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All Quiet on the Western Front and the Fate of a War on JSTOR

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Modris Eksteins, All Quiet on the Western Front and the Fate of a War, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Apr., 1980), pp. 345-366

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the video got cut off but i was basically done.

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First world war: how state and press kept truth off the front page

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Roy Greenslade: Threatening journalists with arrest seems unthinkable now - but that was just one of the obstacles they faced at the start of WW1

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- lost generation: all the wounded or dead people from WWI.
- Some were physically lost in battle, others felt mentally or emotionally lost after war.
- It was more difficult to make sense of the world after war. All truths about national honor and virtue were destroyed by the war.

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- Silencing of the story of shell shock. Even a movie was made talking about the psychological effects soldiers face, but it was silenced.
- Example of censorship that took place in war propaganda and media.
- Even through shell shock, soldiers were silenced.

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War Beyond Words: Shell Shock, Silence, and Memories of War (Chapter 7) - War beyond Words

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War beyond Words - by Jay Winter July 2017

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- "it was so strange to have silence." They were so used to the sound of guns all day long.
- The silence at the end of the war was a mix between peace and horror.

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World War I recordings reveal joy, despair on Armistice Day

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- video about two minute silence on Armistice Day.
- significance behind the silence in present day.
- 11 am on November 11.

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Two-minute silence marks Armistice Day on 11 November - CBBC Newsround

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Millions of people observe a two-minute silence at 11am on Friday 11 November, to remember those who have died fighting for their country.

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Propaganda and censorship were crucial elements in the flow of news to Australian newspaper audiences during World War I. While Australian newspapers were enthusiastic supporters of the war effort, the Australian model of press censorship proved to be highly restrictive and the relationships between newspaper editors and censorship authorities were not always smooth. Over the course of the war, frustration regarding the operation of censorship intensified. A series of events surrounding the conscription referenda of October 1916 and December 1917 led to the 1918 Conference of Editors. The outcome of this conference was greater and more formalized involvement for the press in censorship matters. Within this dialectic of cooperation and conflict, this paper examines the relationship between the press and the Australian Government in the World War I conflict.

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Propaganda and censorship were crucial elements in the flow of news to Australian newspaper audiences during World War I. While Australian newspapers were enthusiastic supporters of the war effort, the Australian model of press censorship proved to be highly restrictive and the relationships between newspaper editors and censorship authorities were not always smooth.

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- DORA organization silencing the truth even of the bloodiest battles.

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The Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) was an Act of Parliament, passed on 7 August 1914 and extended several times thereafter, granting extraordinary wartime emergency powers to the British government during the First World War. DORA was intended purely as a wartime measure, but remained in effect in various capacities until 1921. Through its multiple expansions DORA became a considerable legislative tool for wartime social, economic, and industrial control, though the act itself was mostly a framework justifying emergency powers and defining sedition. Specific powers were outlined in individual Defence of the Realm Regulations (DORRs). "DORA" eventually became synonymous with wartime state powers in general, and was a familiar target of satirists.

Purpose, Impact and Reception ↑

The Defence of the Realm Act was passed three days after Britain's entry into the war. It was refined and extended with a further bill on 28 August 1914, and superseded by the Defence of the Realm Consolidation Act on 27 November 1914. Two further amendments were made in 1915: the first restored the guarantee of a civil trial instead of a military court martial for those arrested under DORA, the act's most contentious feature, while the second afforded greater government control of munitions creation, foreshadowing the later Munitions of War Act. Approximately 260 individual DORRs were introduced to operationalize the act, covering areas beyond censorship and the management of dissent, to economic and labour management, social controls around consumption of alcohol and food economy, and even regulations for the containment of venereal disease.

Though DORA met with some criticism and opposition, in general the British reaction to DORA was resignation if not acceptance. DORA was designed to represent the government's preparedness and seriousness in response to the war, and accordingly was seen by many as a necessary sacrifice The government's careful application of its new powers likewise kept opposition to DORA low. Even after DORA's expansion and increased application against dissenters from 1917, the government continued to exercise caution and moderation, and never applied DORA to its fullest coercive potential. Furthermore, DORRs were just as likely to be applied to censure over-enthusiastic pro-war propaganda, as to dissenting or pacifist propaganda. Nevertheless, DORA was a dramatic extension of state power, and DORRs became more socially invasive from 1917, particularly the introduction of new regulations regarding venereal disease control, regardless of how moderately these regulations were applied.

DORA was applied more directly in Ireland. DORA's initial application was similarly moderate in Ireland as in mainland Britain. British authorities used DORRs against Irish agitators accused of sedition from at least November 1914, though these initial arrests were generally directed against separatists specifically accused of undermining the war effort or assisting the enemy, rather than for separatist agitation outright. Arrests increased from 1915, as the Allies' declining military fortunes made British authorities less tolerant of any Irish nationalist agitation. It was after the Easter Rising of 1916, however, that the enforcement of DORA significantly expanded, in particular as a means of introducing martial law in Ireland, representing DORA's most extensive and repressive application. Furthermore, after the Rising, the 1915 amendment allowing civilians a choice of civil trials over court martial was suspended in Ireland. Despite this more expansive use of DORA in Ireland, a degree of moderation continued. Again, DORA's expansive scope and license meant that even here it was not applied to its fullest possible extent. DORA remained in effect in Ireland until 1921, when the very similar Restoration of Order in Ireland Act (ROIA) replaced it.

European and Imperial Counterparts ↑

DORA was not atypical compared to other belligerent governments' emergency powers, though France and Germany's emergency powers tended to be justified through more established, familiar, even venerated political traditions: état de siège in France, which carried revolutionary associations, and Kriegszustand in Germany. Conversely, critics saw DORA as a break with Britain's liberal tradition, without respectable precedent. DORA inspired very similar legislation throughout the British Empire, particularly in the Dominions. Canada's War Measures Act, Australia's War Precautions Act, and New Zealand 's War Regulations Act all borrowed in intent and format from DORA. Some Dominion Acts went even further than the original: Australia's War Precautions Act, for instance, consolidated more emergency powers under one law than DORA. While these emergency acts met with a similar mixture of resistance and acceptance as had DORA in Britain, they served the same function of reassuring imperial audiences that the Dominions were seriously committed to the war.

Gregory Hynes, University of Oxford

Section Editor: Jennifer Wellington

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The Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) afforded the British government extraordinary emergency powers during the First World War. DORA's remit was expansive, and grew in severity throughout the war, though public reaction was generally muted. DORA's application in Ireland was harsher, where it was used to institute martial law.

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- feeling of belonging at the front.
- Many soldiers didn't even feel happy or surprised that the war was over. They were ready to accept anything.
- going back home wasn't as happy and easy at it seemed. They were leaving a place where they were understood the most, a place where they risked their lives together and everyone shared the same fear of death.

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- soldiers don't talk or have any feelings because during war, they have to shut down all emotions of that do not serve directly to survival. So, during war they cannot feel humor, grief, pain, or fear.
- When soldiers come home, they feel the same way. It is difficult for them to open up and feel all the emotions they had blocked off during war.

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Experts - When They Come Home... | The Soldier's Heart | FRONTLINE | PBS

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Just some simple education would just drop the level of confusion and tension all around. There are vet centers all over the country, and usually they're in the phone book under the heading vet center. The official name is the Readjustment Counseling Service of the VA.

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- soldiers won't talk because they don't actually remember the feelings.
- It is compared to a woman forgetting what childbirth is like, so women can have more children and men can return to war again.
- The feeling is so powerfully emotional, yet the mind is unclear. The blasting sounds and overpowering emotions block out your memories.

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- belonging to the front: being home was awful because soldiers were surrounded by people who didn't understand war.
- those who were unable to cope with shell shock were treated as malingerers.
- One of the treatments for shell shock was to remain silent and not talk about the war.

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Considering trauma, censorship and social convention, Julian Walker asks why many soldiers were unwilling or unable to talk about their experience of World War One.

'He was in the war, but he never spoke about it'. An unwillingness to talk about the war, expressed in this familiar sentence, sums up its horror, stoicism, and inexplicability. As the culture of the war then and since has been so much a verbal culture, this notable absence of words needs to be considered. Was the silence engendered by the soldiers themselves, was there pressure on them to remain silent, or was there a drift into leaving it all behind?

Too painful for words

One theory proposes that the obvious way to deal with the experience of suffering, of inflicting pain on others, and of witnessing death and injury on such a scale, so new and different for many men and women serving, was by removing it from speech: just as speaking about it made it real, not speaking about it contained it. But other aspects of the management of language affected the business of speaking about the realities of conflict.

Control over written communication

A culture of control over written communication developed during the war, with the troops finding their letters censored, and the press knowing that information was being withheld. Numerous amendments to the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) left people unsure of what they could legitimately say, while knowing that dissent was a punishable offence. The familiarity of the phrase 'Somewhere in France' on letters home indicates how much the troops complied with this. In this environment, with conscientious objectors and non-combatants publicly castigated, there was considerable pressure not to express negative attitudes towards the conflict. Troops meeting on the march often ironically gave the good-natured challenge 'Are we downhearted?'(the formula assumed the cheerful response, 'no!'); the fact that the actual soldiers' answer was usually 'Yes!' itself acknowledged that the default answer was the optimistic 'no'. As any talk that would cause people to doubt the worth of pursuing the war and leave them feeling that the costs were too high, involved risk, a pragmatic course was that of silence.

Swearing and slang

Tim Cook has suggested that swearing was such a strong part of soldiers' way of coping with war, and an expression both of belonging and of excluding others, that many would have had trouble talking about their experiences without swearing. This reinforces the view that to a large extent the war was mediated by language; it proposes that there was an essential link between the primary experience of conflict and a particular kind of language. In a domestic environment, where obscenity would cause a breakdown in communication, soldiers were not equipped to 'translate' - it was easier not to talk about the experience of the war at all.

To what extent did soldiers know how to talk about what they had experienced? The absence of slang terms for major injuries - the slicing away of parts of the body by shrapnel - implies that these could only be expressed in clinical or literary terms or not at all. Around 10 years after the armistice there was a spate of books which explored the 'pornography' of war, but during the conflict this was avoided; compare 'a Mills bomb would blow seven men to rags' from Charles Edmonds' A Subaltern's War (1929) with 'concerning their actual killing exploits the men were absurdly reticent' from Troddles in the Trenches by R Andom, printed for Newnes' Trench Library (1919). For those trying to write about the experience of the Front there were only words that described indescribability; it was 'beyond description', 'utterly undescribable'.

Belonging at the Front

A repeated motif is the idea of the Front as the place where the soldier belongs. For Robert Graves 'home was awful because you were with people who didn't understand what this was all about': in particular he noted that the level of noise at the Front was incommunicable. Corporal J Bemner writes in his diary, three days after his return from England: 'I am beginning to feel all right again after leave' (6 August 1915). A poem, On Leave, in the Depot Review No.5, begins:

'I wanter get back from the war news
I wanter get back to the Hun;
I wanter retreat from the chaps in the street
'Oo know how the war should be won ...'

Erich Maria Remarque wrote of home in All Quiet on the Western Front (1929): 'I do not belong here any more, it is a foreign world.' Those who had not been at the Front could not possibly understand what it was like.

An 'acceptable' reaction

Reticence was praised more highly then than now. Sangfroid was employed and no doubt felt at all levels - 'nothing makes you feel madder than being fired at when doing a job that has to be done slowly and carefully, such as insulating the wire after baring the cable and joining the ends. A man who has been fouled at footer has the same feeling', wrote C W Langley in Battery Flashes (1916). Not expressing despair was reflected back as bravery, increasing self-esteem and status. Rudyard Kipling, devastated in private by the death of his son at the Front, mentioned his name in passing in one sentence in his two-volume The Irish Guards in the Great War (1923). In the face of the inexpressible, silence was the expected and praiseworthy position.

The verbal expression of trauma

Those who declared themselves unable to cope, through shell or combat shock or devastating loss of comrades, were generally treated as malingerers rather than victims. Few doctors, with the notable exception of W H Rivers and Arthur Brock at Craiglockhart Hospital for victims of shell shock, explored the verbal expression of trauma. Up to 1917 treatment for shell shock involved being forbidden to talk about the war. One officer treated by Rivers at Craiglockhart, said 'that it was obvious to him that memories such as those he had brought with him from the war could never be forgotten. Nevertheless, since he had been told by everyone that it was his duty to forget them he had done his utmost in this direction.' It was felt that silence settled the mind, and that unpleasant memories could be replaced by means of pleasant activities such as walking and sports. An advertisement in the Pall Mall Gazette (8 May 1919) read: 'So bury all those unpleasant memories in Dora's waiting grave ... and get your Austin Reed straw hat to signalise the event' [DORA was the Defence of the Realm Act].

Literary accounts of the war

Henri Barbusse's graphic account of trench life, Under Fire (1916), was widely read on both sides of the Front, with a 1917 reviewer in The Manchester Guardian noting that generally 'the "horrors of war" are taken for granted but ... mercifully concealed.' But the majority of the novels and poems that verbally explored the body's destruction were not published until 10 years after the armistice: the translation of Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front (1929), Robert Graves' Goodbye To All That (1929), Charles Edmonds' A Subaltern's War (1929), Helen Z Smith's Not So Quiet (1930), Frederic Manning's Her Privates We (1930), Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) are a few of over 60 books on the war that were published in these two years. For Graves, Goodbye To All That was, as the title states, an attempt at closure: 'once this has been settled in my mind and written down and published it need never be thought about again.' The interim silence seemed to be as much about 'holding on' as 'holding back'. But there appears to have been a consensus for a period of literary silence, broken after a decade with a tumult of descriptions of violent death.

Under fire: The story of a squad by Henri Barbusse

Translated from the French novel Le Feu first published in 1916, Under Fire: The Story of a Squad realistically covers the horrors of the war.

Absence and silence

Typical of those who 'did not speak about the war' were lapses into silence, the 'thousand-yard stare', or 'a vacant look', all of them characterised by absence of communication. This absence is seen also in the way the major war memorials communicated the experience of the war: the empty tomb of the Cenotaph, the absent name of the Unknown Warrior, the open space at the centre of the major architectural memorials in France and Belgium, at Vimy, Thiepval and the Menin Gate; and most of all in the annual two minutes' silence on Armistice Day. The 'empty space in the centre' became the defining motif of memorialising the war.

And ultimately, what did the people who were not there actually want to hear? While relatives needed details of time and place in order to make meaning out of their loss, did they want to know that the loved one's body had been blown apart or had lain rotting unburied for days? W H Rivers was clearly aware that there was the 'natural tendency to repress, being in my experience almost universally fostered by ... relatives and friends' John Brophy wrote in 1965: 'for the men who survived it, it became in retrospect an experience to be thrust out of memory most of the time, an experience impossible for the mind to digest, and, for many, tolerable only when some of the less distressing events were selected for recall and dressed up with sentimental emotions'.

Footnotes

[1] Tim Cook 'Fighting Words: Canadian Soldiers' Slang and Swearing in the Great War' in War in History, 2013 20: 323

[2] Personal diary of H H Cooper, Imperial War Museums

[3] David Fraser Jenkins, Paul Nash: the Elements (London: Scala, 2010)

[4] W H Rivers, Instinct and the Unconscious: A contribution to a biological theory of the psycho-neuroses (Cambridge: University Press, 1922), p.189

[5] W H Rivers, The Repression of War Experience, presented to the Royal School of Medicine, 4 December 1917.

[6] John Brophy and Eric Partridge (eds), The Long Trail: Soldiers' Songs and Slang, 1914-18 (New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1972).

Julian Walker is an artist, writer and educator, who works with the Learning Department at the British Library. His research-based art and writing practice explores language, social history, the nature of objects and engagement with the past. He is co-author of Trench Talk: Words of the First World War (Stroud: Spellmount, 2012).

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Considering trauma, censorship and social convention, Julian Walker asks why many soldiers were unwilling or unable to talk about their experience of World War One. 'He was in the war, but he never spoke about it'. An unwillingness to talk about the war, expressed in this familiar sentence, sums up its horror, stoicism, and inexplicability.

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Topic: Soldiers' silence after the war
- Were soldiers silent because they were forced to remain silent or because it was too painful to talk about and they wanted to move on?
- How do they feel a sense of belonging at the front if it is so horrifying?
- What is the deeper meaning of All Quiet on the Western Front? Why is it quiet? Is it referring to peace after war ends?
- What is the greater meaning of silence in WWI? How do the two minute silence of Armistice Day, the silence at the end of the war, the censorship and silencing of press, and the silence of soldiers all relate?