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Heroism after WW1: How the concept changed

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What do we understand by 'heroism'? WW1 changed many perceptions of what it meant to be heroic, towards a more inclusive idea, beyond the classical ideal of a man-of-action engaged in battle. | Voir plus d'idées sur le thème Guerre mondiale, La première guerre mondiale et Chirurgie esthétique.

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The last known surviving British soldier to have fought in the World War I trenches, Harry Patch, has returned to the site of the Battle of Passchendaele. "War is a calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings" 30th July 2007

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Crafted from the ruins of war and the indestructibility of love, Birdsong is a novel that will be read and marveled at for years to come....

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The Soldier by Rupert Brooke. The Soldier Learning Guide by PhD students from Stanford, Harvard, Berkeley

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If I should die, think only this of me:

That there's some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England. There shall be

In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;

A body of England's, breathing English air,

Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,

In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Poetry Out Loud Note: This poem has had two titles: "The Soldier" and "Nineteen-Fourteen: The Soldier". The student may give either title during the recitation.

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The Soldier by Rupert Brooke | Poetry Magazine

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If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam; A body of England's, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

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Le British Council vient de publier un rapport sur la Première Guerre mondiale intitulé 'Remember the World as Well as the War' ( Se souvenir du mot 'mondiale' autant que du mot 'Guerre'). Ce rapport présente les résultats d'une étude internationale menée dans sept pays (Allemagne, Egypte, France, Inde, Royaume-Uni, Russie, Turquie) par l'institut YouGov.
Cette publication analyse les perceptions et la connaissance de la Première Guerre mondiale. Les résultats soulignent la nature mondiale du conflit et son héritage durable sur le monde actuel.
Ce rapport reconnaît aussi que l'image actuelle du Royaume-Uni est en partie toujours influencée par le rôle tenu par les Britanniques pendant la Première Guerre mondiale.

Avec ce rapport, le British Council tient à souligner l'importance des célébrations et commémorations autour du centenaire de la Grande Guerre pour promouvoir une meilleur compréhensions de la nature mondiale du conflit et reconnaître son impact sur le développement de relations de confiance et de compréhension mutuelle entre le Royaume-Uni et les autres pays.

Quelques résultats marquants pour la France :

38% des personnes interrogées estiment que la Première Guerre mondiale est un des trois événements internationaux les plus importants du siècle passé

67% des personnes interrogées pensent que la France est toujours affectée par les conséquences de la Première Guerre mondiale

26% ont une image positive du Royaume-Uni ; 28% croient que le rôle tenu par les Britanniques dans la Première Guerre mondiale affecte positivement leur image du Royaume-Uni

89% estiment que la Première Guerre mondiale doit être commémorée

Les mots les plus fréquemment associés avec la Première Guerre mondiale en France : mort / tranchées / poilus / bataille de Verdun / horreur / gaz / Allemagne / boucherie / massacre / guerre / inutile

Le rapport du British Council 'Se souvenir de la dimension internationale de la guerre' est désormais disponible en français : vous pouvez le consulter en bas de cette page.

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Centenaire de la Première Guerre mondiale

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Le British Council vient de publier un rapport sur la Première Guerre mondiale intitulé 'Remember the World as Well as the War' ( Se souvenir du mot 'mondiale' autant que du mot 'Guerre'). Ce rapport présente les résultats d'une étude internationale menée dans sept pays (Allemagne, Egypte, France, Inde, Royaume-Uni, Russie, Turquie) par l'institut YouGov.

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Drag a poster onto the pin-board and add your reflection. How does your chosen poster represent ideas of heroism during world war 1?

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Page from WW1 Heroism: Through Art and Film - University of Leeds

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Discover just some of the ways that heroism and the First World War is portrayed through art and film.

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Presented by Sgt. Johnson Beharry British Army

Presented by Sgt. Johnson Beharry British Army

Harry Patch was an ordinary soldier of the First World War. Like many who fought, he was conscripted and sent to the trenches of the Western Front, where he was wounded at the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917.

Unlike many, Harry lived on until the age of 111, by which time he had become the last British survivor of the World War One trenches. Despite not talking publicly about his war experiences until late in life, he came to represent the generation of ordinary men who served in the First World War. When he died in 2009, over 1,000 people, including dignitaries from around the world, attended his funeral.

But when war broke out, men like Harry were not seen as heroes-in-waiting. Instead it was a very different type of soldier who captured the public imagination.

Representations of war in British art show how ideas of heroism shifted in the early 20th century.

The medals awarded to Harry Patch - from service in World War One to a fireman during the Blitz in World War Two - they tell the story of how, over time, the British Army started to recognise the bravery of more and more people.

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How did Harry Patch become an unlikely WW1 hero?

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Presented by Sgt. Johnson Beharry British Army Presented by Sgt. Johnson Beharry British Army Harry Patch was an ordinary soldier of the First World War. Like many who fought, he was conscripted and sent to the trenches of the Western Front, where he was wounded at the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917.

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Drag a painting you'd like to explore onto the pin-board  and add your reflection.
How does your chosen painting represent ideas of heroism during  World War 1?

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Design for Deer Hunting Mural in the Cabaret Theatre Club, 1912, oil & chalk on paper by Spencer Gore (1878-1914), photo credit: Yale Center for British Art

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Explore around 800,000 items that tell the story of modern war and conflict, collected by the museum since 1917.

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The first special exhibition of the new National World War I Museum opened in 2006 in Exhibit Hall, one of the original, 1926 Liberty Memorial buildings. War Art drew completely from the Museum's rich collections to examine a WWI topic in more detail. From the "high art" of such luminaries as France's Pierre Carrier-Belleuse to the etched mess kit of an unknown American soldier to so-called "trench art," this exhibit illustrated a wide range of pieces created during and after the war. A military historian once asserted, "Art and war are old companions. Battlefields and soldiers have been popular subjects with artists since earliest times." Here are a few examples from our extensive collections:

"Sergeant Ian MacGregor" (1921 - oil). At the 1921 site dedication of the Liberty Memorial, Kansas City artist Daniel MacMorris met Sergeant MacGregor, who attended the ceremony with his Scotch-Canadian Highlander regiment. MacGregor posed for MacMorris and his classmates at the Kansas City Art Institute.

The image of the bored soldier, sitting in his trench, twisting and hammering brass shell casings into vases, is one of the longest-running snippets of folklore from World War I. It is true that American and other soldiers wanted souvenirs of all types, and they purchased decorated, recycled shell casings on a grand scale, but the front-line soldier had neither the tools nor the time to create many of the fantastic decorations.

As late as 1921, mass-produced shell art was still being sold to souvenir-seeking Doughboys. An advertisement in an American Legion Weekly from that year touted a "75mm ash tray - the Ideal Christmas Gift - a genuine 75mm cartridge with original markings on base. Get an extra one for a pal." The $1 piece of shell art was produced by the Keeler Brass Company of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

"The French had quite an industry behind the lines. They filled the shells [artillery shell casings] with sand and then using a punch and other tools made decorations and inscriptions." Second Lieutenant Allen B. Brown, 119th Field Artillery, 32nd Division, American Expeditionary Forces, described the French cottage industry of producing shell art or so-called trench art.

The soft aluminum of the U.S. Model 1910 mess kit (meat can) provided a canvas of sorts for the soldier with a knife.

During the war the steel helmets worn by the Doughboys were unadorned. Unit insignia were the first objects painted on helmets, but this was rare before the cessation of hostilities due to the concern that the enemy would gain information from seeing the insignia. But after the guns were silenced, the Doughboy artists got busy with painted insignia, itinerary, maps, pseudo-camouflage, and battle scenes. Some painted helmets were done on commission for American soldiers by German prisoners of war. Painted helmets also were made into lamps stateside.

Drawings by Lester G. Hornby. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1882, Hornby studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Art Students' League of New York. He studied in Paris from 1906 to 1910, where he served as Director of the American Art Association of Paris. He was in Brittany, France, when the war started in 1914. When the Americans arrived in 1917, General Pershing gave Hornby a pass to travel among the American Expeditionary Forces where he made these etchings.
Art That Delivered a Message
Soon after the outset of World War I the poster, previously the successful medium of commercial advertising, was recognized as a means of communication in spreading national propaganda with unlimited possibilities. The poster could impress an idea quickly, vividly, and lastingly.

In almost every country involved in the war, the poster played its part in the war effort. The posters of 1914-1918 illustrate every phase and difficulty and movement - from recruiting to munitions work and from war loans to the work of women and the Red Cross.

In 1920 English writer Martin Hardie stated succinctly the poster's place in World War I history: "They had their story to tell and message to deliver. Their business was to waylay and hold the passersby and to impose their meaning upon them."

Soldiers wanted souvenirs, and many a cottage industry developed to meet that desire. Embroidered silk handkerchiefs, many with intricate designs and colors, provided a souvenir that could easily be carried and mailed home to a mother, wife, or sweetheart.

Corporal Walter Bullard, 603rd Engineers, American Expeditionary Forces in France, wrote his mother on August 16, 1918: "I am enclosing a handkerchief that I bought for you. It is rather pretty with the French flag and the Stars and Stripes together. They sell quite a bunch of them to the boys to send home, and there is hardly a town that I have been in that you can't find hundreds in stores. They have all colors and with different words and such. Some have the Allied flags worked in the corner."

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war art national wwi museum kansas city world war one missouri

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The first special exhibition of the new National World War I Museum opened in 2006 in Exhibit Hall, one of the original, 1926 Liberty Memorial buildings. War Art drew completely from the Museum's rich collections to examine a WWI topic in more detail.

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Professor Paul Gough introduces British and Belgian artists of World War One, from Henry de Groux and his eyewitness responses to the Belgian invasion, to the later generation of British artists who transformed their frontline experiences into abstract, modernist artworks.

Why paint war: why send artists to the battlefield when a camera could capture the face of conflict so much more convincingly than a painter with a canvas and brushes? The question is as timely now as it was when war broke out in Belgium in 1914.

Quick to spot a propaganda coup, German and French artists accompanied troops to the front, making spontaneous sketches and watercolours of soldiers as they engaged with the enemy en masse. Belgian artists fled into exile, many taking refuge in London where they gathered and started to recreate harrowing visions of the overthrow of their country. Many British artists volunteered, some joining the Artists' Rifles, an officer training battalion in the County of London Regiment. Others opted for the field ambulance units or the Red Cross; the young Modernist painter 'Richard' Nevinson (Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson) had a nerve-shredding experience in the makeshift casualty clearing stations behind the battlefields, confronted by hundreds of dead and dying wounded soldiers. Painter Eric Kennington joined the London Regiment and served in the snow-covered trenches near Laventie in France in terrible conditions.

The British response - the Scottish etcher

Unlike the systematic response of the German government, the British reaction was rather slow. A War Propaganda Bureau had been created in 1914 as a part of the Foreign Office. Its task was to generate literature that promoted Britain's interest and might sway neutral nations - principally the USA - to enter the war on the Allied side. Concentrating on pamphlets and books, its meetings were attended by such leading Edwardian authors as Rudyard Kipling, G M Trevelyan and H G Wells. However, it was not until May 1916 that the first official war artist, Muirhead Bone, was commissioned.

A distinguished Scottish etcher more used to drawing industrial and architectural scenes than distant battlefields, Bone was nicknamed the 'London Piranesi' for his ability to depict vast and complex construction sites, shipyards, cathedrals and docksides. Nothing daunted him. But on the static battlefields of the Western Front he struggled to locate the face of modern war; it was elusive, distant and nocturnal. By daylight, the battlefield, or what he could safely see of it, was empty and deserted, with tens of thousands of combatants secreted in the trenches or hidden far behind the lines. At night it was crowded with activity but too dark to draw. Like the few official photographers who had been sent before him, he became frustrated at the huge scale of the war on the Western Front with its 'Figures scattered, atmosphere dense with haze and smoke - shells that would simply not burst when required. All the elements of a picture were there, could they but be brought together and condensed.'

Bone worked diligently in demanding conditions. In a six-week period he produced over 150 highly finished drawings, many depicting the systematic ruination of the French countryside, though often there was little left to see. Disappointed by their deadpan realism some critics were rather dismissive. 'It is like looking at war through the wrong end of a telescope' scoffed one. Another commented, rather wittily, that his portrayals were simply too accurate and his fine charcoal and ink drawings were dismissed as being 'too true to be good'.

However, Bone's work was widely featured in government publications and his graphic style reproduced well on the war-rationed newsprint of the day. His drawings were highly regarded as pictorial propaganda and exhibited in Britain and the USA, where tens of thousands of people flocked to see them.

Above all, Bone's work was authentic. It was he said, 'War, as it is'. By comparison some of the leading photographers of the day, frustrated by the absence of suitably dramatic subject-matter on the battlefields, committed the ultimate transgression: a number of them created their own imaginary compositions by combining negatives one on top of another to create a composite vision of the reality of trench warfare. The resulting images were widely criticised for being contrived: they were deemed to have broken a sovereign rule of documentary reportage.

Belgian artists as witnesses of war

Eye-witness experience was regarded as a critical factor in the authority of official war art. This lent an added quality to the work of the many Belgian artists who had witnessed the violation of their country in the opening months of the war. Gisbert Combaz was a Belgian doctor of law, an artist and professor in the decorative arts. On 25 August 1914 German soldiers burnt down the city of Leuven after killing hundreds of civilians. In highly graphic detail Combaz described the population fleeing from the city with flames visible in the background of the drawing. Other Belgian artists drew upon second-hand accounts to conjure up images of the impact of war. Henry de Groux was a Belgian symbolist painter and sculptor, who was deeply disturbed by the reports of death, maiming and ruination that filled the newspapers; combined with his own eye-witness accounts he created a series of drawings, etchings and lithographic prints about the atrocities of the war. They have an immediacy and an intensity of representation which is instantly convincing.

The second wave of British artists

In Britain, the popularity of draughtsmen such as Muirhead Bone convinced the British government to be bolder and to commission a second wave of artists. Under the auspices of the Ministry of Information, and guided by leading authorities from the arts and museum services, a younger generation of painters was commissioned, many of whom had recent front-line experience. Amongst these artists were those who would shape modern British art in the decades to come - Paul Nash, Percy Wyndham Lewis, William Roberts, David Bomberg, Stanley Spencer. However by 1916, perhaps the two most memorable British paintings to have emerged from the war were by those who had first volunteered for the Front - Eric Kennington's reverse painting on glass 'The Kensingtons at Laventie', and Richard Nevinson's 'La Mitrailleuse', a daringly modern canvas of French machine-gunners. When the latter was first exhibited, in early 1916, attendants had to be placed on either side to keep the queues moving past it. For a short while, Nevinson became the enfant terrible of the British art scene. He met the essential criteria of the war artist: dogged, dangerous, inspirational; capable of rendering the dreadful nihilism of the war in an uncomplicated figurative form that blended realism with geometric modernism. Above all, he had unchallengeable authority, his reputation as a painter underpinned by proven credentials.

Footnotes

[1] Giovanni Battista Piranesi was a 16th-century Italian artist, particularly famous for his etchings of complex architectural creations, both real and imagined.

[2] Frank Hurley's diary, quoted in Lennard Bickel, In Search of Frank Hurley (Australia: Macmillan, 1980) p.61. Frank Hurley served as an official photographer with the Australian forces during both world wars.

[3] From a review in The Manchester Guardian, 30 August 1917

[4] Imperial War Museums: The Kensingtons at Laventie

[6] For a fuller account of Bone, Kennington and the second wave of British artists see Paul Gough, A Terrible Beauty: British Artists in the First World War (Bristol: Sansom and Company, 2009)

Paul Gough is Professor of Fine Arts at University of the West of England, Bristol. A painter, writer and a broadcaster, his art works are in permanent collections of the Imperial War Museum, London; Canadian War Museum, Ottawa; and New Zealand War Memorial, Wellington. He has published on the visual culture of war and peace as well as landscapes of remembrance. His books include a monograph on the British artist Stanley Spencer, Stanley Spencer : Journey to Burghclere (Sansom & Company, 2006) and A Terrible Beauty, an extensive study of British art of the Great War (Sansom & Company, 2010). In 2014 he is curating three Great War centenary exhibitions in London and Bristol, and he is currently writing a book - Brothers in Arms - about the work of Paul and John Nash.

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Why paint war? British and Belgian artists in World War One

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Professor Paul Gough introduces British and Belgian artists of World War One, from Henry de Groux and his eyewitness responses to the Belgian invasion, to the later generation of British artists who transformed their frontline experiences into abstract, modernist artworks.

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Commemorating the centenary of the First World War.

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researching posters