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victorian221b2019-12-18 12:35 pm
mightymads) wrote in victorian221b2019-12-18 12:35 pm
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Rec books about WWI?
I’d like to expand my knowledge on WWI which is quite rusty, to be honest. The last time I studied anything about it properly was at school, and that was about 15 years ago. Until I read Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters, it was but a historical event for me as the history program at my school wasn’t particularly strong. It was something from the textbooks, and that was all. The letters made me realise how tragic it was. They gave the sense of “immediate presence” and the taste of how it affected one particular family. So now I’d like to know more.
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For me, biographies are always a powerful way to learn about war and other huge events. Wilfred Owen is the person who always comes to my mind first when thinking about an individual whose life story seems to speak so powerfully to the WWI experience. His poetry is among the most famous to have come out of the war; he fought in some of the bloodiest battles, including the Somme, and was hospitalized for shell-shock. While there, he met another of the war's most famous poets, Siegfried Sassoon, and they adored each other (both were queer men, and although I don't think it's generally thought that they consummated an affair - or at least, if they did, it can't be known with any certainty - their correspondence nonetheless read as love letters, particularly on Owen's side). In the end, Owen voluntarily went back to the front rather than sitting out the rest of the war in England, as he could have done due to his medical history. He believed it was important to continue witnessing and writing about the war, and he felt that being an active combatant would give his voice and his critiques authenticity and credibility. He was killed in a meaningless skirmish seven days before the final cease-fire in 1918, at the age of 25.
I hear good things about Dominic Hibberd's 2002 book Wilfred Owen: A New Biography, if you'd like to read more about his life. (I'd like to do the same, I think this is going on my Christmas list). And of course his own collected poetry is widely available, too.
Finally, in our own fandom, oldshrewsburyian is a historian who has written an excellent Holmes story set during WWI, and I think she'd be a great person to talk to about all this :) Here's her fic, for those interested:
The Craven Hive (35627 words) by OldShrewsburyian
Chapters: 18/18
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes & John Watson
Characters: John Watson, Sherlock Holmes, Historical Character(s), Original Characters, Original Female Character(s)
Additional Tags: World War I, Canon Compliant, POV John Watson, Arthur Conan Doyle Canon References, Tea, London, Literary References & Allusions, England (Country), Hospitals, Case Fic, Smoking, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-War, Canon-Typical Violence, Death, Original Character Death(s), Original Character(s), Angst, Sherlock Holmes and Bees, Queer Gen, Canon Universe, Friendship/Love, Soldiers, John is a Very Good Doctor, Sherlock Plays the Violin, Background Relationships, Sherlock Holmes & John Watson Friendship, Background Femslash, Post-World War I, Asexual Sherlock, Background Slash, Angst and Feels, Moral Dilemmas, Angst with a Happy Ending, Platonic Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, Queerplatonic Relationships
Summary:
In the last days of the First World War, Dr. Watson returns from the service for which he departed in "His Last Bow," and looks for a new kind of work. He joins Dr. Arthur Hurst in his pioneering treatment of shell-shocked soldiers. But their work on the forefront of medical research, locked in battle against the destruction of the war, is disrupted by violent death. In addition to the obvious danger near at hand, there is the risk that this will discredit Hurst’s unusual methods. Dr. Watson does the only thing he can do: he calls in Holmes. The case will require their joint expertise, and all the wisdom of their shared experience.
This fic includes lots of emotional conversations, history, architecture, parlor music, and literary allusions. It is appearing in fortnightly installments (every other Sunday), and should be published in its entirety by February 2018.
Post-completion note for the curious: this does not explicitly ship Holmes and Watson as sexual partners, but is designed to be shipping- and shipper-friendly.
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And thank you for recommending the fic!
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https://youtu.be/iGVPxnxvFgU
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If you want some recent photos of WWI sights, you could try my blog from 28 April to 1 May last year and 27 - 30 April this year.
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I couldn't comment on your blog and just wanted to say that seeing the photos and reading your impressions was very interesting. I'll look up the book you recommended and I should watch The Crimson Field
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A classic is Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory. More recent review articles will sum it up (and changes in the field since), but it's a beautiful work in its own right.
David Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War, is a collection of letters you might be interested in.
Among primary sources, I'd recommend Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth, which is tender and searing by turns.
A few summing-up thoughts (and I'd be happy to recommend more books for more specific things you're curious about:)
No one agrees on the causes of the war. The centenary of its coming produced not only commemorative campaigns from art installations to Twitter initiatives, but a number of monographs. Was Europe sleepwalking? Was Europe terrified? Historians disagree… and so did contemporaries. From 1914 onwards, the changes that the war brought to society resulted in the time that came before becoming designated as “pre-war,” a time with its own contradictions and contrasts, and, certainly, with its own changes and controversies, but suddenly marked off as starkly, crucially different. This was a total war, and that really cannot be overemphasized. Participation and fear both came to mean new things. Refugees were in England by September 1914. Displacement and violence were experienced by vast numbers of civilians, and civilian life changed drastically as well.
We see in England's and Europe's upper classes, especially, the idea that civilization as known had played itself out… that after the long debates of the 19th century, what was needed was an upheaval, a crisis that would allow each of these powers to reveal or rediscover or reacquire their vitality; that they could be renewed through a purgative experience. You may also see a sentiment somewhat analogous to that of Cecil Rhodes, exhorting young men to leave boring offices for conquest on the plains of Africa… here the idea is less terribly imperialist, but associated with similar ideas of virile heroism. For the men (and women) themselves who joined up, the concept was usually more muted, an idealistic sense of duty which may be hard for us, now, to understand; it was hard to understand even for those looking back on their own sentiments of 1914 in the later years of the war… Again, accounts differ. As the universities were drained of their best and their brightest, the middle class brought up to ideas of both superiority and obligation, there were triumphalist church services held in their honor; the organs of Oxford and Cambridge, Paris and Berlin, rolled mightily. But accounts also survive of a dulled, apprehensive mood; of columns of recently-recruited men marching silently down the avenues.
The Western Front has given modern Europe many of its images of war. Here were the trenches, the mud, the weeks and months of shelling that changed the landscape of France in ways that can still be seen today; the battles that shook the earth across the sea. Here were the disasters, the travesties that found their ways into poems and novels and nightmares, into drawings of destroyed landscapes and fractured men that were deemed too obscene for public exhibition.
The scope of the conflict owed much to the fact that it was an imperial war. The infamously narrow strips of blood and mud and metal on the Western Front were fought over not only for their own sakes, but also very much for the sake of which of the empires in the conflict would have the power to draw the maps of the future.
In the aftermath, all the members of the League of Nations — everybody but Germany and the Ottoman Empire, or what Woodrow Wilson called “dismembered Turkey,” — agreed not to go to war without first submitting the decision for either arbitration or discussion. What collective security means, in practice, is that the members of the league took oaths to protect the “territorial integrity and existing political independence” of other member states against external influence. There was here a significant caveat: there is no oath taken to protect member states from internal disruption. So… Spain’s Civil War, for instance, was not something on which the League of Nations was obliged to step in.
The civilian population, too, was changed—often traumatized—by war. Air raids were a reality for the first time in WWI, meaning that, for urban populations at least, the war could happen anywhere, and at any time. Because of this, and because of the sheer shortage of raw materials, fuel, etc., blackouts were a necessity. Food shortages became increasingly acute as the war dragged on. Rationing was severe in Britain; in France, too many fields had become war zones; in Eastern Europe, too, where the grain fields of Hungary and Romania had been plundered and trampled. Part of the difficulty of collectively processing WWI came from the fact that the hardships of war didn’t automatically end with the declaration of a truce, or even with the signing of the peace treaty (which dragged on so long, and was so conspicuously a space for political rivalries, that it was the subject of jokes even before it was done.)
Changes in the structure of civilian society also had to be coped with. Changes in laws about women’s participation in public life (voting, getting university degrees) seemed almost anticlimactic… freedom in women’s travel and participation in careers had become de facto a necessity, and continued to be so, due to the vast numbers of men killed or incapacitated.
...Clearly, I could go on, but I'll stop doing so for now!
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Also the movie "They Shall Not Grow Old", a documentary made from actual footage, restored.
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