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The Palgrave Handbook of Artistic and Cultural Responses to War since 1914 pp 147–161Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Witnesses to Death: Soldiers on the Western Front

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Abstract

This chapter explores the response of British soldiers who fought on the Somme between July and November 1916 to bereavement. While historians concede that these soldiers were affected, sometimes profoundly, by their battlefield experiences, this is usually balanced by the belief that in time they became hardened to the sights of violent death. Nevertheless, the belief that emotional stoicism was such a vital part of the pervading construct of masculinity that emotional responses from soldiers were rare and when they did occur, were frowned on, deserves to be more thoroughly interrogated by historians. The diaries, memoirs, trench journals, and oral testimony of soldiers provide ample proof that they constructed, processed, or attempted to mask their feelings in a variety of ways in response to bereavement.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Dan Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory (London: Continuum, 2005), 45. Mark Hewitson, “German Soldiers and the Horrors of War: Fear of Death and Joy of Killing in 1870 and 1914,” History 101, no. 346 (2016): 415. Richard van Emden, The Quick and The Dead: Fallen Soldiers and Their Families in the Great War (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 56. Pat Jalland, Death in War and Peace: Loss and Grief in England, 1914–1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 16.

  2. 2.

    Malcolm Brown, Tommy Goes to War (Gloucestershire: The History Press, 1978), 161.

  3. 3.

    Harry Drinkwater, Harry’s War: The Great War Diary of Harry Drinkwater (St. Ives: Edbury Press, 2013). E.P.F. Lynch, Somme Mud: The Experiences of an Infantryman in France, 1916–1919 (London: Transworld Publishers, 2006).

  4. 4.

    This phrase, though not the viewpoint, was popularised by Alan Clark in his book The Donkeys (1961). The phrase itself is much older with variations of it dating back to the First Century.

  5. 5.

    For a more in-depth understanding of the Somme as a military campaign see: William Philpott, Blood Victory: The Sacrifice on the Somme (London: Abacus, 2014). Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, The Somme (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006). Gary Sheffield, The Somme (London: Cassell, 2003).

  6. 6.

    Philpott, Bloody Victory, 625.

  7. 7.

    Jay Winter, “Representations of War on the Western Front, 1914–18: Some Reflection in Cultural Ambivalence” in Power, Violence and Mass Death in Pre-modern and Modern Times, ed. Joseph Canning, Hartmut Lehmann and Jay Winter (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 205–210.

  8. 8.

    Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 14–18: Understanding the Great War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), 204.

  9. 9.

    Colin Murray Parkes, Bereavement: Studies of Grief in Adult Life (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 107.

  10. 10.

    Michael Roper, The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 14.

  11. 11.

    Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 169.

  12. 12.

    Brown, Tommy Goes to War, 143.

  13. 13.

    Watson, Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 57.

  14. 14.

    Todman, The Great War, 63.

  15. 15.

    Tony Ashworth, Trench Warfare, 1916–1918: The Live and Let Live System (London and Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press, 1980), 155.

  16. 16.

    William G. Hay, Do Funerals Matter? The Purpose and Practice of Death Rituals (New York: Routledge, 2013), 11.

  17. 17.

    David French, Military Identities: The Regimental Systems, the British People and the British Army c. 1870–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 284.

  18. 18.

    Watson, Enduring the Great War, 63.

  19. 19.

    Alfred Percy Bulteel Irwin, 1973, 211, The Imperial War Museum.

  20. 20.

    Drinkwater, Harry’s War, 192.

  21. 21.

    Drinkwater, Harry’s War, 149.

  22. 22.

    For more information on the debates surrounding oral testimony see, Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral History Interviews (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), Alessandro Portelli, “The Peculiarities of Oral History,” History Workshop Journal, no. 12 (1981): 96–107.

  23. 23.

    Thomas Alfred Dewing, 1999, 19073, The Imperial War Museum.

  24. 24.

    Andre Loez, “Tears in the Trenches: A History of Emotions and the Experience of War,” in Uncovered Fields: Perspectives in First World War Studies, ed. Jenny Macleod and Pierre Purseigle (Boston, Brill Academic Publishers: 2004) 213.

  25. 25.

    “Editorial. 1916,” The Outpost, Aug 1, 1916.

  26. 26.

    H.C. A, “Editorial,” The Outpost, Oct 1, 1916.

  27. 27.

    J. G. Fuller, Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 137.

  28. 28.

    Fuller, Troop Morale and Popular Culture, 15.

  29. 29.

    H.C. A, “Editorial.”

  30. 30.

    Winter, “Representations of War on the Western Front,” 208. Winter, Death’s Men: Soldiers of the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 204.

  31. 31.

    Lieutenant Harold Harding Linzell, Fallen on the Somme: The War Diary of 2nd Lieutenant Harold Harding Linzell M.C. 7th Border Regiment, ed. M.A. Argyle (Bideford: Shadow Books, 2015), 47.

  32. 32.

    Jan Davies, “One Hundred Billion Dead: A General Theology of Death” in Ritual and Remembrance: Responses to Death in Human Societies, ed. Jan Davies (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994), 24. Hay, Do Funerals Matter?, 10.

  33. 33.

    E.P.F. Lynch, Somme Mud, 71.

  34. 34.

    Alexander Watson, Enduring the Great War, 67. Loez, “Tears in the Trenches,” 218.

  35. 35.

    Drinkwater, Harry’s War, 165.

  36. 36.

    Alexander Aitkens, Gallipoli to the Somme: Reflections of a New Zealand Infantryman (Wellington and Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1963), 140.

  37. 37.

    Aitkens, Gallipoli to the Somme, 160.

  38. 38.

    Roper, The Secret Battle, 14.

  39. 39.

    Eyre, Somme Harvest, 161.

  40. 40.

    Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 115.

  41. 41.

    Eyre, Somme Harvest, 161.

  42. 42.

    Jalland, Death in War and Peace, 20.

  43. 43.

    Eyre, Somme Harvest, 162.

  44. 44.

    Robert J. Lifton, The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 169–7.

  45. 45.

    Lifton, The Broken Connection, 171. Edward K. Rynearson, Retelling Violent Death (Philadelphia: Brumer-Routeldge, 2001), 21–5.

  46. 46.

    Lifton, The Broken Connection, 188.

  47. 47.

    Eyre, Somme Harvest, 211.

  48. 48.

    Denis Winter, Death’s Men, 138–9.

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  1. University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

    Natasha Silk

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  1. Natasha Silk
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Correspondence to Natasha Silk .

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  1. University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, QLD, Australia

    Martin Kerby , Margaret Baguley  & Janet McDonald ,  & 

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Silk, N. (2019). Witnesses to Death: Soldiers on the Western Front. In: Kerby, M., Baguley, M., McDonald, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Artistic and Cultural Responses to War since 1914. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96986-2_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96986-2_9

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