Last week, I read Kate Adie’s article publicising her new book celebrating the diverse ways in which women worked in the First World War. In it she bemoans the fact that ‘the history of the war has been almost entirely written by men’. I was bemused by the comment, then returned to working on my book about Gallipoli. The next day I travelled to Paris for an academic conference on the First World War. There I caught up with Elizabeth Greenhalgh whose book on Marshal Foch, Supreme Allied Commander at the war’s end, was published in 2011 and has just appeared in French translation; Jessica Meyer who told me about blogging about her research on the RAMC (Royal Army Medical Corps) and on the war in popular culture; and Laura Rowe who will shortly complete revisions to her book on morale in the Royal Navy during the war.
Kate Adie cites a lone female author, Barbara Tuchman, whose best known work dates from the 1960s. The responses to her article are mainly informed by what has been taught in schools over the decades. Meanwhile, the main academic intervention in the public debate about the forthcoming centenary of the war draws on the debates of the 1990s: whether or not the commemorations will counter our national obsession with what Wilfred Owen termed ‘the futility of war’ by acknowledging the victory won on the battlefield by the allied armies in 1918.
And none of this reflects the ways in which historians study the war today, nor what we understand about its impact.
Here is some of what I learned this week. America sent women war correspondents to the western front. Argentina looked on the war and concluded that European civilisation was dying. Some Austrians taken prisoner of war in the east were excited and inspired to be transported and imprisoned in Siberia and stayed there long after the 1918. More than a quarter of Italy’s population lived inside the officially designated war zone, and the army took control of the food supply for all of them. Indeed, hundreds of thousands of Europe’s citizens experienced occupation by home or enemy forces in WW1, and came under military regulation and sometimes under fire and aerial bombardment. The racist codes of the day meant black soldiers were used as shock troops or as labourers, but never in technical roles. Germany thought it barbaric that the Allied used black soldiers in Europe.
Much of the research informing these facts was conducted by women (mostly in their 20s and 30s), who were in the majority at the latest conference of the International Society for First World War Studies. Women’s growing presence and importance in this field accounts for much of its vibrancy and diversity. Many of them are based in UK universities and study the war’s impact on Britain: Helen McCartney, Catriona Pennell, Alison Fell, Fiona Reid, Jane Potter, and Emily Mayhew to name but a few. None of this is reflected in Britain’s public conversation about the First World War.
What can be done to bridge the gap between academic research and the public conversation about the war? Would there be an appetite to hear about this diverse and internationalist approach? At a time when public engagement is increasingly emphasised within academia, the opportunities offered by social media and the interest in our subject generated by the centenary should be seized.
Without ever wishing to dislodge the centrality of the soldiers’ sacrifice in the way in which the war is remembered, a broader, richer understanding of the war’s impact could emerge. Without denying a nation’s or a community’s primary need to remember and acknowledge its own, a greater sense of the parallels and the particularities of the experience and the suffering on all the home and fighting fronts could develop. Women’s scholarship on the war will contribute to this, if we make our voices heard.