Rationale for the Seminar

Some of the best-remembered utterances to emerge from the First World War are the poems by the British soldiers who served in the trenches of France and Belgium, and they remain important elements of British culture to this day. John McRae's image of poppies blowing “Between the crosses row on row” in a British cemetery in Belgium directly inspired the red poppies still seen every Remembrance Day in British lapels (including Tony Blair's during his visit in November of 2004 to Washington, D.C.). Similarly, the posthumous colonization envisioned in Rupert Brooke's poignantly prescient epitaph, “If I should die, think only this of me: / That there's some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England” (“The Soldier”), has been realized by the many British cemeteries and memorials that dominate the Western Front. Such connections between past and present, poetry and memorial, home and abroad, individual and collective have been central to the British response to the Great War since it began, and they remain so as the unresolved response continues to evolve.

Unlike the Second World War, which has taken a fairly consistent shape in British memory as a tragic but necessary sacrifice, World War I is still surrounded by tension and ambivalence. One such division has become commonplace: that between the heroic idealism of the war’s early days and the jaded despair that set in as troops entrenched and the losses mounted. Although there was demonstrably more idealism in the war’s early days and more despair in its later ones, it is also true that both attitudes coexisted from the beginning and still do; just as some contemporaries saw the war as tragically senseless from the beginning, so does the urge to see the huge sacrifice as heroic and worthwhile persist even nine decades later. As Niall Ferguson argues in The Pity of War, the popular wisdom that British crowds turned out in enthusiastic support of the war in August 1914 must be leavened by evidence that “feelings of anxiety, panic, and even millenarian religiosity were equally common popular responses to the outbreak of war.” This ambivalence is as evident in modern films, novels, memorials, popular songs, and public observances as it is in the poetry and memoirs produced during the war and in its immediate aftermath. Novels such as Pat Barker's Regeneration (1992) and Sebastian Faulks' Birdsong (1993) exemplify this tension: they concur with historian John Keegan's assessment that “The First World War was a tragic and unnecessary conflict,” but they also portray the war as encouraging and even creating heroism, selflessness, and bravery in the men who fought a war they viewed as ludicrous.

Of the British written responses to the Great War, the poetry from the trenches is perhaps the first to come to mind. The searing images of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Ivor Gurney, and Isaac Rosenberg, among others, are hardly less famous than those paeans to wartime death as a glorious sacrifice, such as McRae's blowing poppies or Brooke's pastoral bit of England on foreign soil. The second most familiar written responses are the many soldiers' memoirs of the war and its aftermath, especially those by Graves , Sassoon, and Edmund Blunden, all of which have been continuously in print since their first publication. Equally famous is Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth, a memoir of her experience in the wartime hospitals at home and abroad. This work, which is also still in print, helped to make her a feminist icon and the war's “chief mourner” (a designation that is itself ambivalent, used as it is by those who believe she over-emphasizes the tragedy of the war).

Farther away from England are other forms of response that are well-known to the British who make pilgrimages to the Western Front: the many grand British memorials erected on the sites of great British losses, particularly along the Somme front and on the once mud-soaked terrain around Ypres in Belgium. Indeed a significant share of the tourism in Flanders and Picardy consists of British pilgrimages to the sites of the greatest World War I losses. It is common for English children to take school trips to the French battlefields, for instance, and early July sees a surge in British tourism to mark the anniversary of the first wave of the infamous Somme Offensive. Britons flock to the many memorials erected by the mourners of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, as well as of the Commonwealth countries that contributed troops to the Western Front. These memorials, which themselves are marked by the tension between celebration and mourning, are given context by the museums and reconstructed sites that dot the Western Front. The long history of the magnificent town of Ypres itself has been rendered almost a footnote to its overriding significance as a site of British martyrdom, and this hierarchy is reflected in the focus of the town's tourism industry, such as the devotion of its grand medieval Cloth Hall to a museum of the Great War with a strong British bias.

These varied memorials are themselves evolving British responses to the war as are other significant monuments along the Somme front, such as the angry Welsh dragon atop a plinth at the edge of Mametz Wood and the huge marble monument amidst the lovingly reconstructed trenches and tunnels at Vimy Ridge, where the Canadians commemorate their heavy losses. To experience these public memorials along with the wartime poetry and the post-war memoirs is to begin to understand the conflicts between individual and collective experience, a sense of meaningless loss and a belief in heroic sacrifice that are still at the unresolved heart of the British response to the Great War.

The immediate goal of this seminar, then, is to consider the continuing impact of the war on Britain. We will study the role of Britain in the Great War and encounter the British art, museums, and monuments that constitute the persistent and still conflicted cultural memory of it. We hope this seminar will awaken participants, and through them their students, to the deep, devastating, and lasting effects of war on a culture that has experienced it in a way the U.S. has not. We expect thus to develop an understanding of the British experience before, during, and after the war that will help Americans recover the First World War's suppressed importance in our own literature and culture. We also hope that an interdisciplinary, co-directed seminar will encourage teachers to use an interdisciplinary approach in their own teaching and perhaps try team-teaching when they return home.

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