, 1880–1914: Myths and Realities’, Canadian Historical Review 64, no. 3 (1983): 317–51; David Joseph Gallant, ‘Bracing for Armageddon: Rethinking the Outbreak of the First World War in Canada’, PhD dissertation, University of Calgary, 2016; Robert S. Prince, ‘The Mythology of the War: How the Canadian Daily Newspaper Depicted the Great War’, PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 1998.   4. Jeffrey A. Keshen, ‘Hopkins, John Castell’, in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 15, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–present, , accessed 13 July 2020.  5. Globe, 22 July 1916, 13.   6. Ross Harkness, J.E. Atkinson of The Star (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), 99; Miller, Our Glory and Our Grief, 7–9.   7. Terry Copp with Alexander Maavara, Montreal at War, 1914–1918 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022), 7–34.

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 8. Paul Rutherford, A Victorian Authority: The Daily Press in Late Nineteenth-Century Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 3–5.  9. The Daily Telegraph and The Sun (St John, New Brunswick), 27 July 1914, 1; Montreal Daily Star, 28 July 1914, 10. 10. Edmonton Daily Bulletin, 3 August 1914, 5. 11. Gallant, ‘Bracing for Armageddon’, 112–17. 12. Tim Cook, Warlords: Borden, Mackenzie King, and Canada’s World Wars (Toronto: Allen Lane, 2012), 41. 13. J. Castell Hopkins, Canada at War 1914–1918: A Record of Heroism and Achievement (New York: George H. Doran, 1919), 26–8. 14. Montreal Witness, 4 August 1914, 1. 15. Toronto Daily Star, 4 August 1914, 5. 16. Daily Colonist, 4 August 1914, 4. 17. Gene Allen, Making National News: A History of Canadian Press (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013); Simon Potter, News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System, 1876–1922 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2003). 18. Jonathan F. Vance, A Township at War (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2018). 19. Quebec Chronicle, 6 August 1914, 1. 20. Gallant, ‘Bracing for Armageddon’, 121–3. 21. On the battle, see Andrew Iarocci, Shoestring Soldiers: The 1st Canadian Division at War, 1914–1915 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008); on gas, see Tim Cook, No Place to Run: The Canadian Corps and Gas Warfare in the First World War (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1999). 22. Miller, Our Glory and Our Grief, 39. For other British and Canadian reactions, see Marion Girard, A Strange and Formidable Weapon: British Responses to World War I Poison Gas (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008). 23. Montreal Star, 27 April 1915, 3. 24. Calgary Daily Herald, 26 April 1915, 1. 25. Bill Freeman and Richard Nielsen, Far from Home: Canadians in the First World War (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1999), 56. 26. Montreal Witness, 27 April 1915, 1. 27. Carl Berger, The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, 1867–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970). 28. Murray Donnelly, Dafoe of the Free Press (Toronto: Macmillan Company of Canada, 1968), 77. 29. Toronto World, 14 May 1915, 3. 30. Winnipeg Tribune, 23 October 1915, 9; Keshen, Propaganda and Censorship, 14. 31. Prince, ‘The Mythology of the War’, 80–1. 32. Jeffrey A. Keshen, ‘The War on Truth’, Canada’s History (August/September 2015), , accessed 13 July 2020. Chambers continued as press censor until the end of 1919. 33. Henri Bourassa, The Duty of Canada at the Present Hour (Montreal: Le Devoir, 1914), 3. 34. Jean Martin, ‘Francophone Enlistment in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1918: The Evidence’, Canadian Military History 25, no. 1 (2016): 1–12; Richard Holt, Filling the Ranks: Manpower in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1918 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016). 35. J. C. Hopkins, ed., Canadian Annual Review of Public Affairs 1916 (Toronto: The Annual Review Publishing Company, 1917), 296. See also Geoff Keelan, Duty to Dissent: Henri Bourassa and the First World War (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2019). 36. Hopkins, ed., Canadian Annual Review 1916, 297.

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37. Bourassa, Duty of Canada, 3. 38. Jean de Bonville, ‘Berthiaume, Trefflé’, in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 14, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, , accessed 13 July 2020. 39. Timothy C. Winegard, For King and Kanata: Canadian Indians and the First World War (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2012). 40. Sean Flynn Foyn, ‘The Underside of Glory: AfriCanadian Enlistment in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1917’, MA thesis: University of Ottawa, 1999; Amy Shaw, Crisis of Conscience: Conscientious Objection in Canada during the First World War (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009). 41. Canadian Churchman, 13 August 1914, 519. 42. Canadian Churchman, 13 August 1914, 520. 43. Mark G. McGowan, The Imperial Irish: Canada’s Irish Catholics Fight for the Great War, 1914–1918 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017). 44. Library and Archives Canada, MG 26 H, Sir Robert Borden papers, reel C-4232, speech, 18 December 1914, 17702. 45. J. C. Hopkins, ed., Canadian Annual Review of Public Affairs 1917 (Toronto: The Annual Review Publishing Company, 1917), 305. 46. Hopkins, Canadian Annual Review 1917, 306. 47. Hopkins, Canadian Annual Review 1917, 480. 48. Christian Guardian, 25 October 1916, 5. 49. On the plot, see Enn Raudsepp, ‘Graham, Hught, 1st Baron Atholstan’, in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 16, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003, , accessed 7 May 2022. 50. J. W. Dafoe, Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1963), xviii. The Manitoba Free Press changed its name in 1934 to the Winnipeg Free Press. 51. Harkness, J.E. Atkinson of The Star, 108. 52. Patrice Dutil and David Mackenzie, Embattled Nation: Canada’s Wartime Election of 1917 (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2017). 53. John English, The Conservatives and the Party System, 1901–1920 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 123–60. 54. Globe, 11 August 1914, 4. 55. On Vimy and its evolving meaning, see Tim Cook, Vimy: The Battle and the Legend (Toronto: Allen Lane Canada, 2017). 56. Michael Valpy, ‘Setting Legend in Stone’, Globe and Mail, 7 April 2007, 5. 57. Prince, ‘The Mythology of the War’, 66. 58. Harkness, J.E. Atkinson of The Star, 109.

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30 The Ottoman Empire Mustafa Aksakal, M. Talha Çiçek, Aimee Genell, Dimitris Kamouzis, Janet Klein, Armen Manuk-Khaloyan, Devi Mays

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ewspapers cannot print anything!’ (Matbuat hiç bir șeyi yazamıyor!) Emmanouilidis Efendi (1867–1943), the deputy from Izmir, protested in the Ottoman parliament on 22 February 1915. Up for debate that day was a law defining violations in the press. Emmanouilidis found the law superfluous, even ridiculous. Given the heavy censorship in place, he argued, there was no need for such a law. All papers had been muzzled already, in his view, and no violations were possible. Deputies representing the government maintained that all states had instituted censorship in the world war, and that their state was no different.1 As this chapter shows, despite the heavy hand of the wartime government, the vibrant dynamic of the pre-war Ottoman press was far from snuffed out. Rather, newspapers and periodicals continued to be a contested public arena for the future of the empire and a challenge to government conduct. The structure of this chapter – organised by language – points to one of the greatest difficulties facing scholars of the Ottoman Empire: writing history that does justice to the multilingual, multi-ethnic realities of the empire. To do so, scholars must work with sources in languages too many to be mastered by a single researcher. This chapter, therefore, is a collaborative effort at overcoming such limitations; it should not convey the impression that language groups lived in isolation from each other. On the contrary, as this chapter demonstrates, news authors in one language followed very closely authors writing in other languages and were often in direct dialogue with each other. Studies on the Ottoman press in the First World War remain few and far between. While recent work on the late Ottoman press has done much to deepen our knowledge of newspaper publishing and public opinion, it has addressed the war years only partially.2 The excellent scholarship on the Ottoman First World War that has appeared in recent years, moreover, has not focused on the press.3 This chapter provides a preliminary overview of the Ottoman press during the First World War. It draws on papers in the predominant languages of the empire, though by no means all of them. The chapter argues that despite heavy state censorship, newspapers articulated crucial perspectives on the social and political conditions of the war and therefore represent an important and underutilised source for historians, art historians, literary scholars and social scientists.

The Ottoman Press, 1908–22 The new government that came to power in the aftermath of the 1908 Constitutional Revolution lifted the heavy press censorship that had prevailed under the rule of Sultan

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Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1908/9).4 A ‘press boom’ ensued, fuelled by electoral campaigns and party politics jockeying for position in the newly established Ottoman parliament. The overnight appearance of hundreds of new publications has been described as ‘truly an Ottoman event’, highlighting the fact that papers sprang up in more than a dozen languages – Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Bulgarian, Greek, Hebrew, Judeo-Spanish (Ladino), Kurdish, Persian, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Turkish in Greek script, English, French, German and Italian – in Istanbul and in provincial capitals and port towns such as Beirut, Salonica and Smyrna/Izmir.5 Despite the fact that literacy rates were in the single digits outside of the major imperial cities, newspapers reached wide audiences often through public readings in spaces such as cafés and reading rooms.6 The explosion of the Ottoman press was further aided by the re-establishment of the 1876 Constitution, which guaranteed a free press in accordance with ‘the law’ and the 1909 Press Law.7 The new law made it easier to obtain permits to start newspapers, provided protection to journalists from claims of libel and limited government interference in the press – particularly in terms of pre-publication censorship.8 Nevertheless, in the spring of 1909 the Press Law was restricted by extra-legal means when the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the dominant political faction during the Second Constitutional period, established martial law in the wake of a counter-revolution.9 During and following the Balkan Wars, additional censorship and press regulations were put in place. These intensified with the beginning of the First World War.10 Even though the government could suspend the publication of newspapers, the Press Law made it easy to re-establish the same paper under a different name. Several of the largest circulating dailies, including İkdam (Effort, 1894–1928) and Tanin (Clarion, 1908–25; 1943–7) appeared under slightly different names throughout this period.11 This loophole was steadily tightened with revisions to the Press Law in 1912 and 1913, culminating in the imposition of new military censorship regulations in 1914.12 While the press during the Second Constitutional period (1908–18) was remarkably free compared to the Hamidian era (1876–1909), it was nevertheless an arena that was highly volatile, marked by violence and intense political and ideological contest – all against unremitting internal and external crises that both the CUP and the liberal opposition governments understood in existential terms. The Ottoman press was a battleground where disputes over the meaning of constitutionalism and debates on how best to administer the multi-confessional empire in the age of nationalisms were hashed out. The press was a deeply factional and polarised space. Some papers were affiliated with political parties and published explicit party programmes, while others were independent. Some of the papers launched after 1908 lasted only briefly, but all of them weighed in on the domestic and foreign crises fracturing the empire. From power brokers asserting local control in Ottoman Yemen (1911) and Albania (1912) to Bulgaria’s declaration of independence (1908) and the Habsburg annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina (1908) to the unprovoked wars initiated by Italy (1911) and the Balkan states (1912–13), the press was where political factions vied for support and justified or challenged government policies. Several prominent journalists wrote about the danger of the profession during these years of upheaval.13 Following the suppression of the counter-revolution of 1909, the chief editor of Volkan (Volcano, 1909), Derviş Vahdeti (1869–1909), was tried for treason and executed.

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476 aksakal, çiçek, genell, kamouzis, klein, manuk-khaloyan, mays Editors received death threats and three journalists and newspaper owners were assassinated. In the aftermath of the CUP coup d’état in 1913, opposition newspapers were shuttered, and writers and editors arrested, imprisoned and exiled internally.14 On the eve of the First World War, the CUP had successfully crushed its political adversaries and re-established a regime of pre-publication censorship in which all articles had to be submitted to the censor both before and after going to press.15 The political polarisation of this period did not vanish with the onset of the war; temporarily quieted, it erupted with a fury once the wartime government fell in October 1918. While there was strict military and political press censorship for much of the Ottoman First World War, the predominant Ottoman-Turkish dailies such as Tanin, Sabah (Dawn, 1919–22) and İkdam continued publication throughout the period – despite paper shortages, the arrest, imprisonment and exile of opposition journalists, and state control over the press. Articles reflected the CUP government’s wartime policies or were explicit works of state propaganda. Though many wartime events were well publicised – especially the Ottoman military successes at Gallipoli and Kut al-Amara – discussion of defeats such as at Sarıkamış or Suez, domestic crises and actual danger to the imperial capital Istanbul were excised from daily reporting.16 Explicit critique of the wartime government was prohibited, and the press was dominated by voices friendly to the CUP. Talat Pasha, the interior minister (and grand vezir after February 1917), met with editors and writers to shape content on issues approved for reporting.17 Government intervention and censorship decimated the robust and open political debates that had characterised the early part of the Second Constitutional period. There were some notable continuities between the wartime press and what preceded it, especially in terms of reporting on foreign affairs and Ottoman relations with Europe. However intensely censored, the press continued its pre-war attack against the rapaciousness of the other European empires and what they considered to be their two-faced morality that justified Great Power land grabs while holding the Ottomans to different moral and legal standards. This mode of critique had emerged forcefully in the midst of Italy’s unprovoked attack on Ottoman Libya in 1911. While Ottoman intellectuals and writers had long challenged European imperial powers directly over their claim to moral and civilisational superiority, the illegal war in Libya – as Ottomans cast the conflict at the time – was a turning point. After appeals to the European powers demanding it put the brakes on Italy were met with silence, the Ottoman press launched an assault on the bankruptcy of European moral and legal norms – a position that was taken up across the political spectrum, from the CUP-backed Tanin to liberal opposition papers such as Sabah.18 These blunt critiques of European imperialism paved the way for wartime attacks against the Allies. Several articles appearing in Vakit (Time, 1918–22), Tanin and İkdam aimed to lay bare the hypocrisy of Allied colonial policy, especially the use of imperial subjects as soldiers and workers on the Western Front.19 Writers connected the plight of Egypt, India and Ireland together and cast the Ottoman Empire as an anti-imperialist power. Though it may be tempting to dismiss these critiques as state-generated propaganda in the service of jihad (declared against the Allied powers in November 1914), it should be noted that Ottoman antiimperialism was a well-developed strain of intellectual thought well before the July Crisis.20 In this period of censorship, several prominent exiled and imprisoned journalists, who had cut their political teeth in the euphoric days of 1908, turned to writing fiction

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and memoirs, or simply put down their pens.21 This situation changed dramatically in the summer of 1918. On 11 June 1918, the CUP government lifted political censorship and unleashed a rising tide of criticism against wartime policies – journalists also aggressively publicised cases of corruption and war profiteering.22 The Americantrained journalist Ahmed Emin (Yalman) (1888–1972) described this sudden measure as a ‘safety valve for the disaffections over the conduct of the war, and uncontrolled abuses, which were on the verge of violent outburst’.23 Starting in the summer of 1918, the Ottoman-Turkish press exploded in Istanbul.24 While there were far fewer papers published than in the years between 1908 and 1913, there was nevertheless a similar ‘press boom’ after years of tight CUP intimidation and repression. Military censorship ceased to function even before the Armistice was signed. During October–December 1918 journalists simply printed what they wished. But with the onset of the unofficial Allied occupation of the capital, starting on 13 November 1918, the Allies revived the regime of pre-print censorship. By December 1918 the occupiers had forced papers to publish canned news items, but unlike during the war years, Ottoman journalists managed to print controversial articles through 1920. Allied-censored articles were printed as blank or black spaces – a visible form of protest – and journalists continued to print articles that criticised the occupation, the harsh treatment of the Ottoman delegation at the League of Nations in Paris and, especially, Allied support for the Greek invasion of Asia Minor in May 1919. Istanbul dailies across the political spectrum reported on the mass demonstration against the Greek invasion of Izmir.25 Ahmed Emin’s Vakit published the full text of Halide Edib’s (1883–1964) speech condemning the invasion, which she cast as another European attempt to divide the lands of Islam.26 In the early days of the Armistice, pre-war political constellations and battles reemerged as old scores were to be settled. Once again, the press was a battlefield. When the cabinet of Grand Vezir Talat Pasha resigned against impending defeat in October 1918, the CUP government became an object of derision and was roundly criticised in the press for the disasters of the war, corruption and war profiteering.27 As in the period of the revolution after 1908, Ottoman papers debated the future of the state and the meanings of constitutionalism. In their critique of the CUP, the old liberal opposition wrote openly about the Armenian deportations and murders.28 But just like the CUP before the war, the Allied censorship regime became increasingly harsh as the occupation dragged on. With the official occupation of the capital beginning on 16 March 1920, the press came under Allied control. Just like the CUP, Allied officials shut down newspapers and went after opposition journalists. Scores of journalists were court-martialled and imprisoned alongside German, Habsburg and Bulgarian POWs in Malta. Others fled the capital and joined Mustafa Kemal’s resistance movement in Ankara. The Ottoman government, under Allied pressure, banned any reports on the resistance and declared the circulation of Ankara-based newspapers illegal. By the spring of 1920 the antagonism between the Istanbul government under the authority of the sultan and the government that had formed around Mustafa Kemal in Ankara was played out in two rival presses. Ankara created its own news agency, Anadolu Ajansı (Anatolia Agency), to counter the claims of the Istanbul press. Hakim­ iyet-i Milliye (National Sovereignty, 1920–35), the paper of the Ankara regime, gen­ erated arguments expressed in the official historiography of the Turkish Republic.29 The newspaper cast the Istanbul government as traitors and pinned responsibility for

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478 aksakal, çiçek, genell, kamouzis, klein, manuk-khaloyan, mays wartime crimes on the sultan. Moreover, many journalists who had suffered under Allied censorship, press closures, arrests and imprisonment eventually made their way to Ankara and re-established their Istanbul papers with ‘in Anatolia’ (Anadolu’da) added to the title. Satirical journals (known as mizah) were particularly important in conveying Ankara’s message. A satirical ‘Anadolu’da’ version of Ali Kemal’s Peyam-i Sabah (Morning News, 1920–2) appeared in Ankara and regularly mocked the sultan’s regime in Istanbul. Sedat Simavi’s Güleryüz (Smiling Face, 1921–3) appeared in the Ottoman capital between 1921 and 1923 even though its editor backed Mustafa Kemal; it featured issues ridiculing the Greek-language paper Neologos and the Armenian publication Verjin Lur (both discussed below).30

Papers in Armenian Newspapers, journals and satirical magazines played a similarly important role in shaping political opinion, social values and cultural tastes among the empire’s twomillion-strong Ottoman Armenian community. The emergence of the Ottoman Armenian mass press in the late nineteenth century reflected the simultaneous expansion of the political public sphere in the empire, new career opportunities in professional journalism, and the rise of a well-educated middle class that kept abreast of foreign matters and increasingly came to see the Ottoman state’s fortunes as closely intertwined with those of its neighbours. Armenian-language dailies both in the capital and the provinces of Anatolia in the pre-war era devoted extensive space in their pages to public discussion of issues linked to international relations and the foreign affairs of the empire. The commentary they provided to their readers and the occasional dustups they got into with other Ottoman papers were coloured by the multivalent political orientations, beliefs and views of their respective editors and writers, representative of the broader intra-communal cleavages within the Ottoman Armenian community itself. Foremost among the Istanbul-based Armenian newspapers in terms of prestige, breadth of coverage and circulation numbers was Biwzandion (Byzantium, 1896– 1918).31 Launched amid the worst scenes of anti-Armenian violence the empire had until then witnessed, the paper took a conservative stance on political, social and Armenian national issues in its first years of publication.32 It built a close relationship with the Armenian Patriarchate and saw official state- and Church-led efforts and local community institutions – rather than popular agitation and violent change – as the best ways of bringing about the moral and material uplift of Ottoman Armenians.33 In its founder and long-time editor-in-chief Puzant Kechian (1859–1927), Biwzandion had a knowledgeable and experienced writer who had previously served as a contributor to a number of other papers and who, in the more liberal political climate of the Second Constitutional period, would become a much more forceful and optimistic advocate for Ottomanism and expanded political and cultural rights for the empire’s Armenians.34 Other papers also managed to capture sizeable readerships, but it was only after the constitutional revolution that the number of political-literary periodicals increased rapidly.35 The moderate Istanbul daily Zhamanak (Time, 1908–) appeared in October 1908, under the editorship of Misak Kochunian (known also by his pen name, Kasim, 1863–1914). It featured a talented staff of journalists that included the satirist Yervant

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Odian (1869–1926), who lent his sharp wit and observations to many of the paper’s leading pieces. Shedding its profile as an armed nationalist underground organisation, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) formally entered the realm of constitutional politics and launched its official Istanbul-based organ, Azatamart (Battle for Freedom, 1909–14). Periodicals such as Amēnun Taretsʻoytsʻě (Everyone’s Almanac, 1907–29), published annually by Teotoros Lapchinchian (Teotig, 1873–1928), and Hracheay Der-Nersisian’s political daily Verjin Lur (Latest News, 1914–24) likewise enjoyed wide popularity in the years leading up to the war’s outbreak, as did other newly established newspapers and dailies in Anatolia’s urban and rural centres.36 Foreign affairs dominated news headlines as tensions mounted in Europe and as the empire itself became entangled in some of the most serious crises of the pre-war period, including the war over Tripolitania with Italy and the conflict with the Balkan states. Armenian-language papers closely monitored the progress of the German naval programme, the war scares prompted by the crises over Morocco (1905–6; 1911) and Bosnia-Herzegovina (1908–9), the protracted negotiations on the Great Powersponsored reform project for the Armenian-inhabited provinces in eastern Anatolia, amongst a host of other topics, and accordingly offered modest suggestions on how the empire should respond. Most Armenian papers refrained from adopting the kind of language – alternating from the frenetic to the apoplectic – seen on the front pages of the Ottoman Turkish press; their editorial lines took comparatively more measured tones. Biwzandion expressed admiration for British classical liberal ideas and institutions and the Habsburgs’ accommodating position on cultural rights for the empire’s multi-ethnic population.37 With its roots in the Russian Populist movement, the ARF ensured its papers kept their readers informed of the most recent activities of the socialist movement in Europe and regularly published translations of works by Kautsky, Jaurès, Bebel and Chernov.38 Running, as they generally did, against the current of popular revanchism seen at the end of the Balkan Wars and the CUP government’s own rearmament policies, however, opened the Armenian papers and their authors up to charges of disloyalty. Increasingly stringent press regulations imposed in the last year before the war meant that they could easily run afoul of vaguely worded legal provisions ostensibly passed to safeguard the ‘internal and external security’ of the empire. In November 1913 one such clampdown resulted in the shuttering of all but two of the Armenian newspapers published in Istanbul.39 While these papers were permitted to resume publication shortly thereafter, the restrictions underlined the precarious conditions under which the Armenian press operated at the time and anticipated the extreme measures the state would undertake with the outbreak of war in 1914. News of the Habsburg archduke’s assassination captured headlines when reports reached the empire. A number of Ottoman Armenian observers, such as Kechian, deplored the killing as ‘a grave political incident’ (k‘aghak‘akan tsanrakshiṛ dēpk‘ mě), and felt that the Habsburg Empire’s current state could only be ‘presented in the darkest of colours, especially now, as Austria-Hungary has direct participation in such questions that threaten general peace every day’ (amenamut‘ goynerov kě nerkayanay manawand hima vor Awstrewhungaria ughghaki masnakts‘ut‘iwn uni aynpisi harts‘eru, voronk‘ amēn ōr spaṛnalits hangamank‘ mě unin ěndhanur khaghaghut‘ean hamar).40 Biwzandion covered the course of the ‘Sarajevo Drama’ in the following weeks and even used the subject of the assassination to explore broader issues such

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480 aksakal, çiçek, genell, kamouzis, klein, manuk-khaloyan, mays as the seemingly intractable conflicts between small national groups and large imperial polities (the suggestive allusions to the Ottoman Empire could scarcely be more obvious).41 By mid-July 1914, others, like Ardashes Kalpakchian (1866–1942), the responsible director of Zhamanak, could not help but see the political consequences of the saga expanding beyond the Balkans and ‘opening the door to a vicious struggle between pan-Slavism and pan-Germanism’ (hamaslawut‘ean ew hamagermanut‘ean kataghi payk‘ari mě duṛě kě banan).42 Azatamart’s editorial board, which, curiously, chose largely to ignore the crisis brewing in the Balkans until Serbia’s rejection of the Habsburg ultimatum to establish an Austro-Hungarian inquiry into Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, also came around to framing the impending conflagration as a decisive showdown between the two rival camps on the European continent.43 That the Ottoman Empire could ill afford to be drawn into a wider war was a point that Kechian and other writers emphatically made as mobilisation got under way in Europe. It could not wage a ground war until it secured allies in the Balkans, Kechian contended in a 30 July 1914 leader, and could not do so on sea until it received the two dreadnought-class battleships it had ordered from Britain.44 Five days later, Kechian wrote again to advise against Ottoman entry, closing his editorial by remarking: There is nothing left for us to do but wish that Turkey emerge unharmed from the threatening storm, that the course of events benefit the interests of the Ottoman peoples, and that the neutrality of the Ottoman State opens before it an auspicious era to a new century. (Himak urish ban ch‘i mnar mez bayts‘ yetē maght‘el vor T‘urk‘ia anvnas ellē spaṛnats‘ogh p‘ot‘orikēn, dēpk‘erun ěnt‘ats‘k‘n Ōsm. zhoghovurdnerun shaherě npastaworē, ew Ōsm. Tērut‘ean ch‘ēzok‘ut‘iwně barebastik shrjani mě daraglukhě banay ir aṛjew.)45 Most of the other Armenian papers in the capital sounded similar cautionary notes and evinced a weariness for a new war, which they all agreed would be far more devastating than any conflict the world had until then seen.46 Yet even amid paper shortages and disruptions to daily life, the Armenian-language press maintained a strong circulation during the period of ‘armed neutrality’. Readers could open Armenian papers and track the daily movements of the armies as they marched and counter-marched across the continent, learn about the new technology that was deployed on the field of battle and pore over first-hand accounts of the fighting on the Western Front. Where the war directly impinged on imperial affairs, such as when the SMS Goeben and Breslau were granted safe passage across the Straits or when the abrogation of the Capitulations was announced, the responses of the Armenian papers were always carefully measured and worded so as not to offend the censor. Thus, Kechian, while politely acknowledging that Germany’s sale of the two warships to the imperial navy illustrated its ‘friendship towards Turkey’ (ir barekamut‘iwně ts‘oyts‘ talu T‘urk‘ioy), could at one and the same time also write that the British could resume their role in its training and supply.47 Biwzandion, Azatamart, Zhamanak and virtually all of the Armenian newspapers were more effusive in their praise of the abolition of the Capitulations and congratulated the state on finally removing a much-reviled obstacle to progress and restoring the political and financial

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independence of the empire.48 That Ottoman Christians had previously been accused of taking advantage of the privileges offered by the Capitulations was something left unaddressed in the editorials, and perhaps unsurprisingly so, given popular Muslim resentment against the Great Powers and the CUP’s single-minded pursuit of reasserting the empire’s sovereignty.49 Above all, the papers accepted the official account that the Russians had carried out unprovoked attacks against the empire on the northern mouth of the Straits and in the Caucasus in late October 1914, prompting the official declaration of war against the Triple Entente the following month. On 7 November Zhamanak published a translation of an editorial from the Ottoman Turkish newspaper Tercüman-ı Hakikat (Interpreter of Truth, 1878–1921), saying that ‘the Armenian nation and its representative, the Patriarchate, must work together with the government’ (Sakayn pētk‘ ē vor kaṛavarut‘ean het miasin Hay azgě ew ayd azgě nerkayats‘nogh Patriark‘arann al ashkhati): Nature and history have bound these two nations [Armenians and Turks] together in such a manner that it is impossible even to divide them. These two nations will accordingly coordinate their work, movements, and progression so that they will ensure the great benefits of their both living together [. . .] In this way, both sides will work together, hand in hand, unto the very end. (Bnut‘iwnn u patmut‘iwně ays erku azgerě anank mě iraru kapats ē vor ankareli ē bazhnuil angam. Hetewabar ays erku azgerě irents‘ gortserě, sharzhumnerě, ěnt‘ats‘k‘ě anank mě kazmakerpelu en vor miats‘ats aprilě erkuk‘in al mets ōgutner apahovē . . . . ays kerpov erku koghmn al dzeṛk‘ dzeṛk‘i talov ashkhatin minch‘ew verj.)50 In his editorial published that same day, Kechian likewise struck a solemn note, declaring that a responsibility has fallen on all of us each to do our share [. . .] We know that Armenians will [. . .] this time as well carry out the part that has fallen to them as citizens of a constitutional country with self-devotion, cognizant of their rights and responsibilities [. . .] and firmly embrace the cause of harmony among all the Ottoman elements. (Mer amēnus ank ē katarel mer vray inkats partakanut‘ean bazhině . . . Menk‘ gitenk‘ vor Hayern al . . . ays angam ews kkataren irents‘ inkats andznuirut‘ean bazhinn ibrew sahmanadrakan erkri mě k‘aghak‘ats‘iner, gitakits‘ irents‘ irawunk‘nerun u irents‘ partaworut‘iwnnerun . . . ew pind p‘arelov Ōsm. tarreru hamerashkhut‘ean datin.)51 The press had finally got to grips with the reality of the empire’s entry into the global war and the forthcoming sacrifices that its peoples would have to make. Sincere professions of unwavering loyalty and commitment to the struggle, however, were insufficient to allay the CUP government’s suspicions of the Armenians. Following the military defeats in the previous winter, in the spring of 1915 it enacted a series of repressive measures targeting the empire’s Armenian population (see Chapter 16). In its eyes, Armenian political groups, associations, community institutions and intellectuals

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482 aksakal, çiçek, genell, kamouzis, klein, manuk-khaloyan, mays were engaged in subversive activity, intent on undermining the war effort in furtherance of their own separatist, nationalist aims. The increasingly radical measures led to the one-by-one shuttering of the Armenian papers and the imprisonment of dozens of journalists. On 24 April 1915, along with hundreds of other Armenian political and cultural leaders, many among their number in Istanbul were rounded up and deported to central Anatolia. There, virtually all of them met their end.52 Kechian, Teotig and Odian, who were among the deportees, through sheer luck managed to survive. A handful of papers in the capital were allowed to operate, albeit under severely straitened conditions, relegated mainly to publishing the official blandishments of the state (Kechian’s sons Baruyr and Ashod dutifully assumed their father’s responsibilities at Biwzandion and, with Arshag Alboyachian [1879–1962], edited the paper until 1918, its final year of publication, while Vahan Toshigian [1880–1954] took over duties at Verjin Lur after editor Hagop Der-Hagopian’s arrest and exile to Konya). The politicians, artists, writers and journalists murdered in 1915–17 were only the first victims of the CUP government’s broader policy to reorder the empire along much stronger Turkish ethno-nationalist lines by way of destroying the Ottoman Armenian community through wholesale deportations and massacres. Defeat at the end of the world war brought a brief respite to what remained of the shattered community. Not long after the signing of the Armistice and the arrival of Allied troops, Istanbul Armenians, chastened and reduced to a subdued existence during four years of war, reasserted themselves in public life and revived literary production. A number of periodicals, such as Azatamart’s successor, Chakatamart (Battle, 1919–20), socialist Tigran Zaven’s (1874–1938) political daily Zhoghovurd (People, 1918–19), and the fortnightly feminist journal Hay Kin (Armenian Woman, 1919–32), edited by Toshigian’s wife, Hayganush Mark (1885–1966), began publication.53 Though still constrained by Allied censors, they reported on topics that had been largely forbidden during the war, including the plight of Armenian orphans and women living as captives among Muslim families and the intellectuals executed by the CUP. With a renewed air of confidence, the Ottoman Armenian press excoriated German militarism and the government’s decision to plunge the empire into the war. Embracing the new rhetoric and vision of international order and national self-determination as laid out by President Wilson and the Allies, the press acclaimed the new Armenian republic established in the South Caucasus and Allied promises to see that all those responsible for the massacres were swiftly brought to justice. Rewriting the narrative of the war, Teotig insisted in a long-form essay that appeared in 1920 that Armenians had ‘from the very first day’ (arji mēk ōrēn) sided with the Allies, earning them the right to be called ‘the little ally’ (pok‘rik dashnakits‘ě).54 ‘These are defining times’ (Vchṛakan zhamer en), Chakatamart meanwhile remarked on the occasion of Wilson’s arrival in Europe for the peace conference. ‘We suffered a historic Martyrdom that has no parallel in history [. . .] when tomorrow people listen to our Cries and our Cause at the Areopagus, let no one dare raise objections or spin arguments like the Sophists’ (Unets‘ank‘ Martirosagrut‘iwn mě vor patmakan ē, ew nmaně ch‘uni patmut‘ean mēj . . . erb, vaghuan Aripagosin mēj, mardik lsen mer Aghaghakn u Datě, voch‘ mēkě hamardzaki aṛarkut‘iwnner kam sop‘estut‘iwnner hiwsel).55 All of the papers counselled vigilance against any recrudescence of the CUP, and watched with marked trepidation as Mustafa Kemal’s movement began to gain momentum in 1919.56 That movement’s victory in what Turkish nationalist historiography later called the Turkish War of Independence ultimately sealed the fate

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of the Armenian press. While a handful of papers survived and continue to operate even today, most others folded, their staff departing from Turkey not long after the republic’s founding.57 Armenian papers would resume publication in the interwar period in communities in the Middle East, Europe and the Americas, where a new literary culture would take root and flourish.58

Papers in Arabic The collapse of Hamidian authoritarianism in the Ottoman Empire also brought about an explosion in the number of newspapers published in various Ottoman Arab cities.59 Even in 1908, no less than forty-four new Arabic newspapers had been initiated in Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Iraq, as well as Istanbul. On the eve of the First World War, 355 additional newspapers and journals were published in the Ottoman Arab provinces. Quantity is only one aspect of this ‘journalistic boom’, as the papers discussed in great detail all the major problems of the modernising Arab-Ottoman societies. The major themes on which they focused were the restructuring of the Ottoman Empire to secure improvement – and greater political rights – for the empire’s Arab populations. Convenient to the liberal spirit of the time, Ottoman-Arab newspapers took titles such as al-Inqilab (Revolution, 1909–?), al-Hurriyya (Liberty, 1908–?), al-Nahda (Renaissance/Awakening, 1908–?), alWataniyya (Patriotism, 1908–?), Shams al-’Adala (Sun of Justice, 1908–?) and Brutistu (Protest, 1908–?).60 The First World War era was among the poorest periods in the history of the Ottoman Arab lands in terms of the number and content of newspapers published. Because of heavy government censorship and the financial hardships brought about by the war, nearly all the newspapers published in the Ottoman Arab lands were shut down. During the war, only two Arabic newspapers continued publication in Iraq – al-Zuhur (Appearance, 1909–?) in Baghdad and Da’wat al-Haqq (Invitation of Truth, 1909–?) in Mosul.61 For the Syrian lands, in addition to the attendant financial hardships, the authoritarian regime of Cemal Pasha, the region’s military commander from 1914 to 1917, played an important part in the scarcity of newspapers. Thus, the history of the Ottoman Arabic press during the First World War cannot be separated from the political transformations experienced in Syria. Cemal established a despotic regime during his tenure in Syria by either abolishing or checking the non-state political actors of the Syrian lands, and accordingly silenced the voices of opposition as well as the papers that expressed their loyalty to the state, such as Muhammad Kurd Ali’s al-Muqtabas (Acquired Learning, 1906–28).62 In line with the elimination of the Arabist opposition, the Ottoman Arabic newspapers were either closed by the government or were turned into propaganda tools espousing official state policy. By mid1916 the Arabic press in Syria was completely under the control of Cemal’s regime. Nonetheless, the government-controlled al-Sharq (The East, 1916–18) newspaper sought to reach a wider audience and diversified its content in its early issues. The outbreak of the Arab Revolt in June 1916, however, complemented the process and transformed al-Sharq, as the major representative of the Ottoman Arabic press, into a loyal instrument of the government legitimising the government’s actions, responding to the allegations of Sharif Husayn (1853–1931), who led the reform, and promoting pan-Islamic solidarity.

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484 aksakal, çiçek, genell, kamouzis, klein, manuk-khaloyan, mays Wartime Ottoman Arabic newspapers can be grouped into three broad categories: the newspapers of the opposition, the loyalists and the government press. In order to show the transformation of the Arabic press during the war, we examine the content of three papers representing these political strains: Ahmad Tabbara’s al-Ittihad alUthmani (Ottoman Unity, 1908–16?), Muhammad Kurd Ali’s al-Muqtabas and the military-backed al-Sharq. Tabbara’s paper can be considered the mouthpiece of the ‘moderate’ and ‘Ottomanist’ Arab opposition. al-Muqtabas represented the loyalist position that preferred to reconcile with Cemal’s regime from its very beginning in 1915. None of them escaped Cemal’s despotism until the very end of the war. Cemal closed al-Ittihad in late 1915 and executed Tabbara for ‘treason’, while Kurd Ali’s paper continued to appear until 1917. Founded directly by Cemal and funded by the Ottoman Fourth Army, al-Sharq was an outlet for government propaganda. The establishment of authoritarianism in the Syrian lands resulted in the merging of alMuqtabas and al-Sharq into one and, by the end of the war, only the government press remained. The newspapers of the so-called ‘radical’ political opposition, such as ‘Abd al-Ghani al-‘Uraisi’s al-Mufid (The Informer, 1909–14) and Shukri al-Asali’s al-Qabas (The Firebrand, 1908–14 and 1918?–28) were closed by the government in the early months of the war.63 Until around May 1915, the government adopted a peaceful policy towards all the political tendencies in the Syrian provinces.64 It did not, in other words, seek to create an ‘official press’ from the outset of the war. Although censorship frequently intervened in the specific content of pieces published, the press could report on problems generated by wartime government policies. In this regard, al-Ittihad al-Uthmani, published in Beirut, became a platform for challenging government policies while supporting Beirut’s reformist leaders. The articles published in al-Ittihad addressed both the local population and the central government, arguing that local authorities represented the ideal agent for resolving local hardships brought on by the war. The newspaper found ways of reporting on both the region-wide organisational problems of cereal transportation – that is, the transfer of grain from Aleppo to Beirut – and the miseries of Beirut’s poor who suffered as a result of the famine.65 The press had the freedom, for example, to report on local panic at the sight of enemy warships in the Mediterranean, which undermined the government’s war propaganda.66 Al-Ittihad al-Uthmani also served to consolidate the position of the Beirut municipality, the reform politicians’ stronghold, and ‘avoided making blunt accusations’ about the local notables ‘that could potentially destabilise the municipality’s position’.67 Many reports implicitly or explicitly praised the capability of the local notables and the municipality to solve Beirut’s food crisis.68 As Cemal’s despotism gained ground in Syria, such voices were silenced – the clearest expression of which was the execution of the journal’s editor, Ahmad Tabbara, at the hands of Cemal on 6 May 1916, following a show trial. While Cemal violently suppressed al-Ittihad al-Uthmani as traitorous, the loyalist paper, al-Muqtabas, was absorbed into the state propaganda apparatus. Its editor, Muhammad Kurd Ali, was a prominent figure of the Arabist opposition in the pre-war era and called for a cultural renaissance among Ottoman Arabs. In the years preceding the war, Kurd Ali wrote provocative articles on the impact of Ottoman rule in Syria. He blamed Turkish rule for the sluggishness of the empire’s Arab population. In addition, he conducted academic studies to increase Arab cultural awareness.69 With the

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outbreak of the war, however, Kurd Ali became an important partner for Cemal. He played an active role in propagating Cemal’s regime and among other things organised a visit to Istanbul for a delegation of Syrians.70 His newspaper functioned as the mouthpiece of the new regime in Syria. And yet despite this full loyalty, al-Muqtabas, too, was shut down in 1917 and Muhammad Kurd Ali began to write for the government-funded al-Sharq newspaper. The launching of al-Sharq represented a new chapter in the wartime Ottoman Arabic press. Cemal determined the aims of the newspaper and viewed it as a significant step in the struggle against domestic and foreign ‘enemies’ of Islam because it provided an outlet to express the ideology of pan-Islamism – Muslim cooperation inside and outside the Ottoman state. Rather than discussing the acute problems of wartime Syria and Arab society more broadly, such as hunger and epidemics, the newspaper sought to demonstrate the true nature of the empire’s enemies. It would ‘strive to awaken and strengthen the patriotism of the Syrians and their youth’ (Suriye ehalisi ve gençliği nezdinde vatanperverliğin ikaz ve takviyesine çabalayacaktır).71 In short, the press in Syria no longer played a role in critiquing government conduct, but instead legitimised its actions. To increase the propaganda effects of al-Sharq, the outstanding OttomanArab intellectuals and political figures, Muḥammad Kurd Ali and Shakib Arslan, were selected as prominent authors because they held an influential place in Arab public opinion.72 The subjects covered by al-Sharq also offer a window onto Cemal’s designs with regard to the Syrian lands. The publishers reserved a prominent place in its issues to demonstrate the importance of loyalty to the Ottoman Empire and the Caliph for the emancipation of the Muslims from the Western threat of colonisation. Sharīf Ḥusayn and other leaders and communities who sided with Great Britain in the war were harshly criticised because they were cast as posing a grave threat to the Ottoman project of Muslim unity. The newspaper stressed that these ‘traitors’ had ‘betrayed’ the Lord (Allah), his Prophet, the Ottoman motherland (al-waṭan al-ʿuthmani), Arab nationalism (al-qawmiyya al-ʿarabiyya) and Muslim society (al-jamiʿa al-Islamiyya). In the same context, al-Sharq focused on the ‘atrocities’ of the imperial states against Muslim populations under their rule – in the British, French and Russian empires. Al-Sharq claimed that these populations longed for Ottoman rule after having suffered the ‘atrocities’ of European imperialist powers. Similarly, in another article, the newspaper reported on British ‘scandals’ (faḍaʾiḥ) and ‘atrocities’, and referred to a book published in London on the ‘illegalities’ of the British archaeological excavations in Egypt.73 Although the publication of such content is understandable in the context of the Ottoman propaganda related to pan-Islamism, Cemal’s enterprise in Syria laid the foundation for an authoritarian regime that transformed the Arabic press, which aimed at establishing the dominant propaganda discourse but also redesigned intellectual and social life in Syria along his own autocratic lines. Cemal Pasha’s draconian rule did not end the life of the nationalist newspapers. The Arab opposition radicalised their discourse and political attitude, and maintained their press in Egypt and Mecca. Al-Qibla (The Direction of Mecca, 1916–24) and al-Manar (The Beacon, 1870–1935) are two notable examples that reported regularly on Ottoman Arab affairs and harshly criticised Cemal’s regime in Syria. In accordance with the Arab Revolt’s goals, al-Qibla mainly propagated the ‘bad intentions’ of the Germans and the ‘evils’ of the ruling Unionist party.74 In addition, they published extensively on Arab

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486 aksakal, çiçek, genell, kamouzis, klein, manuk-khaloyan, mays nationalism in a similar way that the Ottoman Arabic press had done in the pre-war era. Although it supported Sharif Hussein’s movement, al-Manar was a more independent and balanced platform that published harsh critique of what happened in the Ottoman Arab lands during the war years. Its global reach in the Muslim world, moreover, increased the influence of the reports and articles published there.75

Papers in Greek The revolution of the Young Turks in July 1908 and the restoration of the Constitution of 1876 were greeted with enthusiasm by the Ottoman population, both Muslims and non-Muslims. The heavy censorship of the Hamidian absolutist period was lifted, a fact that became immediately evident from the increased publication of Greek newspapers – as it had with the Armenian press. In what follows, we zero in on the Greek wartime press in three representative regions: Istanbul, Izmir and Pontus. During the period 1908–14 there were forty-nine newspapers and journals circulating in Istanbul (forty-four in the Greek language, four in Karamanlı [Ottoman Turkish written in Greek alphabet] and one trilingual with articles in Greek, Armenian and Karamanlı).76 The most important of them were the dailies Neologos (Neologist, 1866–97; 1908– 22), published and directed by Stavros I. Voutyras; Proodos (Progress, 1902–23), published and directed by Konstantinos P. Spanoudis; Tachydromos (Courier, 1898– 1923), published by Nikolaos I. Margaritis and directed by G. Oikonomidis; Chronos (Time, 1914–23), published by Alexandros Skenderidis and directed by Nikolaos I. Margaritis; and Patris or Nea Patris (Homeland or New Homeland, 1908–20), published and directed by Pananos N. Kesisoglous;77 the weekly satirical newspapers Ano Kato (Upside Down, 1911–22), directed by Christos P. Deligiavuris; Ap’Ola (Variety, 1910–20), published by Aristovoulos D. Christidis and directed by Theodoros Kavalieros-Markouizos; and Embros (Forward, 1908–15; 1918–20), published and directed by Konstantinos G. Makridis;78 and the official newspaper of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, Ekklisiastiki Alitheia (Ecclesiastical Truth, 1880–1923), directed by Manouil Gedeon (Figure 30.1). In addition, one needs to refer also to the Karamanlı newspaper Anatoli (East, 1851–1912) and later Nea Anatoli (New East, 1912–21), initially published by Evaggelinos Misailidis and directed by Theagenis E. Misailidis, which mainly addressed the Turkish-speaking readership from Cappadocia, and Politiki Epitheorisis (Political Review, 1910–12), the semi-official mouthpiece of the Greek ethnocentric faction of the Ottoman Greek deputies in the parliament also known as the ‘Hellenic Party’ (Elliniki Omas).79 Politiki Epitheorisis along with newspapers such as Neologos and Proodos became vocal advocates of the values related to the Ellinikon Ethnos (Greek nation). This political stance resulted in several state persecutions against them such as fines, closures, imprisonments and even temporary expulsion of their personnel. Nonetheless, through the articles of these newspapers the terms ethnismos (national spirit), ethnikon fronima (national mindset), ethniki syneidisis (national consciousness), ethniki aythyparxia (national self-existence) and Elliniki fyli (Greek race) gradually assumed a central position in Greek public discourse within the empire.80 Following the Balkan Wars and throughout the First World War, the Ottoman state imposed measures of heavy censorship on the press. Greek newspapers were no exception. Their overall attitude towards CUP policies concerning the Ecumenical Patriarchate

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Figure 30.1  Caricature of the editors of the Greek newspapers Nea Patris, Ap’Ola, Embros, Proodos, Chronos, Tachydromos, Neologos, Ekklisiastiki Alitheia and Ano Kato published in Istanbul. The title reads: ‘Our journalists.’ Ap’Ola, 1 January 1915. of Constantinople and the communal rights of the Greek Orthodox Ottoman subjects combined with the active participation of Greece in the Balkan Wars against the Ottoman Empire had already placed them in a difficult position. When the Ottoman Greek deputies of Aydın, Emmanouil Emmanouilidis, and of Smyrna, Symeon Symeonoglou, publicly voiced their concerns in parliament about the censorship laws affecting the freedom of the press, their arguments and complaints were not taken into consideration.81 By 1914 the majority of Greek newspapers in Istanbul had been shut down. Very few managed to withstand state pressure and publish – in most cases sporadically – during the years of the First World War. Among them were Neologos, Proodos, Patris, Ekklisiastiki Alitheia, Ano Kato, Embros and Ap’Ola. These newspapers chose the path of caution and selfcensorship since they were obliged to operate in a hostile environment, especially after Greece’s entry into the war on the side of the Triple Entente in June 1917.82 It was not until the summer of 1918, when the press regulations relaxed somewhat, and especially in the autumn of the same year that the situation began to change. The defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the war combined with the signing of the Armistice of Mudros (30 October 1918) facilitated the re-establishment of several newspapers. However, compared to the pre-1914 period the overall number of publications was significantly reduced. During the years 1918–22 there were only nineteen newspapers published in Istanbul (eighteen in Greek and one in Karamanlı).83 With the exception of the Karamanlı Nea Anatoli, which maintained a rather neutral and cautious stance focusing more on the situation at the front, and the anti-Venizelist Patris (1920–1), the majority of the newspapers openly supported the prime minister of Greece,

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488 aksakal, çiçek, genell, kamouzis, klein, manuk-khaloyan, mays Eleftherios Venizelos, and the Greek irredentist plan of the Megali Idea (Great Idea).84 Their editors were forced to flee Istanbul before the surrender of the city by the Allies to the Kemalist forces out of fear of retaliation, due to their direct involvement in the activities of the Greek nationalist organisation ‘Committee of National Defence’.85 By the end of 1923 none of these newspapers remained in Istanbul. As in Istanbul, the newsstands in pre-war Izmir (Smyrna) carried an abundance of publications: forty-seven local periodicals, forty-five of which were printed in Greek and two in French. The ones which stood out were Amaltheia (Amalthea, 1838–1922) – initially published by Iakovos Samiotakis and from 1882 onwards by Sokratis Solomonidis, who acted also as co-editor alongside Georgios K. Yperidis – one of the oldest and, along with Voutyras’s Neologos, most important Greek newspapers in the Ottoman Empire; Armonia (Harmony, 1880–1922), published by Georgios I. Asthenidis and edited by Miltiadis D. Seizanis; Imerisia (Daily, 1906–22), published by Nikolaos Tsourouktsoglou and edited by Georgios Anastasiadis; Nea Smyrni (New Smyrna, 1876–1914), published by Nikolaos Sifakis and edited by Pantelis Kapsis; and the satirical newspaper Kopanos (Mallet, 1908–22), published by Georgios Anastasiadis.86 These newspapers, led by Amaltheia, repeatedly published articles opposing state policies which targeted the non-Muslim population of Izmir – and especially the Greek Orthodox (referred to as Rum in Ottoman) – such as the anti-Rum economic boycotts and deportations, the censorship laws affecting freedom of speech, military conscription and the curtailment of the Patriarchate’s jurisdiction over the affairs of the Greek Orthodox population. As in the case of the Constantinopolitan Greek Orthodox press, such articles were met with closures, imprisonments and expulsions by the authorities and on some occasions with scorn and open hostility from the Ottoman Turkish press.87 From the moment the Ottoman Empire entered the war alongside the Central Powers, the Greek-language newspapers in Izmir had no other choice but to comply with similar state restrictions and penalties regarding the publication of war-related news or articles and comments concerning the Ottoman Empire’s allies, namely Germany, Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria.88 The defeat of the Ottoman Empire and the Greek landing at Izmir on 15 May 1919 altered completely the inter-communal dynamics between Muslims and non-Muslims, and in particular between Ottoman Turks and Ottoman Rum. Under the safety provided by the Greek military and diplomatic authorities, the Rum newspapers publicly supported Greek irredentism and the demands for enosis (union) with Greece.89 After the defeat of the Greek army and the collapse of the Asia Minor Front some of the directors of these newspapers, including Solomonidis, managed to escape to Greece, whereas others such as Tsourouktsoglou, Tonis Zanos and Nikos Kyriakidis were less fortunate and were killed when Turkish forces entered the city in September 1922.90 The Pontus region counted its own set of Greek newspapers: nine in Trabzon, one in Giresun, one in Samsun, one in Merzifon, one in Ordu and one in Erzincan. Three papers, especially, enjoyed a certain longevity: Ethniki Drasis (National Action, 1905–13), which was published in Trabzon and was later relocated to Russia due to its criticism of the CUP; Pontos, a monthly periodical of the American College ‘Anatolia’ in Merzifon which lasted for three years (1910–13); and Iho tou Pontou (The Echo of Pontus, 1913–22), published in Trabzon.91 In fact, contrary to other parts of the empire, the First World War benefited the publication of Greek newspapers in the Pontus. The conflict between the Russian and

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Ottoman armies led to the end of Ottoman rule in Eastern Pontus in April 1916, a fact that was perceived by the Pontic Rum as the first step towards their liberation. This attitude was expressed primarily through the publication of the weekly periodical Oi Komninoi, published in Trabzon between May 1916 and April 1917 by the local Metropolitan Chrysanthos Philippidis (1881–1949), who participated in the provisional administration established there by the Russians.92 Support for Greek national ideas and the self-determination of the Pontic Rum was further intensified during the period 1918–21 through the articles of the Trabzon-based Epohi (Era), published and directed by Nikos Kapetanidis. Consequently, the newspaper became the target of Turkish militia operating in the region under the leadership of Topal Osman, and eventually in 1921 Kapetanidis as well as the journalists V. Oikonomidis and Layrentios Tatsoglou were arrested and executed.93 Overall, the development of the Greek press facilitated significantly the dissemination of Greek national ideas to the educated middle and upper social strata of the Rum population of the empire and reinforced their politicisation along national lines in the aftermath of the Constitutional Revolution of 1908. The Balkan Wars and the systematic violence of the CUP regime against the non-Muslim Ottoman subjects of the empire during the First World War shattered the fragile cohesion of the multiethnic and multi-religious Ottoman society. Thus, from 1918 onwards the Greek press became one of the ideological pillars for the promotion of the irredentist policy of the Megali Idea among the larger masses of the Rum population up until the collapse of the Asia Minor Front in 1922 and the massive violent displacement of the Orthodox Greeks. Nonetheless the publication of Greek newspapers was not completely obliterated. The exemption of the Greek Orthodox minority of Istanbul from the compulsory Greek-Turkish population exchange of 1923 allowed the resurrection of the Greek press in the former Ottoman capital and guaranteed the continuation of a long publishing tradition even after the establishment of the Republic of Turkey.

Papers in Kurdish The Kurdish press began with the publication of Kurdistan (1898–1902), although it was published outside the empire proper, due to Sultan Abdülhamid II’s strict censorship. Copies were smuggled to readers inside the empire and also reached those who were unable to read, as literate individuals would read the Kurdish-Ottoman gazette aloud to those gathered nearby. Some articles were published in Ottoman Turkish and others in different dialects of Kurdish, which was the same for later journals as well, causing listeners to ask readers not only to translate articles from Ottoman Turkish into Kurdish but also Kurdish articles into Kurdish.94 While the subject of standardising Kurdish was explicitly broached in later Kurdish-Ottoman newspapers, the eclectic mix of local dialects remained the norm throughout the Ottoman period. Although scholars have viewed the Kurdish-Ottoman press as an organ of Kurdish nationalism, it is important to remember that not only the two Bedir Khan brothers who founded the first Kurdish gazette, Kurdistan, but also those who established later papers or contributed to them were Kurdish elites deeply invested in wider Ottoman politics and debates. Authors only began to issue separatist calls after the end of the war, and even these were in the context of hedging bets in the chaos of the various post-war settlement plans. There were elements of continuity as well as shifts in topics

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490 aksakal, çiçek, genell, kamouzis, klein, manuk-khaloyan, mays and worldview in the Kurdish-Ottoman press from 1898 to 1919, as circumstances changed dramatically in just two decades. From 1898 to 1909 the Kurdish press can be viewed as an auxiliary organ of the CUP, an umbrella organisation that stood in opposition to the policies of Sultan Abdülhamid II and that encouraged his deposition and the reinstatement of the Ottoman Constitution of 1876, which he had abruptly abrogated – along with the Ottoman parliament – in 1878. Kurdistan was published by CUP presses and, as an exile gazette, emerged from centres of CUP activity abroad, such as Cairo, Geneva, Folkestone and London.95 Its content reflected the larger worldview and politics of the CUP at the time. Articles were highly critical of the sultan and his policies, particularly with regard to how they played out in Kurdistan. In addition to the personal ire the Bedir Khanis felt towards the sultan for his role in empowering the Bedir Khan family’s regional rivals, contributors to the journal were also focused on modernising the region, invigorating Kurdish culture and education, and promoting administrative decentralisation – governance that was also desired by other non-Turkish Ottoman groups. Relations with Armenians were of special importance to writers in Kurdistan. They suggested that the sultan was fuelling animosity between Kurds and Armenians and were especially concerned that anti-Armenian activities that Kurds engaged in would bolster European support for Armenians and could challenge the territorial integrity of the empire’s eastern regions; here they were concerned as both Kurds and Ottomans.96 Publishing opposition newspapers continued to be challenging for Kurds and other Ottomans, but after the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, as has been established, the empire saw a flurry of journalistic activity across many languages. Several Kurdish journals and gazettes emerged during this time – Şark ve Kurdistan (Kurdistan and the East, Istanbul, 1908), Kurd Teavün ve Terakki Gazetesi (Kurdish Journal of Mutual Aid and Progress, Istanbul, 1908–9), Amid-i Sevda (Love of Amid, Istanbul, 1909) and Peyman (Oath, Diyarbekir, 1909).97 After the CUP came to power there was widespread rejoicing among many Kurds, along with Ottomans from other ethnic groups. Disaffected Kurds whose fortunes had been tied to Hamidian rule were, of course, less than pleased with the new state of affairs. Soon alienation began to spread. All of these complicated sentiments were on display in the journal Kurd Teavün ve Terakki Gazetesi (KTTG). Beginning in 1908 with the founding of ‘ethnic’ clubs in the Ottoman Empire, many of these organisations produced publications, including Kurdish ones; KTTG was published by the Kurdish Society for Mutual Aid and Progress (Kurd Teavün ve Terakki Cemiyeti). Although Kurdish writers celebrated the Second Constitutional Revolution, they remained somewhat wary of the new government. From their perspective, the Kurds were right to be guarded. The CUP’s decision in 1911 to shut down most non-Turkish ‘ethnic’ clubs and the journals they sponsored was particularly unpopular among the Kurds and other non-Turkish groups. It was not until 1913 that Kurds resumed publication of their gazettes. The papers published in the 1913–14 period were Rojî Kurd (Kurdish Day, Istanbul, 1913), Yekbûn (Unity, Istanbul, 1913), Hetawî Kurd (Kurdish Sun, Istanbul, 1913–14) and Bangê Kurd (Kurdish Call, Baghdad, 1914).98 In Rojî Kurd and its successor, Hetawî Kurd, we see many of the same concerns that writers in earlier Kurdish-Ottoman publications had, albeit with new urgency given to the Balkan Wars and the increasingly precarious state of the empire. Writers were particularly concerned with establishing the Kurds’ unique identity, but still (albeit tenuously at this point) within the Ottoman sphere. They

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were interested in establishing Kurdish nationalism, but were not necessarily separatist. ‘Nationalism’ and a commitment to the empire were not seen as incompatible before the war.99 With the chaos of war, the drafting of Kurdish-Ottoman writers (among other Ottomans) and paper shortages, the Kurdish press was inactive between 1914 and 1918, and when Kurdish writers resumed publication, they focused on the same issue that other Ottomans were consumed with – the question of what would happen to the empire. Kurds had their own concerns, which they expressed on the pages of the journals Jîn (Life, Istanbul, 1918–19) and Kurdistan (Istanbul, 1919).100 While contributors to earlier journals firmly situated themselves in the Ottoman struggle to maintain sovereignty and territorial integrity (albeit with a focus on Kurdish regions), writers in the post-war press were more ambivalent, given the changed situation. The empire was under occupation and some Kurds had participated in the Armenian genocide. The carving-up of the Ottoman Empire was underway. In this political pandemonium, Kurds hedged their bets. They explored connecting with the Kemalist movement to preserve what remained of the empire, and they pondered independence as well, prompted by the twelfth of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points to establish peace. In the Armistice period, Kurdish-Ottoman writers were fixed on what possible post-war settlements would mean for them. By this point the ‘nationality principle’ had been established, and those who wanted to advocate for independence needed to prove their non-Turkishness and also those markers of a ‘civilised society’ as laid out by the powers who were to judge them. Thus, much of the post-war KurdishOttoman press was concerned with establishing the unique identity of the Kurds, demonstrating their historical presence in Kurdistan and highlighting how ‘civilised’ they were vis-à-vis their neighbours, particularly in terms of gender relations. They followed the Peace Conference very closely and published numerous articles on Wilson’s Fourteen Points, particularly the twelfth point, which concerned the question of self-determination for non-Turkish groups. Of course, what ‘autonomy’ meant was up for interpretation, and quite a few contributors to the post-war Kurdish-Ottoman press read it as a call for independence. Their arguments hinged on the Kurds’ historical presence and their numerical superiority in Kurdistan, not only over Turks, but particularly over Armenians, whose population had been decimated by the wartime genocide. Their multiple ‘studies’ in Kurdish ethnography were authored in this light as well. Already seeing Turkish nationalists deny the Kurds’ unique identity, Kurdish intellectuals responded, citing Orientalist studies of the Kurds to demonstrate that they were linguistically and culturally different from Turks and therefore deserving of autonomy or independence. This struggle would continue for decades – to the present day, in fact – changing shape along the way but with the ever-persistent question: to what extent could the late Ottoman Empire, and particularly republican Turkey, manage diversity within its borders?

Papers in Ladino Ladino periodicals first emerged in the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of the 1840 Damascus Affair, a blood libel instigated by local Christians and abetted by the French consul that resulted in the arrest, imprisonment, torture and death of Damascene Jewish notables.101 It was only in the 1870s that long-standing journals emerged in

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492 aksakal, çiçek, genell, kamouzis, klein, manuk-khaloyan, mays the cities of Istanbul, Izmir and Salonica, where a significant number of the empire’s 250,000-strong Ladino-speaking Jewish population lived. These and later periodicals offered their readers news from throughout the Ottoman Empire, updates on Jewish communities within the empire and throughout the world, articles liberally borrowed from European and American periodicals in a variety of languages, essays on historical and religious topics, serialised novels often translated and adapted from European classics, and advertisements from insurance companies, banks, transatlantic shipping lines and numerous department stores that sold Victorian and Edwardian fashions rather than traditional Sephardi garb.102 These periodicals, with a moralising message buried within the narrative, sought to shape their readers’ worldviews as they provided an aspirational model for Ottoman Jewish modernisation.103 However, it was in the aftermath of the 1908 Constitutional Revolution that the Ladino press truly experienced a flowering.104 In addition to long-standing journals such as El Telegrafo (The Telegraph, Istanbul, 1872–1931), El Tiempo (The Times, Istanbul, 1871–1930), La Buena Esperanza (The Good Hope, Izmir, 1871–1912, 1914–17?) and La Epoka (The Epoch, Salonica, 1875–1911), some thirty-eight new Ladino periodicals sprouted up, with Edirne and Jerusalem now hosting journals in addition to Istanbul, Izmir and Salonica.105 Some of these new periodicals centred on controversial topics that would have tempted the pen of Hamidian censors, including periodicals that were humorous and satirical (El Djugeton, The Joker, 1909–31), overtly Zionist albeit with a uniquely Ottoman Sephardi bent (El Djudio, The Jew, Istanbul, 1909–30, published in Varna after 1922) or socialist (Avanti, Forward, Salonica, 1911–35).106 Published circulation numbers were notoriously unreliable, as newspapers inflated their numbers to position themselves advantageously against their competitors even as they castigated the many readers who shared copies of the papers or read them aloud to illiterate family members and friends.107 The outbreak of the Balkan Wars, and even more so the First World War, vastly changed the landscape of Ladino publications, a fact that has not yet received sustained attention in scholarship on the Ladino press and the experiences of Ottoman Jews outside Palestine during the First World War. Salonica, with its vibrant press culture, was no longer part of the Ottoman Empire, and Ladino periodicals now only appeared in Istanbul and Izmir. Within the empire, many journals were permanently shuttered, while others, like Istanbul’s El Telegrafo, ceased publication during the First World War only to recommence after the Armistice. Other papers only appeared sporadically, and in limited circulation, as extant copies of papers such as Istanbul’s El Djudio, or Izmir’s La Buena Esperanza, El Meseret (The Joy) and El Nuvelista (The Novelist), are rare, if they exist at all.108 Istanbul’s El Tiempo was the only Ladino periodical in the Ottoman capital to publish throughout the war, but it no longer appeared reliably on a bi-weekly or weekly basis, and at times was only a few pages long. As before the war, El Tiempo was largely written by its long-time editor, David Fresco (c. 1853–1933), an irascible figure who was an ardent proponent of the reformation of Ottoman Jewry and a staunch opponent of Zionism. Meanwhile, the wartime diary of Alexandre Ben Ghiat (1863–1923), the editor of Izmir’s El Meseret, sheds light on the choices that editors of the Ladino press made in order to continue publication under the censorship regime, even as the articles they featured did not necessarily match their own views on the Ottoman leadership and the war itself.

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El Tiempo’s abbreviated pages during the First World War featured terse updates on the war, numerous attestations of Jewish loyalty to the Ottoman Empire, including prominent Jewish men who won military awards and the valuable service that Jews rendered to the Ottoman army, and calls for demonstrations of Jewish patriotism in addition to military service. Jewish women, the paper reported, raised money for the Ottoman military or injured soldiers, knitted socks and gloves, and trained to be nurses for the Red Crescent; they also bore the deaths of their sons and husbands stoically, as a necessary loss for the empire. El Tiempo sought to portray the Ottoman Jewish community as unified in patriotic support of the Ottoman war effort, regardless of the sacrifices this entailed. Likewise, it cast the Ottoman administration as appreciative of the Ottoman Jewish community and sensitive to the religious needs of its Jewish soldiers. At times, the paper also published what was essentially Ottoman propaganda, whether celebrating the 1914 Ottoman declaration of the war as a jihad, overlooking the military setbacks of the Ottomans and their allies and predicting victory, or publishing pieces that lauded the military forces allied with the Ottoman Empire while describing the lack of enthusiasm among Entente soldiers. Sensitive topics, such as Ottoman losses, the genocide of Armenians, forced deportations of Greek Orthodox and Kurdish populations, service in labour battalions, war profiteers and corruption, were almost entirely absent, though they featured prominently in Ladino publications after the Armistice.109 El Tiempo did, however, publish occasional articles in the later years of the war on the growing number of Jewish poor and efforts to create Jewish soup kitchens and an orphanage to house the growing number of Jewish girls orphaned by the war; girls, in particular, were seen as vulnerable and in need of communal protection. The spectral figure of the censor looms large behind these absences, and at times, appears directly in the form of blank columns where an article was excised. Alexandre Ben Ghiat, the editor of Izmir’s El Meseret, noted in his diary that in the early days of the war, his periodical continued much as before, publishing weekly or even twice a week ‘almost all that had happened’ (kuaji todo lo ke pasava).110 Eight or nine months later, however, with rigorous censorship now in effect, he noted that ‘[w]e could not write anything’ (no pudimos nada eskrivir).111 This, together with a paper shortage, prompted Ben Ghiat first to publish the paper irregularly, which led to the authorities threatening to close the journal if he did not publish regular editions to reassure his readership. In October 1915 he ceased publication of El Meseret altogether after being threatened with closure for violating the censorship regime. He explained in his diary that ‘what I cannot publish in the journal, I am gathering as notes to make a book someday’ (lo ke no puedo publikar tambien en el ditto djurnal yo lo rekojere en notas para azer un dia algun livro).112 He mocked Turkish periodicals such as Köylü (Villager) for making wild claims about Ottoman successes even as Britain took Mesopotamia and Palestine. The subjects that were deliberately omitted from El Tiempo filled the pages of his diary, including strategies to avoid mobilisation, large-scale poverty and hunger, massacres of Armenians and deportations of non-Turkish populations, the corruption of Ottoman officials, Jewish notables and war profiteers alike, and the ways in which Ottoman authorities used the war as cover for targeting Armenian, Greek Orthodox and Jewish individuals and communities in Izmir and its environs. As such, Ben Ghiat’s diary alerts us to the discrepancies between what appeared in the Ladino press concerning the war, what journalists knew of the war and what was occurring in Ottoman lands and beyond. The readers of

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494 aksakal, çiçek, genell, kamouzis, klein, manuk-khaloyan, mays El Tiempo were likely similarly aware that the press did not accurately convey the full reality of the war on the battle and home fronts alike.

Conclusion The Ottoman wartime press cannot be disaggregated from social and political developments between 1908 and 1914. The politics of the pre-war period defined the wartime debate in terms of demands for political rights, visions of the imperial future, the place of the Ottoman Empire in the international system and economic development. While wartime censorship put a lid on these political contestations, in the last months of fighting and the subsequent Armistice period pre-war disputes blew up anew against a vastly different social and political landscape. During the war, as we have seen, government-backed news organs dominated the OttomanTurkish language press and the wartime government was especially repressive with respect to the various non-Turkish-speaking communities of the empire. These, in turn, reclaimed their voices at the end of the war and engaged with the new realities, cleavages and opportunities presented, returning the contest for the empire’s future once again to its multilingual setting and debate.

Notes  1. Meclis-i Mebusan Zabıt Ceridesi [Minutes of the Ottoman Parliament], III/1, Session 31, 9 Şubat 1330/22 February 1915. For Emmanouilidis’ political activities, see Vangelis Kechriotis, ‘On the Margins of National Historiography: The Greek İttihatçı Emmanouil Emmanouilidis – Opportunist or Patriot?’, in Untold Histories of the Middle East: Recovering Voices from the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Amy Singer, Christoph K. Neumann and Selçuk Akşin Somel (Abingdon: SOAS/Routledge Studies on the Middle East, 2011), 124–42.  2. Erol A. F. Baykal, The Ottoman Press (1908–1923) (Leiden: Brill, 2019); Murat R. Ṣiviloǧlu, The Emergence of Public Opinion: State and Society in the Late Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Ali Birinci, Tarih Uğrunda: Matbuat Âleminde Birkaç Adım (Istanbul: Dergâh Yayınları, 2001); Ali Birinci, Tarih Yolunda: Yakın Mazînin Siyasî ve Fikrî Ahvâli (Istanbul: Dergâh Yayınları, 2001); Ali Birinci, Hürriyet ve İtilâf Fırkası: II. Meşrutiyet Devrinde İttihat ve Terakki’ye Karsı Çıkanlar (Istanbul: Dergâh Yayınları, 2012).  3. For the new scholarship on the Ottoman First World War in English, see works by Yiğit Akın, Talha Çiçek, Stacy Fahrenthold, Elif Mahir Metinsoy, Ronald Suny, Melanie Tanielian, Elizabeth Thompson and Yücel Yanıkdağ. This is far from representing an exhaustive list.  4. İpek K. Yosmaoğlu, ‘Chasing the Printed Word: Press Censorship in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1913’, The Turkish Studies Association Journal 27 (2003): 15–49.  5. Baykal, Ottoman Press, 56–9.   6. Benjamin C. Fortna, Learning to Read in the Late Ottoman Empire and the Early Turkish Republic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 78.  7. Yosmaoğlu, ‘Chasing the Printed Word’, 15–49.  8. Baykal, Ottoman Press, 80ff.   9. Nader Sohrabi, Revolution and Constitutionalism in the Ottoman Empire and Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 224–83; M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 150–77; Feroz Ahmad, The Young Turks: The Committee of Union and Progress in Turkish Politics, 1908–1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 36–41.

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10. The full text of the 1909 press law can be found in Baykal, Ottoman Press, 310–21. 11. The CUP-backed Tanin appeared under the titles Canin, Cenin, Senin and Hak. İkdam appeared as Yeni İkdam and İktihâm, Halk Gazetesi, Sabah Postası and Gece Postası. Baykal, Ottoman Press, 104–11; Zeynep Çelik, Europe Knows Nothing about the Orient (Istanbul: Koç University Press, 2021), 257. 12. Baykal, Ottoman Press, 113–14. 13. Christine Philliou, Turkey: A Past against History (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021), 46–60; Palmira Brummett, Image and Imperialism in the Ottoman Revolutionary Press, 1908–1911 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 9; Baykal, Ottoman Press, 120–1. 14. Ahmad, The Young Turks, 34–41, 113–14; Philliou, Turkey: A Past against History, 66–72. 15. Baykal, Ottoman Press, 122. 16. Baykal, Ottoman Press, 94. 17. Ahmed Emin, Turkey in My Time (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1956), 60–1. 18. Stefan Hock, ‘“Waking Us from this Endless Slumber”: The Ottoman–Italian War and North Africa in the Ottoman Twentieth Century’, War in History 26 (2019): 204–26. 19. For example, Ahmed Emin, ‘Wilson’ın Yeni Nutku’, Vakit, 14 Kanun-i Sani 1918. 20. Mustafa Aksakal, ‘Not “by those old books of international law, but only by war”: Ottoman Intellectuals on the Eve of the Great War’, Diplomacy & Statecraft 15 (2004): 507–44. 21. For an example, Refik Halid Karay, who started to write political satire in 1908, turned to fiction after the CUP deported him to Sinop in 1913. See Philliou, Turkey: A Past against History, chs 2–4. 22. Sedad Simavi, a dominant figure in the satirical press in Istanbul, published one of the most searing critiques of war profiteering in 1918. Sedad Simavi, Yeni Zenginler/Les Néo-Riches (Istanbul: Kütübhane-i Sudî, 1334 [1918]). See also Yiğit Akın, ‘Altruistic Soldiers, BloodSucking Profiteers: Social Relations of Sacrifice in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War’, in Not All Quiet on the Ottoman Fronts: Neglected Perspectives on a Global War, ed. Mehmet Beşikçi et al. (Baden-Baden: Ergon, 2020), 33–48. 23. Emin, Turkey in My Time, 57. 24. Orhan Koloğlu, Osmanlı’da son Tartışmalar: Mondros’tan Mudanya’ya (Istanbul: Doğan Kitap, 2008); Nur Bilge Criss, İstanbul under Allied Occupation 1918–1923 (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 45–50. 25. Vakit, İkdam, Sabah, İleri, 20 May 1919; Zaman, 24 May 1919. 26. Vakit, 23 May 1919. 27. Koloğlu, Osmanlı’da son Tartışmalar; Emin, Turkey in My Time; Ahmed Emin, Turkey in the First World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930); Criss, İstanbul. 28. Taner Akçam and Vahakn N. Dadrian, Judgment at Istanbul: The Armenian Genocide Trials (New York: Berghahn, 2011), 23–33. 29. An earlier iteration of this paper with the same title appeared in Istanbul in 1908, with the subtitle ‘In the Service and the Defence of Democracy’. A few issues can be found in the Hakkı Tarık Us Collection. 30. Güleryüz, 7 July 1337 [1921]; 30 June 1337 [1921]. 31. Sources place its circulation by 1913 at somewhere between 7,000 and 8,000. See US Department of Commerce, Foreign Publications for Advertising American Goods, Miscellaneous Series No. 10 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1913), 148. 32. A. A. Kharatyan, Arevmtahay mamuln ir patmutʻyan avartin (1900–1922) [The Western Armenian Press toward the End of its History (1900–1922)] (Yerevan: Patmut’yan Institut, 2015), 60–2. 33. After the constitutional revolution, the paper’s views came to align closely with the newly founded Armenian Liberal Democratic (Ṛamkavar) Party, which rejected violent revolution,

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496 aksakal, çiçek, genell, kamouzis, klein, manuk-khaloyan, mays economic radicalism and generally promoted the interests of the urban upper classes of the empire. 34. For brief biographical information on Kechian, see Puzant Kechian, ‘Drwag akʻsori shrjanēn’ [An Episode from the Exile Period], Amēnun Taretsʻoytsʻě (1922): 44, and the two articles by Vahan Tekeyan (‘V.T.’) entitled ‘Biwzand K‘echean (Husher)’ [Puzant Kechian (Memoirs)] and published in the 14 and 21 August 1943 editions of the Cairobased newspaper Arev (Sun). 35. Notably, Arewelkʻ (Orient) in Istanbul and Arewelean Mamul (Orient Press) and its successor Dashink‘ (Alliance) in Izmir, neither of which, however, survived into the war period. 36. Basic information regarding these and other periodicals can be found in M. A. Babloian, Hay parberakan mamulě: Matenagitakan hamahavakʻ tsʻutsʻak (1794–1980) [The Armenian Periodical Press: A Compiled Bibliographical Catalogue (1794–1980)] (Yerevan: Haykakan SSH GA Hratarakchʻutʻyun, 1986). See also Bedross Der Matossian, Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014). 37. ‘Haykʻ, huynkʻ, ew Eritasard Turkʻatsʻ himnagirě’ [Armenians, Greeks and the Young Turk Programme], Biwzandion, 30 September 1908, 1; ‘Grichʻ ew sur’ [The Pen and the Sword], Biwzandion, 24 October 1913, 1. 38. Houri Berberian, Roving Revolutionaries: Armenians and the Connected Revolutions in the Russian, Iranian, and Ottoman Worlds (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), 94, 222 n. 257. 39. Sir Louis Mallet to Sir Edward Grey, 30 November 1913, TNA FO 371/1848. 40. ‘Spanum Avstrioy gahazhaṛang arhiduk‘sin Frants‘-Fērtinanti ew knojě’ [The Killing of Austria’s Heir Presumptive Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his Wife], Biwzandion, 29 June 1914, 2. 41. ‘Avstrioy gahazhaṛangin spannwilě’ [The Murder of Austria’s Heir Presumptive], Biwzandion, 30 June 1914, 1. 42. ‘Ewropakan mets paterazmi mě vakhě’ [Fear of a Great European War], Zhamanak, 13 July 1914, 1. 43. ‘Dardzeal paterazm’ [War, Once Again], Azatamart, 26 July 1914, 2. 44. ‘Dardzeal paterazm’ [War, Once Again], Biwzandion, 30 July 1914, 1. The British Admiralty would formally seize those warships for use by the Royal Navy four days later. 45. ‘Evropa taknuvray’ [Europe in Turmoil], Biwzandion, 4 August 1914, 1. 46. ‘1814–1914: Hariwr tari aṛaj ew aysor’ [1814–1914: A Hundred Years Ago and Today], Zhamanak, 4 August 1914, 1; ‘Hskaneru kṛiwě ew menk‘’ [The Clash of the Titans and Us], Azatamart, 30 July 1914, 2. 47. ‘Paterazmiknerun dirk‘ě’ [The Posture of the Belligerents], Biwzandion, 12 August 1914, 1. 48. See, for example, ‘Nor keank‘ T‘urk‘ioy hamar’ [A New Life for Turkey], Biwzandion, 10 September 1914, 1; ‘K‘ap‘it‘iwlasiōnnereu jnjman elewmtakan hetewank‘nerě’ [The Financial Consequences of the Abolition of the Capitulations], Azatamart, 14 September 1914, 2. The Armenian press’s laudatory response did not escape the attention of the Unionist papers. See ‘Tanin ew hay mamulě’ [Tanin and the Armenian Press], Zhamanak, 13 September 1914, 2. 49. The Capitulations were a set of extraterritorial privileges generally granted by the Ottoman state to foreign citizens and non-Muslim Ottoman subjects in matters relating to law and commerce. 50. ‘T‘urk‘erě ew hayerě dzeṛk‘ dzeṛk‘i [The Turks and Armenians Hand in Hand], Zhamanak, 7 November 1914, 2. 51. ‘T‘urk‘ewṛus nor paterazmě: Mets chgnazhamě’ [The New Russo-Turkish War: The Great Crisis], Biwzandion, 7 November 1914, 1.

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52. For concise biographical entries on these individuals, see Teotig, Hushardzan April 11-i [A monument to 11 (24) April] (Istanbul: O. Arzuman, 1919). 53. On Hay Kin, see Lerna Ekmekcioglu, Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 1, 16–17, 153–4, 157–8. 54. ‘Ares ew ir verjin khagherě’ [Ares and his Final Games], Amēnun Taretsʻoytsʻě (1916–20): 328. 55. ‘Verjnakan vchiṛēn aṛaj’ [Before the Final Decision], Chakatamart, 28 December 1918, 1. 56. See Ari Şekeryan, ‘Reactions of the Armenian Community to the Emergence of the Turkish National Movement (1919–20)’, Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 4 (2017): 381–401. 57. Two of the most popular papers today are Zhamanak (which appears now as Jamanak) and Agos (Furrow). 58. A searchable database of digitised Armenian periodicals may be accessed through the website of the National Library of Armenia at , accessed 24 April 2022. 59. For some of their collections and other post-Ottoman Arabic newspapers available online, the following websites can be visited: ; ; , all accessed 24 April 2022. 60. For some descriptions of the Arab press in the Second Constitutional era, see Ami Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 62–9. As the question mark indicates, many of the folding dates of these papers could not be found. 61. Ayalon, Press in the Arab Middle East, 71. 62. For an analysis of Cemal Pasha’s rule in Syria, see M. Talha Çiçek, War and State Formation in Syria: Cemal Pasha’s Governorate during World War I (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014). For an excellent analysis of Muhammad Kurd Ali’s political attitudes during the war period, see Salim Tamari, ‘Muhammad Kurd Ali and the Syrian-Palestinian Intelligentsia in the Ottoman Campaign against Arab Separatism’, in Syria in World War I: Politics, Economy and Society, ed. M. Talha Çiçek (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 37–60. 63. Ayalon, Press in the Arab Middle East, 71; Rashid I. Khalidi, ‘The Press as a Source for Modern Arab Political History: Abd ‘al-Ghani al-‘Uraisi and al-Mufid’, Arab Studies Quarterly 3 (1981): 22–42. 64. For details, see Çiçek, War and State Formation, ch. 1. 65. For famine and its social influences, see Linda S. Schilcher, ‘The Famine of 1915–1918 in Greater Syria’, in Problems of the Modern Middle East in Historical Perspective, ed. John P. Spagnolo (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 229–58; Çiçek, War and State Formation, ch. 7; Najwa Al-Qattan, ‘When Mothers Ate their Children: Wartime Memory and the Language of Food in Syria and Lebanon’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 46 (2014): 719–36. 66. Elizabeth Williams, ‘Economy, Environment and Famine: World War I from the Perspective of the Syrian Interior’, in Çiçek, ed., Syria in World War I, 152. 67. Melanie Schulze Tanielian, ‘Feeding the City: The Beirut Municipality and the Politics of Food during World War I’, International Journal of the Middle East Studies 46 (2014): 737–58. 68. Tanielian, ‘Feeding the City’. 69. Rainer Hermann, Kulturkrise und konservative Erneuerung: Muhammad Kurd Ali (1876– 1953) und das geistige Leben in Damaskus zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1989), 113–24. 70. Tamari, ‘Muhammad Kurd Ali’. 71. ATASE Arşivi (Archive of the Turkish General Staff), Kls. 531, Ds. 2078, Fih. 2–15, 2–29, in Ömer Osman Umar, ‘Cemal Paşa’nın Suriye’de Arap Milliyetçilerine Karşı Neşrettiği El-İslam Gazetesi ve Programı’, Askeri Tarih Bülteni, 2000/49, 133f. 72. For Shakib Arslan, see Abdurrahman Atçıl, ‘Decentralization, Islamism and Ottoman Sovereignty in the Arab Lands before 1914: Shakīb Arslān’s Polemic against the Decentralization

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498 aksakal, çiçek, genell, kamouzis, klein, manuk-khaloyan, mays Party’, Die Welt des Islams 53 (2013): 26–49. For the intellectual life of Kurd ʿAlī, see Hermann, Kulturkrise und konservative Erneuerung, 124–37. 73. For a detailed content analysis of al-Sharq, see M. Talha Çiçek, ‘Visions of Islamic Unity: A Comparison of Djemal Pasha’s al-Sharq and Sharīf Ḥusayn’s al-Qibla Periodicals’, Die Welt des Islams 54 (2014): 460–82. 74. For details, see Çiçek, ‘Visions of Islamic Unity’. 75. See, for instance, Rashid Rida, ‘Rihlatu al-Hijaz’ [Travel to Hijaz], Majallatu al-Manar 19/5, 29 Dhu al-Hijja 1334 [27 October 1916], 307–10. 76. Stratis D. Tarinas, Ο Ελληνικός Τύπος της Πόλης. Α΄ Μέρος – Εφημερίδες [The Greek Press of Constantinople. Part A – Newspapers] (Istanbul: Εκδόσεις Ηχώ, 2007), 25–7. 77. Tarinas, O Eλληνικός Τύπος, 95–6, 98–103, 113–15, 123–4, 133–4. 78. Tarinas, O Ελληνικός Τύπος, 37–8, 41–2, 60–2. 79. Tarinas, O Ελληνικός Τύπος, 111–12, 143–4. It has been impossible to trace the biographies of many of the publishers and editors listed in this paragraph, with the exception of Stavros I. Voutyras (1841–1923), Konstantinos P. Spanoudis (1871–1941), Manouil Gedeon (1851–1943) and Evaggelinos Misailidis (1820–90). 80. Dimitris Kamouzis, Greeks in Turkey: Elite Nationalism and Minority Politics in Late Ottoman and Early Republican Istanbul (Abingdon: SOAS/Routledge Studies on the Middle East, 2021), 22, 24. 81. Emmanouil Emmanouilidis, Τα τελευταία έτη της Οθωμανικής Αυτοκρατορίας [The Final Years of the Ottoman Empire] (Athens: Γ. Καλλέργης, 1924), 339–42. 82. Cf. Kamouzis, Greeks in Turkey, 24–6. 83. Tarinas, Ο Ελληνικός Τύπος, 25–7. 84. During the period 1919–23 Nea Anatoli was published by Iordanis I. Limnidis and edited by Georgios E. Misailidis. Tarinas, Ο Ελληνικός Τύπος, 143–4, 275. 85. Kamouzis, Greeks in Turkey, 74–6, 81–3, 116–17, 128–9, 131–2. 86. Here, too, it has been difficult to trace the biographies of all the figures involved. Iakovos Samiotakis was born in 1817 and died in 1882; Sokratis Solomonidis lived from 1858 to 1932; and Miltiadis D. Seizanis from 1850 to 1930. 87. Christos S. Solomonidis, Η δημοσιογραφία στη Σμύρνη [Journalism in Smyrna] (Athens: Τυπογραφεία Μαυρίδη, 1959), 31–4, 38, 50–1, 104–6, 110, 112, 116–17, 179–80, 195–7, 204, 335–6, 347–8. 88. Solomonidis, Η δημοσιογραφία στη Σμύρνη, 122. 89. Solomonidis, Η δημοσιογραφία στη Σμύρνη, 123–4, 207–24, 228–43. 90. Solomonidis, Η δημοσιογραφία στη Σμύρνη, 60, 198, 243. 91. Panos G. Kaysidis, ‘Εθνική Δράσις’ [Ethniki Drasis], in Εγκυκλοπαίδεια του Ελληνικού Τύπου: Εφημερίδες, Περιοδικά, Δημοσιογράφοι, Εκδότες, τ. Β΄ [Encyclopedia of the Greek Press: Newspapers, Periodicals, Journalists, Publishers, vol. B], ed. Loukia Droulia and Youla Koutsopanagou (Athens: Ινστιτούτο Νεοελληνικών Ερευνών/103 – Εθνικό Ίδρυμα Ερευνών, 2008), 44–5; Elli Droulia-Mitrakou, ‘Πόντος’ [Pontos], in Εγκυκλοπαίδεια του Ελληνικού Τύπου: Εφημερίδες, Περιοδικά, Δημοσιογράφοι, Εκδότες, τ. Γ΄ [Encyclopedia of the Greek Press: Newspapers, Periodicals, Journalists, Publishers, vol. C], ed. Loukia Droulia and Youla Koutsopanagou (Athens: Ινστιτούτο Νεοελληνικών Ερευνών/103 – Εθνικό Ίδρυμα Ερευνών, 2008), 532–3; Panos G. Kaysidis, ‘Ηχώ του Πόντου’ [Iho tou Pontou], in Droulia and Koutsopanagou, eds, Εγκυκλοπαίδεια, τ. Β΄, 378. 92. Vlasis Agtzidis, ‘Οι Κομνηνοί’ [Oi Komninoi], in Droulia and Koutsopanagou, eds, Εγκυκλοπαίδεια, τ. Β΄, 593–4. 93. Vlasis Agtzidis, ‘Εποχή’ [Epohi], in Droulia and Koutsopanagou, eds, Εγκυκλοπαίδεια, τ. Β΄, 227–8. 94. A letter written to Hetawî Kurd (Kurdish Sun) 1, 11 Teşrin(-i Sani) 1329 (24 November 1913), 8, mentions this problem.

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 95. M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, The Young Turks in Opposition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 110–54. Kurdistan has been reprinted with transliteration and commentary by M. Emîn Bozarslan (Uppsala: Weşanxana Deng, 1991), 2 vols. Bozarslan’s volumes include nos. 1–9, 11, 13–16, 20–31. Malmîsanij has republished the contents of issues 17 and 18, which were missing from Bozarslan’s collection, in Abdurrahman Bedirhan ve İlk Kürt Gazetesi, Kurdistan Sayı 17 ve 18 (Spånga, 1992). Originals may also be found at , accessed 24 April 2022.   96. For further analysis of Kurdistan, see Janet Klein, ‘Claiming the Nation: The Origins and Nature of Kurdish Nationalist Discourse, A Study of the Kurdish Press in the Ottoman Empire’, MA thesis, Princeton University, 1996; and Janet Klein, ‘Journalism beyond Borders: The Bedirkhans and the First Kurdish Gazette, 1898–1902’, in The Kurdish Question Revisited, ed. Gareth Stansfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).   97. An introduction to some of these publications can be found in Malmîsanij and Mahmûd Lewendî, Li Kurdistana Bakur û li Tirkiyê Rojnamageriya Kurdî (1908–1992) (Ankara: Öz-Ge Yayınlaı, 1989/1992), 24–52. M. Emîn Bozarslan has reprinted with commentary and transliteration issues 1–9 of Kurd Teavün ve Terakki Gazetesi (Uppsala: Weşanxana Deng, 1998). It can also be accessed online at , accessed 24 April 2022. Other journals of this period (Şark ve Kurdistan and Amid-i Sevda) can be accessed at , accessed 24 April 2022.   98. Extant issues of Rojî Kurd, Hetawî Kurd and Bangê Kurd can be accessed at , accessed 24 April 2022.   99. See Janet Klein, ‘Kurdish Nationalists and Non-nationalist Kurdists: Rethinking Minority Nationalism and the Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, 1908–1909’, Nations and Nationalism 13 (2007): 135–53. 100. Jîn has been republished by M. Emîn Bozarslan in five volumes (Uppsala: Weşanxana Deng, 1985–88). There was apparently a newspaper version of Jîn that ran from 1919 to 1920 (Malmîsanij and Lewendî, Li Kurdistana Bakur, 81–90). Kurdistan (not to be confused with the journal of the same name from 1898–1902) may have published into 1920 (Malmîsanij and Lewendî, Li Kurdistana Bakur, 78). Jîn and extant issues of Kurdistan can be accessed at , accessed 24 April 2022. 101. Olga Borovaya, Modern Ladino Culture: Press, Belles Lettres, and Theater in the Late Ottoman Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 25. 102. Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Making Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 64–5. 103. Borovaya, Modern Ladino Culture, 14. 104. Avner Levi, ‘The Jewish Press in Turkey’, in Jewish Journalism and Printing Houses in the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, ed. Gad Nassi (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2001), 17–18. 105. This count is only of Ladino-language periodicals. Jews in various parts of the Ottoman Empire, however, published and read in a variety of other languages, most commonly French and Hebrew, but also Turkish in Hebrew characters and Yiddish. For a comprehensive list of Jewish periodicals in the Ottoman Empire, see Gad Nassi, ‘Synoptic List of Ottoman-Turkish-Jewish and Other Sephardic Periodicals’, in Nassi, ed., Jewish Journalism, 29–71. 106. In order to bypass Hamidian censors, Ladino authors used printing houses in Vienna and Cairo, and smuggled periodicals, pamphlets and novels into the Ottoman Empire. On Sephardi Zionism, which was explicitly non-separatist and couched itself as being a means of improvement for the empire as a whole, see Michelle Campos, Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). For primary source references, see ‘An Anti-Zionist Appeal from

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500 aksakal, çiçek, genell, kamouzis, klein, manuk-khaloyan, mays Istanbul (1909)’ and ‘“Our Duties as Jews and as Ottomans”: An Ottoman Zionist Vision for the Future (1909)’, in Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History, 1700–1950, ed. Julia Phillips Cohen and Sarah Abrevaya Stein (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 213–22; Nahum Sokolow, Tradjikomedia, o Yorar i Reir, Estudio Psikolojiko sovre el Estado de Alma del Sr. David Fresko, Direktor del Tiempo [Tragicomedy, or to Laugh and Cry, A Psychological Study of the State of the Soul of Sr. David Fresco, the Director of El Tiempo], trans. Ben Ishai (Constantinople: Imprimeria El Djugeton, 5670). 107. Borovaya, Modern Ladino Culture, 58–9. 108. Gad Nassi writes that these journals continued publication throughout the war years, but, as with several other Izmir-based journals, such as La Boz del Puevlo (The Voice of the People), La Boz de Izmir (The Voice of Izmir) and El Pregonero (The Crier), we have been unable to locate extant copies. 109. Devi Mays, ‘Recounting the Past, Shaping the Future: Ladino Literary Responses to World War I’, in World War I and the Jews: Conflict and Transformation in Europe, the Middle East, and America, ed. Martha L. Rozenblit and Jonathan Karp (New York: Berghahn, 2017), 201–21. 110. Alexandre Ben Ghiat, Livro-Djurnal de la Gerra Djeneral [Book-Journal of the General War] (Izmir: El Meseret, 1919), 4. 111. Ghiat, Livro-Djurnal de la Gerra Djeneral, entry on 27 June 1915. 112. Ghiat, Livro-Djurnal de la Gerra Djeneral, entry on 27 June 1915.

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Notes on Contributors

Maaheen Ahmed is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Ghent University, Belgium. She is the author of Openness of Comics: Generating Meaning Within Flexible Structures and Monstrous Imaginaries: The Legacy of Romanticism in Comics (both published by the University Press of Mississippi, 2016 and 2019). In addition to editing several volumes on comics, she has published in journals such as European Comic Art, Children’s Geographies and Comicalités. She is currently the principal investigator of COMICS, a multi-researcher project on children and/in European comics funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 758502). Mustafa Aksakal is Associate Professor of History and Nesuhi Ertegün Chair of Modern Turkish Studies at Georgetown University. He is the author of The Ottoman Road to War in 1914: The Ottoman Empire and the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2008). Jan Baetens is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Leuven. His main fields of research and interest are contemporary French literature (mainly poetry) and visual narrative in print (often in minor genres such as comics and photonovels). Some recent books are The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel, coedited with Hugo Frey (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and The Film Photonovel (Texas University Press, 2020). He is also a published poet and novelist, although only in French, and has recently published Une fille comme toi (JBE éditions, 2020) and Après, depuis (Les Impressions nouvelles, 2021). Argha Kumar Banerjee is the Dean of Arts and Associate Professor, Department of English, St Xavier’s College (Autonomous) Kolkata, Calcutta University, India. Recipient of the Charles Wallace Fellowship (UK), he was previously a Commonwealth Research Scholar at the Department of English, Sussex University. His publications include Female Voices in Keats’s Poetry (Atlantic, 2002), Poetry of the First World War 1914–18: A Critical Evaluation (Atlantic, 2011) and Women’s Poetry and the First World War 1914–18 (Atlantic, 2014). Grace Brockington is Senior Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Bristol. Publications relating to this chapter include Internationalism and the Arts in Britain and Europe at the Fin de Siécle (edited collection, Peter Lang, 2009), Above the Battlefield: Art and Pacifism in Britain, 1900–1918 (Yale University Press, 2010), ‘Art Against War’, in War and Art: A Visual History of Modern Conflict, ed. Joanna Bourke (Reaktion, 2017), ‘Puppetry and Ambivalence in the Art of Paul Nash’, in

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502 contributors Dolls and Puppets: Contemporaneity and Tradition, ed. K. Kopania (Aleksander Zelwerowicz National Academy of Dramatic Art in Warsaw, 2018), Imagined Cosmopolis: Internationalism and Cultural Exchange, 1870s–1920s (Peter Lang, 2019), co-edited with Charlotte Ashby, Daniel Laqua and Sarah Turner, Theatres of War: Experimental Performance in London, 1914–1918 and Beyond (online exhibition, 2019), and ‘Universal Visual Languages in the Age of Telegraphy’, in Coding and Representation from the Nineteenth Century to the Present, ed. Anne Chapman and Natalie Hume (Routledge, 2021). M. Talka Çiçek is Associate Professor of History at Istanbul Medeniyet University. Formerly the British Academy’s Newton Fellow at SOAS University of London, and Humboldt Experienced Research Fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, he is the author of War and State Formation in Syria: Cemal Pasha’s Governorate during World War I (Routledge, 2014) and Negotiating Empire in the Middle East: Ottomans and Arab Nomads in the Modern Era, 1840–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Tim Cook, CM, FRSC, is the Director of Research at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, Canada. He has curated over a dozen exhibitions and is the author or editor of twenty-two books, monographs and catalogues. He is a recipient of the Governor General’s History Award, and a member of the Royal Society of Canada and the Order of Canada. Selena Daly is an historian of modern Italy at University College London. She has held previous positions at Royal Holloway, University of London, University College Dublin and University of California, Santa Barbara, where she was a Fulbright Scholar. She is a specialist in avant-garde studies and has published extensively on the Italian Futurist movement. Her monograph Italian Futurism and the First World War appeared with University of Toronto Press in 2016. She is currently working on a history of Italian emigrants during the First World War to appear with Cambridge University Press. Santanu Das is Senior Research Fellow and Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at All Souls College, University of Oxford. He is the author of two award-winning monographs, Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and India, Empire and First World War Culture: Writings, Images, and Songs (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and the editor of Race, Empire and First World War Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and The Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2014). He is currently editing The Oxford Book of Colonial Writings of the First World War and writing a book on the experience and aesthetics of sea-voyages. Christophe Declerq (University of Utrecht, University College London) obtained his PhD from Imperial College London on the subject of Belgian refugees in Britain 1914–19. With a focus on a cross-cultural study of identity in exile, his research formed the backbone of several projects in both Belgium (with Amsab-ISG) and the UK (Wales for Peace, AHRC-funded Tracing the Belgian Refugees and Belgians in Royal Tunbridge Wells). Together with Julian Walker, he established the Languages and the First World War project (two volumes with Palgrave, 2016; one with Bloomsbury, 2021). He hosts social

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contributors

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media outlets on research subjects and has been involved in several media programmes on either side of the Channel (BBC, VRT). Marysa Demoor is Professor Emerita at Ghent University. Demoor is the author of Their Fair Share: Women, Power and Criticism in the Athenaeum, 1870–1920 (Ashgate, 2000) and the editor of Marketing the Author: Authorial Personae, Narrative Selves and Self-Fashioning, 1880–1930 (Palgrave, 2004). With Laurel Brake, she edited The Lure of Illustration in the Nineteenth Century (Palgrave, 2009) and the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism (British Library and Academia Press, 2009). With Ingo Berensmeyer and Gert Buelens she co-edited The Cambridge Handbook to Literary Authorship (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Her most recent book, published by Palgrave, is entitled A Cross-Cultural History of Britain and Belgium, 1815–1918: Mudscapes and Artistic Entanglements (2022). Maria Dicenzo is Professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada. She has published widely on British suffrage periodicals and the interwar feminist press. Major works include Feminist Media History: Suffrage, Periodicals and the Public Sphere (Palgrave, 2011) with Lucy Delap and Leila Ryan, and Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918–1939: The Interwar Period (Edinburgh University Press, 2018) co-edited with Catherine Clay, Barbara Green and Fiona Hackney. Fionnuala Dillane is Professor at the School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin. She is co-editor of five collections of essays, including The Body in Pain in Irish Literature and Culture (Palgrave, 2016), Ireland, Slavery, Anti-Slavery, and Empire (Routledge, 2018) and Iceland – Ireland: Memory, Literature, Culture on the Atlantic Periphery (Brill, 2022). She has published widely on the nineteenthcentury press, including Before George Eliot: Marian Evans and the Periodical Press (Cambridge University Press, 2013). She is currently vice-president (2020–22) of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals. Jeffrey Drouin is an Associate Professor of English and co-director of the Modernist Journals Project at the University of Tulsa. He has published articles in the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, American Periodicals, Textual Cultures and Genetic Joyce Studies, together with a chapter on archives and digital tools in Teaching Representations of the First World War (MLA, 2017). His first book was James Joyce, Science, and Modernist Print Culture: “The Einstein of English Fiction” (Routledge, 2015). Currently he is completing a book and digital humanities project on memory and ecclesiastical architecture in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. He recently became co-editor of the James Joyce Quarterly. Jane Fisher holds a PhD in English from Cornell University and is an Associate Professor at Canisius College in Buffalo, NY. While her early work focused on literary modernism, particularly Virginia Woolf, her current teaching and research increasingly centres on medical humanities, articulating the different voices always present in illness and disease. Recent publications include Envisioning Disease, Gender, and War: Women’s Narratives of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) as well as essays on teaching the literature of the 1918 flu pandemic, African-American First World War soldiers, and apocalyptic form in the American novel.

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504 contributors Mauro Forno is Full Professor in Contemporary History at the University of Turin, where he is also deputy director of the Department of Historical Studies. His research is mainly focused on the history of the press and journalism, the history of fascism, the history of the Church and the Catholic missions. His most recent publications include Informazione e potere (Rome–Bari, 2012), Cardinal Massaja and the Catholic Mission in Ethiopia (Nairobi, 2013), La cultura degli altri. Il mondo delle missioni e la decolonizzazione (Rome, 2017), and ‘Some Observations on the Itinerary of Don Bosco’s Relics’, in S. Cavicchioli-L. Provero, eds, Public Uses of Human Remains and Relics in History (London, 2019). Elisabeth Forster is a Lecturer in Chinese History at the University of Southampton. Her first book was published in 2018 with De Gruyter under the title 1919 – The Year That Changed China: A New History of the New Culture Movement. She is currently working on Chinese discourses about war and peace in the twentieth century, and has published on the topic in Modern China and Cold War History. She is also interested in the implications of Chinese history for philosophical ‘just war’ theory, and has explored this topic with Isaac Taylor in the Journal of International Political Theory. Samuel Foster is a Visiting Scholar at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, having previously served as Associate Lecturer in History at the University of East Anglia. His research focuses on the ‘Era of the Great War’ in Central and South-eastern Europe, on which he has written and presented extensively including contributions to the BBC World Service and The International Encyclopaedia of the First World War. He is also a co-founder of the ‘BASEES Study Group for Minority History’ and author of Yugoslavia in the British Imagination. Peace, War and Peasants before Tito (Bloomsbury, 2021). Aimee M. Genell is an Assistant Professor of Islamic World History at the University of West Georgia. She is the author of Empire by Law: The Ottoman Origins of the Mandates System in the Middle East, which is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. Andrew Griffiths is Lecturer in English Literature at the Open University. His research interests include war correspondence, literary journalism, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century popular print media and the culture of empire. Current projects include an examination of representations of madness in nineteenth-century fictions of empire and a reappraisal of British war correspondence of the First World War. He is the author of The New Journalism, the New Imperialism and the Fiction of Empire (Palgrave, 2015). Sarah Hellawell is Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Sunderland. Her expertise includes twentieth-century British history, women’s and gender history, and transnational social movements. She has published several articles and book chapters on international women’s organisations. Dimitris Kamouzis is a Researcher at the Centre for Asia Minor Studies in Athens. He completed his PhD in history at the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, King’s College London. He has been a scholar of the Alexander S. Onassis

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Public Benefit Foundation, a Research Fellow of the John S. Latsis Public Benefit Foundation and the National & Kapodistrian University of Athens and a Teaching Fellow at King’s College London. His latest book is entitled Greeks in Turkey: Elite Nationalism and Minority Politics in Late Ottoman and Early Republican Istanbul (SOAS/Routledge Studies on the Middle East, 2021). Edmund G. C. King is a Lecturer in English at The Open University, UK. An historian of reading, his published work has appeared in a variety of journals, including Book History, The Journal of British Studies and (most recently) Literature and Medicine. His First World War research centres on the reading cultures of British and Australian soldiers and prisoners of war, the charities that were established to supply them with reading material, and their relationship to the history of bibliotherapy. With Shafquat Towheed, he is co-editor of Reading and the First World War: Readers, Texts, Archives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Janet Klein is Professor of History at the University of Akron. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Montana and her Master’s and PhD from Princeton University. Her book, The Margins of Empire: Kurdish Militias in the Ottoman Tribal Zone, was published by Stanford University Press in 2011. She has also authored numerous articles and book chapters on various topics related to late Ottoman and Kurdish history and is currently working on the construction of minorities in the late Ottoman Empire and post-Ottoman states. Daniel Laqua is Associate Professor of European History at Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne. He works on the history of international movements, campaigns and organisations. His publications include The Age of Internationalism and Belgium, 1880–1930: Peace, Progress and Prestige (Manchester University Press, 2013), the edited volumes Internationalism Reconfigured: Transnational Ideas and Movements between the World Wars (Bloomsbury, 2011) and International Organizations and Global Civil Society: Histories of the Union of International Associations (Bloomsbury, 2019) as well as themed issues of the Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire (2012), the Journal of Modern European History (2014), European Review of History (2014) and Labour History Review (2021). Armen Manuk-Khaloyan is a PhD candidate in history at Georgetown University. His research focuses on Ottoman Armenian culture and society from the late nineteenth century until the First World War. He is currently preparing for publication an Englishlanguage edition of the memoirs of Soghomon Tehlirian, the man who assassinated former Ottoman grand vezir and chief architect of the Armenian genocide Talat Pasha. Devi Mays is an Associate Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Forging Ties, Forging Passports: Migration and the Modern Sephardi Diaspora (Stanford University Press, 2020). She received her BA in religious studies at the University of British Columbia in 2006 and her PhD in history and Jewish studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, in 2013. Jessica Meyer is Professor of British Social and Cultural History at the University of Leeds. Her research interests lie at the intersection of the histories of gender,

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506 contributors medicine and the First World War and in popular cultural representations of the war. Her publications include Men of War: Masculinities and the First World War in Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and An Equal Burden: The Men of the Royal Army Medical Corps in the First World War (Oxford University Press, 2019). Her current project examines the effects of war disability on the gendering of care provision in twentieth-century Britain. Claire Mouradian is Director of Research Emerita at the CNRS (affiliated with the Center for Russian, Caucasian and Central European Studies/CERCEC) and teaches at the EHESS. She is also a contributor to the publication of French diplomatic papers (War II series), a member of the OFPRA History Committee and of various editorial boards (Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah, Caucasus Survey, Connexe). She is a specialist in the history of the Caucasus and Armenia from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries and has published extensively on nationalities issues in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, Russian-Turkish relations, the Armenian diaspora and the Armenian genocide. Robert L. Nelson is Professor and Head of the Department of History at the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada. His revised Cambridge dissertation appeared in 2011 as German Soldier Newspapers of the First World War (Cambridge University Press). Earlier he published the edited volume Germans, Poland, and Colonial Expansion to the East: 1850 Through the Present (Palgrave, 2009). He has won fellowships from the Killam Trust, the Humboldt Foundation, and was a Visiting Fulbright Scholar at the City University of New York, Graduate Center, in 2015–16. Jane Potter is Reader in Arts at the Oxford International Centre for Publishing, Oxford Brookes University. Her publications include Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print: Women’s Literary Responses to the Great War (Oxford University Press, 2005), Working in a World of Hurt: Trauma and Resilience in the Narratives of Medical Personnel in War Zones (Manchester University Press, 2015) with Carol Acton, Wilfred Owen: An Illustrated Life (Bodleian Library, 2014), A Cambridge History of World War I Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2022), and Wilfred Owen’s Selected Letters: A New Edition (Oxford University Press, 2023). Sara Prieto, PhD, is Associate Professor at the University of Alicante, Spain. She is the author, among others, of Reporting the First World War in the Liminal Zone: British and American Eyewitness Accounts from the Western Front (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), winner of the AEDEAN ‘Enrique García Díez’ research award in 2018 and the ESSE Cultural and Area Studies – First Book Award in 2020. She has also coedited Literary Journalism and World War I: Marginal Voices (Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 2016) with Andrew Griffiths and Soenke Zehle. Anne Schwan is Professor in English at Edinburgh Napier University. Publications include How to Read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (with Stephen Shapiro; Pluto, 2011), Convict Voices: Women, Class, and Writing about Prison in NineteenthCentury England (University of New Hampshire Press, 2014), and the forthcoming Palgrave Handbook of Digital and Public Humanities (Palgrave Macmillan), coedited with Tara Thomson. In 2018, as part of an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) grant for impact and engagement (with Aston University), she

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oversaw the production of theatre and music performances as they would have been staged by German internees at Stobs detention camp in Scotland in 1917. Daniel Steinbach is Associate Professor of European Colonial History at the Saxo Institute at the University of Copenhagen. He works on the global dimension of the First World War with a particular emphasis on Africa. He has written on the interaction between African, Indian and European soldiers and civilians in the colonial sphere as well as the representation and post-war memory of the conflict in Germany, Britain and Africa. He has most recently co-edited the volume Colonial Encounters in a Time of Global Conflict, 1914–1918 (Routledge, 2022). Hanna Teichler is a postdoctoral Research Associate at the Department of English and American Studies at Goethe University, Frankfurt. She holds a PhD from the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Goethe University Frankfurt, and an MA in English, French and Portuguese philology. Her first monograph Carnivalizing Reconciliation came out with Berghahn in 2021. She is the co-editor (with Rebekah Vince) of the book series Mobilizing Memories and of the Handbook Series in Memory Studies (both Brill). She is a member of the executive board of the Memory Studies Association, and co-directs (with Astrid Erll) the Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform. Andrew Thacker is Professor of Twentieth Century Literature at Nottingham Trent University. He is the author or editor of several books on modernism and modernist magazines, including the three volumes of The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines (Oxford University Press, 2009–13) and, most recently, Modernism, Space and the City (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). He was a founder member and the first chair of the British Association for Modernist Studies. He is the UK PI for the Spaces of Translation project on European magazines, 1945–65. Patricia Thomas is an Honorary Research Associate in the School of Design at Massey University, New Zealand. Originally a print designer, she has for the last twenty years examined the artefacts of printed ephemera. Her production-led research primarily focuses on historical advertising’s visual and material manifestations, aiming to discover what presentation, medium and distribution might reveal about its sociocultural contexts. Recent publications include Colonising Te Whanganui ā Tara and Marketing Wellington 1840–1849: Displaying [Dis]Possession (Cambridge Scholars, 2019); ‘The Other Side of History: Underground Literature and the 1951 Waterfront Dispute’, Back Story: Journal of New Zealand Art, Media and Design History (2017); and ‘Emigration and Imperial Business: The New Zealand Company Brand 1839–1841’, The Journal of Historical Marketing (2016). Vincent Trott is Lecturer in Modern History at the Open University (UK). He is the author of Publishers, Readers and the Great War: Literature and Memory since 1918 (Bloomsbury, 2017) as well as several articles and book chapters on the cultural history of the First World War. He is currently writing a book about humour, politics and propaganda in the United States during the First World War. Cedric Van Dijck is a postdoctoral fellow in English Literature at Ghent University. He is the author of Modernism, Material Culture and the First World War (Edinburgh

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508 contributors University Press, forthcoming) and a co-editor of The Intellectual Response to the First World War (Sussex Academic, 2017). Birgit Van Puymbroeck is Lecturer in Literature in English and Research Methodology at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Her research interests include modernist literature, transnational relations, print culture and media history. She is the author of Modernist Literature and European Identity (Routledge, 2020) and has published several articles and book chapters on the early twentieth-century periodical press. Irina Zhdanova is an independent scholar. She is the author of a number of articles on the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the press during the First World War, including ‘The “Propaganda Age”: Information Management in Conditions of War and Revolution in Russia in March–October 1917’, Russian Studies in History 57, no. 1 (2018); ‘Press/Journalism (Russian Empire)’, 1914–1918 online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War; ‘Проблема федеративного устройства государства в Февральской революции 1917 г.’ (The Federation Problem in the February Revolution of 1917), Вопросы истории (Voprosy Istorii), no. 7 (2007).

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Index

10th Australian Ambulance Field Service, 55 1914 and Other Poems (Brooke), 123–4 ‘1918: Zwischen Weltkrieg und Revolution’ (exhibit), 55 23rd, 70–9 291 (magazine), 4, 135–7, 141 391 (magazine), 4, 141 5th East Surrey Magazine, 35, 42 7th F.A.B. Yandoo, 56 Abdülhamid II (Sultan), 259–62, 267, 474–5, 483, 486, 489–90 Abercrombie, Lascelles, 119, 123 Abhi Le Baghdad (Sarbadhikari), 427–8 Ablow, Rachel, 78 Academy, 119 Active Service League, 374 Adana massacres, 259–60, 262 Addams, Jane, 359 advertisements in Australian and New Zealand periodicals, 434–44 in children’s magazines, 98–102 influenza pandemic and role of, 287, 289–99 military symbolism in, 293 newspapers and, 435–6 print networks and, 34–5 in trench journals, 314–15 wartime periodicals revenue from, 23, 26–7, 40 Advocate of Peace, 352, 354 aerial photography, in wartime periodicals, 202 ‘Aéroplanes sur Bruxelles’ (Verhaeren), 389

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affect in children’s magazines, 101–4 in wartime journals, 66–78 affective object, periodical as, 67–8, 78n.2 Africa African-language newspapers in, 409–11 Indian population in, 406 wartime periodicals in German colonial Africa, 401–12 see also German colonial Africa African soldiers, stereotypes in trench journals about, 313 ‘After the Retreat’ (Sinclair), 121 Ahmed, Maaheen, 5 Akbari I Jang, 417 al-Asali, Shukri, 484 Albania, 475 Albert I (King of Belgium), 146 Albertini, Luigi, 212, 217, 244, 246–7, 250, 254 Alboyachian, Arshag, 482 Alcools (Apollinaire), 386 Aldington, May, 124 Aldington, Richard, 384–5, 389 Aleksandar I Obrenović (King of Serbia), 217 al-Hurriyya, 483 al-Inqilab, 483 al-Ittihad al-Uthmani, 484–6 All Abaht It, 55, 71–2 All About the War, 421–6 Allgemeine Zeitung, 412 All Nations Gazette, 450 ‘All that We Have and Are’ (Kipling), 117 al-Manar, 485–6 al-Mufid, 484

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510 index al-Muqtabas, 483–6 al-Nahda, 483 Alphonse XIII (King of Spain), 286, 290 al-Qabas, 484 al-Qibla, 485–6 Alran, P., 321 al-Sharq, 483–6 al-Wataniyya, 483 al-Zuhur, 483 Amalgamated Press, 20, 22 Amaltheia, 488 Ambler, Ernest, 44 Am Bosporus, 313–14 Amēnun Taretsʻoytsʻě, 479 American Commission for Relief in Belgium, 153, 433 American Expeditionary Forces, 170 American Peace Society, 352 American Peace Society of Japan, 358 American periodicals Armenian massacre in, 262 battlefield reporting in, 229 see also Saturday Evening Post American Public Health Association, 288 Amid-i Sevda, 490 Amiens, Battle of, 227 importance of, 239 magazines and, 236–8 newspapers and, 231–6 Armory Show, 135 Amrita Bazaar Patrika, 416 Anadolu Ajansı (Anatolia Agency), 477 Anastasiadis, Georgios, 488 Anatoli, 486 Anderson, Benedict, 9 ‘And There was a Great Calm’ (Hardy), 117 Angell, Norman, 170, 362 Angels of Mons, 7–8 Anglo-Russian Hospital (Petrograd), 59 Ano Kato, 486–7 anonymity, wartime poetry and, 120–1 Anti-Aircraft Spasm, 33–5 Anti-Suffrage Review, 376 anti-war movement international peace movement and, 352–3 in Ottoman Empire, 477–8, 480 in Russia, 281 Sassoon and, 124–6 war correspondents and, 183–5 see also pacifist journals

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‘The Anxious Dead’ (McCrae), 120–1 Anzac Bulletin, 43 ANZAC units, journals of, 41–2 apocalypse imagery, in American culture, 297 Ap’Ola, 486–7 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 37, 69, 131, 136, 386, 394 Apostolidès, Jean-Marie, 109 Arabic newspapers, 483–6 Arab Revolt, 483, 485–6 Arabs, stereotypes in trench journals of, 313–14 Arbeiter-Zeitung (Austria-Hungary), 214, 220 archival material digital archives, 51–63 intimacy of, 68–9 photography as, 197–203 Arensberg, Louise, 138 Arensberg, Walter, 138 Argus, 235, 262–3, 443 Armenian genocide, 10, 258–67 censorship of coverage on, 261–2 global coverage of, 260–1 journalists and, 482–3 post-war investigations of, 264 stereotypes and denialism concerning, 264–7 text and images of atrocities during, 262–4 Armenian newspapers, 478–83 Armenian Patriarchate, 478 Armenian Revolutionary Federation, 479 Armistice and artists’ periodicals, 141 Canadian periodicals after, 471 depiction of war after (in children’s magazines), 109 influenza pandemic and, 290 of Mudros, 487 and Ottoman Empire, 264, 477, 482, 491–4 pacifist groups, 357, 359 war memorabilia after, 23 see also The Times Armistice Supplement Armonia, 488 Armstrong, Elizabeth, 5 Army and Navy of Free Russia (Petrograd), 278 Arp, Hans/Jean, 135, 140

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index 511 Arslan, Shakib, 485–6 artists soldiers as, 130–5 war’s effect on, 392–4 in wartime New York and Zürich, 135–40 wartime periodicals and, 130–41 ‘Artists and the War’ (Lewis), 392–4 Arya, 421, 425–6 Ashmead-Bartlett, Ellis, 180–1 Asia Minor, Greek invasion of, 477, 488–9 Asquith, Herbert Henry, 122 Associated Press, 167, 229, 234–5, 263 Association of Moral and Social Hygiene, 375 Asthenidis, Georgios I, 488 Astor, William Waldorf, 22 Athenaeum, 119 creation of, 1 paper rationing and, 23 social status and readership of, 19 supplements to, 7 war coverage in, 7–8 see also Nation and Athenaeum Atkinson, J. E., 469, 471 Atlantic Advocate, 468 ‘At the Somme’ (Borden), 121 Atwood, Albert, 168 Audoin-Rouzeau, Stéphane, 37, 43–4, 46n.19, 68, 98, 109 Aussie, 35, 42, 48n.69 Australia newspapers and advertising in, 435–6 wartime periodicals in, 433–44 Australian Imperial Forces, 70–1 Australian newspapers, battle reporting in, 235 Australian Press Association, 229 Australian War Memorial archive, 53, 55–6 Austria-Hungary censorship in, 4 ethnic nationalism in, 215 Italian alliance with, 245 origins of press in, 212–14 pacifist movement and, 362 pre-war media landscape in, 214–15, 222 Austrian Peace Society, 353 Austro-Hungarian War Archive (Kriegsarchiv), 53–5 Austro-Serbian Convention, 213–14, 216

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authors in trench journals, 305–6 in wartime periodicals, 115–26 ‘Autobiography of a POW’ (Roy), 428 avant-garde movement artists, 130–141 history of, 2 journals of, 384–95 overview of journals in, 384–8 wartime periodicals and, 4–5, 130–1 Avanti, 492 Avvenire d’Italia, 245 Azatamart, 479–80, 482 Baetens, Jan, 5 Baghot de la Bere, Stephen, 338, 344–6 baihua (plain language) movement (China), 454–5 Bairns Gazette, 314–15 Balkan News, 38–9, 43–4 Balkan Wars of 1912–13 Armenian genocide and, 259 Greek newspaper coverage of, 486–7, 489 Ladino press and, 492–4 press coverage of, 475–6 Serbia and, 211–12, 217–20 Ball, Hugo, 135, 140, 394 Balla, Giocomo, 132, 392 Bande Mataram, 416, 426 Banerjea, Surendranath, 421–2 Banerjee, Argha Kumar, 6 Bangê Kurd, 490 Bangiya Sahitya Parishat library, 427 Barb Magazine, 320–2 Barlen, James W., 297 Barrak, 36–7 Barrier, N. G., 416 Barry, Iris, 389 Barthes, Roland, 204 Bathurst Times, 436 ‘Battaglia a 9 piani’ (Marinetti), 133 Battisti, Cesare, 250 Battle (Gibson), 119 battle reporting, 227–39 Amiens, 231–9 in Armenian newspapers, 480–1 in Canada, 464–7 in magazines, 236–8 in newspapers, 232–6 in Ottoman Empire, 476 photography and, 238

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512 index Beach Thomas, William, 178–82, 184–6, 230, 233–4 Bean, C. E. W., 263 Beauchamp, Leslie, 115 Beaumont, A., 179 Bécassine albums, 98–9, 101–4, 108–9 Bécassine chez les alliés, 103 Bécassine mobilisée, 103–4 Bécassine pendant la guerre, 103 Bedir Khan brothers, 489–91 Beetham, Margaret, 3, 67, 83–4 ‘Before Marching and After’ (Hardy), 117 B.E.F. Times, 55, 185 Behrens, E., 324–5 Beijing University Daily (Beijing daxue rikan), 451 ‘Being a Guest of the German Kaiser’ (Cobb), 168 Belgian News Fund, 153 Belgian War Press thematic research collection, 58 Belgium Australia and New Zealand links to, 433–44 exile press in occupied Belgium, 147, 149, 151–2 German invasions of, 146 pre-war networks in, 149–51 refugees from, 146 Belloc, Hilaire, 236–7 Belpaire, Marie E., 146, 150–3, 155–7 Belvedere circle, 215 Benedict XV (Pope), 245 Bengal Gazette, 416 Bengali wartime periodicals, 426–9 Bengal Renaissance, 427 Ben Ghiat, Alexandre, 492–3 Benjamin, Walter, 191, 205n.2 Bennett, Arnold, 8, 162, 355 Berchtold, Leopold Graf, 4 Bergamini, Alberto, 244, 247 Berkey, James, 68 Berlant, Lauren, 67 Berliner Tageblatt, 356 Berrington, Adrian, 2 Berry, William, 20 Berryer, Paul, 153 Berthiaume, Trefflé, 467 Besant, Annie, 421–2 Best, Brian, 181 Beurier, Joëlle, 4, 191–2, 196–7, 199

7803_Demoor et al.indd 512

Bevione, Giuseppe, 245, 251 Bharatbarsha, 11, 428 Bharati, 11, 427 Bibby, Joseph, 22 Bibby’s Annual, 22 Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte, 53, 55 Bibliothèque nationale de France, 260–1 Bilder zur Jobsiade, 320 Binckes, Faith, 2 Binyon, Laurence, 84–5 Bissolate, Leonida, 250 Biwzandion, 478–80, 482 Black, Clementina, 377 Black Canadians, in First World War, 468 Black Hand see Crna ruka (Austria-Hungary) Blackwood’s Magazine, 42 Blakely, Debra E., 287, 290 Blast, 6, 391–4 Blasting and Bombardiering (Lewis), 393 Bleuette dolls, 98–9 Blind Man, 138–9 Blue (Christ’s Hospital magazine), 119 Blue Mountain Project, 57–8 Blunden, Edmund, 119 Blythe, Samuel G., 162, 166–7 Boak, Denis, 176 Boccioni, Umberto, 132–4, 387 boche, depiction in children’s magazines of, 108 bodily destruction, in wartime journals, 76–7 Boer War, 116, 117 Bohn, Willard, 386–7 Bolshevism First World War and, 279–82 newspapers under, 275–7 press and, 273–4 Bolter, Jay David, 193 Bombay Chronicle, 417 Bombshell (women’s labour magazine), 378 Bontempelli, Massimo, 134 Bookman, 1, 19–20, 121 Boomerang see Harefield Park Boomerang Borden, Mary, 121 Borden, Robert, 463, 466, 468–70 Borgatti, Stephen P., 32–3 Borginon, Hendrik, 156 Bornstein, George, 17–18 Bosanska vila, 218 Bose, Nandalal, 424 Bosnia-Herzegovina, 211, 218, 221, 475

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index 513 Bosnian Muslim newspapers, 211 Bosnische Post, 211, 215, 221 Boston Evening Transcript, 119 Boston Guardian and Lincolnshire Independent, 87 Bottomley, Gordon, 120 Boucheron, Patrick, 191 Bourassa, Henry, 467–9 Bourke, Joanna, 66, 69, 77 boys’ magazines, 109–10 emergence of, 96 Boy’s Own Paper, 18–19 Bozner Nachrichten, 218 Bradford Pioneer, 125 Braque, Georges, 131 Braybon, Gail, 376 Brazier, 35 ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’ (Rosenberg), 120 Brecht, Bertolt, 205n.2 Brigode, Jane, 433 Bristow, Joseph, 123 Britannia, 370 British Expeditionary Force (BEF), 181, 232 journals of, 7–8, 37 press access to, 228–30 trench journals and, 305–7, 313–15 British Newspaper Archive, 83, 93n.12 British publishing culture, 115 British Red Cross Society, 339–41 British War Office, 178–83, 228–9, 231 Brittain, Vera, 6, 121 Brock, Arthur John, 121, 347–8 Broda, Rudolf, 352, 360–3 Brondesbury Park Military Hospital, 36 Brooke, Rupert, 119, 122–5 Brooker, Peter, 2 Brown, William Sorley, 43 Brumby, Alice, 39 Brush, Mary Isabel, 168 Brutistu, 483 Bryce, James, 262 Bryce Report, 162–3 Buchan, John, 81, 88, 181, 183, 186 Buckle, 59 ‘Buddha of the Bathroom’ (Norton), 139 Buitenhuis, Peter, 176 Bulgaria, 475 Bulletin, 237 Bulson, Eric, 9

7803_Demoor et al.indd 513

Bund für Menschheitsinteressen und Organisierung menschlichen Fortschritts (League for the Interests of Humanity and the Organisation of Human Progress, La Ligue pour la Défense de l’Humanité et pour l’Organisation de son Progrès), 360 Bund für Mutterschutz, 358 Bund Neues Vaterland, 353 Burge, Wal, 438 Burgess, Gelett, 164 Burr, Amelia Josephine, 164 Busch, Wilhelm, 320 Buxton, Charles, 356 Buxton, Dorothy F., 10, 355, 362 Buysse, Arthur, 154 Buzzer, 35 Buzzi, Paolo, 388 Bystander, 43, 237 Cabaret Voltaire, 4, 6, 140, 394 Cabaret Voltaire (cabaret), 140 Čabrinović, Nedeljko, 221 Cadorna, Luigi, 253 Caelbrecht, Jozef, 154, 157 Cairns Post, 436 Callewaert, Juul, 151–3, 156 Call to Enlist, 85–6, 88 Cambridge Hospital (Aldershot), 340 Cambridge Magazine, 10, 119, 124, 352, 355–7, 362 Cambridge Review, 123 Camera Work, 136 Camfield, William, 135 Camp Magazine, 35 Camp Nachrichten, 320 Canada censorship in, 228, 464–7 conscription in, 468–71 elections in, 469–70 French-Canadian papers, 467–8 nationalism in, 468–71 war coverage in, 9, 461–71 see also Indigenous Canadians in First World War Canadian Annual Review of Public Affairs, 461 Canadian Churchman, 468 Canadian Daily Record, 43 Canadian Expeditionary Force, 464, 468 journals of, 35–7

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514 index Canadian Infantry Battalion, 36 Canadian National Service League, 469 Canadian Observer, 468 Canadian periodicals, censorship in, 72 Canadian Press Association, 9, 466, 47 Canadian Printer and Publisher, 466 ‘Can America Feed Europe?’ (Laut), 166–7 Cangiullo, Francesco, 132 Cannan, May, 121 Canney, A. E., 21–2 Capa, Robert, 199 Carden-Coyne, Ana, 347, 349 Carlyle, Thomas, 329 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 353 Carrà, Carlo, 132, 134–5 Carthusian, 119 cartoons in wartime journals, 306, 342–6 Cartoons Magazine, 237 Case, Holly, 212 Cassell publishing company, 22 castration of wartime periodicals, 64n.14 casualties censorship concerning, 178–80 publication of, 182, 185, 464, 466–7 Catholic Church Belgian exile press and, 152–4 Flemish intellectuals and, 149–52, 155–6 Italian wartime journalism and, 244–6, 249–50 women’s suffrage and, 376, 380, 382n.34 Catholic Flemish Girls Movement see Katholieke Vlaamse Meisjesbeweging (KVM) Catholic Suffragist, 376 ‘The Cause of France’ (Clemenceau), 162, 168 ‘The Cause of War’ (Lorimer), 167 Cazenovia Republican, 297 Cecil, George, 118 Cemal Pasha, 483–6 Cendrars, Blaise, 32, 394 ‘The Cenotaph’ (Mew), 117 censorship affect and emotion in wartime journals and, 72–3 of Arabic newspapers, 483–6 Armenian massacre and, 261–2 in Austria-Hungary, 213–14 battle reporting and, 228–39 in Boer War, 178

7803_Demoor et al.indd 514

British imposition of, 178–80 in Canadian newspapers, 464–7 First World War periodicals and, 20–7 of German colonial newspapers, 404 Greek press and, 486–8 in hospital journals, 341 influenza pandemic of 1918–19 and, 287–99 of Kurdish press, 489 Ladino press and, 492–4 official correspondents and, 181–3 in Ottoman Empire, 474–8 pacifist journals and, 359 prisoner-of-war camp journals and, 319, 322 Russian Revolution and, 273 in Serbia, 218–20 of trench journals, 305–6 war correspondents and, 175–8, 183–5 wartime introduction of, 4 Century Magazine, 115, 118 Cézanne, Paul, 387 Chakatamart, 482 Chambers, Ernest, 466 Champagne-Kamerad, 37 Chaplin, Charlie, 5, 47 Charles I (King of Austria-Hungary), 362 Chelsea Arts Club, 338 Chen Duxiu, 451, 454–5 Chenbao see Morning Post Chicago Daily News, 167 Chicago Tribune, 167 Children’s Crusade, 263 children’s magazines boches, godmothers and heroics in, 104–9 evolution of, in France, 95–7 postwar changes to, 109–10 wartime in, 97–101 ‘The Children’ (Kipling), 118 China just-war rhetoric in, 452–3 wartime periodicals in, 449–55 Chinese Communist Party, 449–55 Chinese Labour Corps, 10, 449–50 Chinese press, war coverage in, 10–11 Chirico, Giorgio de, 134–5 Chotek, Sophie, 211 Christian Guardian, 469 Christidis, Aristovoulos D., 486 Christy, Howard Chandler, 25, 293 Chronicle Herald, 462 ‘Chronicles’ (Pound), 392

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index 515 Chronicles of the White Horse, 55, 313, 314 Chronos, 486 Churchill, Winston, 122–3 circulation strategies of wartime journals, 38–9 Cirmeni, Benedetto, 251 Citizen (Ottawa), 462 Citizen Archivist program (US National Archives), 57, 61 Civil and Military Gazette, 418 civilian press market saturation in trenches of, 43 unit journal reprints in, 42–3 Claes, Ernest, 154 Clarion, 376 Clarke, Christopher, 211–12 class differences in Austria-Hungary, 211 children’s magazines and, 19, 95 German colonial newspapers and, 403–4 in India, 416–17 in Italian wartime periodicals, 246 newspaper audiences and, 83 in prisoner-of-war journals, 328–9 in Russian wartime periodicals, 276–8, 281–2 Saturday Evening Post and, 165–6 in trench journals, 307–8, 313–14 wartime journals and, 69 see also gender; race and racism Clausewitz, Carl von, 449–52 Clemenceau, Georges, 4, 162, 168, 262 Cobb, Irvin S., 164, 166–9 Coenobium, 354 Cohen, Joseph, 120 Cohn, Jan, 165–6 Cole, Margaret, 122 Cole, Sarah, 66, 70 Collier, Patrick, 18 Collier’s Magazine, 164 Collings, T., 46n.20 colonialism in China, 449 Indian wartime press and, 415–29 Punjabi newspapers and, 418–21 wartime periodicals and, 401–12 see also German Colonial Africa Colonial Press Law (Germany), 404 Colour Magazine, 119 comics, in children’s magazines, 96–7

7803_Demoor et al.indd 515

Comité National de Secours et d’Alimentation, 433 Committee for Union and Progress (CUP), 258–9, 475–7, 479, 481–3, 486–7, 489–91 Committee of National Defence (Greek nationalist organisation), 488 Committee on Public Information (US), 163–4 Common Cause, 372–4, 379–80 communication circuit, 33 communication networks, 32 communities of readers, wartime periodicals and formation of, 6 Company of the Royal Engineers (112th), 55 comradeship in First World War, 66 Concord, 353 Concours de l’Envoi aux Soldats (game), 100–1 Congress of Berlin, 258 Conrad, Joseph, 8 ‘Conscientious Objectors’ (Booth), 122 conscription British opposition of, 357 in Canada, 461–2, 466, 468–71 in Great Britain, 469 New Zealand opposition to, 354 pacifist campaigns against, 353 wartime journals on, 67, 73, 122 women’s protest against, 378 Conservative & Unionist Women’s Franchise Review, 376 ‘Constantinople Our Star’ (Lewis), 392–4 Constitution (Ottoman Empire), 475 Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets) (Russia), 275–6, 278–9 Constitutional Revolution (Ottoman Empire), 474–5, 489, 492 Contagious Diseases Acts, 375 Contemporary Word, 278–9 Coogan, Jackie, 5, 263–4 Cook, Tim, 9 Cooke, Alice, 124 Cooperative Congress (Russia), 275 Coppola, Francesco, 248 Cordemans, Marcel, 154, 156–7 Cornwall, Mark, 212, 220 Correspondance bi-mensuelle, 352–3 Corriere della Sera, 244, 247, 254 Corriere mercantile, 250–4 Coste, Maurice, 310

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516 index Coterie, 391 Counter-Attack and Other Poems (Sassoon), 124–5 Counter-Reformation, 212 court gazettes (China), 450 cover design Blast, 392 emotion and affect in, 67–8 L’élan, 386 Hydra magazine, 2 Il Montello, 135 Indian Ink, 425 Nash’s and Pall Mall Magazine, 25–6 Saturday Evening Post, 165, 168, 170 wartime Bécassine albums, 103 Covid-19 pandemic, 93n.12 digital archives and, 62 press coverage of, 298–9 Cowman, Krista, 371 Craiglockhart War Hospital, 1, 59, 121, 126, 338, 347–8 Creel, George, 163–4 Crewe (Lord), 421 Crichton Royal Institution, 59 Cricket Magazine, 119 Crimean War, photography during, 5 Criminal Investigation Department (India), 418 Criterion, 120 Critical Review, 451 Crna ruka (Black Hand) (Austria-Hungary), 214, 217 Crosby, Alfred, 290–1 cross-dressing, in trench journals, 307–10 ‘The Crowd-Master’ (Lewis), 393 ‘Crushing the People for War Money’ (Atwood), 168 Crvena Hrvatska, 219 Cubism, 130–2, 140–1, 384, 386, 392 Culleton, Claire, 378 cultural memory digital archives of wartime periodicals and, 51–63 war photography and, 192–4 wartime journals as, 53–63 culture advertising and, 292–9 in German colonial newspapers, 403–4, 406–9 influenza pandemic impact on, 287–8, 294–9

7803_Demoor et al.indd 516

intimate culture of war, 68–9 material culture of First World War, 17–29 print networks and, 35–6 in prisoner-of-war camp journals, 328–30 trench journals as reflection of, 307–10 war photography as cultural series, 193 wartime periodicals in context of, 5, 8–12 Current Affairs, 450–1 Curtis, Cyrus, 165 Curtis Publishing, 165 Cyclostyle printing machines, 36–7 Dada, 4, 140–1, 394–5 Dada movement, 4, 6, 135–41, 394–5 Daels, Frans, 153, 156 Dafoe, J. W., 465, 469 Daily Bulletin (Edmonton), 463 Daily Chronicle, 175–6, 229–30 Daily Colonist, 462, 463 Daily Express, 42, 124, 182 Daily Herald, 465 Daily Mail, 1, 3 battle reporting in, 229–30, 233, 236 casualty lists in, 182 market saturation by, 43 mythology of war in, 124 photography in, 238 poetry in, 116, 184–6 propaganda in, 177–80 war correspondents for, 184–6 Daily Mercury, 437 Daily Mirror, 3, 41, 43, 82–3, 91 Daily News, 6, 82, 86–9, 123 Daily News & Reader, 88 Daily Sketch, 43 Daily Star (Montreal), 462, 465, 469 Daily Telegraph, 20, 41, 117–18, 175, 176, 179–82, 185 battle reporting in, 229 Damascus Affair, 491–2 Darnton, Robert, 33 Das, Santanu, 9–11, 66, 68–9 Davis, Richard Harding, 162 Da’wat al-Haqq, 483 ‘The Dead Fox-Hunter’ (Graves), 119 death, in wartime journals, 74–8 ‘The Death Bed’ (Sassoon), 125 De Belgische Standaard, 149, 150–2, 154–7 Debeuckelaere, Adiel, 156 De Chirico, Georgio, 140 de Clercq, René, 154

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index 517 De Dietsche Warande & Belfort, 150–1 Dedijer Vladimir, 212 Defence of India Act, 418 Defence of the Realm Act (DORA), 4, 20–1, 177, 228, 375 De Gourmont, Remy, 390 De Groeve, Alfons, 153 de la Mare, Walter, 123 Delaunay, Robert, 140 De Lelie, 150 Deligiavuris, Christos P., 486 Demain, 354 Demoyan, Hayk, 260 denialism, Armenian genocide and, 264–7 De Nieuwe Gazet, 150 Department of Information (Great Britain), 231 Depero, Fortunato, 132 De Pillecyn, Filip, 156 Derain, André, 131 Der Blaue Reiter (school), 130 Der-Hagopian, Hagop, 482 Der Kriegsbote, 411–12 Der Mistral, 394 Der-Nersisian, Hracheay, 479 Der Schützengraben, 306 Der Sturm, 385 Desh, 418 Despard, Charlotte, 375 De Standaard, 147, 150–5, 156–7 De Standaard publishing company, 156–7 De Stem Uit België, 150–4, 156–7 De Stijl, 4 ‘Destroyers at Jutland’ (Kipling), 118 ‘Destruction of Syntax-Wireless ImaginationWords in Freedom,’ 388 Deswarte, Alberic, 154 Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Zeitung, 402, 404–5 Deutsch-Südwestafrikanische Zeitung, 402, 404 De Vlaamsche Stem, 154, 156 De Wachter, Antoine Alphonse, 152 de Zayas, Marius, 135–7 DiCenzo, Maria, 358 Dicke, Tom, 287–8 Dickens, Charles, 83 Die Aktion, 385 Die Bombe, 215 Die Brücke (school), 130 ‘Died of Wounds’ (Sassoon), 119

7803_Demoor et al.indd 517

Die Friedens-Warte, 353–4, 362–3 Die Menschheit, 360–3 Die Neue Generation, 358 Die Presse, 215 Die Sappe, 6 Die Versöhnung, 361–2 Die Waffen nieder!, 353 Die Zukunft, 356 digital archives of wartime periodicals, 51–63 Armenian genocide and, 260–1 in Canada, 461 limitations of, 54–8 public engagement in, 58–61 technology behind, 62–3 Dillane, Fionnuala, 51 Dilnot, Alan, 33–4 Dimitrijević, Dragutin T. (‘Apis’), 217, 221 Direct Hit, 35, 41 discourse networks, 33 disillusionment, emergence in periodicals of, 87–91 Dismorr, Jessica, 392 distribution strategies for wartime journals, 36–40 trench journals and, 305–6 Dixie Cup advertisements, 292–9 D-Notices, wartime censorship and, 177, 228 Dobell, Eva, 6, 121 Doings, 411–12 Dokumente des Fortschritts, 360 Dominion, 442 Dongfang Zazhi see Eastern Miscellany DORA Paper Restriction Order no. 203, 21 Dosfel, Lodewijk, 150, 156, 157 The Dove’s Nest (Mansfield), 115 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 6, 8 Draper, Norman, 162, 168 drawings, photography compared to, 196–203 ‘Drummer Hodge or the Dead Drummer’ (Hardy), 116 Dual Monarchy (Austria-Hungary), 214, 220, 222n.2 Dubbs, Chris, 163 Duchamp, Marcel, 135–6, 139–40 Duckworth, Ethelwyn, 38–9 Dud, 35 ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ (Owen), 53 Dump, 74–6, 313 Dunoyer de Segonzac, André, 131 Durham Light Infantry, 35, 55

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518 index Dutch-language Belgian exile periodicals, 150–3 Dutoict, Paul, 433 duty to remember paradigm, wartime memories and, 85 Duykers, Louise, 157 Eastern Miscellany, 451 Eastern Times, 451 Easter Rising, 419 East London Federation of Suffragettes, 370, 375 Echo du Camp de Rennbahn Münster, 321–2 Écrire et publier dans les tranchées (project), 56 Ecumenical Patriarchate, 486–7 Edinburgh Review, 123 Editions Montsouris, 109 editors of wartime periodicals, 146–58 in Canada, 465 French-Canadian press, 467–8 hospital journals, 338, 340–1 prisoner-of-war journals, 328–30 Saturday Evening Post, 165–7 trench journals, 305–6 ‘Edward Eastaway’ (Thomas), 121 Edwards, Elizabeth, 18 Edwards, Paul, 393–4 Efendi, Emmanoulidis, 474 Eggen, Johan, 154 Egoist, 121, 384–5, 389 Egyptian Revolution, 9–12 Ehrenpreis, Petronilla, 4 Eigen Leven, 150–1 Ekklisiastiki Alitheia, 486–7 Ekstein, Modris, 176 Elder-Vass Dave, 32–3 El Djudio (Istanbul), 492 El Djugeton, 492 El Dschihad, 320 Eliot, Henry, 7 Eliot, T. S., 7, 53, 392–3 Elisabeth (Queen of Belgium), 146 Ellinikon Ethnos (Greek nation) ideology, 486 El Meseret, 492–3 El Telegrafo (Istanbul), 492 El Tiempo (Istanbul), 492–4 Embros, 486–7 Emin, Ahmed (Yalman), 477

7803_Demoor et al.indd 518

emotion, in wartime journals, 66–78 Enemy, 394 English Review, 121, 124 engravings, in periodicals, 193–4 entertainment, in trench journals, 307–10 Entre-Temps, 191 Enver, Pasha, 259, 262, 268n.6 Épinal prints, 97, 99 ‘Epitaphs of War’ (Kipling), 118 Epohi, 489 esprit de corps, wartime journals and, 73 Ethniki Drasis, 488 eulogies, in wartime periodicals, 122–4 Europeana database, 57 European War Reports (Ouzhan shibao), 451 Eustace, Claire, 375 Evening World, 230, 232–3, 235, 238 Everyman, 122 ‘The Exploding Shells’ (Young), 88–9 Expressionism, 140, 385–6, 392 ‘Extracts from a Soldier’s Diary’ (Read), 384 ‘The Eyes of Asia’ (Kipling), 118, 424 Fag-Ends, 37, 39 Fall In, 41 Faringdon Advertiser, 90 Farrar, Martin, 8, 175, 177–9, 183 Fawcett, Millicent Garrett, 372–3 Fayard, 96 February Revolution, 273, 274, 279–80 The Federalist and Granada People, 419 feminist press in Armenia, 482–3 pacifism and, 361–3 suffrage movement and, 369–80 Ferguson, Niall, 175, 177 fictitious war coverage, 7–8 Field, 41 Fifth Glo’ster Gazette, 38, 41–3 Fillette (children’s magazine), 95–6, 98–9, 104–9 Filliaert, Juul, 155 financing for wartime journals hospital journals, 339 prisoner-of-war camp journals, 324 ‘Finished with the War: A Soldier’s Declaration’ (Sassoon), 125 First Eastern General Hospital Gazette, 348 First Opium War, 450

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index 519 First World War advertising during, 293–9 affect and emotion in, 66–78 American journalism in, 161–4 Arabic newspapers and, 483–6 in children’s magazines, 97 German colonies and, 404–6 global turn in studies of, 10–12 home-front narratives from, 433–44 Indian military presence in, 415 influenza pandemic of 1918 and, 286–99 material culture of, 17–29 memory in, 81–3 networks in, 32–50 origins of, 212 Ottoman Empire and, 474–8 pacifist journals and, 353–5 periodicals publication during, 1–3 photography during, 5 prisoner-of-war camps during, 319–32 Russian Revolution and, 279–82 suffrage movement and, 358–9 suffrage press and, 370–6 US entry into, 170 Fischer, Fritz, 212 Fisher, Harrison, 25–6 Flatley, Jonathan, 69–70 Flemish Continued Education see Vlaamse Hogeschooluitbreiding Flemish intellectuals and politicians Belgian exile press and, 151–6 in pre-war Belgium, 149–51 Flemish nationalism, 151 Flers-Courcelette, Battle of, 44 Flint, F. S., 388–9 ‘The Fly’ (Mansfield), 6, 115 Foch, Ferdinand, 232 Foerster, Friedrich Wilhelm, 360 Ford, Ford Madox, 8, 388–9, 392–3 Foreign Affairs, 354 Forno, Mauro, 4 Forster, Elisabeth, 10 ‘For the Fallen’ (Binyon), 84–5 Fortnightly Review, 117 Forton, Louis, 97 Fountain (Duchamp), 138–9 Four Lights: An Adventure in Internationalism, 358–9 Fourteen Points programme, 491

7803_Demoor et al.indd 519

France Armenia and, 262–3 artists as soldiers in, 130–5 avant-garde in, 385–7 Belgian exile press in, 148, 151–2 Belgian refugees in, 146 censorship in, 4 trench journals in, 305–7, 310–11 United States ties to, 162 France, Anatole, 262 Francis I (Emperor of Austria), 213 Franco-Prussian War, 98 images of, 196 Frank, Richard, 53 Franz Ferdinand (Archduke), assassination of, 211–12, 215, 220, 222, 479–80 Fraser, Lovat, 230 Frassati, Alfredo, 244, 250–4 Frassati, Luciana, 252 Free People, 275 Freie Zeitung, 354 French, John (Sir), 181 French 108th Infantry Regiment, 37 French-Canadian newspapers, 467–8 French-language Belgian exile periodicals, 153–4 ‘French Literature and the War’ (De Gourmont), 390 Fresco, David, 492 Fresnaye, Roger de la, 131 Fried, Alfred Hermann, 353, 361–3 ‘The Fringes of the Fleet’ (Kipling), 118 ‘From Pillar to Post’ (Maxwell), 179 Frost, Robert, 389 Frueh, Alfred, 138 Funder, Friedrich, 215 Fussell, Paul, 40, 81–2, 175–6, 186 Futurist movement, 6, 130, 132–5, 140–1, 386–94 ‘Futurist Sculpture’ (Boccioni), 387 Gallica online digital library, 56–7 Gallipoli campaign, 443, 476 Armenian genocide and, 259 correspondents’ reports on, 180 trench journalism and, 37, 41–2 Galsworthy, John, 116 G. A. Natesan & Co., 421 Gandhi, Mahatma, 416–17, 421 Gao Qiang, 450

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520 index Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War, 206n.18 ‘The Gardener’ (Kipling), 118–19 Gasparri, Pietro, 249, 256n.31 gas warfare, 464–5 Gatrell, Peter, 147 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri, 393 Gaudin, Corinne, 277 Gaudreault, André, 193 Gautier, Henri, 96 Gazette (Montreal), 233–6 Gazette des Ardennes, 8 Gazette of the 3rd London General Hospital, 338, 343–6 Gazet van Antwerpen, 150 Gazet van Mechelen, 150 Gedeon, Manouil, 486 Gellert, Owen, 438 gender in German colonial newspapers, 406–9 in hospital journals, 342, 344–6 influenza pandemic narrative and, 288–9 in trench journals, 310–15 in war periodicals, 86 see also class differences Geneeskundig Tijdschrift voor België, 150 Genocide Museum, 260 Gentleman’s Magazine, 18 Gentlewoman, 5 geographical context, of wartime periodicals, 8–12 George, Frank William, 117 George V (King of England), 8 Georgian movement, 388 German Army Battle of Amiens and, 232–6, 237 internment camp newspapers and, 320–2 journals distributed by, 37 trench journals in, 305–7, 310–15 German Atrocities: An Official Investigation, 163 German colonial Africa African-language newspapers in, 409–11 battlefield reporting from, 408–9 conquest of, 411–12 cultural mobilisation in, 406–9 wartime periodicals in, 401–12 see also Herero War German-language newspapers, in Austria-Hungary, 215–16, 218–19 German Peace Society, 354

7803_Demoor et al.indd 520

Germany American case against, 164–70 Armenian massacre and, 262, 264–7 Armenian news coverage of, 479–80 avant-garde in, 385 censorship in, 4 China and, 449–55 Italian alliance with, 245 peace movement in, 353–5 prisoner-of-war camps in, 320 Russian Revolution and, 280–1 United States ties to, 161–4 germ panic, press’s exploitation of, 291–9 ‘Getting Foreign Trade’ (Payne), 168 Gevaert, Lieven, 150, 154 Ghadr ki Gunj, 417 Ghadr movement, 417 Ghain Tuffieha and Garrison Gazette, 39 Ghosh, Aurobindo, 416, 425–6 Giacosa, Piera, 254 Gibbon, Perceval, 183 Gibbs, Philip, 175, 176–9, 181–6, 229–30 Gibson, Charles Dana, 25 Gibson, Wilfrid, 119, 126 Giolitti, Giovanni, 244, 246–9, 252, 254 Giornale d’Italia, 244 girl’s magazines, emergence of, 95–6 Girl’s Own Paper, 19 Girl’s Reader, 23 Girl’s Realm, 23 Gladstone, William, 262 A Glance at the Soul of the Low Countries (Persyn), 153 Glasgow Herald, 119 Gleizes, Albert, 131 Globe (Toronto), 234, 461–2, 470 Godfrey, J. M., 469 godmother figure in children’s magazines, 108–9 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 325, 329 Gold Coast Leader, 11 Golos Tolstogo i Edinenie, 281 Google Books project, 57 Gore-Booth, Eva, 122 Gorky, Maxim, 277, 281 Gosse, Edmund, 123 Graham, Hugh, 469 Granthan Journal, 86 Graphic, 43 Graves, Robert, 119

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index 521 Great Britain Armenia and, 262–3 avant-garde in, 388–94 Belgian exile press in, 147–9, 151–4 Belgian refugees in, 146 Canadian relations with, 461–71 censorship in, 4 China and, 451–2 peace movement in, 354–5 United States ties to, 161–4 US propaganda campaign, 162–4 Greece, invasion of Asia Minor by, 477 Greek newspapers, 486–9 Greek Orthodox (Rum), 488–9 Green Tiger, 38 Grusin, Richard, 193 Guignol, 110 Güleryüz, 478 Guogu see National Heritage Gupta, Abhijit, 416 Gurney, Ivor, 6, 120 Habsburg Monarchy, 211–13, 218, 220n.2, 362 Hachette, 96, 109 Hage, Emily, 140 Haig, Douglas (Field Marshal), 230, 232 Hakimiyet-i Milliye, 477–8 Halbmondlager, 320 Halgin, Daniel S., 32–3 Hamburg State Library, 57 Hamidian Massacres, 259, 261–2, 267 Hamilton, Helen, 124 Hamilton Times, 471 Hammerton, John, 20, 22, 27–8 Harding, D. W., 120 Hardinge (Lord, Viceroy of India), 416 Hardy, Thomas, 8, 71, 116–17, 119, 357, 424 Harefield Park Boomerang, 341–6 Harfield, Douglas, 44 Harmsworth, Alfred (Lord Northcliffe), 3–4, 20, 22, 162, 177, 180–1 Harris, Corra, 167 Harrison, C. Rhodes, 343–4 Harrison, Jane, 357 Harvey, F. W., 41 HathiTrust, 57 Hauptgeschäftsstelle für Liebesgaben, 324 Havas, 263 Haviland, Paul, 135, 137

7803_Demoor et al.indd 521

Hay, John, 297 Hay Kin, 482 Hazell, Watson and Viney Ltd, 46n.20 H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), 385 Hearst, William Randolph, 25 Heiwa Jihō (Japan Peace Movement), 358 Hellenic Party, 486 Hendrix, Arnold, 150 Hennings, Emmy, 135–40, 394 Herald (Halifax), 462 Herald (Melbourne), 436–7 Herero War (German Southwest Africa), 406 heroic child trope, in children’s magazines, 98 Hesse, Hermann, 328–9 Het Algemeen Belang der Provincie Limburg, 150 Hetawî Kurd (Istanbul), 490 Het Laatste Nieuws, 150 Heymann, Lida Gustava, 361 Hickey, Augustus, 416 Highland Light Infantry Chronicle, 38 Hiley, Nicholas, 43 Hindustan (newspaper), 417 Hindustan (weekly), 418 history, photography and, 190–1 Hiteshranjan Sanyal Memorial Collection, 427 Hodginson, Shirley, 424 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 8 Hooger Leven, 150–1 Hopkins, J. Castell, 461, 463 hospital journals, 338–49 contents of, 341–6 organisation of, 340–1 therapeutic function of, 347–8 types of hospitals, 339–40 Hoste, Julius Jr., 153–6 Housman, Laurence, 357 Hovanec, Caroline, 287 Howarth, Peter, 388 Howe, Janice, 288, 290–1 Howell, B., 346–7 ‘How Waste Paper is Treated to Make New Paper’ (Keenan), 21 Hrvatski narod, 211, 215 Huagong Zhoubao, 10 Huculak, J. Matthew, 17–18, 21, 30n.8 Huddersfield War Hospital Magazine, 39 Huelsenbeck, Richard, 140, 394 Hughes, Linda, 72

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522 index Hughes, Sam, 464 Hughes-Johnson, Alexandra, 371 Hullebroeck, Emiel, 154 Hulme, T. E., 120, 355, 384, 388 humour in wartime journals, 76–7 Hungarian Revolution, 213 Hungary anti-Serb sentiment in, 217 journalism in, 219–20 Hunt, Cathy, 378 Hunt, Karen, 375 Ḥusayn, Sharif, 483, 485–6 Hu Shi, 454–5 Hydra, 121, 124, 338, 347–8 cover of, 2 creation of, 1 wartime experiences in, 6 hygiene advertising, 293–9 influenza pandemic and, 291–2 Hyslop, Jonathan, 354 Iho tou Pontou, 488 İkdam, 475–6 Il Giornale d’Italia, 247 Illustrated London News, 43 Illustrated War News, 23 Illustrovana Ratna Kronika, 219 Il Mattino, 250 Il Momento, 245 Il Montello, 131, 134–5, 141 Ilott agency, 438 Il Popolo d’Italia, 246, 248 Il Resto del Carlino, 247 Il Secolo, 250 Imagerie Quantin, 98 Imagism, 385, 388 Imerisia, 488 Imperial Camel Corps, 36 imperialism in China, 450–1 Ottoman Empire and, 476–8 Imperial War Museum, 53–5 Imprimeries Réunies, 35 Independent Suffragette, 371 Independent Women’s Social and Political Union, 371 India Bengali periodicals, 426–9 English-language journals in, 421–6 Punjabi public sphere in, 417–21 wartime periodicals in, 415–29

7803_Demoor et al.indd 522

Indian Ink: Splashes from Various Pens, 9–10, 421, 423–6 Indian Review, 416 Indian Review War Book, 421–6 Indian soldiers, stereotypes in Trench journals of, 313 Indigenous Canadians, in First World War, 468 ‘In Flanders Fields’ (McCrae), 6, 120 influenza pandemic of 1918 advertising and, 287, 291–2 press coverage of, 286–99 public narrative for, 287–91 information government wartime mobilisation and control of, 3–5 networks, 40–4 wartime periodicals as source for, 7–8 Inge, William, 122 Intelligence Bureau for the East see Nachrichtenstelle für den Orient interconnectivity, wartime periodicals and, 8–12 Internationaal, 358–62 International Arbitration and Peace Society, 353 International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace, 357–9, 362 international cooperation on wartime periodicals, 324, 330–2 International Council of Women, 357–8 International Dada Archive, 58 International Freethought Federation, 360 International, 360 international news networks, 229 battle reporting and, 234 International News Service, 229 International Peace Bureau, 352–3 international peace movement, 352–3 International Union of the Peace Press, 353 International Women’s Suffrage Alliance, 357–8, 374 internment camp journals, 320–2 international encounters in, 330–2 see also prisoner-of-war camp journals interventionism, in Italian wartime press, 245–50, 254 ‘In the Interests of the Brethren’ (Kipling), 118 ‘In the Pink’ (Sassoon), 125

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index 523 ‘In the Time of “The Breaking of Nations”’ (Hardy), 117 intimate culture chaotic intimacies, organisation of, 72–8 in wartime journals, 68–72 Iodine Chronicle, 40, 76 Iraq, Arabic newspapers in, 483 Irish Citizen, 373, 376 Irvine, John D., 182 Irwin, Will, 162, 166 ‘Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918)’ (Silk), 120 ‘Isaac Rosenberg: From Romantic to Classics’ (Cohen), 120 Italy artists as soldiers in, 130, 132–5 Futurism in, 130–1, 133, 135, 386–8 interventionist message in, 245–6 neutrality and interventionism in, 249–50 Ottoman Empire and, 475 pacifist movement in, 354 wartime journalism in, 244–54 Jackson, Paul, 2 Jacobs, Aletta, 358, 361 J’ai tué (I have killed) (Cendrars), 32 James, Pearl, 293 Janco, Marcel, 394 Jannelli, Guglielmo, 131 Janssens, Aloïs, 154 Japan China and, 450–1, 453–5 German soldiers’ internment camps in, 320–2 Japan Peace Society, 358 Jarboe, Andrew Tate, 417–18, 419 Jat Gazette, 420–1 Jaures, Jean, 262 Jebb, Eglantyne, 356, 362 Jerome, Jerome K., 329 Jewish newspapers, Ladino papers, 491–4 jihad, in Ottoman Empire, 476 Jildirim, 313–14 Jin (Istanbul), 491 Job Press, 35 Joffre, Joseph, 103 John Bull, 43 Jones, Heather, 330–1 Joseph II (Emperor of Habsburg-Lorraine), 212–13

7803_Demoor et al.indd 523

Journal (Ottawa), 462 A Journal of Impressions in Belgium (Sinclair), 121 journalists American journalism, 161–4 in Austria-Hungary, 212–13 in Ottoman Empire, 477–8 in Serbia, 213–14 wartime periodicals and, 161–70 see also war correspondents Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 21 Joyce, James, 385, 393 Judson, Pieter, 215 Jus Suffragii, 358, 374, 380 Justice, 376 just war rhetoric in Canadian press, 465 in Chinese press, 452–3 Kai Tiaki, 38 Kalpakchian, Ardashes, 480 Kamerun-Post, 401–2 Kamouzis, Dimitris, 474–94 Kandinsky, Wassily, 140, 394 Kapetanidis, Nikos, 489 Kapsis, Pantelis, 488 Karađorđević family, 213, 217 Katholieke Vlaamse Meisjesbeweging (KVM), 157 Katscher, Leopold, 361–2 Kautsky, Karl, 279 Kavalieros-Markouizos, Theodoros, 486 Kechian, Ashod, 482 Kechian, Baruyr, 482 Kechian, Puzant, 478–82 Keenan, Thomas, 21 Keetmanshoper Zeitung, 402, 404 Kelley, John Daniel, 163 Kemal, Ali, 478 Kemal, Mustafa, 259–60, 262, 264, 477–8, 482–3, 488 Kendall, Tim, 116, 117–18 Kent Fencible, 37 Kerensky, Aleksandr, 278 Kesari, 416 Keshen, Jeff, 461 Kesisoglous, Pananos N., 486 Kia Ora, 39 The Kid (film), 5 Kikeriki, 215 Kilmer, Joyce, 123

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524 index King, Edmund G. C., 5 Kings, Queens and Pawns: An American Woman at the Front (Rinehart), 169 King’s Own Scottish Borderers, 43 Kiongozi, 409–10 Kipling, John, 118 Kipling, Rudyard, 116–19, 418, 424 Kitchener, Horatio Herbert (Lord), 178–9 Kittler, Friedrich, 33 Kloian, Richard, 260 Knightley, Philip, 175 Knockaloe Lager-Zeitung, 320, 323 Kochunian, Misak (Kasim), 478–9 Kolata, Gina, 291, 298 Kolonitskii, Boris, 276 Kopanos, 488 Kopek Newspaper, 277 Kornilov, Lavr, 278 Kosovo, Serbian acquisition of, 219 Köylü, 493 Kress, Gunther, 190 Kriegsüberwachungsamt, 218 Kriegs-Zeitung der 4. Armee, 311 Kriegs-Zeitung von Baranowitschi, 308, 312 Kriegszeitung Heeresgruppe Scholtz, 311 k.u.k Kriegspressequartier, 8 Kurd Ali, Muhammad, 483–6 Kurdish press, 489–91 Kurdish Society for Mutual Aid and Progress, 490 Kurdistan, 489–91 Kurd Teavün ve Terakki Gazetesi (Istanbul), 490 Kut al-Amara, 476 ‘Kwa Siku Kuu ya Kaiser Wetu’ (Saidi), 409–10 Kyriakidis, Nikos, 488 La Baïonnette, 56 La balza futurista, 131 La Bourguignotte, 311 labour journals, 368–80 women’s movement and, 376–9 Labour Leader, 376 Labour Party, women’s labour movement and, 378 Labour Woman, 378 La Buena Esperanza (Izmir), 492

7803_Demoor et al.indd 524

Lacerba, 6, 131, 387 ‘La Chanson de l’Alsacienne’ (Fillette), 106 ‘La Coccinelle’ (cover story in Suzette), 100 La Contemporaine: Bibliothèque, Archives, Musée des Mondes Contemporaines, 54, 56 La Croix d’Honneur, 109–10 Ladies’ Home Journal, 165, 292–4 Ladino periodicals, 491–4 Lady’s Realm, 23 La Epoka (Salonica), 492 La Fontaine, Henri, 353–4 Lager-Echo, 320 Lagerzeitung für Wagna / Gazzetta d’Accampamento di Wagna, 320 La Ghirba, 130–1, 134–5, 141 La Jeunesse illustrée, 96 Lal, Ramji, 415 La Libre Belgique, 55 La Libre Pensée internationale, 360 La Mère éducatrice, 358 La Métropole d’Anvers, 153–4 Lancet, 6, 94n.50 Land and Water, 43, 236–7 Landswoman, 5, 378–9 Languereau, Maurice (Caumery), 99, 103 Lanning, Katie, 98 L’Anti-Cafard, 320 La Paix par le Droit, 352, 354 Lapchinchian, Teotoros (Teotig), 479, 482–3 Laporta, August, 152, 157 Laporta, Maria, 157 La Presse, 467 L’Argonnaute (database), 56 Larousse, 109 La Semaine de Suzette, 95–6, 98–104, 106, 108–9 La Stampa, 244, 247, 249–54 ‘The Last Post’ (Graves & Sassoon), 119 La Tribuna, 244, 249 Laurier, Wilfrid (Sir), 463, 469–70 Laut, Agnes Christina, 166–7 L’Avanti!, 245–6 La Vie en culotte rouge, 96 La Vie Internationale, 353–4 La Voix de l’Humanité, 360–1 Lawrence, D. H., 389 L’Azione, 245 Lazzari, Constantino, 249–50 Le 120 Court, 42 Leadswinger, 309

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index 525 League Leaflet, 378 League of Nations, 353, 361–2, 477 League of Nations Society, 354 Lear, Edward, 75 learning, prisoner-of-war journals and culture of, 328–30 Leavis, F. R., 120 Le Canard enchaîné, 4 Le Carnet de camp, 56 L’Echo de Belgique, 153 L’Echo des Baraques, 320 L’Echo du Ravin, 36 Le Cri-Cri, 109 Le Devoir, 467, 469 Le Figaro, 215, 387 Léger, Fernand, 139 Le Journal de la Jeunesse, 96 L’élan, 4, 130–2, 135, 140, 386–7 Le Miroir, 191–2, 194–205 Lemke, Hilde, 409–10 Lemkin, Raphael, 258 L’Enfance de Bécassine, 99, 103 Lenin, Vladimir, 260 L’Épatant, 96–7 Le Pays de France, 55 Le Petit Écho de la Mode, 110 Le Petit Journal, 56, 264, 266 Le Petit Parisien, 194, 264–5 Le Poilu, 37 Le Rire rouge, 265–6 Les Belles Images, 96 Les Documents du Progrès, 360 Les enfants de l’otage (Fillette story), 105–8 Les mille et un tours de l’espiègle Lili, 104–9 Les Soirées de Paris, 136, 386 Les Tablettes, 354 Les Trois Couleurs, 97 Le Tas de Blagues, 320 Le Temps, 4 Letourneux, Matthieu, 95–6 ‘Letter Captured on the Battlefield’ (Daily News & Reader), 88 Lever, Debbie, 394 Lewis, Wyndham, 384–5, 391–4 Le XXe Siècle, 147–9 Leyendecker, J. C., 168, 170 L’homme enchaîné, 4 Lhote, André, 131 Liang Qichao, 450–1 ‘Liberty – A Statement of the British Case’ (Bennett), 162

7803_Demoor et al.indd 525

L’Idea Nazionale, 245–6, 248 Liebknecht, Karl, 385 Lief en Leed – uit dagen van lijden (Elebaers), 154 Life, 205 Liller Kriegszeitung, 308 L’Illustration, 204 limericks in wartime journals, 75 Lindeman, Jack, 120 L’Indépendance Belge, 153 L’Intrépide, 96 Lisette, 110 Listening Post, 36, 37, 40, 76, 313 L’Italia, 245 L’Italia Futurista, 130, 132–4, 136, 140, 388 literacy rates in Austria-Hungary and Serbia, 214 in Ottoman Empire, 475 periodical expansion and, 19 Russian newspapers and, 275–8 little magazines, 9, 11, 19, 130, 135, 138, 141, 384, 386, 393; see also avantgarde movement Little Newspaper, 276 Little Review, 9 Livesay, J. F., 471 Living Age, 321 ‘Livres roses pour la jeunesse’ children’s series, 109 Lloyd George, David, 178, 419 ‘Lob’ (Thomas), 121 ‘The Lofty Sky’ (Thomas), 121 London Daily News, 81, 83 London Evening News, 41 London General Hospital, 338 London Mercury, 391 Longuet, Jean, 360 Long Xiaoli, 450 Loos, Battle of, reporting on, 229–30 Lorimer, George Horace, 165–70 L’Osservatore Romano, 245 Loughran, Tracey, 86, 90–2 Lowe, Corinne, 169 Lowell, Amy, 389 Loy, Mina, 138 Ludendorff, Erich (General), 232, 286 Lüderitzbuchter Nachrichten, 404 Lüderitzbuchter Zeitung, 402 Luo Gang, 450 Lusitania, sinking of, 163, 169–70, 174n.63, 465–6

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526 index Luxemburg, Rosa, 385 Lyon, James, 221 Lyon, Stewart, 470–1 Lysol advertisements, 292–9 Maas, William, 41 McAleer, Joseph, 23–9 Macarthur, Mary, 377–9 McBride, Douglas Brent, 385 McCall’s Magazine, 118 McCrae, John, 6, 120–1 Macdonald, H. R., 34 MacDonald, Ramsay, 360 McGann, Jerome, 17–18 McKenzie, Don, 18 McLuhan, Marshall, 193 McQuilton, John, 434 Maitland Weekly Mercury, 443 Maji Maji War (German East Africa), 406 Major, Ernest, 450 Makridis, Konstantinos G., 486 Malagodi, Olindo, 244, 247 male friendship in First World War, 66 in trench journals, 307 Manasi O Marmadhwani, 428–9 Man at Arms, 7 Manawatu Times, 439–40 Manchester Guardian, 120, 182, 233–6, 356 Manchester Regiment, 36 Manitoba Free Press, 462, 465, 469 manliness and masculinity, war as test of, 85–6 Man Ray, 138, 139–40 Mansfield, Katherine, 6, 115 Manus, Rosa, 358–9 Maoriland Worker, 354 Mao Zedong, 454–5 Maple Leaf, 35 Marchand, Jean, 131 ‘Marching’ (Rosenberg), 120 ‘March of the Recruits’ (Rhys), 390 Mardiganian, Aurora, 264 Margaritis, Nikolaos I., 486 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 130–1, 133, 135, 386–7, 391–4 Marion, Philippe, 193 Mark, Hayganush, 482 Markel, Karl Emil, 324 market forces, emotional traction of periodicals and, 67

7803_Demoor et al.indd 526

Marlborough Express, 436, 441 Marlburian, 119 Marmita, 310 Marsden, Dora, 384–5 Martin, Meredith, 121, 347–8 Martin, Richard, 168 Marx, Karl, 281, 451 ‘Mary Postgate’ (Kipling), 118 Massingham, H. W., 125 Masterman, Charles, 164, 177 Matania, Fortunino, 25 Mataram, 416–17 materiality, First World War culture and, 17–29 Mature, Ramiro de, 384 Maxwell, Perriton, 25 Maxwell, William, 179 May Coup (Austria-Hungary), 217 May Fourth protests (China), 10–11, 450, 453–5 medium theory (McLuhan), 193 Megali Idea, 488, 489 memory First World War and role of, 81–3 newspapers and, 81 periodicals as medium for, 20, 83–92 Mensheviks, 279–80 ‘Mental Reactions’ (Meyer), 136 ‘Men Who March Away’ (Hardy), 71–2, 116 Mercier, Cardinal Désiré-Joseph, 152–3 Mercure de France, 386 Mesopotamia, Indian army in, 426–9 messianic framework, in war periodicals, 87–91 Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS), 63 metonymy, memory and, 82–3 Metropolitan, 119 Metzinger, Jean, 131 Mew, Charlotte, 117 Meyer, Agnes Ernst, 135–7 Meynell, Alice, 376 Middleton, G. A. T., 156 Miglioli, Guido, 245 military commanders, correspondents’ ties to, 184 military hospitals, 340 ‘The Military and Naval Defenses of the US’ (Taft), 169 Millais, J. E., 22 Miller, Alisa, 122

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index 527 Miller, Ian, 461 Misailidis, Evaggelinos, 486 Misailidis, Theagenis E., 486 Miss Hobbs (Jerome), 329 Mitchell, Ruth, 124 mnemonic medium memory and, 82 periodical press as, 84–93 shell shock as, 86–91 modern art, 130–41 in Italy and France, 130–5 in New York, 135–9 in Zürich, 140 see also avant-garde movement modernism in Britain, 389 in Europe, 384–8 literary, 53, 115, 126 periodical coverage of, 2 see also modern art; avant-garde movement Modernist Journals Project (MJP), 57, 58 Modern Review, 421 Molchanov, Leonid, 277 Moncrieff, Alexia, 349 Mond, Alfred (Sir), 54 Monger, David, 177 Mon Journal, 96 Monro, Harold, 353, 384, 388–91 Monroe, Harriet, 120 Montague, C. E., 182–4 Montdidier, Battle of, 232, 235 Monthly Chapbook, 390–1 Monthly News Sheet, 358 Monthly Report for Members, 354 Moore, T. Sturge, 389 morale, decline in, 88–91 Moreau, Luc-Albert, 131 Morel, E. D., 362 Moreland, Arthur, 237–8 Morgenthau, Henry, 262 Morning Chronicle (Quebec), 464 Morning Post, 117–18, 123–4, 356 Morning Post (Chenbao), 451 ‘The Morning before the Battle’ (Graves), 119 Morogoro News, 411 Morris, Grace, 465 ‘Moses. A Play’ (Rosenberg), 120 Mosse, George L., 86, 89 Mudhook, 35–6, 74–5, 308–15 Muir, Ward, 338, 342–3

7803_Demoor et al.indd 527

Mules Monthly, 313 Mullen, J. G., 10–11 Muraviev, Valerian, 280 Murray, Gilbert, 123 Murry, John Middleton, 125 Musa Dagh revolt, 259, 261 music hall genre, in trench journals, 307–10 ‘The Music of the Fieldgreys (Feldgrauen)’ (Simon), 308 Musil, Robert, 8 Muslim prisoners of war, 320 Mussell, James, 18, 28–9, 67 Mussolini, Benito, 245–6, 248 ‘My Boy Jack’ (Kipling), 118 Myers, Charles S., 6 ‘My Experience in Cameroons during the War’ (Mullen), 10–11 mythology of war Brooke’s poetry and, 122–4 in poetry, 122–4 in wartime periodicals, 85–91, 122–4 Nachrichtenstelle für den Orient (information centre), 320 Nandy, Ashis, 419 Naorji, Dadabhai, 422–3 Narod, 211, 215 narrative influenza pandemic and, 287–91 metonymy and, 82–3 photography as, 203–5 Nash, Eveleigh, 25 Nash’s and Pall Mall Magazine, 18, 24–9, 118 sales and circulation figures for, 26–7 Nash’s Magazine, 118 Nateson, G. A., 421–2 Nation, 1, 119, 121–2 National Archives and Records Administration (US), 61 National Federation of Women Workers, 377–8 National Geographic, 261 National Heritage, 451 nationalism in Arabic newspapers, 484–6 in Austria-Hungary and Serbia, 215, 217 in Belgium, 151 in Canada, 468–71 in Greek newspapers, 486–9 in Italy, 245–6 in Kurdish press, 490–1 Kurdish press and, 489–91

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528 index National Library of Australia, Trove project of, 56 National Magazine Company, 25 National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (NUSEC), 372 National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), 372–4 National World War I Museum and Memorial (US), 54–5 Nation and Athenaeum, 6, 115 ‘A Nativity’ (Kipling), 118 Naumann, Francis, 135–6 Nea Anatoli, 486–7 Near East Relief Foundation (US), 263, 267 Nea Smyrni, 488 Nedelja, 320 Nederlandsche Anti-Oorlog Raad, 353 Neff, Stephen C., 449 Nelson, Robert L., 10, 37, 68 Neologos, 478, 486–8 Nestlé, 263 Netherlands Belgian exile press in the, 147–9, 151–2, 154–5 Belgian refugees in the, 146 networks in First World War, 32–50 printing networks, 33–6 Neue Freie Presse, 215, 219, 220 neutrality of American journalists, 162–4, 166 in China, 451–2 Italian wartime press and, 249–54 war correspondents’ problems with, 176–7 Nevinson, C. R. W., 338, 392–3 Nevinson, Henry W., 181, 234–5 New Age, 120, 384–5, 389 ‘A New Year’s Eve in War Time’ (Hardy), 117 Newbolt, Henry, 424 New Citizen, 451 New Culture movement (China), 450–1, 453–5 New Freewoman, 384 New Journalism, 20–1, 67–8 New Life, 277, 281 New Moon, or the Crichton Royal Literary Register, 59 Newnes, George, 20, 23 New Numbers, 119, 122

7803_Demoor et al.indd 528

New Paper, 450 New Republic, 115 News (Toronto), 471 newspapers advertising and, 435–6 Amiens Battle reporting and, 231–6 Arabic newspapers, 483–6 in Armenian, 478–83 Armenian genocide coverage in, 260–1, 262–3 in Austria-Hungary, 212–14 battle reporting in, 237–9 in Canada, 461–4 in China, 450–5 development and transformations in, 3–5 French-Canadian papers, 467–8 in German colonial Africa, 401–12 in Greek, 486–9 influenza pandemic of 1918 and, 298–9 in Kurdish, 489–91 memory and, 81–93 in Ottoman Empire, 474–94 in Punjab, 417–21 in Russia, 273–82 New Statesman, 6, 19, 119, 124, 273 ‘The New Warfare’ (Draper), 168 New York, artists in, 135–40 New York, wartime periodicals in, 135–40 New York Times, 118, 229–30, 234–5, 262–3, 287, 289–91, 470 New York Times Magazine, 123 New York Tribune, 118 New Youth, 451, 453–4 New Zealand newspapers and advertising in, 435–44 pacifist movement in, 354–5 ‘The Next War’ (Owen), 121 Ngai, Sianne, 75 Nicastro, Luciano, 131 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 385 ‘Night and Day’ (Rosenberg), 120 Nilsson publishers, 97 Nineteenth Amendment, 291–2 No-Conscription Fellowship (Great Britain), 354, 357 No-Conscription League (US), 353 Nord-Sud, 4 Northcliffe (Lord) see Harmsworth, Alfred Northern General Hospital (Leeds), 340 Northern Mudguard, 38

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index 529 North of England Newspaper Company, 35 Norton, Louise, 139 Nouvelle Revue Française, 1 Novine srbske, 214, 217 Novi vakat, 211, 215 ‘Nur Mut’, 325–6 nursing services, hospital journals and, 340–9 Nyssens, Marguerite, 433 obituaries in hospital journals, 341–2 Obrenović family, 213, 217 Observer (Punjab), 418 October Revolution, 281 Odian, Yervant, 478–9, 482 Odjek, 221 O’Donnell, Krista Molly, 402 Offenstadt/S.P.E. press, 96–7, 105, 109 Official Bulletin (US), 164 Ogden, C. K., 355–7 Oi Komninoi, 489 Oikonomidis, G., 486 Oikonomidis, V., 489 ‘The Old Houses of Flanders’ (Ford), 392 The Old Huntsman and Other Poems (Sassoon), 116, 124 O’Leary, Grattan, 462 Oman, Carola, 121 ‘On Impressionism’ (Ford), 389 online databases, wartime journals on, 57 On Service, 38 Ons Leven Hoogstudent, 6, 153 Ons Vaderland, 151–2, 155–6 Ons Volk Ontwaakt, 150–1 ‘On the Way to the Trenches’ (Nevinson), 392–4 Onze Taal, 320 Opdebeek, Gabriël, 154 Open Exhaust or Karstinks, 309 Opportunity, 380 Orage, A. R., 120, 384 Orgelsdorfer Eulenspiegel, 320, 322 The Origins of the War of 1914 (Albertini), 212 Orphist movement, 140 Orthodox Bosnian Serbs, 211 Osborn, E. B., 41 Otago Daily Times, 443 Otlet, Paul, 353–4 Ottoman Empire, 211–13, 218–20, 259–63, 267, 474–94

7803_Demoor et al.indd 529

Arabic newspapers in, 483–6 Armenian newspapers in, 478–83 censorship in, 474–5 Christians in, 481 Greek newspapers in, 486–9 Kurdish press in, 489–91 Ladino periodicals in, 491–4 trench journals in, 310–12 see also Austria-Hungary; Habsburg Monarchy Ottoman National Telegraph Agency, 261–2 Our Glory and Our Grief (Miller), 461 Outpost, 36 Owen, Harry Collinson, 44 Owen, Wilfred, 1, 53, 64n.5, 121, 126, 347–8, 390, 429 Owl, 391 Oxford Magazine, 123 Ozenfant, Amédée, 131–2, 386–7 Pach, Walter, 138 pacifist journals, 352–63 Broda’s wartime periodicals, 360–2 First World War and, 353–5 see also anti-war movement The Pageant of War (Sackville), 122 Pahiatua Herald, 441 Paisa Akhbar, 418 Palazzeschi, Aldo, 388 Pale Horse, Pale Rider (Porter), 286 Pall Mall Budget, 25 Pall Mall Gazette, 25, 89–90, 124 Pall Mall Magazine, 24–5 Palmer, Carol, 57, 61 Palmer, Frederick, 229 pan-Islamism, 483–5 Panjabee, 418–21 Pankhurst, Christabel, 368, 370–1 Pankhurst, Emmeline, 368, 370–1 Pankhurst, Sylvia, 370–1, 375 paper prices, wartime journals and, 37 paper rationing, wartime press and, 4–5, 21, 26–7 Papers Past digital archive, 435 ‘Paper Supplies as Affected by the War’ (Phillips), 21 Papini, Giovanni, 131, 387 Paris Peace Conference, 264, 415, 449, 452, 454, 482, 491 Parsons, Gwen, 434 Pašić, NIkola, 216, 221–2

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530 index ‘Passing of War’ (Ghosh), 426 Patriotic Union of Belgian Women, 433 patriotism in children’s magazines, 98 in wartime periodicals, 116–17 Patris (Nea Patris), 486–7 Paul et Mic (children’s magazine), 104 Pavilion ‘Blues’ magazine, 39 Pax et Libertas, 359 Pax International, 359 Payne, Will, 168 PD corset, 433–44 ‘Peace Dream of a French Soldier’ (cartoon), 306 Peacewards, 358–9 Peano, Camillo, 247 Pearson, C. Arthur, 20 Pearson’s Weekly, 22 Peeters, Ildefons, 155 Pegum, John, 338–9 Péguy, Charles, 262 Pelmanism memory training system, 27, 42 ‘The Pentecost of Calamity’ (Wister), 170 Pentland (Lord), 421 People’s Cause, 278–80 People’s Radical Party (Serbia), 216 People’s World, 275 periodicals as affective object, 67–8, 78n.2 defined, 11–12 materiality, 18–19 as memory medium, 81–92 New Journalism and, 20–1 price increases on, 22–3 as textured objects, 78n.2 wartime paper rationing and, 21–2 Periscope, 36, 40 Perry Robinson, Harry, 181, 185, 234 Persyn, Jules, 150, 153, 157 Pester Lloyd, 215, 219 Petar I Karađorđević, 217 Pethick-Lawrence, Frederick, 370–1 Petrishev, Afanasii, 276–7 Petrograd Committee, 275–6 Petrograd Telegraph Agency, 279 Peyam-i Sabah, 478 Peyman (Diyarbekir), 490 Pfemfert, Franz, 385 Philadelphia Inquirer, 237 Philippidis, Chrysanthos, 489 Phillips, Percival, 181, 184

7803_Demoor et al.indd 530

Phillips, S. Charles, 21 photography as cultural series, 192–4 digital archives of, 56–63 in Le Miroir, 191–2, 194–203 narrative and, 203–5 wartime contests for, 199–202 in wartime periodicals, 5, 18, 20, 190–205 Picabia, Francis, 135–40 Picasso, Pablo, 131–2, 136, 387, 394 picture stories, in children’s magazines, 96–7 A Piece of Mosaic (Rosenberg), 120 Pieds Nickelés comics, 97 Pierrot, 110 Pignot, Manon, 98, 109 Pijemont, 214 Pinchon, Joseph Porphyre, 99, 102–3 Pite, Ralph, 117 ‘The Pity of It’ (Hardy), 117 Pius X (Pope), 244–5 Poems (Brooke), 123 ‘Poems of War and Patriotism’ (Hardy), 116 Poesia, 132, 386 poetry in German colonial newspapers, 406–9 in hospital journals, 347–8 in prisoner-of-war journals, 325–8 in Russian newspapers, 277 verbo-visual poetry, 136 in wartime periodicals, 6, 116–22 Poetry, 120 Poetry and Drama, 388–91 Poetry Review, 388 poilu (French soldier), 41, 306 Poilu (trench journal), 37 Poincaré, Raymond, 103 Politiken, 289 Politiki Epitheorisis, 486 Politka, 217, 219 Pollio, Alberto, 253 Pontos, 488 Poor Law infirmary, 340 Pope, Jessie, 124–5 Pöppinghege, Rainer, 320–2 popular culture mediation of war in, 95–110 poetry and, 116 Popular Socialist Party (Russia), 275–6 Porter, Bruce, 341 Porter, Katherine Anne, 286,

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index 531 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce), 385 Post-Impressionism, 384 Postnikov, Sergei, 279 Potiorek, Oskar, 211, 218, 221 Potter, Simon, 9 Pound, Ezra, 9, 384, 389, 392–3 Powell, Alexander, 162 Prabasi, 421 Prager Tagblatt, 218 Prampolini, Enrico, 140 ‘Preludes’ (Eliot), 392 ‘Premesse per l’intervento’ (Albertini), 247 press see newspapers; periodicals Press Bureau (France), 20 establishment of, 4 Press Bureau (Great Britain), 177–8, 185, 228–30 Press Law (Ottoman Empire), 475 price increases, 23–4, 26, 37–8 Prieto, Sara, 176, 230 Prims, Floris, 150, 152–6 Princip, Gavrilo, 211, 221 ‘Printemps’ (children’s novels series), 110 printing networks, 33–6 print magazines digital archives vs, 62–3 intimate culture of, 68–9 prisoner-of-war camp journals, 319–32 financing for, 324 as genre, 331–2 Indian newspapers, 417 international encounters in, 330–2 poetry in, 325–8 reading and learning cultures in, 328–30 see also internment camp journals Proctor, Tammy, 434 ‘The Profits and Loss of War’ (Lorimer), 166 progressive education, children’s magazines and, 96 Proodos, 486–7 propaganda absence in trench journals of, 306–7 Armenian genocide and, 261–2 avant-garde critique of, 389–91 battlefield reporting and dissemination of, 231–9 Brooke’s poetry and, 122 in Canadian periodicals, 461 in children’s magazines, 95–6, 98 First World War periodicals and, 20–7

7803_Demoor et al.indd 531

in Indian newspapers, 417, 424–6 Kipling’s contributions of, 117–18 in Ladino press, 493–4 organisations established for, 4 photography and, 194–203 in poetry, 122–4 reality of war vs, 88–9 US journalists and, 162–4 war correspondents and pressures of, 176–8, 183–5 wartime journals endorsement of, 42–3 in wartime periodicals, 116 wartime periodicals as counter to, 7–8 ProQuest Trench Journals and Unit Magazines of the First World War (database), 57–8 proto-Dadaists, 139–40 psychological weapons, wartime publications as, 8 public engagement, digital archives of wartime periodicals and, 58–61 public opinion Armenian genocide and, 267 wartime publications’ influence on, 7–9, 126 Publishers’ Circular, 21 Puls, Hans, 325 Punch, 6, 120, 124, 237–8 Punjab (India), newspapers and gazettes in, 417–21 Quaker magazines, 6 Quarterly, 119 Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service, 339–40 Queen Mary’s Hospital, Sidcup, 340 Queue, 44 race and racism in Canadian military, 468 in German colonial newspapers, 406–9 Indian newspapers and, 418–21 in trench journals, 310–15 see also class differences Rai, Lala Lajpat, 415 Rasmussen, Anne, 403 Ravished Armenia or Auction of Souls (film), 264 Rawlinson, Henry, 232, 235 Ray, Deeptanil, 416 Read, Herbert, 102, 384

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532 index reading communal, of periodicals, 36, 275, 475 networks and, 36, 39, 40, 45, 435 periodicals, conditions of war and, 6, 18 periodical form and, 84 prisoner-of-war journals and culture of, 328–30 ‘sideways’ (Hughes), 72 ‘tessellated’ (Lanning), 98 see also literacy rates Red Cross Magazine, 261 Redlich, Josef, 220 Refugeeliefde (Prims), 154 refugees Belgian exile press and, 146–9, 153–4, 157–8 internment camp newspapers and, 320 Regulation 17 (Canada), 467 Reichspost, 215, 218 Reilly, Catherine, 116 religious communities, Canadian war effort and, 4, 68 ‘Relocation and Resettlement Law’ (Sevk ve Iskân Kanunu), 259 Relt, E. G. B., 465 Remak, Joachim, 212 Remarque, Erich Maria, 429 remediation theory, 193 Rendall, Vernon, 7 Repington, Charles à Court, 178 Research Clique (China), 451 Reuters, 9, 229, 263 ‘A Review of Contemporary Art’ (Lewis), 392 Review of Reviews, 237 Reznick, Jeffrey, 338, 346–9 ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ (Eliot), 392 Rhys, Ernest, 390 Rhythm, 119 Richard, Paul, 425 ‘The Richard Mutt Case,’ 139 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 8 Rinehart, Mary Robert, 162, 167–70 Ringham, H. T., 44 Rising Sun, 43 Risorgimento ideology, Italian press and, 245, 249–50 Rivers, William Halse, 126 Rivière, Jacqueline (Jeanne Spallarossa), 99 Roberts, F. J., 34 Roberts, Hilary, 5 Robertson Advocate, 436–7

7803_Demoor et al.indd 532

Roché, Henri Pierre, 138 Rockwell, Norman, 168, 170 Rodríguez, Dylan, 332 Rojî Kurd (Istanbul), 490 Rolland, Romain, 356–7 Roma Futurista, 141 Roma people, in Ottoman Empire, 310–11 Roneo machines, 36 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 290 Roosevelt, Theodore, 262 Rosenberg, Isaac, 119–20, 126, 390 Row, H. St C., 74 Rowley, Evelyn, 297 Roy, Ashutosh, 428 Royal Army Medical Corps, 338–41 Royal College of Music Magazine, 120 Royal Commission on Paper, 21 Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, 36 Royal Leicestershire Regiment, 38 Royal Pavilion Military Hospital, 39 Rümanien in Wort und Bild, 311–12 Russell, Bertrand, 125, 357 Russell, Herbert, 181, 229 Russia Armenia and, 258–9, 262–3, 267 Armenian press coverage of, 481 Austria-Hungary and, 213–14, 217 logistics of press in, 278–9 Ottoman Empire and, 488–9 readers’ letters to newspapers in, 276–8 Serbia and, 214, 216, 218 uneducated readers in, 275–6 war coverage in, 167 Russian Freedom, 280 Russian Populist movement, 479 Russian Records, 275 Russian Revolution, 11, 183, 273–82 First World War and, 279–82 in Indian newspapers, 419 Russian Wealth, 276–7 Russian Word, 275, 278–9 Russolo, Luigi, 132–3 Rutherford, Andrew, 117 Rutten, Georges, 150, 152–3, 157 Sabah, 476 ‘Sac à Malices’ column (Fillette), 105 Sackville, Margaret, 122 Saidi, Ramazan, 409–10 Salandra, Antonio, 246, 248, 251–2 sales strategies for wartime journals, 36–40

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index 533 Salmond, J. B., 1 Salonika, unit journals in, 38–9, 43–4 Salvemini, Gaetano, 254 Samiotakis, Iakovos, 488 Samouprava, 221 Sandhya, 416 Sandweiss, Martha A., 193–4 San Francisco Chronicle, 234–5 Sant’Elia, Antonio, 133 Sap, Gustaaf, 154 Šaranec, Danilo, 217 Sarbadhikari, Sisir Prasad, 427 Şark ve Kurdistan (Istanbul), 490 Sartor Resartus (Carlyle), 329 Sassoon, Siegfried, 116, 119, 124–6, 175, 183, 185, 353 satirical magazines in Austria-Hungary, 215–16 in Britain, 237 in Ottoman Empire, 478 wartime emergence of, 4 Saturday Evening Post, 118, 162–70 Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, 117 Saunders, Helen, 392 Saunders, Nicholas J., 17 Schäfer, Corinna, 402 Scheer, Tamar, 213 Scholes, Robert, 384 Schollaert, François, 153 ‘Schweizer Fieber’ (Swiss Fever), 327 Scientific American, 21 Scots Magazine, 1 Scotsman, 43, 234 Scott, Marion, 120 ‘Sea Constables: A Tale of 15’ (Kipling), 118 Seal, Graham, 2, 40, 68–72 Secolo XIX, 246 Second Constitutional period (Ottoman Empire), 475 Second World War, advertising during, 292, 297–9 Seizanis, Miltiadis D., 488 Seligman, V. J., 44 Sen, Prafulla Chandra, 428–9 Sephardic Jews, Ladino press and, 491–4 Serbia Balkan Wars and, 217–18 First World War and, 211–12, 221–2 Hungarian nationalism and, 217 journalism in, 213–14, 218–20

7803_Demoor et al.indd 533

origins of press in, 212–14 pre-war media landscape in, 214–15, 218–22 propaganda concerning, 218–20 Serbskiia novini, 213 serial communication, magazines as, 95–6, 98–9 Settimelli, Emilio, 132, 388 Seventh Manchester Sentry, 40 Severini, Gino, 387, 392 Sex Disqualification Act (UK), 380 Shams al-’Adala, 483 Shanghai News, 450 Sharp, Evelyn, 371 Shaw, George Bernard, 355 Sheard, Virna, 124 Sheffield, Gary, 239 Shell Chippings, 378 Shell Magazine, 378 shell shock, memory of war and, 82–92 as mnemonic medium, 86–91 terminology of, 94n.50 treatment of, 6, 347 Shenbao see Shanghai News Shibao see Eastern Times Shil’, Sofia N., 275 Shi Liangcai, 450 Shiwubao see Current Affairs SIC, 4 Sidebotham, Herbert, 234 Sidgwick & Jackson, 123 Sidney, Philip (Sir), 123 Si Eda, 41 Sifakis, Nikolaos, 488 Signal Company, Royal Naval Division Engineers, 37 Simavi, Sedat, 478 Simon, Fritz, 308 Simonis, H., 23 Simplicissimus, 215 Sinclair, May, 121 sintesi teatrali, 133 Sirius, 394 Sironi, Mario, 132–4 Sisterhood of International Peace, 358 Sitwell, Edith, 120 Skenderidis, Alexandros, 486 Sketch, 43 Slavenoserbskij magazine, 213 Sling, 74–5

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534 index Smith, Angela, 375 Smith, Cicely, 124 Smith, Ernest, 88 Smith, F. E., 228–9 Smith, W. H., 35 Snapper, 41 Snyder, Carey, 2 Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria, 214 Socialist Revolutionary Party (Russia), 278–9 social networks in First World War, 32–3 in wartime journals, 38, 40–4 social status, periodical materiality and, 19–20 Societé Parisienne d’Édition, 96 Society of Friends, 329–30 Society of Independent Artists, 138 Soffici, Ardengo, 132, 134, 387 Soldatenpennen (Soldiers’ Pens) series, 154 ‘Soldier’s Declaration’ (Sassoon), 183 Soldier’s Truth, 274, 276 ‘The Soldier’ (Brooke), 122 Solomonidis, Sokratis, 488 ‘Some Trench Scenes’ (Graves), 119 Somigli, Luca, 387–8 Somme, Battle of, 468 reporting on, 230 ‘Song of Songs’ (Owen), 121 ‘Song of the Soldiers’ (Hardy), 116 Sonnino, Sidney, 247 Sontag, Susan, 291 Sorley, Charles Hamilton, 119, 124, 126 South African Peace and Arbitration Society, 358 South African Women in Council, 120 ‘Southern’ Cross, 338, 341–2, 344–7 Southern Mail, 436–7 Southern Slav Question, 217–18 Southland Times, 442 Spanish flu see influenza pandemic of 1918 Spanoudis, Konstantinos P., 486 Special Organisation (Ottoman Empire), 259 Spectator, 119, 120, 124 Speech, 278–9 Spencer, Ellen, 124 Sphere, 43, 117, 122, 123 Sphinx, 39 Sprig of Shillelagh, 36, 73–4 Srpske novine, 217

7803_Demoor et al.indd 534

Stam, Christine, 19 Standard of C Company, 310 Star, 123 Stawell, Florence, 356 steamship newspapers, 14n.39 Stefani, 263 Stella, Joseph, 138 ‘Stella’ (children’s novels series), 110 Stevenson, Iain, 21 Stieglitz, Alfred, 135–7, 138–9 St. John Daily Telegraph and the Sun, 462 Stobsiade, 319–32 Stockdale, Melissa, 281 Stock Exchange Records, 280 Story-Teller, 118 ‘The Story of the Bengal Ambulance Corps’ (Sen), 428–9 Strand Magazine, 1, 6, 22–3, 118 ‘Strange Alliances’ (Lorimer), 166 Streatham News, 42 The Street of Ink (Simonis), 23 Strong, Charles, 358 St Vitus Day see Vidovdan Sub Rosa, 35 Südwest, 402, 408, 411 Südwestbote, 404 suffrage movement, 368–80 First World War and, 370–6 Suffragette, 370 Suffragette News Sheet, 371 Suffragettes of the Women’s Social and Political Union, 371 Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette, 90–1 supply networks, 32 ‘Suppose America Declared War on Germany’ (Angell), 170 surenfant in French popular culture, 109 Suttner, Bertha von, 353 Suvorin, Aleksei A., 276 Swadeshimitram, 416 Swanwick, Helena, 379 ‘Swept and Garnished’ (Kipling), 118 Swinton, Ernest, 179, 229 Swiss Relief Committee, 261 Switchboard, 37 Switzerland, wartime periodicals in, 135–40 Sydney Morning Herald, 235–6 Syndicat national des journalists, 4 Syria, Arabic newspapers in, 483–6

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index 535 Tabbara, Ahmad, 484–6 Tacatacteufteuf, 54 Tachydromos, 486 Taft, William Howard, 169 Tagore, Abanindranath, 424 Tagore, Rabindranath, 424–5 Talat Pasha, 262, 265, 476–7 ‘Tales of “The Trade”’ (Kipling), 118 Tanin, 475–6 Tarr (Lewis), 385 Tatler, 41 Tatsoglou, Layrentios, 489 Tatthavabodhini Patrika, 427 Taubenberg, Jeffrey, 298 Taxette, 380 Taylor, Philip, 176–7 Tehlirian, Soghomon, 264 Telegram (Toronto), 462 Telegraph (Toronto), 462 telegraph, World War I and, 9–12 in Canada, 463–4 in Russia, 279 Territorial Forces Nursing Service, 340 Territorial Royal Army Medical Corps, 339–40 Teşkilât i-Mahsusa see Special Organisation (Ottoman Empire) Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), 63 Thacker, Andrew, 2 Thames Star, 439–41 theatre, in trenches, 308–9 thematic research collections, digital archives and, 57–8 ‘Things we need to know’ columns, 74 Thomas, Edward, 121, 389–91 Thomson, Alex, 471 Thomson, D. C., 21, 22 Tijdingen, 150 Tilak, Bal Gangadhar, 417 Timaru Herald, 439–40 Time and Tide, 124, 380 Time Magazine, 292, 295 Times Armistice Supplement, 117 Times Literary Supplement, 41, 120, 122, 124–5 The Times, 3, 41–2, 83, 85, 177–80, 184, 186 Armenian genocide in, 262–3 battle news in, 228–9, 233–5 influence of, 215 influenza pandemic coverage in, 288–9 poetry in, 116–19, 122–6

7803_Demoor et al.indd 535

Tingel-Tangel, 308 Tintin series, 109 Tokushima-Anzeiger, 320 Tolstoy, Leo, 281 Tomes, Nancy, 291–2 Toronto Daily Star, 236, 463, 469 Torre, Andrea, 246 Toshigian, Vahan, 482 To the Lighthouse (Woolf), 53 Towheed, Shafquat, 5–6, 44 Toynbee, Arnold J., 261, 267 Tranchman Echo, 37, 39 transnational connectivity, World War I and, 9–12 Traue, Jim, 435 Treaty of Lausanne, 267 Treaty of London, 146, 433 Treaty of Versailles, 449, 453–5 trench journals authors and readers of, 305–6 censorship of, 305–6 cross-dressing and entertainment in, 307–10 cultural stereotypes, gender and race in, 310–15 distribution strategies for, 37–40, 305–6 editors of, 46n.19 as historical phenomenon, 41 information and social networks in, 40–4 intimate culture in, 68–72 networks in, 33, 34 overview of, 305–15 photography and, 197–203 purpose of, 306–7 reprinted news in, 43 in Russia, 276, 278 satirisation of war correspondents in, 185 tradition of, 2 Trench Truth, 276, 278 trench warfare disillusionment with, 87–91 hygiene and, 294–9 Tribuna, 247, 249–50 Tribunal, 354 Tribune (Lahore), 416, 418, 419–20 Triple Alliance, 244–5, 250–2 Triple Entente, Declaration of, 262–4, 481, 487 troopship journals, 35 Troop Supply Company, Army Service Corps, British Army, 38

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536 index Trove (database), 56, 435 ‘The Trumpet’ (Tagore), 424–5 Truth, 43, 275 Tsourouktsoglou, Nikolaos, 488 Tuckwell, Gertrude, 377 Turkey Allied occupation of, 477–8 Armenian genocide and, 263 journalism and press in, 477–8 stereotypes in trench journals of, 311–13 Turkish Republic, 259, 267 Turkish War of Independence, 482–3 Turrell, Helen, 118–19 ‘Two Poems by Soldiers’ (Graves & Sassoon), 119 Tynan, Katharine, 124 typography, in wartime periodical advertisements, 437–44 Tyro, 393 Tysmans, Angela, 157 Tzara, Tristan, 135, 140, 394 Ujedinjenje ili smrt, 214 Underdown, Emily, 124 ‘Unidentified’ (Borden), 121 Union of Democratic Control, 354, 362 United Cable Service (Australia), 229 United Kingdom see Great Britain United Press International, 229, 465 United States Armenian massacre and, 261, 262 avant garde in, 135–40 battle reporting by journalists from, 229–33 discourse of war in, 164–70 disease and military in advertisements by, 293 First World War journalism and, 161–4 German soldiers’ internment camps in, 320–2 influenza pandemic impact in, 287–8, 294–9 photography of American West, 193–4 women’s pacifism in, 358 United Suffragists, 371 unit journals, 34–40 civilian press excerpts in, 43 reprints in, 42 see also trench journals Universal Peace Congresses, 352–3 ‘The Unknown’ (Thomas), 121

7803_Demoor et al.indd 536

‘Un soir d’hiver’ (Verhaeren), 389–90 Untimely Thoughts (Gorky), 277 ‘Uraisi, ‘Abd al-Ghani al-, 484 Usambara Post, 402, 404–5 US National Archives, 57, 59–61, 63 vaccines, influenza epidemic and, 297 Vahdeti, Derviş, 475 Vakil, 419 Vakit, 476–7 Valet, André, 105 Valle, Jo (Joseph), 105 Van Cauwelaert, August, 155 Van Cauwelaert, Frans, 150–2, 154–6 van den Plas, Louise, 433 Van de Perre, Alfons, 150–6 Van Dijck, Cedric, 69, 74 Vangramberen, Victor, 156 Van Leeuwen, Theo, 190, 435 Van Mierlo, Jozef, 152–3 Vann’Antò, 131 Van Puymbroeck, Birgit, 69, 74 Vela Latina, 130, 132–3, 136 Venezelos, Eleftherios, 488 verbo-visual poetry, 136 Verduyn, Jozef, 156d Verhaeren, Émile, 389 Verjin Lur, 478–9, 482 Verschaeve, Cyriel, 156 Vic’s Patrol, 40, 41 Videlier, Philippe, 191 Vidovdan (Serbian National holiday), 211 ‘The Vigilantes’ group, 164 Village Herald, 276 Vimy Ridge, Canadian attack on, 470 Vischer, Adolf Lucas, 320–1 ‘A Vision of Mud’ (Saunders), 392 ‘A Visit to the Front’ (de Maeztu), 384 visual culture, emergence of, 96 Vlaamse Hogeschooluitbreiding (VHU), 150 Vodovozov, Vasilii, 275 Voices, 391 Volkan, 475 VölkerFriede, 354 Volksbureel, 153, 156 Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD), 5, 340–1, 344–5, 348–9 Volunteer Units in the County of Kent, 37 von Bernstorff (Count), 262 von Bülow, Bernhard, 247 von Eichendorff, Joseph, 328

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index 537 von Metternich, Klemens, 213 Vorticism, 6, 391–4 Voss, Paul J., 52 Vote, 375, 380 Votes for Women, 371–3, 370 Votes for Women Fellowship, 371 Voutyras, Stavros I., 486 Vrij België, 147–9, 151–2, 154–7 Vu, 205 Wanguo gongbao see All Nations Gazette Wairarapa Age, 443 Wairarapa Daily Times, 443 Walder, Herwarth, 385 War and Self-Determination (Ghosh), 426 war correspondents, 175–86 Amiens battle reporting by, 231–9 antiwar movement and, 183–5 Armenian genocide and, 263–4 battle reporting by, 227–39 external pressures on, 176–8 military commanders’ ties to, 184 official correspondents, 180–3 reassessment of, 185–6 women as, 187n.17 war culture thesis, 316n.8 Ward, Douglas B., 165 War Illustrated, 18–19, 20, 22, 27–9, 192, 238 bound format for, 27–8 War Illustrated Album-de-Luxe, 28 War Measures Act (Canada), 228, 467 War News in India, 417–18 War on War League, 354 War on War Gazette, 354 ‘War Poems from The Times,’ 424 ‘War Poetry’ (Thomas), 390 War Precautions Act (Australia), 228 War Press Office (Germany), 4 War Propaganda Bureau (Austria-Hungary), 8 War Propaganda Bureau (Great Britain), 116, 117–18, 177; see also Wellington House Warren, Maude Radford, 168 war reporting censorship of, 4 criticism of, 42–3 ‘War the Creator’ (Burgess), 164 ‘The War and the Schools’ (Kipling), 118 ‘The War in the Mountains’ (Kipling), 118 wartime periodicals

7803_Demoor et al.indd 537

advertising in, 23–9 affect and emotion in, 66–78 Australia, 433–44 avant-garde journals, 384–95 battle reporting in, 228–39 Belgian exile press and, 146–52 in Canada, 461–71 in China, 449–55 communication networks in, 33 correspondents’ style in, 176–86 cultural and geographical contexts, 8–12 as cultural memory, 53–63 digital archives of, 51–63 distribution and sales strategies, 36–40 emergence of, 1–5 eulogies in, 122–4 forms and functions, 5–9 French-Canadian papers, 467–8 in German Colonial Africa, 401–12 hospital journals, 338–49 in India, 415–29 internment camp newspapers, 320–2 labour journals, 368–80 loyalty and altruism and, 116–17 materiality of, 20–7 network-based approach to, 44–5 New Zealand, 433–44 object and subject in, 69–72, 78n.2 pacifist journals, 352–63 paper rationing impact on, 21–2 photography in, 190–205 poetry in, 116–22 price increases for, 22–3 prisoner-of-war camp newspapers, 319–32 public opinion and propaganda in, 116 quest for identity in, 119–22 shell shock reports in, 89–91 staff attrition at, 5 suffrage press and, 368–80 trench journals, 305–15 war victim, cultural memory and, 92 ‘Was dann?’, 327–8 Washington Conference, 449 Washington Herald, 262–3 Watson, David, 464 Watson, William, 424 Watts, G. F., 22 wedding notices in hospital journals, 341 Wellcome Collection, 57, 59–60, 63 Wellington House, 8, 162–4; see also War Propaganda Bureau (Great Britain)

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538 index Wells, H. G., 8 Werfel, Franz, 259 Werkman, H. N., 35 Werner, Marta L., 52 West, Rebecca, 357 Western Press Association, 471 West Kent Yeomanry, 55 Westminster Gazette, 116, 117, 119, 123, 125, 232 Wharton, Edith, 6–7 Whistler, J. A., 22 White Book (report), 163 Whitehorn, Alan, 260 Whizz-Bang, 35, 40, 55, 74, 77, 313 Wiener Zeitung, 215 Wiggle Waggle, 55 Wildman, Allan, 274 ‘Wild Yearning for Home’ (Puls), 325 Wilkinson, Glenn R., 7 ‘Will America Dress Herself? The Effects of the War on Fashion’ (Lowe), 169 Williams, Kevin, 176 Willison, J. S., 471 Wilson, Herbert Wrigley, 20 Wilson, Woodrow, 163, 166, 170, 491 Windsor Record, 471 Winnipeg Free Press, 462 Winnipeg Tribune, 466 Winter, Jay, 81–3, 85, 87, 89, 91 Wipers Times, 34–5, 55 ‘Wireless Imagination and Words in Freedom’ (Marinetti), 387 Wise, Stephen, 261 Wister, Owen, 170 With the Colours, 46n.20 With the Wounded, 36 Witness (Montreal), 463 Woman at Home, 19–20, 23, 121 Woman Clerk, 380 Woman Engineer, 380 Woman’s Dreadnought, 125, 375 Woman’s Home Companion, 6–7 Woman Teacher, 380 Woman Worker, 377–9 women Armenian press and, 482–3 in Australia and New Zealand, 433–44 Australian and New Zealand advertising for, 436–44 in German colonial newspapers, 406–9

7803_Demoor et al.indd 538

hospital journal depictions of, 342, 344–6 influenza pandemic narrative and, 288–9 in trench journals, 310–15 in war periodicals, 86 in wartime Belgium, 433 Women’s Co-Operative Guild, 374 Women’s Freedom League, 372, 375 Women’s Industrial Council, 377 Women’s Industrial News, 377 Women’s Institutes, 378–9 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 357–9, 363, 374 news-sheet of, 359 Women’s Labour League, 378 Women’s Land Army, 5, 378–9 women’s movement labour movement and, 376–9 pacifist journals and, 357–63 in post-war era, 379–80 suffrage and labour journals and, 368–80 Women’s Party, 370 Women’s Peace Congress, 361 Women’s Peace Party (US), 358 women’s periodicals expansion of, 19 history of, 2 in India, 421 suffrage movement and, 369 wartime expansion of, 5 women’s rights, advertising and, 291–9 Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), 368, 370–2 Women’s Suffrage National Aid Corps, 375 Women’s Trade Union League, 377–8 Women’s Trade Union Review, 377 women writers poetry by, 124 at Saturday Evening Post, 167–8 as war correspondents, 187n.17 wartime periodicals and, 6–7, 121–2 Wong, Hannah, 136–7 Wood, Beatrice, 138, 139 Wood, Francis Derwent, 340 Woodville, Richard Caton, 7 Woolf, Virginia, 53, 124–5 Worker Newspaper, 277 Workers’ Dreadnought, 375, 380 Workers’ Socialist Federation, 375

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index 539 Workers’ Suffrage Federation, 375 World Affairs, 352 ‘Writing a War Story’ (Wharton), 6–7 Wulfman, Cliff, 384 Wykehamist, 118

Ypres battlefields of, 81, 83–6 First Battle of, 146 Second Battle of, 464 Yugoslavist movement, 219

Xinbao see New Paper Xinmin congbao see New Citizen Xin qingnian see New Youth Xueheng see Critical Review

Zamindar, 415, 418–21 Zang Tumb Tumb (Marinetti), 133 Zanos, Tonis, 488 Zastava, 217, 219–20 Zaven, Tigran, 482 Zeit der Weltkriege (archive), 55 Zeitung der 10. Armee, 311–12 Zeppelin air attacks, 466 Zhamanak, 478–80 Zhoghovurd, 482 Zier, Édouard, 103 Zimmerwaldists movement, 279, 353 Zionism, in Ladino press, 492–4 Zürich artists in, 135–40 Dada in, 394–5 Zweig, Stefan, 8, 220

Yangchu, Yan, 10 Yekbûn (Istanbul), 490 Yemen, Ottoman Empire and, 475 YMCA, support for prisoner-of-war journals from, 324, 329–30 Young, Geoffrey, 88 Young, William, 91 Young India (Rai), 415 Young Turk revolution, 258–60, 264, 267, 486, 490 ‘Youth’ (Rosenberg), 120 Yperidis, Georgios K., 488

7803_Demoor et al.indd 539

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7803_Demoor et al.indd 540

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