The Great War and the Moving Image

Michael Hammond, Adrian Smith

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138207578
• eBook ISBN: 9781315461632
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Great War and the Moving Image focuses upon the Allied war effort on the Western Front and in the Mediterranean. In doing so, the book addresses topics ranging from how carefully selected images projected a positive portrayal of ambulance trains, through film's instructional role promoting self-sufficiency on the home front, to the vital role of makeshift YMCA cinemas both sides of the Channel.

With editors and contributors who are authorities on cinema in wartime Britain and on the British response to the challenge of 'total war', the volume highlights the power that the moving image had during the Great War. In the introduction, the editors consider why the First World War can be seen as the first uniquely cinematic conflict. Later, historians from Britain, Australia, and America go on to explore film's pioneering role as a powerful vehicle for propaganda at home and abroad, and its contribution to maintaining morale among soldiers on the front line as well as across civilian audiences back home.

WRITING HISTORY ON THE PAGE AND SCREEN: MEDIATING CONFLICT THROUGH BRITAIN’S FIRST WORLD WAR AMBULANCE TRAINS

Rebecca Harrison

This article examines how different forms of writing mediate the past. In doing so, I focus on two ostensibly distinct types of authorship: the light that writing projected on-screen, and the life-writings found in letters and diaries. Between 1914 and 1919 in Britain, cinema and personal testimonies intervened in historiography in apparent opposition to one another. It is easy for us now to assume that state-censored, propagandistic movies narrated the state’s version of the First World War, while secret, illegal accounts written by personnel on the Western Front line described actuality (while letter writing was permitted – subject to censorship – all serving personnel were banned from keeping diaries). However, a study of British ambulance trains reveals that films and life-writings have a shared vocabulary, which complicates the two media’s connections to history and to one another. I argue that by interrogating the motifs congruent on the screen and the page, and by reading films and testimonies in tandem, we can rediscover effaced narratives about wartime conditions and marginalised peoples.

The British government’s propaganda strategy during the First World War did not initially include film. Military and parliamentary authorities concealed the conflict’s scale from the British public, and strict censorship was at odds with the revelatory nature of cinema, which necessarily made visible the conditions facing the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in France. However, the Ministry of Information (MoI, the government department set up to regulate wartime news) increasingly recognised the moving image’s value not only in reaching large audiences, but also in persuading people to support the war effort. In January 1916, footage shot at a battle was released in Britain for the first time and proved popular with viewers.¹ Later in 1916, a poem entitled ‘The War Films’ was printed in The Times. In the poem, Henry Newbold describes ‘[h]ow in a gleam have these revealed/The faith we had not found’.² His assertion that the films inspired a newfound ‘faith’ in viewers attests to film’s role in convincing the British public to back the war effort. So strong was the association between cinema-going and support for the BEF that by 1917, the MoI’s rhetoric demanded that viewers watched British war news ‘in order to save the country’.³

Popular pictures screened on the Home Front included scenes of battles, munitions and subaltern troops. One recurrent motif in wartime film was caregiving, and the ambulance train (AT) (all but forgotten in today’s histories of the war) was essential to an on-screen narrative about medical practice that the government propagated to reassure civilians about conditions in the military. For example, fiction films such as Under the Red Cross (1914), John and the Ambulance (1914) and Red Cross Pluck (1915) all, as their titles suggest, portrayed nurses and medical officers.⁴ Throughout the conflict, the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), Red Cross and the Friends’ Ambulance Unit (FAU) staffed over forty vehicles that carried patients across an extensive European rail network.⁵ Under the cover of darkness, the trains provided relative shelter to the injured and sick and romanticised depictions of the vehicles were prevalent in British media. The ATs featured in numerous articles in the daily press, covering subjects ranging from technical appraisals to descriptions about the work carried out on board.⁶ Additionally, there are at least nine surviving ambulance train films, including The Wonderful Organisation of the RAMC (1916), Behind the Lines with Our French Ally (1917) and The Military Power of France (1917).⁷

The AT films showed gleaming, white railway spaces that offered modern care to smiling troops. Personal testimonies by those on board the trains described the blood, dirt and life-threatening injuries experienced by the military off-camera. Nevertheless, there are three topoi (routine, medical instruments and whiteness) that are consistent throughout both cinematic and written accounts of the AT. I therefore examine why both public films and private testimonies shared a vocabulary when so many other disparities existed between the two media. In doing so, the article re-evaluates how we conceive of wartime propaganda and proposes that by reading between the lines of the surviving newsreels and personal testimonies, we can access the trains’ contested spaces and the experiences of the minority groups within.

Ambulance trains

ATs were used on the continent to transport sick and wounded soldiers from Casualty Clearing Stations (CCSs, semi-permanent medical establishments) to base hospitals and ports further afield. In 1914, the British army had only one such vehicle at its disposal.⁸ A report in The British Medical Journal described how on arrival in France, the French ‘allowed the English to beg, borrow and steal coal carriages wherever they could find them, at a time when the French themselves were very hard up for like accommodation’.⁹ Suitable vehicles were hard to acquire as most French rolling stock was sent south to avoid capture by the invading German army.¹⁰ Furthermore, the French rail network was running at full capacity, so even when the BEF obtained carriages, there was no certainty of using the coaches.¹¹ Consequently, the first eleven ATs operated by the British on the Western Front were improvised and unreliable.

By April 1915, eight months into the war, the borrowed trains evacuated 67,000 wounded troops to French ports.¹² The British government commissioned the nation’s requisitioned private rail companies (including Great Central, and London and South Western) to build new, more suitable caregiving facilities.¹³ With no formal blueprint to work from, many companies continued producing ambulance coaches that were inappropriate for the task. For example, the ‘Knights of Malta and the Grand Priory of Bohemia’ train only accommodated one hundred patients.¹⁴ John F. Plumridge suggests that the vehicle was designed to serve the staff rather than the patients, with the train’s inventory listing items including ‘glasses for champagne, port, claret, sherry, wine and liqueurs, as well as wine decanters and beer tumblers, spoons and nut crackers’.¹⁵ However, by 1916, numbers 12 to 42 were in service and all designed to a regulated standard. H. Massac Buist, a contemporary medical professional, claimed that bespoke vehicles were ‘undoubtedly better’ at serving the military’s requirements; the new coaches were therefore an improvement on the earlier models.¹⁶

Subsequently, those serving on board divided the British ATs into two groups. The first, according to an officer’s diary, were ‘[t]he green trains’, which referred to the vehicles compiled from French carriages. The green trains were numbered one to eleven.¹⁷ The second group, numbered twelve to forty-two, were ‘streamlined, painted a flat khaki colour, against which the white of the Red Cross show[ed] conspicuously’.¹⁸ The ‘khaki’ trains were the new vehicles, and, in Matron McCarthy’s words, ‘[a]ll coaches communicated’ (with through corridors) and were ‘most beautifully fitted up’.¹⁹ Leonard Horner, an FAU volunteer, described No. 15 AT in a letter to his cousin. The train was typical of the standardised design sent to France from 1915, in that it was ‘about 230 yards long’ and had fifteen coaches that looked ‘pretty much like an ordinary corridor train’. The orderlies ‘ha[d] the last coach on the train. There [were] four bunks in each compartment: two up, two down’.²⁰ The AT wards were similar in design to those found in contemporary hospitals. In permanent caregiving institutions, architects laid out wards along corridors, enabling nurses to inspect the patients with ease, while adding ‘a strong element of regimentation along with sanitary order’.²¹ Railway carriages, which often featured through corridors, were structures well suited for adaptation into hospital environments. However, the ATs were not equipped with the same amenities as hospitals. London institutions featured laboratories, schools, museums and spacious wards.²² Even the larger military hospitals in France ‘lack[ed] nothing that wealth c[ould] provide’ and offered ‘up-to-date treatments’.²³

While funding and space persistently restricted facilities inside the mobile trains, the staffs ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: The Great War and the Moving Image
• 1. Writing History on the Page and Screen: Mediating Conflict through Britain’s First World War Ambulance Trains
• 2. Everybody’s Business: Film, Food and Victory in the First World War
• 3. Forgetting their troubles for a while: Australian soldiers’ experiences of cinema during the First World War
• 4. Putting the moral into morale: YMCA cinemas on the Western Front, 1914–1918
• 5. ‘Snapshots’: Local Cinema Cultures in the Great War
• 6. Pixel Lions – the image of the soldier in First World War computer games
• Index