Matters of Conflict

Material Culture, Memory and the First World War

Nicholas J. Saunders

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134463718
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Archeologia

Matters of Conflict looks at the definitive invention of the twentieth century - industrialised war - and its vast and varied material legacy. From trench art and postcards through avant-garde art, museum collections and prosthetic limbs to battlefield landscapes, the book examines the First World War and its significance through the things it left behind. The contributions come from a multidisciplinary perspective, uniting previously compartmentalized disciplines such as anthropology, archaeology, cultural history, museology and art history in their focus on material culture. This innovative, hybrid approach investigates the 'social life' of objects in order to understand them as they move through time and space and intersect the lives of all who came in contact with them.
The resulting survey sets a new agenda for study of the First World War, and ultimately of all twentieth-century conflict.

1
MATERIAL CULTURE AND CONFLICT

The Great War, 1914–2003

Nicholas J. Saunders

Twentieth-century war is a unique cultural phenomenon. While all conflicts in history have produced dramatic shifts in human behaviour, the industrialised nature of modern war possesses a material and psychological intensity that embodies the extremes of our behaviours. Fundamentally, war is the transformation of matter through the agency of destruction; the character of modern technological warfare is such that it simultaneously creates and destroys more than any previous kind of conflict.

Since the 1970s there have been significant advances in our ability to conceptualise and understand the past. At the forefront of these developments has been the reappraisal of materiality – the ways in which we view and think about the things we make, and their complex and elusive meanings. The transformative quality of modern war’s material culture, and its ability to move across disciplinary boundaries, demands an anthropologically informed interdisciplinary response. Focused on material culture, such an approach offers to revitalise investigations into the physical and symbolic worlds that war has created, and that define us as subjects through memory, imagination, and technology.

For the First and Second World Wars, we occupy a unique moment in time – the furthest edge of living memory, the cusp upon which history becomes archaeology. Hitherto, the study of twentieth-century conflict has focused on military history and, variably, its political, economic and social consequences. But, as first-hand memory disappears, our views are inevitably shaped by the physical remains themselves, and by the interpretations of those who had no part in their design, production or original purpose. We are now in the realm of the object and its materiality, a world of multi-dimensional and multi-vocal meanings – fertile ground for anthropology. After all, modern conflicts are defined by their technologies – all are wars of matériel.

Arguably, no event is more significant for conceptualising and problematising these issues than the Great War of 1914–18, the world’s first global industrialised conflict. The material culture of the First World War was small (a bullet or machine-gun), intermediate (a tank or aeroplane), and large (a battleship or battlefield landscape). All share one defining feature – they are artefacts, the product of human activity rather than natural processes. In this sense, the Western Front is as much a cultural artefact as a Second World War V2 rocket as are photographs, films, war memorials, war souvenirs and museums. Similarly artefactual, though not always understood as such, are the war maimed (sometimes fitted with prostheses), specialist associations, and the post-war ‘presence of absence’ on the streets of large numbers of missing men. All are war-related materialities that create and perpetuate different engagements with conflict and its aftermath.

Conceiving materiality this way enables us to construct a biography of the object (Kopytoff 1986) – to explore its ‘social life’ through changing values and attitudes attached to it over time (Appadurai 1986). Many objects survive as expressions of ‘war beyond conflict’, revitalising meanings and creating new engagements between people and things. Not only is the variability of objects seen as social in origin but also objects themselves constitute the physical world by structuring the perceptions of those who live within it (Miller 1985: 204–5). Changing attitudes towards Armistice Day and its two minutes’ silence from 1919 to the present illustrate the overlap between physical, spiritual and sensory domains (see Richardson 1998). Symbolic empty tombs (cenotaphs) are a material focus for changing relationships between the living and the dead in a cross-generational interplay of past and present.

Consciously and subconsciously, we all interact with the objects that surround us. Our incessant and intimate interaction with endlessly varied artefacts is perhaps the most distinctive and significant feature of human life (Schiffer 1999: 2, 4). Perhaps as never before, we perceive during war an unfamiliar but underlying truth – that objects make people as much as people make objects (Pels 1998). The extreme behaviours provoked by war illustrate how an individual’s social being is determined by their relationship to the objects that represent them – how objects become metaphors for the self, a way of knowing oneself through things both present and absent (see Hoskins 1998: 195).

The passage of time and generations creates different interpretations of, and responses to, the materialities of war as they journey through social, geographical and symbolic space. A museum’s collection comes alive through interpretive contextualisation that identifies object and individual (or a succession of individuals) who come into contact with each other – each adding a layer to the accretion of meanings. The different (sometimes extraordinary) engagements between the British public and Great War objects displayed by the Imperial War Museum in its different locations in London before 1936 highlight these issues (Cornish, this volume).

To illustrate the potential of an anthropological approach to the materialities of the First World War, I will explore several distinct but inevitably linked topics: the nature of battlefield landscapes, the meanings of memorabilia, and the nascent archaeology of the war. Each offers a unique perspective on the same intricate web of objects, people, places and values whose interactive significance has so far been unacknowledged and little investigated.

Materiality and Great War landscapes

The Great War breached the boundary between materiality and spirituality, and between emotion and object, more than any previous conflict (see Becker 1998). One consequence of this was that, after 1918, something new was happening along the old Western and Eastern Fronts. Conflict locations were not simply left as decaying battlefields, but were actively becoming something else – a complex palimpsest of overlapping, multi-vocal landscapes. Often unbearably poignant, areas of the Isonzo in northeast Italy, the Ypres Salient in Belgium, and the Somme and Verdun in France, became prime examples of the social construction of landscape, of landscape as an ongoing process, which have implicated the lives of a succession of people since 1914 (see Hirsch 1995: 22–3).

Today, such places are contested by different groups who engage with their materiality in different ways (see Layton and Ucko 1999: 1) and whose experience of ‘being in’ their landscape produces a sense of place and belonging (Tilley 1994: 15). No longer are battlefields the inert empty backgrounds to military action, nor solely terrains of commemorative monumentality. Rather, like Stonehenge, the Gaza Strip, and the Soviet gulags, Great War battlefields are ‘something political, dynamic, and contested, something constantly open to renegotiation’ (Bender 1993: 276).

Two recent events emphasise this dynamic view of war-related landscapes. In March 2003, the Cross of Sacrifice monument at the First World War cemetery at Étaples near Boulogne in northern France was defaced with red graffiti. These included a swastika, and the message ‘Rosbeefs go home’ (Bremner and Hamilton 2003). More insidious was another message that stated that the 11,436 soldiers buried there were soiling French land (ibid.). In Iraq, in April, Lieutenant Rob Williams discovered the headstone of his great-grandfather in a desecrated war cemetery near Basra; he had died in 1916 of dysentery (Anon. 2003). Both events drew powerful and complex connections between the First World War and the latest 21st-century conflict, highlighting the contested nature of such locations, the dead within them, and differing national perceptions of a modern conflict whose roots lay in the political shaping of the Middle East in the aftermath of the Great War itself.

These events demonstrate the need to alter our theoretical engagement with such landscapes. Great War battlefields, and the Western Front especially, are neither single historical entities, nor fossilisations of four years of war. They are, at the very least,

composed, variously, of industrialized slaughter houses, vast tombs for ‘the missing’, places for returning refugees and contested reconstruction, popular tourist destinations, locations of memorials and pilgrimage, sites for archaeological research and cultural heritage development, and as still deadly places full of unexploded shells and bombs.

(Saunders 2001a: 37)

All of these landscapes occupy the same physical space. Perhaps only at such locations can so many different attitudes be held, and emotions engaged, by a group of people all standing in one place at the same time. Differing but simultaneous perceptions of place are a feature of cultural landscapes, but perhaps find their most extreme expression on battlefields, particularly those that have drawn in international, multi-ethnic and multi-faith armies.

On the Western Front, the Great War brought cataclysmic disorder to large areas of northern France and Belgium. Yet, this destruction of land and life created new landscapes infused with new meanings – a reordering of existence whose memories and associations came into conflict with other realities after 1918, and continue to do so, at an accelerating pace today. Associated in time, but not in space, were facsimile landscapes (i.e. training grounds), ambiguous ‘spaces’, where men practised ‘safe killing’ under the illusion that Salisbury Plain was in fact the Somme (see Schofield, this volume).

How war creates

Great War battlefields were, and remain, metaphysically unstable places. Originally rural, almost medieval in aspect, they had been industrialised by force – ‘drenched with hot metal’. Ground was ripped open, buildings shattered, forests blasted, rivers poisoned. The land was abused – cut by endless trenches, tied down by barbed wire, impregnated with fumes, poisoned by gas, and transformed into a cratered lunar landscape. Even worse, these otherworldly places were a bizarre mixture of human putrefaction and ammunition, where the dead rubbed shoulders with the living as both held up trench walls from the Belgian coast to the Carpathians and beyond.

These were new landscapes, created by war, and the death and suffering of men. The destruction was selective but stunning; in France alone, the worst affected areas had more than 1,000 shells per square metre, some 330,000,000 square metres of trenches, and 375,000,000 square metres of barbed wire (Clout 1996: 46). Personal accounts of the process are vivid; ‘Showers of lead flying about and big big shells its an unearthy [sic] sight to see them drop in among human beings. The cries are terrible’ (Dorothy Scoles, quoted in Bourke 1996: 76).

After battle, the land was strewn with spent shells, shrapnel, smashed artillery, lingering gas, unexploded ordnance, and the fragments of men – the definitive artefacts of industrialised war. Everything was broken and in pieces, the differences between war matériel and human beings elided perhaps for the first time in human history. This is seen clearly in memoirs, newspaper reports and official accounts of the time, where the language used to describe such events included words such as ‘skeleton’, ‘gaunt’ and ‘broken’, in such a way that imagery phases in and out between landscape, village and human corpse. The result, as Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau perceptively observed, was ‘a close connection, an osmosis between the death of men, of objects, of places’ (Audoin-Rouzeau 1992: 81).

The intensities of these experiences produced a different view of the world for many soldiers who survived (see Keegan 1996: 204–84). Men were physically and symbolically folded into landscape and emerged remade. By smothering soldiers with debris, or sucking them down into glutinous mud, it seemed as if the earth itself was alive. In this landscape of trenches, dug-outs, deafening artillery bombardments and blind advances across smoke-filled No Man’s Land, the visual sense was often denied. It was replaced by other elements of sensory experience such as smell, sound and touch (Eksteins 1990: 146, 150–1; Howes 1991: 3–5). This was a new world of experience, for, as one soldier explains, one had quickly to acquire

an expert knowledge of all the strange sounds and smells of warfare, ignorance of which may mean death … My hearing was attuned to every kind of explosion … My nostrils were quick to detect a whiff of gas or to diagnose the menace of a corpse disinterred at an interval of months.

(Paterson 1997: 239)

And, as Winter (1979: 116) observed, vis-à-vis the many different sounds made by different kinds of shells – ‘The strain of listening for all these sounds did something to the brain. A man could never be rid of them’.

The human body is our way of relating to and perceiving the world (see Stewart 1993: 125; Tilley 1994: 10...