Great War, Total War: Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914- 1918

2001 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 521
Author(s):  
Samuel R. Williamson ◽  
Roger Chickering ◽  
Stig Forster
Keyword(s):  
Great War ◽  
Total War ◽  
Western Front

Britain in a Continental War: The Civil-Military Debate Over the Strategical Direction of the Great War of 1914-1918

1980 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
David R. Woodward
Keyword(s):  
Great War ◽  
British Army ◽  
The West ◽  
The Public ◽  
War Of Attrition ◽  
Total War ◽  
Western Front ◽  
Secretary Of State ◽  
Widespread Belief ◽  
The Great War

The friction between civil and military authorities was never greater than during the Great War of 1914-1918. The unprecedented casualties suffered by the British Army and involvement of every element of British life in the conflagration gave added intensity to this conflict. The ability of British democracy to wage total war was put to a severe test. Where did the responsibility of the civilians end in formulating strategy? Where did the authority of the soldiers begin? This strategic debate largely centered on the size of Britain's commitment to the ghastly slaughter in the trenches of the Western Front.Before 1914 British war planners had thought of a short war with at most only limited involvement in Europe. After Britain's plunge into war, the civil and military authorities decided to employ the small professional British Army on the continent to save France from being overrun, a decision made easier by the widespread belief that the war would be over within a few months. By this continental commitment Britain became involved in a long and bloody war of attrition in France and Flanders.As 1914 ended in stalemate in the West with few of the original members of the British Expeditionary Force still on their feet the debate over the employment of future British armies began in earnest. The government's chief military adviser was Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War. Although the public viewed Kitchener as Britain's greatest soldier, his appointment was almost certainly a mistake.

David Malouf’s Fly Away Peter (1982)

2021 ◽  
pp. 64-76
Author(s):  
Kathleen Riley
Keyword(s):  
Bird Migration ◽  
Great War ◽  
Western Front ◽  
The Great War

The final chapter of Part I examines the theme of impossible nostos within David Malouf’s novella Fly Away Peter, which is set at the time of the Great War. The story traces the journey of a young Australian, Jim Sadler, from an Edenic bird sanctuary on the Queensland coast to the perverted pastoral of the Western Front where he realizes he has hitherto been living ‘in a state of dangerous innocence’. The principal motif Malouf employs is the miracle of bird migration, through which he explores the idea of homecoming, what it means to belong, to leave one’s home, and to return. The chapter concludes by focusing on the unconventional Penelope figure, Imogen Harcourt, whose solitary ruminations extend the book’s philosophical enquiry from the nature of home to the nature of being.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
pp. 221-228
Author(s):  
Laura Eastlake
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Great War ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Classical Education ◽  
Total War ◽  
Cultural Implications ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Modern Era

This final chapter examines the cultural implications of a new century and the outbreak of the Great War for notions of masculinity. It considers the writings of commentators like Robert Baden Powell and A. C. Benson to show that questions of how best to prepare Britain’s youth to face the ‘vast energies and problems’ of the modern world were also, inevitably, questions about the role and relevance of a classical education in that process. The final section glances forward to examine the processes by which receptions of Ancient Rome persist, and are remade during the Great War and a new modern era of total war. Far from attempting to ‘finish’ the meaning of Rome or to homogenize its uses as part of a single theory of what Rome meant to the Victorian male, this chapter emphasizes the ongoing pluralities and complexities inherent in the Roman parallel.

Remarque, Erich Maria (1898–1970)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irene Gammel
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
World Wide ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
Advertising Campaign ◽  
Western Front ◽  
Wide Readership ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Quiet Day

Born Erich Paul Remark in Osnabrück, Germany, Erich Maria Remarque is best known for his influential anti-war novel Im Westen nichts Neues (1929, All Quiet on the Western Front). First serialized in the Vossische Zeitung in 1928, All Quiet was launched with an unprecedented advertising campaign. Hailed as ‘the great war novel’, the book spawned a world-wide readership with translations into over twenty-five languages, and a film (directed by Lewis Milestone) in 1930. Written within just a few months in 1927, All Quiet on the Western Front toys with autobiographical references. The protagonist Paul Bäumer is a nineteen-year old war veteran whose seemingly non-consequential death in October 1918, on a ‘quiet’ day on the Western front, stands for the shared fate of millions of soldiers obscured by the unprecedented violence and horror of World War I. Remarque changed his name after the war, dropping his middle name Paul, and adopting his mother’s name, Maria, while also Gallicizing the spelling of his last name, thereby blurring national boundaries.

Stimmungen, Spannungen, Visionen

2019 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 339-371
Author(s):  
Max Graff
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
Literary Magazines ◽  
Western Front ◽  
Military Surgeon ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Poetic Visions

Wilhelm Klemm, Expressionist poet and military surgeon on the Western front during World War I, published approximately 60 war poems, both in his collection Gloria! (1915) and in several literary magazines such as Franz Pfemfert’s Aktion. Some of them were soon hailed as eminently critical of common, glorifying poetic visions of war. This is certainly adequate; a closer scrutiny of the entire corpus of Klemm’s war poems, however, reveals a peculiar diversity which requires an awareness for their ambivalences. The article therefore considers three fields of inquiry: the poems’ depiction of the human body, their relation to lyrical paradigms focussed on nature and Stimmung, and ways of transcending both these paradigms and naturalistic representations of war and its effects. It thus identifies Klemm’s different modes of perceiving, interpreting and processing the experience of the Great War.

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