Abstract
Although trench newspapers occasionally published verse or prose that contained highly personal views or renditions of experience, by and large the domain of the trench press is the public rather than the private sphere. Here we may observe the workings of everyday interaction between groups as they go about fighting and attempting to survive the war. The world conveyed in, and reflected by the trench publication is a collective and shared one in which the individual is mostly subsumed by the larger communicative and emotional needs of the group to which he belongs. Such large and diverse bodies of mostly citizen soldiers contained individuals with a vast array of talents, abilities and interests, and some put these to use in the creation of the soldiers’ press.
The Splint Record is edited, printed, etc. in the zone of Shells, Bombs, Grenades, French Beer, Zeppelines [sic], Flares and Spies, but then everyone will know this once they have read it.
Splint Record, December 1916, p. 6
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Notes
See Beresford, C., the Fifth Gloucester Gazette: A Chronicle, Serious and Humorous, of the Battalion while serving with the British Expeditionary Force, Sutton, Stroud, 1993.
See Kent, D., From Trench and Troopship: The Experience of the Australian Imperial Force 1914–1919, Hale & Iremonger, Alexandria, NSW, 1999, pp. 113–15, for an account of problems faced by Australian publications.
This would seem to be a point of difference, one of several, in relation to the editors of German trench journals, see Nelson, R., German Soldier Newspapers of the Great War, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2011, pp. 22–7.
Schlesinger, A., ‘The Khaki Journalists, 1917–1919,’ The Mississippi Valley Historical Review vol 6, no 3, December 1919, pp. 350–59.
Brophy, John and Eric Partridge, Songs and Slang of the British Soldier, 1914–1918, The Scholartis Press, London, 1930.
The Spiker claimed, almost certainly accurately, to have been the earliest American soldier publication of the war, Cornbise, A., Ranks and Columns: Armed Forces Newspapers in American Wars, Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, 1993, pp. 82 and 180 fn 80.
See Giddings, Robert, The War Poets: The Lives and Writings of Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, and the Other Great Poets of the 1914–1918 War, Orion Books, New York, 1988, p. 8.
There is a considerable literature on this folkloric genre, summarised in the introduction to Seal, G., The Bare Fax, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, NSW, 1996.
Zeiger, Susan, In Uncle Sam’s Service : Women Workers with the American Expeditionary Force, 1917–1919, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1999.
As well as news, information, morale-boosting messages from the President and the like, its various editions, customised to some extent for each camp, also carried a good deal of soldier verse, see Rives, T., ‘The Work of Soldier Poetry in Kansas, 1917–1919,’ New Directions in Folklore, 7, 2003.
Kent, D., From Trench and Troopship, and Kent, D., ‘Troopship literature: “A life on the ocean wave”, 1914–19,’ Journal of the Australian War Memorial no 10, April 1987, pp. 3–10.
See also Seal, G., Inventing Anzac: The Digger and National Mythology, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2004
and Seal, G., Echoes of Anzac: The Voice of Australians at War, Lothian, South Melbourne, VIC, 2005.
Bean, C. E. W. (ed.), The Anzac Book, Cassell & Co, London, 1916.
See also Kent, D., ‘The Anzac Book and the Anzac Legend: C. E. W. Bean as Editor and Image-maker’, Australian Historical Studies vol 21, no 84, April 1985, pp. 376–90.
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© 2013 Graham Seal
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Seal, G. (2013). From the Trenches. In: The Soldiers’ Press. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303264_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303264_2
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