Conflict Landscapes

Materiality and Meaning in Contested Places

Nicholas J. Saunders, Paul Cornish, Nicholas J. Saunders, Paul Cornish

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367711535
• eBook ISBN: 9781000391282
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Conflict Landscapes explores the long under-acknowledged and under-investigated aspects of where and how modern conflict landscapes interact and conjoin with pre-twentieth-century places, activities, and beliefs, as well as with individuals and groups.

Investigating and understanding the often unpredictable power and legacies of landscapes that have seen (and often still viscerally embody) the consequences of mass death and destruction, the book shows, through these landscapes, the power of destruction to preserve, refocus, and often reconfigure the past. Responding to the complexity of modern conflict, the book offers a coherent, integrated, and sensitized hybrid approach, which calls on different disciplines where they overlap in a shared common terrain. Dealing with issues such as memory, identity, emotion, and wellbeing, the chapters tease out the human experience of modern conflict and its relationship to landscape.

Conflict Landscapes will appeal to a wide range of disciplines involved in studying conflict, such as archaeology, anthropology, material culture studies, art history, cultural history, cultural geography, military history, and heritage and museum studies.

Part I

The First World War

1
The dead and their spaces

Origins and meanings in modern conflict landscapes

Nicholas J. Saunders

Landscape is complex and slippery, a concept rather than a single place in historical time, a cultural image as well as a physical location (Daniels and Cosgrove 1988: 1). It is, fundamentally, a palimpsest of multi-vocal overlapping layers possessing different meanings for those who choose and engage with an aspect important to them. Each layer represents a physical engagement with space and time, and thus a world of social experience and imagination. Landscapes possess memory-making and memory-evoking qualities that connect to our cultural, emotional, and spiritual lives (Basso 1996), and so can serve as sensuous metaphors of identity. In this sense, every landscape embroiders the past with the present.

How much more so for landscapes of modern conflict, those bloody markers of industrialized war, the defining human activity of the twentieth century; created by the suffering and death of those whose remains have become part of the terrain – sometimes indistinguishable from, and at one with, the shattered earth and debris of war. These landscapes possess arguably the most intense and enduring legacies of pain, suffering, redemption, sacrifice, and in a world of materiality, of broken objects large and small. Such places are not simply the fossilized remnants of battle-space, but rather volatile dynamic entities, constantly changing their shape and significance for successive generations who engage with them in new and often unpredictable ways. Conflict landscapes are proactive, stationary yet ever-changing, and open to many kinds of interpretation and representation.

As Schäuble (2011: 52) observes for the Second World War Partisan landscapes of the Croatian-Bosnian borderlands,

The land does not allow its inhabitants to forget and is in turn also not allowed to forget as the people of the region persistently charge the territory with commemorative meaning and erect monuments and religious shrines to that effect.

Volatility is a characteristic here – for while in the immediate aftermath of the conflict the dead haunted the memories of the living, ‘since the 1980s the living seem to haunt the dead in an attempt to secure them as allies for their changing political endeavours’ (ibid.: 53).

Here, I explore modern conflict landscapes from the perspective of the First World War as the event which created and perpetuated the idea and the reality of such places, so different in intensity and scale to the landscapes of pre-twentieth-century conflict. I do so in part because the legacies of 1914–1918 include the effects which the multidimensional nature of that war have had on many if not most subsequent conflict landscapes (e.g. González-Ruibal 2008; Garfi 2019), of which, as I write, the area around Idlib in north-western Syria is the most recent (Anon. 2020). I do not deal here with other kinds of First World War landscapes – those focused on military training, the Home Front of munitions factories and other economic wartime activities (Saunders 2010: 202–212; Brown 2017; Cocroft and Stamper 2018), and cemeteries, though these are equally the result of modern conflict. For my purposes, I deal with battle-zone landscapes and draw mainly on the evidence of three case studies – the Western Front (France and Belgium), the Italian Front (Italy and Slovenia), and the Middle East (Jordan). Each of these reveals distinctive elements which illustrate the complex and enduring nature of historically recent conflict landscapes and their infinite capacity to shape-shift meaning, significance, emotion, and cultural and political resonance.

At once physical and metaphysical, all landscapes are made by and for people, and those of the First World War still conceal many of the individuals who created them between 1914 and 1918, either as undiscovered bodies, body parts, or millions of microscopic bone fragments. In such places, literally and figuratively, human beings and landscape have become one. Lying sometimes just centimetres beneath the modern land surface, these landscape makers sometimes return, bursting forth into the modern world by virtue of urban construction, motorway building, accidental explosions of ordnance, and sometimes archaeological excavations. Here, time, space, history, memory, and chance intertwine, most notably (and emotionally) perhaps when families who had forgotten or never knew of their First World War ancestors are informed that they have been found. At such times, a paradox is born – absence becomes presence with a phone call or email, a name is erased from the list of the missing, and temporal and geographical distance collapses (see Saunders 2017).

The human cost of creating First World War landscapes was often described day by day, sometimes hour by hour, in memoirs and regimental (and private) war diaries, producing what must be some of the most exhaustively documented, personalized, and spiritualized locations ever to be considered for archaeological, anthropological, and historical study. Despite this, the remains of those who undertook these acts of destruction/creation often remain lost or unidentified, so many that they became something new – ‘the missing’, remembered on monuments and in cemeteries – but ‘made present’ by absence, by anonymity rather than by name. Here was, and remains, a landscape of intense sorrow and pain, yet also of ‘nothingness’ – no bodies to grieve over, only the landscape itself to bear witness (Dyer 1994; van Emden 2019; and see Chielens et al. 2006). As Jennifer Iles (2006: 177) observed,

The people who once went to battle there have disappeared, yet their spaces remain … [and quoting Hilaire Belloc] ‘More than dust goes, more than wind goes; … But what is the mere soil of the field without them? What meaning has it save for their presence?’

The Western Front

Arguably, never before in human history has a landscape impressed itself onto human memory so deeply or in such myriad ways as the Western Front. Since 1914, it has been shaped by war, peace, renewed conflict, and a post-1945 political reconfiguration forged at least in part by a transnational desire not to repeat the wars of the recent past. Today, this landscape continues to be re-invented (and redeveloped) at an accelerating pace, and integrated piecemeal into a common European and possibly world heritage (Miles 2016: 18–19; Himpe 2018: 180–181).

In recent years, the Western Front has been reassessed as far more than a century-old battlefield; rather, it is a battle-zone composed variously of industrialized slaughterhouses, vast tombs for ‘the missing’, places for returning refugees and contested reconstruction, popular tourist destinations, locations of memorials and cemeteries, pilgrimage destinations, sites for archaeological research and cultural heritage development, and, not least, still deadly places full of unexploded shells and bombs (Saunders 2001: 37). The Western Front, and the less well investigated Eastern and Italian Fronts, are indeed palimpsests – prime examples of landscape as ongoing process, colliding with and implicating the lives of countless individuals since their inception (see Hirsch 1995: 22–23).

There is no greater proof of this than the Western Front today, after more than four years of Centenary events (2014–2018), which have seen the creation of multiple new layers of landscape in the form of commemorative monuments (including trees), cemeteries, war walk routes, signage, school visits, archaeological investigations, museums and art galleries and their exhibitions, hotels/cafés, souvenirs, confectionery, food and drink, books, films, and television programmes. Each of these represents new or reconfigured ways of seeing and understanding the First World War in this region.

The Western Front landscape which existed before 2013–2014 is now ‘buried’ beneath that which exists in 2020, at least in part, and in a not dissimilar way to how the immediate post-war landscape of 1919 was covered over, rebuilt, re-valued, and re-presented by often contested layers of the inter-war period (and beyond) (Clout 1996; Various 2020; Vermeulen 1999). The Western Front demonstrates beyond doubt that a conflict landscape is a hybrid of the original geographical location, geological nature (e.g. Devos et al. 2017; Doyle 2017), the cultural landscape at the time of the military event, that event itself, and the various ways in which it lives on in memory and is physically reconfigured so that real worlds and memory worlds are brought into alignment.

War landscape 1914–1918

Military actions along the Western Front took place in largely medieval landscapes, finely balanced between architectural splendour (e.g. churches, cathedrals, and civic buildings) and rural features (e.g. moated farms, fields, and centuries-old drainage systems). These landscapes themselves lay on top of (and sometimes were visibly integrated with) the remains of a deeper prehistoric past, such as the Butte de Warlencourt on the Somme (Saunders 2004: 10–11). War changed rich agricultural terrain into a factory of industrialized death (Bernède 1997:91), as the landscape was ‘drenched with hot metal’, cut by trenches, swathed in barbed wire, poisoned with gas, soaked with human and animal blood, and disfigured by shattered buildings, shell craters, and blasted trees. This new layer of death and destruction quickly overlaid traditional pre-war landscapes, but mainly only in a narrow front-line zone beyond which physical destruction was either minimal or non-existent, though social life could be greatly disrupted (Giono 2004 [1931]). This could lead to a surreal experience where total devastation could lie almost adjacent to areas of untouched bucolic beauty.

This new landscape was created by men for whom the physical and psychological intensities of their experiences produced otherworldly places where ‘the bizarre mixture of putrefaction and ammunition, the presence of the dead among the living, literally holding up trench walls from Ypres to Verdun, suggested that the demonic and satanic realms were indeed here on earth’ (Winter 1995: 68–69). As the French poilu Louis Barthas recalled, ‘On both sides of the trench, uncovered by earth slides, appeared skulls, feet, leg bones, skeletal hands, all mixed up with rags, shredded packs, and other shapeless debris’ (Barthas 2014: 32). And animals joined the danse macabre – crows, eager to reach the flesh of dead French soldiers ‘even pushed the helmets back from the heads of the dead … [and] pulled at the beard until the area between beard and chest hair was exposed … [and began] pecking at once, tearing off the skin’ (Giono 2004 [1931]: 92).

Sensing and n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I The First World War
• PART II The Second World War
• PART III Beyond world wars
• Index