Modern Conflict and the Senses: Killer instincts? 9781138927827, 9781315682228

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Modern Conflict and the Senses

Modern Conflict and the Senses investigates the sensual worlds created by modern war, focusing on the sensorial responses embodied in and provoked by the materiality of conflict and its aftermath. The volume positions the industrialized nature of twentieth-century war as a unique cultural phenomenon, in possession of a material and psychological intensity that embodies the extremes of human behaviour, from total economic mobilization to the unbearable sadness of individual loss. Adopting a coherent and integrated hybrid approach to the complexities of modern conflict, the book considers issues of memory, identity, and emotion through wartime experiences of tangible sensations and bodily requirements. This comprehensive and interdisciplinary collection draws upon archaeology, anthropology, military and cultural history, art history, cultural geography, and museum and heritage studies in order to revitalize our understandings of the role of the senses in conflict. Nicholas J. Saunders is Professor of Material Culture at Bristol University and co-director of two long-term First World War projects: the ‘Great Arab Revolt Archaeological Project’ (Jordan), and the ‘Isonzo Valley Conflict Landscapes Project’ (Slovenia/Italy). He has published numerous articles and books on the archaeology and anthropology of modern conflict, including Trench Art: Materialities and Memories of War (2003), Matters of Conflict (2004), Killing Time: Archaeology and the First World War (2007), and co-edited with Paul Cornish Contested Objects (2009) and Bodies in Conflict (2014). Paul Cornish is a Senior Curator at Imperial War Museums, and played a leading role in the museum’s Regeneration Project for the 2014 Centenary. He has co-organized five IWM-based international and multidisciplinary conferences on modern conflict, has published Machine Guns and the Great War (2009) and The First World War Galleries (2014), and co-edited Contested Objects (2009) and Bodies in Conflict (2014).

Modern Conflict and the Senses

Edited by Nicholas J. Saunders and Paul Cornish

First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business  2017 Nicholas J. Saunders and Paul Cornish The right of the editors to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-92782-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-68222-8 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK

Contents

List of figures Notes on contributors Foreword: the engagement of the senses

viii xii xix

DAVID HOWES

Introduction

1

PAUL CORNISH, NICHOLAS J. SAUNDERS, MARK SMITH

PART I

Sensual landscapes

11

  1 Sensing war: concept and space in the Imperial War Museum’s First World War Galleries

13

PAUL CORNISH

  2 Materiality, space and distance in the First World War

29

NICHOLAS J. SAUNDERS

  3 Assaulting the senses: life and landscape beneath the Western Front

43

MATTHEW LEONARD

  4 The scent of snow at Punta Linke: First World War sites as sense-scapes, Trentino, Italy

61

FRANCO NICOLIS

  5 Sensorial engagement in tourism experiences on the Western Front

76

STEPHEN MILES

  6 ‘Dead air’: the acoustic of war and peace – creative interpretations of the sounds of conflict and remembrance PAUL GOUGH AND KATIE DAVIES

93

vi Contents   7 Moaning Minnie and the Doodlebugs: soundscapes of air warfare in Second World War Britain

106

GABRIEL MOSHENSKA

  8 The Cave Mouth: listening to sound and voice in Okinawan war memory

123

RUPERT COX AND ANGUS CARLYLE

  9 Emplacing the Italian Resistance: the dystopian fight against Fascism and Nazism (1943–1945)

142

SARAH DE NARDI

PART II

Sensing bodies

155

10 Odour and ethnicity: Americans and Japanese in the Second World War

157

SUSANNAH CALLOW

11 Ingestion and digestion on the Western Front

171

RACHEL DUFFETT

12 Trench crap: excremental aspects of the First World War

183

DOMINIEK DENDOOVEN

13 Sense and sensibility: the power of print in post-war recuperation

196

JEFFREY S. REZNICK

14 The ‘white death’: thirst and water in the Chaco War

213

ESTHER BREITHOFF

15 Jan Karski, from eye witness to moral witness: what to do with your senses?

229

ANNETTE BECKER

16 The sensory signature of being an airman in a Second World War Lancaster bomber aeroplane MELANIE WINTERTON

237

Contents  vii 17 Sounds of horror: sensorial experiences of a Gestapo prison, Begunje (Slovenia)

256

UROŠ KOŠIR

18 The uninvited guests who outstayed their welcome: the ghosts of war in the Channel Islands

272

GILLY CARR

19 Sensory deprivation during the Irish Civil War (1922–1923): female political prisoners at Kilmainhan Gaol, Dublin

289

LAURA MCATACKNEY

PART III

Sensorial objects

305

20 Sensing the sepoy: objects, letters and songs of Indian Soldiers, 1914–1918

307

SANTANU DAS

21 War with flowers: the paintings of Albert Heim and the German sensory experience of the Somme, 1914–1916

327

ALASTAIR H. FRASER

22 The senses: battlefield exploration, drawing and sculpture

344

STEVE HURST

23 War, memory and the senses in the Imperial War Museum London, 1920–2014

361

ALYS CUNDY



Afterword: war on the senses

375

JOANNA BOURKE

Index

379

Figures

  3.1 The Maison Blanche souterraine near Neuville St Vaast lit with candles   3.2 These carvings created by American soldiers in the Froidmont souterraine on the Chemin des Dames show the dramatic effects that lighting can have on deeply carved designs   3.3 Part of the La Folie system on Vimy Ridge. Here the proximity to danger was (and remains) constant. A Durand Group investigator is pictured next to a bag of ammonal high explosive   3.4 The remains of a gas curtain, made of heavy leather. It would have fitted perfectly into a wooden frame cemented into the chalk walls   3.5 A typical section of subterranean front line according to depth and feature type   3.6 A typical section of subterranean front line according to sensorial categorization   4.1 Punta Linke: exterior view of the transit station at 3,629m above sea level   4.2 Interior view of the transit station during the excavation   4.3 The tub for sauerkraut, part of which was still preserved at the bottom   4.4 The pile of overshoes made of rye straw during excavation   4.5 Pair of rye straw overshoes from the Punta Linke excavations   4.6 Exterior view of the Punta Linke transit station today   4.7 Interior view of the Punta Linke transit station today; note the engine replaced on its original base   5.1 British soldier Greg Nottle, present at the Christmas Truce 1914, In Flanders Fields Museum   5.2 Inside the Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne showing the fosses

44

51

53

54 55 56 63 63 65 65 66 66 67 79 80

List of figures  ix   5.3 Simulations of gas smells, Memorial Museum Passchendaele 1917, Zonnebeke   5.4 The Old Blighty Tea Room, La Boiselle, France   5.5 The Platoon Experience   7.1 Second World War air raid siren in Lowestoft War Memorial Museum   7.2 3.7 inch anti-aircraft gun at Nothe Fort, Weymouth   7.3 V1 missile in the museum at Peenemünde   8.1 Ino Lagoon at the edge of Kadena USAF base   8.2 Yogi-san in the gama (limestone cave) beneath Sunabe   8.3– Examples of text used in the film The Cave Mouth and the   8.5 Giant Voice   9.1 Cadolten, village destroyed by the SS 12.1 German chamber-pot, Christmas 1914 12.2 Manual of Elementary Military Hygiene, 1912, p. 68 12.3 ‘Ein Abenteuer auf dem Kriegsschauplatze im Weltkriege’. Plate published on p. 199 of Magnus Hirschfeld’s classic work Sittengeschichte des Weltkrieges (1930) 12.4 From the 1914–15 souvenir book of Reserve-InfanterieRegiment 236 12.5 British standard issue latrine bucket 12.6 French postcard ‘I work for the German people. With this his bread is made’ 12.7 French postcard ‘Whatever his smell, it brings good luck. Crush without fear this dirty bore’ where the French expression sale emmerdeur (dirty bore) contains the word merde (shit) 13.1 Henry Goldstein, ‘Observations at Jewish Welfare Building, “That Dippy Jazz Band”’, The Mess Kit 1(6) (August 1919), 20–1 13.2– The Mess Kit. Salvation Army Number 1(7) 13.4 ‘Life Preservers of the A.E.F.’ and ‘Salvation Lassie O’Mine’, in The Mess Kit. Salvation Army Number 1(7) (September 1919), 17 and 23, respectively 13.5 Masthead of The Come-Back, Walter Reed Army General Hospital, Washington, DC (8 January 1919), 2. 13.6 The Mess Kit. Salvation Army Number 1(6) (August 1919), 34 14.1 Base of a tin mug with engravings of a rifle and a possible fortín at the Museo Mitológico Ramón Elias, Asunción, Paraguay 14.2 Original Ford Cuatro water carrier outside Museo Boquerón, Fortín Boquerón

82 84 86 111 117 118 130 133 137 145 184 185

187 188 190 192

192

202

205 208 209

220 221

x  List of figures 14.3 Paraguayan soldiers posing with a freshly dug up Yvy’á 223 16.1 A Lancaster B Mk 1 in flight, 1942 239 16.2 Artwork for Lancaster DS734. The aeroplane was called ‘Y’ Yorker and the pilot, Howells, hence ‘Y’s ‘Owells’ 246 16.3 Lucky mascot from Lancaster R5868 ‘S’ for Sugar 247 16.4 Bomber Command memorial, Green Park, London 249 17.1 Katzenstein mansion in Begunje 258 261 17.2 Today’s view of the hallway with ‘bunker cells’ 17.3 Prisoners during exercise 262 17.4 Page from a prisoner’s book – Gefangenen-Buch 264 17.5 Prisoner’s graffiti on the cell door 266 18.1 German Underground Hospital, Guernsey 273 18.2 German Occupation Museum, Guernsey 276 18.3 Inside the command bunker at Noirmont Point, Jersey 279 18.4 Bunker built into the side of Le Creux Faïe in Guernsey; person on left is standing on top of the underground bunker 279 18.5 Cleansing ceremony in the German Underground Hospital, Guernsey 284 19.1 Graffiti image created with pencil over whitewash depicting a nurse working for the Free State in Kilmainham Gaol c.1922–3 295 19.2 Substantial graffiti slogan created using paints by the women. Located above an archway leading into the so-called ‘1916 Corridor’ featuring a quotation from Padraig Pearse: ‘Beware the risen people that have harried and held ye who have bullied and bribed’ 297 19.3 Faint graffiti image in pencil over whitewash of a historically dressed male and female figure in profile looking towards each other. Possibly the figure of Robert Emmett, executed after being held in Kilmainham Gaol in 1803 298 19.4 Substantial graffiti slogan created using paints by Bridie O’Mullane during her imprisonment in 1922–3 299 19.5 Programme created by pencil and painted in the autograph book of Nellie Fennell 300 20.1 Calcutta’s First World War Memorial 311 20.2 Lota (brass drinking vessel) 312 20.3 German shell-case found by Dr Manindranath Das in Mesopotamia 313 20.4 The glasses of Jogen Sen 313 20.5 An Indian, unable to write, is putting his thumb on the pay-book 315 20.6 A wounded sepoy dictates a letter to a scribe or fellow sepoy 316

List of figures  xi 20.7 An audio-recording taking place at the Wünsdorf camp 20.8 Professor Heinrich Lüders from Berlin University with a group of Gurkha prisoners at Wünsdorf Prisoner of War camp 21.1 (Heim 10) ‘Anmarsch des Esstrupps’ or ‘March of the Commissariat. General’s Dugout’ dated 1916, showing Baul carrying a meal for the General down a flower-covered trench 21.2 (Heim 55) ‘Kampf um Thiepval’ or ‘The Fight for Thiepval’. The work is dated 1916 and depicts von Wundt watching a bombardment of the German front line at Thiepval from the south side of the Ancre Valley 21.3 (Heim 3) ‘Drunten im Unterstand. Do ists halt schön’ or ‘It is Cosy Down in the Dugout’. Von Wundt and his staff enjoy a glass of wine and a cigarette in a fairly cramped but well appointed dugout 21.4 (Heim 48) ‘Wie ich meinen Irelander fing’ or ‘How I Caught my Irishman’. A comfortable, brightly lit cottage sitting room forms a striking contrast to the muddy German infantrymen and their prisoner 21.5 (Heim 59) ‘Schützengraben im Beaumont nach dem 3 Sept 1916’ or ‘Front Line Trench in Beaumont on 3 September 1916’. The only painting known to have been copied from a photograph 22.1 ‘Beaumont’, 1971. The colours are symbolic of the German defenders and the Allied attackers at Beaumont Hamel 22.2 ‘Y Ravine’ (Beaumont Hamel), 1978. The sculpture symbolizes an infantry weapon and also describes a kneeling corpse 22.3 ‘Jacob’s Ladder’, 2012–13. Inspired by a notorious British section of the line at Beaumont Hamel, this symbolizes both the official pomp and glorification of the war and the reality of death, madness and mutilation 22.4 ‘Tambour’, 2000. The remnants of battle at the German fortification of the Tambour near Fricourt on the Somme emphasized the shared humanity and suffering of soldiers

319

321

329

333

335

338

340

347

348

348

352

Contributors

Annette Becker is a History Professor at the University of Paris-Ouest Nanterre and a member of the Institut Universitaire de France. She has been working for many years on the links between the two world wars, especially on the many aspects of occupation, on the forms of violence – including genocide – that were inherited from one to the other. Her recent books include Apollinaire, un poète combattant (Hachette 2009–14), and Voir la Grande Guerre, un autre récit (Armand-Colin, 2014). She coordinated the French edition (Fayard) of the Cambridge History of the Great War (3 vols., 2014, directed by Jay Winter). Her Messengers of the Catastrophe, on Lemkin and Karski, will appear in 2017. Joanna Bourke is Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the prize-winning author of twelve books, including histories on modern warfare, military medicine, psychology and psychiatry, the emotions, and rape. In 2014, she was the author of The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers (OUP) and Wounding the World: How Military Violence and War-Play are Invading Our Lives (Virago). Esther Breithoff is a Post-doctoral Research Associate at the UCL Institute of Archaeology. Her PhD focused on the intrinsic relationships between humans and things during and after the Chaco War in Paraguay (1932–5). Esther has published several articles and book chapters on her doctoral research, and is currently turning it into a monograph while working on a research proposal on the material culture of conflict in Laos. Susannah Callow After completing her PhD on bodily transformations in twentieth-century conflict at the University of Bristol in 2014, Susie Callow now holds a post as Lecturer and Course Leader in Anthropology at Cirencester College. Her continuing research interests relate to the complex interactions between human corporeality, material culture, personhood and ethnicity in modern conflicts. Gilly Carr is a Senior Lecturer and Academic Director in Archaeology at the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education. She is also a Fellow and Director of Studies at St Catharine’s College. She is

Notes on contributors  xiii author of Legacies of Occupation: Heritage, Memory and Archaeology in the Channel Islands (Springer 2014); co-author of Protest, Defiance and Resistance in the Channel Islands: German Occupation 1940–1945 (Bloomsbury Academic 2014), and editor of several volumes including, most recently, Heritage and Memory of War: Responses from Small Islands (with Keir Reeves, Routledge 2015). Her current research focuses on the memory and heritage of Nazi persecution in the Channel Islands. Angus Carlyle is Professor of Sound and Landscape at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. He edited Autumn Leaves: Sound and the Environment in Artistic Practice (2007), co-edited On Listening (2013) and co-wrote In the Field: The Art of Field Recording (2013). His artistic research involves the representation of sensory experience of place and finds expression in nature writing, experimental film works and field recordings that are presented in galleries, on CDs and in performance. The multi-dimensional projects Air Pressure (2011–13) and Zawawa (2015–17) are creative collaborations with anthropologist Rupert Cox. Paul Cornish is a Senior Curator at Imperial War Museum London. He is currently working on the creation of a new permanent Second World War gallery to open in 2020, having previously been involved with the construction of the First World War gallery which opened in 2014. He has co-organized five IWM-based international conferences on the material culture of conflict with Nicholas J. Saunders and has co-edited the volumes Contested Objects (2009) and Bodies in Conflict (2014) both published by Routledge. Rupert Cox is a senior lecturer in visual anthropology in the department of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. He has written books on the Japanese ideas of the Zen arts, copying culture and material heritage for Routledge and about forms of representation that lie ‘beyond text’ in anthropology for Manchester University Press. Currently he is writing The Sound of the Sky Being Torn – about the cultural history of military aircraft noise – for Bloomsbury Press and making a collaborative film and sound art project in Okinawa, supported by the Toyota Foundation. Alys Cundy completed a Collaborative Doctoral Award PhD with the University of Bristol and Imperial War Museums. The project explored the changing display policies and practices at Imperial War Museum London from its foundation in 1917 to its major redevelopment in 2014. Her research interests include material culture and commemoration, and difficult heritage. She has previously published on the use of objects and space in displays at the Imperial War Museum. She was a Goethe Institut ‘Scholar in Residence’ in 2013/14, working on emotional strategies in museum representations of twentieth-century conflict. She currently works at the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, London.

xiv  Notes on contributors Santanu Das is Reader in English at King’s College London. He is the author of Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (2006) and the editor of Race, Empire and First World War Writing (2011) and the Cambridge Companion to First World War Poetry (2013). A visual sourcebook Indian Troops in Europe, 1914–1918 was published in 2014 while India, Empire and the First World War: Words, Objects and Images is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2017. He is currently directing a HERA international research project ‘Cultural Exchange in the Time of Global Crisis’ (www.cegcproject.eu) and editing the Oxford Book of First World War Empire Writing. Katie Davies is an artist exploring communal rituals, secular performances and the effect of contemporary bordering practices on the every day. She has exhibited internationally including Sarajevo Film Festival 2015, Oberhausen International Film Festival 2015, Border Visions, Connecticut, USA 2012 and the Istanbul Biennial 2009. She has contributed to several publications, public collections and her writing on practice-led research has been included in US and British publications. Katie is course leader in Fine Art at the University of Gloucestershire. Dominiek Dendooven is a researcher at In Flanders Fields Museum, Ieper (Belgium) and an associate researcher at the University of Antwerp. His research focuses on the multicultural presence in Flanders during the First World War and its enduring legacies. He is the author of Menin Gate and Last Post: Ypres as Holy Ground (De Klaproos, 2014) and (with Piet Chielens) World War One: Five Continents in Flanders (Lannoo, 2008). Rachel Duffett teaches at Essex University and for the Open University. She has written extensively on the role and significance of food in the lives of First World War soldiers and her 2012 book The Stomach for Fighting: Food and the Soldiers of the Great War was published by Manchester University Press in their Cultural History of War series. Her current research focuses on the legacy of the conflict in the lives of children growing up in the inter-war years. Alastair H. Fraser is Early Printed Books Librarian at Durham University Library and also writes and lectures on the Great War. He is membership secretary of No-man’s-Land: the International Group for Great War Archaeology and is running their Cocken Hall project which examines the training and battlefield performance of 18th Durham Light Infantry through archaeology and documentary evidence. He is co-author of Ghosts on the Somme: Filming the Battle. June–July 1916 and numerous articles. Paul Gough is Pro Vice-Chancellor and Vice-President of RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. He has exhibited internationally and is represented in the permanent collection of the Imperial War Museum, London; the

Notes on contributors  xv Canadian War Museum, Ottawa; the National War Memorial, New Zealand. He is author of a monograph on Stanley Spencer: Journey to Burghclere (2006); A Terrible Beauty: British Artists in the First World War (2010), and Your Loving Friend, the edited correspondence between Stanley Spencer and Desmond Chute (2011). Books on the street artist Banksy were published in 2012, and on John and Paul Nash (2014). David Howes is Professor of Anthropology and Co-Director of the Centre for Sensory Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. He is the author of Sensual Relations (2003), and co-author (with Constance Classen) of Ways of Sensing (2014) and (with Classen and Anthony Synnott) Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (1994). He is the editor of numerous books on the sensorium as a social formation, including Empire of the Senses (2004) and A Cultural History of the Senses in the Modern Age, 1920–2000 (2014). His current research focuses on law and the senses (or sensori-legal studies) and – together with Chris Salter – the design of performative multi-sensory environments. Stephen Hurst is a sculptor, bronze caster and writer. Educated at the Ruskin School of Drawing, Oxford, Goldsmiths College, London, and the Royal College of Art, London, he was awarded an MA in ‘Transition from Empires’ in 2000 from Royal Holloway, University of London. He remembers visits during his childhood by a family friend, the social anthropologist E. E. Evans Pritchard, and inspiring gifts of African sculptures. He has had many major solo exhibitions of his work, including at the New Vision Centre, London (1962), the Arts Council of Northern Ireland Gallery, Belfast (1985), In Flanders Fields Museum, Ieper, Belgium (2014), and Pangolin London Gallery (2014). He has published widely – Metal Casting: Appropriate Technology in the Small Foundry (1996, 2000, 2002), Bronze Sculpture – Casting and Patination – Mud Fire and Metal (2005), The Public Schools Battalion in the Great War: Goodbye Piccadilly (2007), Famous Faces: Writers and Artists in the Spanish Civil War. 1936–1939 (2009), and has recently completed Drawn from Life: The Ruskin Diaries. 1949–1953. Uroš Košir is a PhD candidate at the Department of Archaeology, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, focusing on the First World War archaeology of the Soča Front. He is interested in modern conflict archaeology, especially in the First and Second World War conflict landscapes of Slovenia and their numerous legacies, especially the material culture. He is also an author of several papers, ranging from the topics of modern conflict archaeology to personal histories of people involved in twentiethcentury conflicts. Matthew Leonard is a modern conflict archaeologist at the University of Bristol. His work combines archaeology and anthropology to examine the material culture of twentieth and twenty-first century warfare. His

xvi  Notes on contributors doctoral research explored the human engagement with the subterranean worlds of the Western Front during the First World War, and he conducts regular fieldwork beneath these 100-year-old battlefields in France and Belgium. Matthew is a member of the Durand Group and advises the BBC on its cross-platform coverage on the Centenary of the First World War. He is also a major contributor to Oxford University’s online project, ‘World War One Centenary: Continuations and Beginnings’. He has published widely both commercially and academically and has contributed to numerous television documentaries on various aspects of the First World War. Laura McAtackney is Associate Professor in Sustainable Heritage Mana­ gement in the Archaeology Department at Aarhus University, Denmark. An archaeologist by training, her current research uses contemporary and historical archaeological approaches, and its heritage implications, to explore areas as diverse as material barriers in post-conflict Northern Ireland, historic institutional graffiti, female experiences of political imprisonment during the Irish Civil War and race/social relations on early modern Montserrat in the Caribbean. She published An Archaeology of the Troubles: The Dark Heritage of Long Kesh/Maze (Oxford University Press) in 2014 and created and maintains a website on female experiences of imprisonment during the Irish Civil War . She is secretary of CHAT (Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory) and is co-assistant editor of the journal Post Medieval Archeology. Stephen Miles is Affiliate Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow’s Crichton Campus in Dumfries, Scotland. He completed his PhD in battlefield tourism in 2012 and maintains research interests in tourist engagement with conflict sites, heritage management and the construction and meanings of place. He has published a range of academic papers, book chapters and articles and has spoken at several conferences. A paper on Remembrance Trails along the Western Front is soon to be published in the Journal of Heritage Tourism and his book The Western Front: Heritage, Landscape and Tourism will be published by Pen and Sword Books in 2016. Gabriel Moshenska is Lecturer in Public Archaeology at UCL Institute of Archaeology. He is the author of The Archaeology of the Second World War: Uncovering Britain’s Wartime Heritage (2013), edited volumes on the archaeology of internment and the ethics of conflict archaeology, and a number of papers on the archaeology and material culture of childhood and civilian life in Second World War Britain. He is particularly interested in gas masks (which he collects) and air raid shelters (which he explores). Sarah De Nardi is a Research Associate in Cultural Geography, Durham University. A landscape archaeologist by training, her work on place,

Notes on contributors  xvii emotion, landscape, the materiality of memory and community heritage intersects the disciplines of archaeology, heritage studies and cultural geography. She is the author of the forthcoming monograph The Poetics of Conflict Experience: Materiality and Embodiment in Second World War Italy (Routledge). Franco Nicolis is Director of the Archaeological Heritage Office of the Autonomous Province of Trento in Italy. He has published widely on European prehistory, including the Beaker phenomenon, Alpine archaeology and the archaeology of death. His recent interests include First World War archaeology, and between 2009 and 2014 he directed the Punta Linke Project, an investigation of an ice-bound AustroHungarian cableway transit station at 3,629m in the Italian Alps. He is co-editor (with Gianni Ciurletti and Armando De Guio) of Archeologia della Grande Guerra/Archaeology of the Great War (2011). Jeffrey S. Reznick is Chief of the History of Medicine Division of the US National Library of Medicine, and an Honorary Research Fellow in the Centre for War Studies of the University of Birmingham. He is author of John Galsworthy and Disabled Soldiers of the Great War (2009) and Healing the Nation: Soldiers and the Culture of Caregiving in Britain during the Great War (2005), both of which appear in the Cultural History of Modern War series of Manchester University Press. Nicholas J. Saunders is Professor of Material Culture at Bristol University, and co-director of the ‘Great Arab Revolt Project‘ (Jordan). Between 1998 and 2004, he was British Academy Senior Research Fellow at University College London, making the first anthropological study of the material culture of the First World War. He has undertaken research in France, Belgium, Bosnia, Mexico, Peru and the Caribbean, and currently in Slovenia with the ‘Soca/Isonzo Valley Conflict Landscapes Project’. He has published widely on the anthropology and archaeology of modern conflict, including Trench Art (2003), Matters of Conflict (2004), Bodies in Conflict with Paul Cornish (2014), and Desert Insurgency: Archaeology, T. E. Lawrence, and the Arab Revolt due in 2017. Mark Smith is Carolina Distinguished Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. He has published a dozen books, including Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South (winner of the Organization of American Historians’ 1997 Avery O. Craven Award); Debating Slavery: Economy and Society in the Antebellum American South; Listening to Nineteenth-Century America; How Race is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (a Choice Outstanding Academic Title); Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History, and Camille, 1969: Histories of a Hurricane. His most recent book is The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the

xviii  Notes on contributors American Civil War (2014). He is co-editor of the Cambridge University Press series, Studies on the American South, and General Editor of Studies in Sensory History for the University of Illinois Press. He is a regular book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal. Melanie Winterton is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Bristol. She specializes in modern conflict archaeology and her AHRC-funded research focuses on the ‘depths and dimensions of a First World War Aviator’s sense-scape from an archaeological and anthropological perspective – 1914 to the present’. She has previously published ‘Signs Signals and Senses: The Soldier Body in the Trenches’, in N. J. Saunders (ed.) Beyond the Dead Horizon (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2012).

Foreword The Engagement of the Senses David Howes

For all that war is ‘senseless’, ‘unrepresentable’ and even ‘unthinkable’, it leaves a material and sensory legacy which it behooves us to try and comprehend. Such is the challenge faced by the contributors to this volume. Their efforts to make sense of the conflicts that wracked the twentieth century – beginning with the Great War of 1914–1918 – are informed by a unique theoretical and methodological paradigm: that of sensory studies. Sensory studies foregrounds the senses as both object and means of inquiry. It is based on the premise that the sensorium is a social formation, and seeks to bring out the mediatory role of the senses in the production of experience. With its roots in the history and anthropology of the senses, which first took shape in the 1990s (Herzfeld 2001; Classen 2001), it has gradually spread to other disciplines, such as geography and archeology, as well as the interdisciplinary fields of material culture and, as here, conflict studies. By engaging the senses in the study of war and its aftermath, the sensory studies approach has created a new engagement with conflict. The first level of engagement is at the level of the soldier’s body and senses, the second at the level of the landscape and detritus of war, and the third at the level of the commemoration of conflict in war memorials and museum displays. Constance Classen enables us to gain our bearings on the unbearable experience of war at the level of the body in her introduction to A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Empire, 1800–1920. In a section called ‘The Senses at War’, she observes that inversion is one of the defining features of modern conflict due in large part to the invention of trench warfare. The entrenchment of war replaced living above ground with living underground, making the modern warrior the lowly antithesis to the high-riding knight of old. [It] replaced being active during the day with being active at night, and attending to sights with attending to sounds. One French combatant noted: ‘The darkness is a huge mass: you seem to be moving through a yielding substance; sight is a superfluous sense. Your whole being is concentrated on the faculty of hearing’ (Classen 2014: 21)

xx Foreword The techniques of listening which the soldiers devised included everything from eavesdropping on the enemy through the walls of the trenches with the aid of improvised hearing trumpets (Leonard 2015) to trying to gauge the calibre, trajectory and speed of shells from the whistling, screaming and other sounds they gave off: ‘the strain of listening for all these sounds did something to the brain. A man could never be rid of them’ (Winter cited in Gough and Davies, this volume). The sounds of air-warfare, including the wail of sirens, also left marks in the minds and memories of those who were evacuated, such as the ‘children of the Blitz’, as Gabriel Moshenska brings out in his analysis of the harrowing narratives of wartime childhood in the archive of the BBC People’s War project. Along with the consciousness of hearing, the consciousness of smell intensified as a result of the up-ending of the conventional hierarchy of sensing.1 In his chapter in this book, Dominiek Dendooven describes how, despite the stringent regulations regarding the digging and use of latrines (particularly among the British, less so among the French) and the use of quick lime to counteract the putrefying smell of corpses, the stench of open latrines and decomposing bodies created an atmosphere so poisonous that some troops were driven to contemplate surrender on these grounds alone. Another defining feature of the trench experience was the confusion of sensory functions – most notably, the obliteration of the conventional separation between defecation and ingestion. The ‘proximity of shit’ rendered the already scarcely palatable rations of bully beef and hard biscuit (selected for their ‘energy values’ and without regard to their form or taste or digestibility) doubly difficult to swallow. The poor teeth of many enlisted men compounded the misery. Rachel Duffet describes with clinical precision the pathologies of digestion on the Western Front,2 while Esther Breithoff focuses on the role of thirst and water in the Chaco War (1932–5): ‘After days without a drop of liquid, every cell in the soldier’s body was desperately craving water. Yet, when it suddenly came in the form of a torrential rainfall, water often turned from a long-awaited saviour into a deadly assassin.’ The rains transformed the dusty landscape and trenches into ‘brown and clingy “slimescapes” that “confused the categories of solid and liquid”’ and occasioned fears of getting buried alive. These studies bring home the truth that war is first and foremost an assault on the senses. It repositions and reconditions the senses. Also noteworthy are all the sensory adaptations occasioned by war, such as European soldiers turning to their Indian comrades for a dash of curry to spice up their victuals, or soldiers slithering through the slimescape, or the suspension of the normal restrictions on touching between men in the trenches, as Santana Das has documented in Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (2005). The adaptation of the senses is also exemplified by the diverse ways in which the contributors have sought to acquire direct experience of the landscapes and machinery of war. Melanie Winterton clambers into the cockpit of a Lancaster bomber and observes how her spatial awareness is

Foreword  xxi altered; the sculptor Steve Hurst attunes his senses to the countryside around Ypres by going on rambles and making sketches; Matt Leonard teams up with a group of engineers to explore the tumbledown tunnels of the Western Front, risking life and limb. Leonard’s objective is not so much to excavate objects as to excavate the experience of life underground. His recent Ph.D. thesis and the chapter included here represent sensory archaeology at its finest, and give new meaning to the idea of an archaeology of perception. A number of chapters are devoted to analysing the sensorial dimensions of the tourist experience of conflicted landscapes, building on the pioneering work of Nicholas Saunders on the recollection of war in Trench Art (2003). The third level of engagement has to do with the memorialization of conflict by means of commemorative ceremonies and museum displays. The curator Paul Cornish relates the considerations that informed the design of the multisensory First World War galleries at the Imperial War Museum (IWM), which opened in 2014, while Alys Cundy presents a fine-grained sensory analysis of the visitor experience of the museum from the creation of its first semi-permanent public display in 1920 down to 2014. She explores the role of the imagination in conjuring the sensescapes of the battlefields both for the veteran whose personal sensory memory is engaged by the displays of war materiel in the IWM and for the visitor with no direct experience of the conflict whose cultural memory is mobilized by the generated sensory experiences created by the curators with the help of multisensory display techniques. She goes on to challenge the assumed polarity between artifice and artificiality that has dogged discussion of heritage representation of conflict on account of the way it trivializes the creative role of the visitor’s imagination. Cundy’s analysis of the ‘sensory display potential’ of material culture is a major contribution to the emerging field of sensory museology and will be of interest to the many curators in other types of museums (art, ethnology, craft) who are now actively enlisting the senses in opening up other worldly experiences for the general public. In ‘The Cave Mouth: listening to sound and voice in Okinawan war memory’ Rupert Cox and Angus Carlyle fill in the background to their collaborative sound-art work, The Cave Mouth and the Giant Voice. Their collaborators included Yogi-san, who hid in one of the many limestone gama or caves during the early stages of the bombardment of Okinawa, and Kozo Hiramatsu, an acoustic scientist who has developed ‘a particular understanding of the ways that military aircraft sounds animate the geographical features of the post-war environment of the military bases and in doing so may reactivate traumatic experiences for many survivors of the Battle of Okinawa who still live in these areas’. Their research involved revisiting the cave with Yogi-san and interviewing him in situ while making sound recordings of the acoustic environment. For their installation, they constructed an analogue of the cave, with particular attention to reproducing the porosity of its surfaces, and carefully positioned speakers. The complex interplay of sounds and voices stretch the bounds of hearing

xxii Foreword and the imagination in deeply evocative ways. Especially meaningful is the figure of the echo as symbol of the presence of absence. This theme, the presence of absence, is indeed one of the most pervasive motifs of the volume. It crops up in Gilly Carr’s chapter investigating the ‘ghosts of war’ in the Channel Islands, and in Paul Gough and Katie Davies’s essay on ‘creative interpretations of the sounds of conflict and remembrance’. One of the sound-art works Gough and Davies analyse is composed entirely of recordings of the ritual two minutes of silence at Remembrance Day ceremonies at the London Cenotaph going back seventy years. The diversity of sense-based analytic approaches, the multiplicity of sources (sketches, paintings, sound recordings, letters and diaries, the materiel of war itself), and the sensuous imaginations of the contributors to this volume make Modern Conflict and the Senses vital reading for those with the will to try and make sense of the all-out assault on the senses that typifies the phenomenon of modern conflict – a phenomenon which appears to know no bounds (see Bull 2014).

Notes 1 In addition to inversion, intensification, and confusion of sensory functions, another hallmark of wartime sense experience is separation, or, the ‘dissociation of sensibility’. As Classen observes, ‘The experience from below [i.e. from the trenches] with its circumscribed sights [through loopholes or periscopes or cautious glances over the top] and its intense sounds, smells and tactile sensations contrasted with the aerial vista of the fighter pilot, which turned battlefields and cities into inaudible, inodorate, and intangible panormas. The German pilot, Ernst Boehme, noted how unreal it seemed to look down on soundless explosions when flying over the front’ (2014: 21–2). Classen’s analysis brings out the importance of taking a relational approach to the study of the sensorium in contrast to the overly simplistic, unitary approach advocated by Tim Ingold (see Ingold and Howes 2011). 2 Another factor contributing to the dissociation of sensibility in wartime was the degree to which soldiers were ‘regarded as bodies that needed to be stoked with calories rather than human beings who were entitled to civilized meals . . . The army’s provisioning systems were founded upon the need to fuel the soldiers, whilst for the men, eating was experienced as a social and emotional act not merely as a nutritional event’ (Duffet, this volume). This theme of the deep-set sociality of sensation, which it is irresponsible to ignore, is also taken up by Cox and Carlyle (this volume) in their reanalysis of the etiology of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. On the interrelationship of the social and the sensible see Laplantine 2015.

References Bull, M. (2014) Sensory Media: Virtual Worlds and the Training of Perception. In D. Howes (ed.) A Cultural History of the Senses in the Modern Age, 1920–2000, pp. 219–41. London: Bloomsbury. Classen, C. (2001) The Social History of the Senses. In P. Stearns (ed.) Encyclopedia of European Social History, vol. IV, pp. 355–63. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Foreword  xxiii —— (2014) Introduction: The Transformation of Perception. In C. Classen (ed.) A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Empire, 1800–1920, pp. 1–24. London: Bloomsbury. Das, S. (2005) Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herzfeld, M. (2001) Senses. In M. Herzfeld Anthropology: Theoretical Practice in Culture and Society. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Ingold, T., and Howes, D. (2011) Worlds of Sense and Sensing the World: A Reply to Sarah Pink and David Howes. Social Anthropology, 19(3): 313–31. Laplantine, F. (2015) The Life of the Senses: Introduction to a Modal Anthropology, tr. J. Furniss. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Leonard, M. (2015) Making Sense of Subterranean Conflict: Engaging Landscapes Beneath the Western Front, 1914–2015. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Bristol. Saunders, N. J. (2003) Trench Art: Materialities and Memories of War. Oxford: Berg.

Introduction Paul Cornish, Nicholas J. Saunders, Mark Smith

Given that we perceive and experience our environment through our senses, it is curious that, until recent times, relatively little attention has been focused on how the senses respond to the extremes to which people are exposed by conflict in all its forms. This is not for lack of evidence. While few people – if indeed any – wrote memoirs or kept diaries of their war experience with the express intent of creating a sensorial record, many such works are saturated with references, both overt and subliminal, to the author’s sensory engagement with his or her circumstances. While only a minority of those engaged in conflict faced daily danger, a huge majority confronted challenges which impinged directly upon their senses; as they grappled with cold or heat, inadequate food or drink, bombardment, injury, illness, disturbing sounds and smells, darkness, or disorientating surroundings. And such sensory engagements with conflict are not limited to participants. Visitors to battlefields or war museums expect to sense a particular atmosphere or, increasingly, expect to have their senses actively engaged in the course of their visits.1 Such desires are bound to be realized only partially, for no one would want to be exposed to the realities endured by those directly affected by conflict. It is indeed just a sense of conflict’s often overpowering sensoriality that they seek – an aspect of reality, not reality itself, a stimulus that can be immaterial yet conjures and privileges certain kinds of materiality (Buchli 2016: 10). This type of sense-engagement appears to seek a carefully configured (safe) degree of authenticity by denying the totality of the (often lethal) original. This volume originates from the joint Imperial War Museum/University of Bristol conference ‘Conflict and the Senses’, held at the Imperial War Museum on 6–7 September 2013. Investigations of the interrelationship between conflict and all five senses – and even the ‘sixth’ (Carr, Hurst) – will be found within its pages. ‘Sensing’ of a different sort is also present – the more general but often intangible and fugitive way in which we have a ‘sense’ of something. Our senses are the markers and indicators of some of our most basic human functions; such as eating, drinking and excreting. Primacy among

2  Paul Cornish, Nicholas J. Saunders, Mark Smith these functions must – for obvious physiological reasons – be accorded to the need to drink (Duffett). Wartime experiences associated with this fundamental requirement could mark people for life and even get passed on into family or community (Breithoff) ‘history’. One of the editors of this book recalls tales of thirst passed on by three uncles who fought in the Great War. Two of them were tortured by it as they marched up the River Tigris. The third grumbled until the 1980s about French civilians (who were in fact experiencing a water shortage) denying him and his comrades the chance to snatch a drink by removing the handles of village pumps behind the Somme front. None, fortunately, had to endure the terrors of the ‘white death’ in the 1932–5 Chaco War (Breithoff); but their stories strike a similar tone to the visceral memories of that war and of other thirst-stricken campaigns of the same era, such as those fought in 1915 at Gallipoli and between 1915 and 1917 on the Carso plateau of the Soča/ Isonzo (Italian) Front, where summer fighting on sharp splintered limestone was accompanied by unquenchable thirst. However, Paraguay would appear to be unique in finding expression for such memories in a national culture of drinking cold tea (Breithoff). In the case of hunger and thirst, our senses can lead us far beyond the mechanical satisfaction of bodily requirements (Duffett 2012). Even when nourishment is in sufficient supply men’s senses can find it deficient in variety or quality (Duffett, Hurst). The relationships between food, drink and morale was well understood however, and surprisingly sophisticated arrangements could be made to satisfy epicurean desires. This even in the shadow of extreme violence (Fraser), or in the face of incredible logistical challenges, such as the high-altitude sauerkraut never consumed (but recovered archaeologically) at the Austro-Hungarian cableway transit station of Punta Linke (Nicolis). The experience of food can also reach beyond the senses of smell and taste to incorporate less tangible sensations, notably nostalgia. Das begins his paper with the lament of an Indian soldier for the butter and milk he enjoyed on his Punjab farm. As a prisoner of war in Germany he was unlikely to have seen either, given that German civilians were largely denied such produce due to food shortages.2 We are reminded of the even more extreme instance of food nostalgia which features in Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, where his fellow Auschwitz prisoners reminisce about their favourite meals (Levi 1987: 80). Another example is the recipe books written by hungry Italian prisoners of war during the First World War (Dickie 2008: 233–9). More recent, but equally powerful is the case of Laos, carpet-bombed by the Americans during the Vietnam War,3 and where the simplest food-producing activity is fraught with danger. One farmer lost her husband when a decades-old bomb exploded in 2009, and food, memory and loss still combine to affect her stomach: ‘When I eat rice I keep thinking about my husband, who was working to grow rice to feed the children. Now the children eat the rice, but he can’t eat it’ (Redfern and Coates 2011: 102).

Introduction  3 The act (and results) of excreting might not engender such longings, but are an ever-present aspect of military life. The poet David Jones placed his own experience of the First World War within a historic continuum of soldiering by having his character ‘Dai Greatcoat’ declare: ‘I built a shit-house for Artaxerxes’ (Jones 1937: 79). He also provided a note to indicate that the inspiration for this line came from a man who, when chaffed for his ill luck in having to carry latrine buckets, replied ‘Bloody job – bloody job indeed, the army of Artaxerxes was utterly destroyed for lack of sanitation’ (Jones 1937: 207). This surprising rejoinder highlights the fact that, for the huge armies on the relatively static Western Front of 1914–18, excreta was a major sanitary and logistical issue. It was also the focus of scatological humour and, simply, an everyday impingement upon the senses (Dendooven, Duffett). The latter effect was even more conspicuous where such matters were less well regulated, such as on the Italian Front in 1915, where ‘the stench of sun-baked faeces mixed with that of death . . . [and] Shit of every size, shape, colour, texture and consistency is scattered everywhere . . . yellow, black, ash grey, swarthy, bronze, liquid, solid’ (Thompson 2008: 151). Such considerations remind us that soldiers lead a largely outdoor life, and the nearer the landscape gets to the zone of contact with the enemy, the more it becomes a topsy-turvy world in which the ravages of warfare and the vestiges of peacetime civilization are weirdly mixed (Fraser). This plays tricks on the senses. Indeed, conflict renders some landscapes so alien that they become disorientating even to their indigenous inhabitants or, conversely, to those shipped across the world to fight in them (Das). The power of such landscapes to reconfigure human senses is captured by a First World War Austrian soldier fighting on the Carso. The sun, he wrote, baked the leaves on the trees to a dark crisp, until they crackle on the branch. It blanches the grass until it shatters at a touch . . . Rocks split. Sounds carry far louder and faster. There is no escaping the heat. Tongues swell, coated with thick saliva. Fingers swell and dangle clumsily from sticky hands. Eyes inflamed, skin like parchment. The blinding light beats everywhere, penetrating our eyelids. Our flasks are empty, sucked dry by early morning. (Thompson 2008: 108) Even when softened and partially erased by the passage of time, the power of such landscapes as lieux de memoire can still be sensed – whether by modern-day artists (Hurst) or by battlefield tourists (Miles). Leonard and Winterton take us into particularly claustrophobic iterations of the conflict landscape. While one lay underground and the other was designed to be airborne, both required a reordering or refocusing of the senses of those who fought in them. Both authors have rightly adopted a participatory approach to assessing the impact of these unique sensescapes, which can truly only be understood through personal experience. The responses

4  Paul Cornish, Nicholas J. Saunders, Mark Smith of tunnellers and aircrew to their very specific fighting environments are of course merely a specialized form of the adaptations that all people involved in war make to some extent. This adaptation frequently takes the form of a new prioritization of the senses, with touch, smell or hearing taking over the previous dominant position of sight (Leonard). Attuning oneself to sounds in particular could be the difference between life and death (Gough, Leonard, Moshenska), whether the calibre of incoming shells or the beginnings of avalanche which inspired more fear than the enemy on the First World War’s Italian Front; in just four days in December 1916, Austrian forces lost 637 killed and 143 wounded to a ‘white death’ very different to that which stalked the Gran Chaco (Schindler 2001: 192–3). The association of sounds with danger can evidently survive long after the end of the direct experience of conflict – even to the extent of forming an element of post-traumatic stress more than half a century later (Cox). Nor is it confined to the sound of military technology, as it can be mediated or triggered by inanimate objects in the home and sometimes even shared by loved ones who never experienced conflict themselves. While an unexpected loud sound sending an ex-soldier diving for cover is a commonly reported occurrence, a more specific example involves a particular kind of mat­erial culture. First World War artillery shell cases were used as impromptu gas-alarms on the front line: ‘Gas horns would be honked, empty brass shell-cases beaten, rifles emptied and the mad cry [i.e. “Gas”] would be taken up’ (Allen, quoted in Winter 1979: 121). The war ended but the sound lingered. Souvenir trench-art shell-case dinner gongs were sounded to announce mealtimes in the 1920s and 1930s, and the reactions of old soldiers can only be imagined (Saunders 2003: 153–4). When envisaging conflict landscapes, we should not forget war museums. These present another locale in which the senses are engaged (Levent and Pascual Leone 2014). This is ensured by their very nature as ‘institutions in which material culture is mobilized to represent the past’ (Cundy). In addition museums such as London’s IWM have long felt it necessary to directly stimulate their visitor’s senses; a policy maintained on several levels in that institution’s First World War Galleries, which opened in 2014 (Cornish, Cundy). It is clear, however, from both papers addressing this subject that any attempt at overt manipulation of the senses – in the form of ‘experiences’ – is likely to be fraught with difficulty. These two papers possess the important, and surprisingly rare (Cornish), merit of having been written from inside the institution under examination. Extraordinary sensory burdens, linked to landscape and environment, can be imposed on people in times of war. These might culminate in dystopian inversions of one’s sense of place (De Nardi) or the perception of new sensescapes in response to circumstances of oppression and confinement (Košir, McAtackney). Interestingly, in both examples of the latter conditions discussed here, some sufferers found expression – and what was

Introduction  5 evidently a vital assertion of their sense of self – in graffiti, even perhaps in the signing of a rye straw snow shoe in the Alps (Nicolis). The sensory overload imposed by such terrible situations can result in extreme psychological and physical reactions. Holocaust witness Jan Karski, although a Gentile, began to identify himself as an ‘Israelite’ (Becker). His immediate response to his clandestine visit to the hellish transit camp at Izbica was compulsive washing, although this failed to drive the stench of the camp from his mind and he vomited repeatedly. This all too tangible sensory response to the horrors of Nazi atrocities contrasts starkly with the numinous supernatural manifestations perceived by some on the Channel Islands (Carr). Here, it is only in relatively recent times that ghostly slave labourers have been added to the roster of phantoms to be seen or heard in bunkers. It would be interesting to hear of any similar manifestations at Begunje (Košir). However, a cursory check certainly suggests that Holocaustrelated supernatural experiences are prevalent in the ‘Bloodlands’ (to quote Timothy Snyder) of south-eastern Poland and western Ukraine: including at Izbica (Burds 2013: 98–9). Perhaps surprisingly, given the subordinate role it has been largely forced to fulfil in the sensorium, the sense of smell is powerfully present in many of the papers in this volume. The history of its devaluation by modern Western society (Callow, Dendooven, Leonard, Miles) is contrasted with its elevation to a higher level of significance in certain conflict environments – literally in the case of snow-and-ice-bound Punte Linke at 3,629m, where, recently, smells have literally been ‘excavated’ (Nicolis). Smells were an inescapable element of the frontline (Fraser, Hurst). They might be caused by animals (living or dead), chemicals (noxious, disinfectant or explosive residue), human corpses (Hurst) or just human waste (Dendooven). These elements polluted ponds, lakes and rivers, discouraging many, such as Benito Mussolini on the Isonzo Front, from bathing in tainted water – which saved health but added to the stench of war (Schindler 2001: 193). The power of odours to conjure (and perhaps even represent) a particular conflict extends to fiction. In Apocalypse Now!, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 epic of the Vietnam War, Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, the character played by actor Robert Duvall, made what has been called the best speech in cinema history when he said ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning’ (BBC 2004). In almost every case however, conflict situations involve a forced engagement with an olfactory stimulant which has long been kept at arms-length in modern society – the smell of other human beings. Writing from Belgium in 1914, American journalist Will Irwin recorded ‘a smell of which I have never heard mentioned in any book on war – the smell of a half-million unbathed men, the stench of a menagerie raised to the nth power. That smell lay for days over every town through which the Germans passed’ (Herwig 2009: 158). In the Vietnam War, the United States Army Chemical Corps created the XM-2, a backpack personnel detector – an electronic sniffer – which detected ammonia particles and condensation nuclei from sweat and

6  Paul Cornish, Nicholas J. Saunders, Mark Smith campfires (Kirby 2007).4 Unavoidable human odour has frequently been employed as a method of ‘othering’ the enemy (Callow, Fraser, Leonard). At one level there might be simple practical reasons for the enemy smelling different, relating to food, hygiene facilities and practices, clothing and methods of cleaning it, etc. At another level however, attempts have been made to impose spurious racial theories upon these perceived differences (Callow, Dendooven, see also Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker 2002: 104, 154). Beyond war too, hitherto emotionally neutral domestic smells could be reconfigured to possess a powerful if mournful resonance. The previously mentioned decorated brass trench-art shell-cases which were such popular war souvenirs during the inter-war years tarnished quickly in hallways and on mantelpieces of the homes of the bereaved. The frequent polishing had a sensual dimension associated with the pungent smell of brass polish, transforming domestic chore to sacred act (Saunders 2003: 153–4). Confinement brings its own inescapable engagement with smells (Košir, McAtackney), of which the most extreme example given here is a stench which gets, whether metaphorically or psychologically, inside the man who smelt it (Becker). Unsurprisingly, given this last manifestation, smells have the capacity to endure in our subconscious for years. Most of us will be familiar with the ability of smells to induce nostalgia, or carry us back to our childhoods, but they can also be the trigger for post-traumatic stress (Moshenska). And not only a trigger: as part of a clinical study at the University of Central Florida, US veterans ‘suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder inhale the unmistakable smell of burning tires, rotting garbage and Middle Eastern spices as part of a virtual reality treatment for the psychological wounds of war’ (Burch 2012).5 Simulating these odours has also been used by the US Army and Marine Corps as part of a training regime to prepare new recruits before their deployment specifically to avoid sensory overload (Vlahos 2006). The essays in this collection, broad and varied though they are, remind us of a fundamental principle guiding the writing and researching of sensory history generally: the pre-eminent importance of attending to context. Wars impact the senses in powerful, enduring, and sometimes crushing ways, it is true; but they do so in highly specific contexts which give meaning to the sensory experience not just of war itself but to specific wars and the particular constituencies engaged in them. Historical context matters for several reasons. First, context both reflects and explains the language combatants and participants used to capture the essence of their sensory experiences and that language, in turn, tells us about the larger society of which they were a part (Gallagher 2010). For example, while the American Civil War is often considered something of a ‘modern’ war – and there is certainly evidence to support that claim – it is nonetheless the case that most soldiers, Confederate and Union, attempted to capture the sound of rifle and musket fire using natural metaphors, not

Introduction  7 mechanical ones. Bullets whizzed by ears sounding not like hissing steam but, rather, like angry bees. This was entirely in keeping with the larger context in which the war was fought: the United States generally, the North included, was still overwhelming an agricultural society, not an industrial one, and the way that its participants experienced the war sensorially was wrapped very much in the language of the larger sensory environment (Smith 2014). In this respect, attention to language and context grants us an important interpretive dividend about the American Civil War, namely: understanding how participants expressed their sensory experiences allows us to see the war in its full, complicated texture as a war at once modern yet atavistic. Attention to context also matters because it helps us to distinguish between ostensibly universal sensory qualities of war, and place- and timespecific ones. While there is clearly much to be learned by exploring the sensory implications of war generally – how conflict assaults and overwhelms the senses, numbs them, and rearranges them in contradistinction to what we might think of peacetime sensory experiences – context allows us to understand the specific sensory experiences peculiar to each conflict under consideration. In addition to allowing us to fathom the particular sensory signatures of each event, such a sensitivity to context also invites us to chart the emergence of sensory warfare (taken to mean both how technologies of war are designed to attack the senses but also, and more generally, how war impacts the sensorium for civilians and soldiers) over time and facilitates comparative analysis. Not all wars impacted all of the senses in the same way, rearranged the sensorium for all constituencies in equal fashion, or spoke in like measure to soldiers and civilians. Understanding – indeed, even narrating – the sensory experience of war also helps temper the seductive power of celebratory war history. As Drew Gilpin Faust (2008) argued in her arresting book on death and the American Civil War, historians have too often looked for – and found – untarnished nobility in America’s bloodiest conflict and implicitly and explicitly celebrated the lofty moral goals of the war. To be sure, those noble aspirations – including the emancipation of almost four million Southern slaves – were important to the meaning of the Civil War. Yet, as Faust demonstrates, such a heavy emphasis occludes the lived experience of war, the utter nastiness, bloodiness and horror of the conflict, qualities which can be more fully profiled and understood by paying close attention to the sensorial experience of the war. Far from being simply the ‘school of gore’ of Civil War historiography, such an emphasis on the sensory experience of war can, and should, attend to the full range of human sensory experience, from the overwhelming stench of death to the tenderness of touches and caresses on the battlefields (Delbanco 2015). In this way, the sensory history of war generally grants us fuller access to the at once frequently destructive and overwhelming but also ennobling ways in which human beings experience conflict.

8  Paul Cornish, Nicholas J. Saunders, Mark Smith

Notes 1 An extreme example of this was the olfactory art exhibition, The Smell of War, curated by Peter de Cupere, and held at the Castle De Lovie, Poperinge, Belgium, between 1 May and 30 August 2015. It was held to commemorate the centenary of the German gas attacks outside Ypres during the First World War. Visitors were recommended to wear complimentary white masks before entering the exhibition due to the deliberate intensity of the odour inside (SoW 2015). 2 For a memorable account of the situation in First World War Germany and the obsession with food which a shortage of it can engender, see the letters of Ethel Cooper, an Australian stranded in Leipzig (Denholm 1982). 3 The Americans flew more than 580,000 bombing missions over Laos during the conflict – the equivalent of one raid every 8 minutes for nine years. More than 50,000 people, mainly farmers, have been killed since (Redfern and Coates 2011:100). 4 There were problems with this machine and its successor, the XM-3 helicopter version, not least in the Viet Congs’ strategies for fooling the sensors by filling buckets with mud and urine and hanging them from trees as decoys far away from their own actual positions (Kirby 2007). 5 A participant sits in a chair wearing a head-mounted display and video goggles connected to a computer system and a scent machine that puffs out the odours, thereby recreating their memories of war, from insurgent ambushes and roadside bombs to witnessing comrades dying in front of them. This is part of a $5 million study, and utilizes the ‘Virtual Iraq’ and ‘Virtual Afghanistan’ software programmes to simulate experiences of conflict based on the soldiers’ memories (Burch 2012).

References BBC (2004) ‘Napalm’ Speech Tops Movie Poll. Accessed Dec. 2015. Audoin-Rouzeau, A., and Becker, A. (2002) 1914–1918: Understanding the Great War. London: Profile Books. Buchli, V. (2016) An Archaeology of the Immaterial. London: Routledge. Burch, A. D. S. (2012) Virtual Reality Recaptures the Smells of War. Accessed Feb. 2016. Burds, J. (2013) Holocaust in Rovno: The Massacre at Sosenki Forest, November 1941. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Delbanco, A. (2015) The Civil War Convulsion. New York Review of Books, 19 Mar. Denholm, D. (ed.) (1982) Behind the Lines: One Woman’s War 1914–1918. Sydney: Collins. Dickie, J. (2008) Delizia! New York: Free Press. Duffett, R. (2012) The Stomach for Fighting: Food and the Soldiers of the Great War. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Faust, D. (2008) This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Gallagher, G. (2010) The Use of Sensory Language in War Literature. Colgate Academic Review, 8 (Fall): 68–82. Herwig, H. (2009) The Marne, 1914. New York: Random House. Jones, D. (1937) In Parenthesis. London: Faber. Kirby, R. (2007) Operation Snoopy: The Chemical Corps’ ‘People Sniffer’. Army Chemical Review (Jan.–June): 20–2.

Introduction  9 Levent, N. and A. Pascual Leone (eds) (2014) The Multisensory Museum: CrossDisciplinary Perspectives on Touch, Sound, Smell, Memory, and Space. Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield. Levi, P. (1987) If This Is a Man. London: Abacus. Redfern, J., and Coates, K. J. (2011) The Flavor of Danger. Gastronomica, 11(4) (Winter): 99–103. Saunders, N. J. (2003) Trench Art: Materialities and Memories of War. Oxford: Berg. Schindler, J. R. (2001) Isonzo: The Forgotten Sacrifice of the Great War. Westport, CT: Praeger. Smith, M. (2014) The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press. SoW (2015) The Smell of War. Accessed Jan. 2016. Thompson, M. (2008) The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915–1919. London: Faber & Faber. Vlahos, J. (2006) The Smell of War. Accessed Feb. 2016. Winter, D. (1979) Death’s Men: Soldiers of the Great War. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Part I

Sensual landscapes

1 Sensing war Concept and space in the Imperial War Museum’s First World War Galleries Paul Cornish

This chapter looks at the creation of the First World War Galleries at Imperial War Museum London, which opened in July 2014. It explores the part that the senses played in their conception and design and how the senses of visitors are engaged in them. It also examines the way in which these galleries interact with another definition of sense, not as a faculty but as a form of awareness – our ‘sense’ of the First World War as an event. Above all, perhaps, this is a first-hand account of the creation of the First World War Galleries, written by the Senior Curator on the First World War Project Team. It is, therefore, a chronicle of an interdisciplinary process, which blends participatory observation with an institutional framework to reveal the process behind a reconfiguration of the presentation of the war for a twenty-first-century public. It has been referenced insofar as the availability of documents permits, but to some extent it might lay claim to being a primary source in its own right, for it is inevitable that not every thought or decision made in the course of such a process gets committed to a document. Such an insider’s view is an unusual thing (see Winter (2006: 222–37) for a notable exception). While museums frequently publish guides or catalogues of recent exhibitions, analyses of their exhibition processes are usually the province of ‘outside’ academics. Very occasionally these might be appointed by the museum in question (Linenthal 1995); more often they are unconnected and base their research on existing exhibitions (Malvern 2000; Whitmarsh 2001; Lisle 2006; Emig 2007). The authors of such studies face unavoidable problems. First there is the danger that the evidence on which their perceptions of the museum are based will be swept away by the ever-changing nature of exhibitions – even ‘permanent’ exhibitions are impermanent. Second, in structuring their arguments, they are all too likely to be tempted into inferring the presence of exhibition philosophies that were actually undreamt of by the people who created the exhibitions. This chapter enjoys the dual advantages of addressing an exhibition due to run for twenty-five years and of coming straight from the horse’s mouth. Happily it will not be the only study of the creation of these galleries from an ‘insider’ viewpoint, as a doctoral student was embedded with the project team (see Wallis 2016).

14  Paul Cornish

A war sensed The First World War now lies effectively beyond human memory. Neverthe­ less a surprisingly high proportion of British people have strong perceptions of what this conflict was like. For most, these perceptions will be built from visual sources: film presented in television documentaries, or photographs of devastated battlefields and men struggling through mud. Further nuances might be added by the work of war-poets or novelists. More personal or family-related influences might also be at work, especially with the rise in popularity of genealogical research. For example, my own early influences were a blend of child-friendly first-hand accounts from my grandfather, the BBC ‘Great War’ documentary series and – oddly, but vividly – a children’s book on the war of American origin (Sutton 1964). With raw materials such as these, we construct a First World War sensory world in our heads. This almost invariably involves mud and rain. It is not by chance that the opening chapter of Dan Todman’s seminal study of British myth and memory of the Great War should be entitled ‘Mud’, which he identifies as a ‘visual shorthand for the British experience in that war’ (Todman 2005: 1). Our war vision is also likely to feature screaming shells and explosions capable of driving men mad, the terrifying odour of poison-gas, the stench of rotting flesh, even the claustrophobia of dugouts or tunnels. If we stop to consider this phenomenon, it could be argued that ‘remembering’ a historical event in this way is unique to this particular conflict. Furthermore, we should realize that this sensory world is an element of what is a peculiarly British image of the war (Todman 2005; Winter and Prost 2005: 196). It is integral to our cultural memory (Cundy, this volume) of the war. Implicit within this version of the war is that it was a uniquely horrible event. Even men fighting in equally terrible circumstances during the Second World War believed that they were getting it easy compared with their fathers in the Great War (Sheffield 1994). The vision is also strongly imbued with a sense of tragedy and futility. Little remains of the satisfying and comforting consciousness of a victory won, which was prevalent until the late 1920s; instead the war is seen as an unnecessary waste (Todman 2005: 121–52). This ‘sense’ of the war pervades our national culture to a level that must be considered unique among the former combatant nations (see Wilson 2013).

Transforming IWM London In May 2010 I became a member of the team tasked with creating new permanent First World War Galleries for Imperial War Museum (IWM) London. Our mission was to create something ground-breaking in terms of museum design and – in line with IWM’s avowed ‘brand’ guidelines (Imperial War Museum n.d. a) – both ‘courageous’ and ‘authoritative’ in the way it explained the war.1 Both of these goals would inevitably bring

Sensing war  15 us into a dialogue and, potentially, into conflict, with the British Great War ‘vision’ adumbrated above. The IWM was established – at least in committee form – while the war still raged. Indeed, when it was instituted in March 1917, a British victory looked less certain than at any time during the war, with German U-boats threatening to bring starvation.2 But with victory secured, the museum opened in 1920 (Condell 1985) and, apart from interruptions during the Second World War (Imperial War Museum n.d. b) and brief periods of relocation or redevelopment, has continuously provided the public with displays relating to the First World War since that time. Naturally it has played a role in creating the British public perception of the war. Jay Winter and Antoine Prost have gone so far as to accord it a leading role: ‘In Britain, popular images of the 1914–18 conflict which have dominated public opinion throughout the twentieth century reflect the collections and displays of this museum, a national monument to the war’ (Winter and Prost 2005: 186). A regeneration project in the late 1980s led to the opening of a new permanent First World War gallery in 1990. This contained a wealth of material from IWM’s superb First World War collections, but lacked the space to interpret them to any great extent, or to include large exhibits. A maze-like arrangement of display cases was not easy for visitors to follow – particularly as this layout had forced an uneasy compromise between a chronological and a themed exhibition. What most visitors – particularly a whole generation of school children – took away from the gallery was a memory of the ‘Trench Experience’. This was a painstaking recreation of a frontline trench, complete with smells, voices and mannequins representing men of the Lancashire Fusiliers. However, with this sort of ‘experience’ naturalism and realism can only be taken so far, for reasons of accessibility, health and safety and taste (see Cundy, this volume). The only danger ever to threaten this particular trench was a Provisional IRA incendiary device planted there in the 1990s. It was impossible to incorporate some of the smells that pervaded an actual trench as they would have been too strong for visitors to stomach. And of course the extreme discomfort of exposure to the elements could only be hinted at. While extremely popular with visitors, this attempt to replicate a sensory environment represented ‘a version of the past which cannot be allowed to be accurate’ (Todman 2005: 217). The new galleries were to be a considerably larger replacement for this gallery.3 Obviously the existing gallery employed exhibition techniques and technology that were now almost a quarter of a century old. It was also inconveniently situated on a lower ground floor and one of the principal drivers behind the proposed transformation of the museum was the need to improve visitor-flow. But beyond such purely practical considerations, the redevelopment would allow IWM to bring its permanent displays up to date and – in the short term – to make the First World War central to the museum’s visitor offer in time for its centenary.

16  Paul Cornish Before we ventured too far into this process however, the museum commissioned an evaluation to see how much our potential audience knew of the First World War, and what they might expect to experience in an exhibition devoted to it. We were alarmed to hear that 2 per cent of our sample claimed no knowledge at all of the war (Slack 2011: 27). While this may have been a statistical anomaly, it was a useful warning to us that – although many people knew quite a lot about the war – we had to work on the principle of assuming no prior knowledge of events among our visitors. Less surprisingly, those participants who expressed impressions of the war conjured up a vision summed up in the words of one interviewee as ‘Trenches, cold, wet feet, mud, bleak, grey, desperate’ (Slack 2011: 22). Trenches, death and loss dominated the topics that people associated with the war (ibid. 22–3). Thus, to our potential audience, the Great War seemed less a historical event than a sensorial experience or cultural memory. The report based on this survey made plain that, if our audience was to engage with the war as history, our galleries would have to have offer clear guidance and a strong structure (ibid. 37). This requirement was borne out by our experience with our existing First World War Gallery and by a series of visits that the project team made to assess exhibitions in other museums. As a consequence, one of our first decisions was that the new galleries would follow a chronological format and feature a strong narrative. Within this narrative we tasked ourselves with offering answers to four big questions: •• •• •• ••

Why did the war start? Why did it go on for so long? How was it won and lost? What was its aftermath?

Concept and space Since the research for the existing gallery had been conducted during the 1980s the historiography of the First World War had undergone what can plausibly be described as a ‘fundamental reorientation’ (Horne 2010: p. xxiv). The whole focus of academic study of the war had switched away from a largely Anglo-centric engagement with the conduct of war on the Western Front to a more inclusive and internationalist outlook, which recognizes the global nature of the war and also its impact away from the fighting fronts. Historians of the war have also become more open to the influences of cultural history, sociology, philosophy, anthropology and archaeology (the two latter disciplines were also developing a new relationship with the First World War during this period: Saunders 2007: 1–30). We were determined that our new galleries would be based on current historical thinking,4 although we were also aware that, dramatic though they were, these academic developments occurred beyond the notice of most members of the general public. So, while we would make no compromises

Sensing war  17 when history clashed with cherished myths, we decided that we would also strive to avoid being unnecessarily idiosyncratic or iconoclastic in the presentation of our narrative. We certainly did not wish to give our visitors the message that ‘everything you know is wrong’ – nor is this case, as mud, trenches and terrible casualties were indeed aspects of this war. One particularly welcome outcome of the burgeoning new historiography of the war was the appearance of no less than three first-class single-volume histories of the war (Beckett 2007; Stevenson 2004; Strachan 2003). These all offered compelling narratives of the war that complemented each other in the vision they offered, but which varied in the way in which they ordered and presented this vision. These proved immensely helpful to us in forming our early thinking about how we would present a chronological story of the war. Largely because collecting started in 1917, IWM’s First World War collections are rich. This is particular true in the case of three-dimensional objects. But there are also incredibly abundant archives of personal papers and photographs, and excellent collections of printed ephemera, posters and film – not to mention one of the world’s finest collections of First World War paintings. We wanted these artefacts to tell our story, and we were determined that both three- and two-dimensional exhibits, and both still and moving images, would be accorded equal status in achieving this. Paradoxically, the very wealth of these resources provided a test to our early efforts to arrive at an exhibition narrative. We felt overwhelmed by both their quantity and the many-faceted stories that we needed to tell with them. This issue was resolved when we began to work alongside our designers, the London-based exhibition design company Casson-Mann. The solution was a sensorial one, as they encouraged us to give our thinking a visual incarnation by sticking annotated post-it notes and printed images of potential exhibits to a wall. We began this process in an office, but were soon forced to relocate to a cavernous former art store, which offered more generous wall space. In multiple meetings over a period of weeks we honed our narrative by moving notes and photos around the walls; eventually creating a coherent story of thirteen sections. Our designers – more visually oriented than ourselves – had presented us with an effective graphic solution to our historiological impasse. The physical scale and layout of the gallery-space dedicated to the First World War offered both difficulties and opportunities. It had been created by opening up a series of formerly separate adjacent areas. It was not, therefore, regular in shape and the exhibition would need to fit around immovable structural elements such as beams, pillars and the lift by which very large exhibits are conveyed to the upstairs exhibition spaces. However, the space was sufficiently large to allow some very large objects to be displayed. For example, in one area a double-height ceiling permitted the display not only of a British Mark V tank, but a Sopwith Camel biplane ‘flying’ above it. We were particularly delighted to be able to incorporate actual artillery pieces into an exhibition concerning what was fundamentally a war of

18  Paul Cornish artillery. Naturally the very large objects would be on open display; many of them touchable by the public. While this contradicts traditional museum practice, it is something that has been present in every iteration of the IWM (Cornish 2004: 42–5; 2012: 159–62). The opportunity for the visitor to engage their sense of touch, coupled with the ‘realness’ of objects that are not sequestered behind glass, gives them great impact and immediacy. It also enhances the accessibility of the galleries for visually impaired visitors. Subsequent to the opening of the galleries, the latter also gained the option of using a descriptive audio-guide featuring key objects. The practice of open display was extended to smaller objects too. Some, like shells or a German trench mortar, are within touching distance of visitors; others, like machine guns or trench signs, are mounted on plinths or walls beyond their reach. Similarly many posters and documents are displayed not in glass cases, but in the form of life-sized facsimiles printed on steel. Visitors can lean over the documents and even draw their finger along the text as they read it – very helpful when it consists of early twentieth century handwriting. Fixed to walls in facsimile form, the posters retain more of the impact that they would have had when first circulated than would be the case if they were displayed behind glass. The configuration of the space also allowed us to incorporate two areas that we call Reflection Spaces. These offer seating and encourage the visitor to consider the moral dimension of war. The first is adjacent to the section of the exhibition dealing with gas warfare and is aimed at provoking a debate on the whys and wherefores of legislating to make war more humane. The second addresses the even more fundamental issue of what it means to be required to kill. The inclusion of such areas was a completely novel direction for an IWM gallery to take and, at the time of writing, we don’t have sufficient data to assess whether or not they ‘work’ in the way we hoped they would. We felt that such questions were not asked frequently enough in war museums, but in posing them, we avoid using a ‘museum voice’. Instead, visitors are confronted in each Reflection Space by a single object displayed on a low circular plinth. In the ‘gas’ space this is a leather glove, dramatically shrunken by exposure to poison gas; in the ‘killing’ space it is a steel helmet pierced by a bullet. Atmospheric projections onto these plinths incorporate the words of contemporary people, reporting their own experience of these difficult issues. At the same time, through directional loudspeakers, the visitor hears these words spoken. So these two areas offer an experience that is sensory rather than didactic.

A sense of history Beyond these physical and sensorial aspects of the creation of the galleries lay the major issue of how we should approach another variety of ‘sense’; that peculiar British sense – as outlined above – of what the First World War was like. The prospect of engaging with over eighty years of disenchantment,

Sensing war  19 controversy, revisionism and counterfactual imaginings was not an attractive one. Still less did we want our new presentation of the war to be dragged into these largely sterile debates – many of which are founded in emotion or political conviction, rather than history. Indeed modern academic study of the First World War – upon which we were determined to base the historical content of the galleries – has moved well beyond such limiting wrangles. Consequently, quite early in the development process, we made a fundamental decision to present the war as seen through the eyes of those who were there at the time. This concept of ‘contemporaneity’ began as a tentative suggestion of my own. We were unsure whether it could be achieved, but after conducting our research with the possibility in mind, we realized that there was abundant contemporary material, largely diaries and letters, to support it. As a result all the quotations that visitors see or hear in the galleries were written down, or spoken, at or very near the time of the events to which they relate. And these ‘voices’ fill the whole exhibition space. They provide the title for each of the sub-stories into which each section of the exhibition is divided; they feature as quotations embedded in the text or in audio-visual material. Most prominently of all they can be seen printed on or debossed in the very fabric of the galleries itself. In some instances, in an unexpected manifestation of synaesthesia, this means that the words can be touched and felt. In keeping with this policy the ‘museum voice’, which appears on the text panels and in audio-visual elements of the galleries, avoids, as far as possible, the application of any hindsight. Above all, it completely eschews lacing any post-war interpretation on wartime events and decisions. An unexpected advantage of ‘contemporaneity’ was how much easier it became to provide answers for two of the fundamental questions that we were required to address: why did the war start and why did it go on so long? Finding an answer actually necessitates a contemporaneous approach, as political leaders made decisions based on their assessment of facts available to them at the time. Ordinary people made similar judgements, although their information was far less complete and delivered through the filter of the press. Only a tiny minority predicted either the dreadful death toll or the cataclysmic political and economic consequences of going to war in 1914. As the war progressed they looked forward to the victory that they believed was just around the corner – unwilling to consider defeat or, in most cases, even a negotiated settlement that would mock the sacrifice of those who had already lost lives, limbs and loved ones. The war could not be prosecuted without majority public support. When this evaporated – as in Russia in 1917 or Austria-Hungary and Germany in 1918 – defeat ensued. Contemporaneity helped us to make clear this fundamental link between the home and fighting fronts. We also feel that it makes our narrative more immediate and impactful than it might otherwise have been. It worked in another context too. The ‘voices’ in the galleries do not embody a single experience of the war. They represent many experiences

20  Paul Cornish and frequently contradict one another. For example, the following lines were both written by soldiers during the 1916 Battle of the Somme: the cruel and apparently inexhaustible supply of shells . . . breaks up and demoralises a man. (Corporal Oswald Blows, 28th Battalion Australian Imperial Force, July 1916) The best shoot I have ever had . . . This is the life! A gunner comes into his own in this place! (Lieutenant William Bloor, 149th Brigade Royal Field Artillery, 30 September 1916) The Somme (1916) is in fact the only individual ‘battle’ that is dealt with in depth in the galleries. The ‘Total War’ section, in which it features, offers an excellent example of how artefacts in varying media are used in conjunction with audio-visual content to create an immersive sense-scape. Today’s popular British perception of the Battle of the Somme is fixated with the disastrous ‘first day’ – 1 July 1916. At the time of the inception of IWM’s previous First World War gallery the names of other campaigns, such as Passchendaele or Gallipoli, had scarcely less resonance. But popular history books and television programmes have gradually narrowed this focus until one historian can plausibly suggest that the whole ‘meaning of Britain’s Great War’ had been ‘whittled down’ to this ‘one sacred day’ (Reynolds 2914: 360), while another identifies a ‘1 July 1916 syndrome’ (Philpott 2009: 599). Of course this was not actually the first day of the battle, as it commenced a week earlier when the artillery bombardment opened. Furthermore this vision of the battle pays scant attention to the remaining 140 days of the battle, or indeed to the fact that the British Army fought there alongside its French ally in pursuit of an overall Allied strategy. Similarly absent from this perception of the battle is the presence, on the opposing side, of German soldiers, or any analysis of what the battle meant for them and their leaders. We addressed this ‘missing’ memory of the Somme in a variety of ways. Naturally there is material relating to the ‘first day’. Among the objects in it is the helmet worn by a French soldier who went into action alongside the British on the same morning. Almost unknown in Britain is the fact that 1 July 1916 was one of the most successful days of the whole war for the French Army (Philpott 2009: 176–8, 207). Behind these exhibits sits a German MG 08 machine gun – the weapon which accounted for an unusually high proportion of the British casualties incurred on that day (Cornish 2009a: 1–3, 4–5). But the whole area is dominated by the massive form of a British 9.2-inch Howitzer. This symbolizes the dominant role of artillery in the battle and the unprecedented amount of munitions that the British Army was now able to hurl at its opponents. The fact that war was becoming

Sensing war  21 almost an industrial process is made plain by film of gun crews serving their weapons. Alongside this, original documents cast light on how the battle fitted into an overall Allied strategy, and how the planning of the artillery bombardment was flawed. On the opposite wall, the largest projection in the galleries strikingly and unavoidably makes the point that the Somme was a battle of almost five months in duration rather than one day. On a panoramic screen the visitor sees modern colour footage of the Somme battlefield, starting in summer and moving through autumn into winter. Superimposed on this are contemporary quotes describing the battlefield in 1916, along with black and white footage of men and machines in action there. Nearby, further objects and letters testify to the varying experiences of men who fought in this gruelling and sanguinary battle. This highly variable group-experience is also highlighted by multiple quotes debossed in the surface of a broad concrete plinth. A whole case is devoted to another element of the battle that has gone missing from people’s memories – the all-pervading obsession of the British soldier with collecting souvenirs and trophies, a phenomenon that might be said to have reached its high-water mark on the Somme (Cornish 2009b). The German experience of the Somme is distilled into a touch-screen digital presentation. This employs powerful photographs of the destruction wrought upon both bodies and landscape, alongside words taken from the letters and diaries of German soldiers, to give an impression of the malign effect that the battle had on German morale and decision-making; the latter being thereafter based on the desire to ‘save the men from another Somme battle’ (Cornish 2014: 133–4, 153). Nearby the visitor is shown how the massive military effort on the Somme was paralleled by initiatives aimed at giving the British public a visual sense of what the war looked like. It was in 1916 that official war artists arrived at the front (Gough 2010: 21–3). Reproductions of the drawings of the first of these, Muirhead Bone, were sold in two volumes. In ‘Total War’ facsimiles in the same format can be picked up and leafed-through. The policy of contemporaneity means that this is the first point that a painting can be displayed – namely one of William Orpen’s 1917 views of the shattered Somme battlefield, which stands behind the area where visitors are encouraged to reflect on the outcome of the battle. Finally visitors are encouraged to sit and watch some of what was by far the most influential visual record of the Somme battle – the documentary film ‘The Battle of the Somme’. This officially sponsored film, covering the preparations and early fighting during June and July 1916, was seen by an estimated 20 million people following its release in August of that year (Reeves 1997). It was the first feature-length documentary film, and the full seventy-three minutes are shown in ‘Total War’. It is accompanied by a soundtrack composed of the music that was the original accompaniment suggested by the distributors for cinema pianists and orchestras. Much of it sounds incongruous to modern ears attuned to experiencing footage of

22  Paul Cornish the Western Front accompanied by music of an altogether more sombre, plangent (even, perhaps, manipulative) nature.

A First World War sense-scape Museum galleries are, by their very nature, sensory creations (Cundy, this volume), but I must confess that the exhibition team did its work in shameful ignorance of the growing body of literature on sensory anthropology and geography (e.g. Howes 2004; Classen 2005; Rodaway 1994; Pink 2009; Seremetakis 1994). Neither did we have in our minds any explicit notions of the Kantian Sublime (Lisle 2006) – although we were well aware that, in terms of its noise, horror and terror, the war was literally unrepresentable. We were nevertheless determined that the galleries should be immersive in nature. The fact that the exhibition space was built as part of a complete transformation of IWM London permitted a considerable level of control over the environment that was created. While certain structural features were immovable, and the shape of the interconnected spaces irregular, it was possible to build a ‘black box’ gallery space that would allow the creation of a multi-sensory environment. In this context, those of us who worked on the content and narrative were obliged to place our trust in the designers and other contractors. Not until installation began would we be able to see how exhibits, text and audio-visual material interfaced with the sensory stimulus of sound and light. As it happened, we found ourselves presented with an immersive atmosphere that surpassed anything which we had been able to imagine. From most parts of the galleries the visitor has views into other parts, so there is no perception of division into separate ‘rooms’. This aids our intention of presenting the war as a seamless whole. Lighting is, of course, determined to a large extent by the conservation requirements of the items displayed. However, large areas of the outer walls of the gallery are kept free of exhibits, allowing them to be subtly up-lit to suggest low daylight. This prevents the space from feeling claustrophobic and, hopefully, avoids making the subliminal suggestion that the war took place at night. A soundscape features throughout the galleries. As visitors progress they are exposed to sounds suggesting ship-building, artillery fire, work in factories and tank and aircraft engines. The use of directional loudspeakers enables this soundscape to exist alongside the sound that accompanies the audio-visual material. Some AV presentations have voice-overs, others have contemporary music. Naturally the soundscape is not ‘real’, and was, in fact, created in a studio in Switzerland. Nevertheless, several iterations of it were created before we considered that it sounded realistic, with factory sounds proving far more difficult to get right than aero engines or gunfire. The most challenging single sound was that of shrapnel shells exploding. This sound is part of an audio-visual feature that attempts to make clear the

Sensing war  23 murderous effect of field guns firing shrapnel shells (Cundy, this volume) – the chief vector of the million deaths suffered during the ‘open’ warfare of 1914. A projection, created using motion-capture techniques, alternately shows French and German soldiers being cut down by shrapnel. Our problem was that no one living has experience of this sort of firepower, which fell out of use after the First World War. We were obliged to create our sound on the basis of one written and one oral description of shrapnel fire (IWM Sound Archive 9434; Houseman 1930: 188). Of central importance in creating the particular atmosphere of the galleries was the physical construction of the exhibition. We knew, from early in the design process, that the fighting fronts and the home fronts would be kept visually distinct; but we had not guessed how great an addition this would make to the ‘feel’ of the galleries. Cases and objects rise out of plinths throughout the galleries. In the war front sections these are constructed from glass-reinforced concrete (GRC); a remarkable architectural material that has the look, but not the weight, of concrete, and which can be coloured, moulded or carved into. On the home front the rough concrete gives way to smooth, lacquered ‘table tops’, dark wooden panelling and even wooden drawers. The visitor is necessarily brought into very close contact with these plinths, so the contrast is strongly haptic, as well as visual. The set works and cases are of the highest quality – something that is likely to pass unnoticed on a conscious level to visitors other than museum or design professionals, but which, I would suggest, is capable of exerting a subliminal influence. In my view the solidity of the concrete and wood, coupled with state-of-the-art display cases, gives the galleries an air of ‘authority’. This is a most unexpected and difficult to define ‘sensory’ effect. It was decided at the outset that the new galleries would include something analogous to the old Trench Experience. However, this would not attempt either to replicate its predecessor or to make a vain attempt at ‘realism’. Mannequins and artificial smells were never on our agenda, but we wanted to create an area that visitors would find immersive and atmospheric and, above all, a place where they could have a rest from absorbing ‘text’. The resulting space, moulded in GRC from a purposely cut trench, offers – insofar as access considerations permit – the spatial experience of being in a trench. In this case a communication or reserve trench is suggested; lacking the revetment, fire-bays and fire-step of the fire-trench represented in the former Trench Experience. The Trench sits in a doubleheight area of the galleries, allowing the British Mark V tank to loom over it, while the Sopwith Camel fighter plane swoops down. Within the Trench visitors hear murmured conversation linked to a projected film of soldiers in silhouette. At certain junctures their conversation is interrupted by rain, a gas alarm and the noise of the tank and aircraft engines. Periscopes enable visitors to scan across two original panoramic photographs of the German lines. Finally, looking down the trench, a rotating selection of colourized photographs of British and Empire soldiers in

24  Paul Cornish trenches can be seen – projected at a scale that makes the men in them lifesized. While eschewing counterfeit realism, we hoped to create an impression of the sense-world of the soldier in the trenches (see Winterton 2012). The Trench drew an equivocal reaction from visitors (Morris Hargreaves Macintyre 2014: 21–2). Those who could recall the former ‘Trench Experience’ were particularly likely to be critical. At the time of writing IWM is working on adding more ‘content’ to the Trench. Interestingly, this suggests an expectation that a greater level of sensorial engagement will make it more attractive to visitors. However, I was struck by our Digital Producer’s analysis of the issue; this being that an immersive ‘experience’ is doomed to struggle for impact if it is situated in an already strongly immersive gallery space (Jo Saull, personal communication). The colourization of the photographs in the trench was the product of a strong desire, shared by both the project team and the exhibition designers, to ensure that the war was not envisaged as an event that took place in black and white. We wanted to challenge the monochrome historical environment conjured up by the photographs and film that are routinely employed to depict the war in books and on television. We therefore used original autochrome photographs where available. Furthermore, coloured washes or tints were applied to some images used at the ‘top level’ of audio-visual presentations. This was somewhat controversial, as IWM’s Film and Photo Archives are, with good reason, generally opposed to the alteration of the images in their collections. Notwithstanding these understandable concerns, we wanted all our interactives and projections to have a strong element of colour. However, when displayed as artefacts – like the photos in the cases, or the film ‘The Battle of the Somme’– we stick with the original image, uncoloured and uncropped. Our designers found other ways of injecting colour into the galleries. The lacquered finish on some of the ‘home front’ plinths is brightly coloured. On the fighting fronts the case and object captions – which like all our texts are spray-painted onto steel – are rendered in multiple colours. While these appear random at first glance, the colours are in fact taken from paintings that appear in the galleries;5 and the palette changes slowly – becoming darker and grimmer as the war progresses. Finally, colourful full-sized metal facsimiles of posters appear throughout.

The viscerality of artefacts For all the impact of design and audio-visual content, I would contend that the successful creation of a First World War sense-scape is based upon the presence of authentic artefacts. This original material is what engages the visitor at a gut level and, in my view, allows the immersive whole to function. This is not the outcome of chance. The project team was always insistent that ‘objects’ (in the widest sense – see above) would lead the exhibition and would not only support the narrative, but actually tell the story.

Sensing war  25 That we succeeded is borne out by the post-opening evaluation, which states boldly that ‘the authentic content is the star’ (Morris Hargreaves Macintyre 2014: 19). Artefacts are able to engage the viewer (or toucher) in more than one way. While initially they might be purely appreciated in a visual (or haptic) context, they are also plainly able to morph into influencers of emotion or inspirers of sensorial engagement. For example, one of the visitors interviewed as part of IWM’s evaluation process was moved to say Things like the relatively crude nature of the gas masks does quite a lot to conjure up the horror of being attacked with gas. Something that looks like you’ve only got a canvas bag over your head is fairly evocative of what it must have been like. (Morris Hargreaves Macintyre 2014: 19) Another object known to elicit direct emotional responses of this sort is the jacket of Harold Cope, an officer wounded on the Somme (IWM UNI 10830). This bears bloodstains and has one sleeve cut away – something done to gain access to dress Cope’s wound. Personal observation of visitors shows that this immediately grabs attention, even though it is displayed in an area heavily populated with objects. It has ‘starred’ in previous IWM exhibitions and was chosen as the front-cover image for the book which accompanies the galleries (Cornish 2014). We hoped that groupings of artefacts and juxtapositions of different types of artefact would elicit similar responses. Here I can only work from my personal response, as evaluation evidence is unavailable. Actually I know that I am not the only person to wonder why the French butcher’s filleting knife (WEA 685), pressed into service for use by the French Army’s euphemistically named Nettoyeurs des Tranchées, sends more of a chill down my spine than any of the purpose-made trench knives that are displayed around it? But I would like to know more of people’s responses to the juxtaposition of gruesome photographs of murdered Belgian civilians with kitsch, patriotic memorabilia linked to the 420mm mortar (‘Big Bertha’) credited with smashing Belgium’s forts; or the toy-like German ‘war’ milk-jug, butter-dish and sugar bowl, displayed alongside a photograph of emaciated Viennese children.

Conclusion As might have been gathered from the preceding paragraphs, the members of IWM’s First World War Project Team could boast not only varying lengths of immersion in the materiality of war, but also a consciousness of material culture studies as an academic discipline. This, alongside a determination to maintain the highest historical standards, provided the academic basis of our work. Beyond that, however, our exhibition ‘philosophy’ was

26  Paul Cornish (to borrow the contemporary German Army concept of Auftragstaktik) ‘mission-driven’. We were tasked with creating an exhibition that was ‘ground-breaking’ in both its narrative content and its immersiveness. It also needed to appeal to the broad audience base at which IWM has traditionally aimed its exhibitions. Thus any conceptual thinking had to be firmly anchored in practical considerations of accessibility and engagement. So how did the powerfully sensorial space that emerged come about? My ‘insider’s’ opinion is that it grew organically from the iterative collaborative exchanges between the project team and the designers that took place between 2011 and 2014, a process that overlapped at its end with a similar engagement between the project team and various AV contractors. In the academic world, this process would be characterized as cross-disciplinary, and it proved as fertile in the museum context as such ventures frequently are in academia. I would suggest that the prime example of the fruitfulness of this interaction is the constant presence of the ‘home front’ alongside the fighting fronts – with each having its own design language. In this we see an IWM narrative concept given a physical and sensorial presence through collaboration with designers. It was central to our aims that the visitor would see that the war could not have continued without the physical, political and moral backing of society as a whole. This is a potentially hard message to swallow, compared with the rather cosier notion of soldiers as passive victims of callous ‘Generals’, and might be said to represent the chief area in which we challenge the public ‘sense’ of the First World War. For this reason, when speaking about the galleries, I make the claim that we show the war as being more horrible than is popularly imagined. Finally I must return to the fundamental fact that all the elements that combine to create the sense-scape of the First World War Galleries are based on a very solid foundation – IWM’s collections. Artefacts were our chosen means of telling the story of the First World War to a new generation, and it is the artefacts that grip the visitor most viscerally. Without these authentic material remains of the war, both the design and the historical content would be no more than a house of cards.

Notes 1 IWM’s Tone of Voice Guidelines lists the museum’s values as ‘Courageous, Authoritative, Relevant, Empathetic.’ 2 Germany’s campaign of ‘unrestricted’ submarine warfare had begun in February and sinkings of merchant ships would peak in April. 3 1,100 m2 instead of c.600 m2. 4 We were greatly assisted in achieving this aim by an Academic Advisory Board, chaired by Sir Hew Strachan. The other members were David Reynolds, David Stevenson, Deborah Thom and Dan Todman. 5 William Orpen, A Grave and a Mine Crater at La Boisselle, C. R. W. Nevinson, After a Push, Paul Nash, The Menin Road (the latter since removed from the galleries).

Sensing war  27

References Beckett, I. (2007) The Great War. Harlow: Pearson Education. Classen, C. (ed.) (2005) The Book of Touch. Oxford: Berg. Condell, D. (1985) The Imperial War Museum 1917–1920. M Phil thesis submitted to the Council for National Academic Awards. Cornish, P. (2004) Sacred Relics. In N. J. Saunders (ed.) Matters of Conflict, pp. 35–50. Abingdon: Routledge —— (2009a) Machine Guns and the Great War. Barnsley: Pen & Sword. —— (2009b) ‘Just a Boyish Habit’? In N. J. Saunders and P. Cornish (eds) Contested Objects, pp. 11–26. Abingdon: Routledge. —— (2012) Extremes of Collecting at the Imperial War Museum, 1917–2009. In G. Were and J. King (eds) Extreme Collecting, pp. 157–67. New York, NY: Berghahn. —— (2014) The First World War Galleries. London: Imperial War Museum. Emig, R. (2007) Institutionalising Violence, Destruction and Suffering: Pitfalls, Paradoxes and Possibilities of War Museums in Britain. Journal for the Study of British Cultures, 14(1): 52–64. Gough, P. (2010) A Terrible Beauty. Bristol: Sansom Horne, J. (ed.) (2010) A Companion to World War I. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Houseman, L (ed.) (1930) War Letters of Fallen Englishmen. London: Gollancz. Howes, D. (2004) Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Imperial War Museum (n.d. a) Tone of Voice Guidelines. London: IWM. —— (n.d. b) War History of the Imperial War Museum. London: IWM. —— (n.d. c) Sound Archive 9434. Collins, William, Reel 3, 22.48. Linenthal, E. (1995) Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Memorial Museum. New York, NY: Viking. Lisle, D. (2006) Sublime Lessons: Education and Ambivalence in War Exhibitions. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 34: 841–62. Malvern, S. (2000) War, Memory and Museums: Art and Artefact in the Imperial War Museum. History Workshop Journal, 49: 177–203. Morris Hargreaves Macintyre (2014) ‘Interesting, Emotional, Inspiring’: An Evaluation of the First World War Galleries and Atrium Displays at IWM London. IWM FWWG and Atrium Evaluation FINAL report October 2014. Held in IWM files, available on request. [The report is coloured by the extremely high visitor numbers (and hence overcrowding) which were being experienced at the time of the evaluation during Summer 2014.] Philpott, W. (2009) Bloody Victory. London: Little Brown. Pink, S. (2009) Doing Sensory Ethnography. London: Sage Publications. Reeves, N. (1997) Cinema, Spectatorship and Propaganda: ‘Battle of the Somme’ (1916) and Its Contemporary Audience. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 17(1): 5–28. Reynolds, D. (2014) The Long Shadow. London: Simon & Schuster. Rodaway, P. (1994) Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense and Place. London: Routledge. Saunders, N. J. (2007) Killing Time. Stroud: Sutton. —— and Cornish, P. (2009) Contested Objects. London: Routledge. Seremetakis, C. N. (ed.) (1994) The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity. Boulder, CO: Westview.

28  Paul Cornish Sheffield, G. (1994) The Shadow of the Somme. In P. Addison and A. Calder (eds) Time to Kill, pp. 29–39. London: Pimlico. Slack, S. (2011) The First World War at the Imperial War Museum: Front End Audience Research Report. 2011_11_08 FWWC. Held in IWM files, available on request. Stevenson, D. (2004) 1914–1918. London: Allen Lane. Strachan, H. (2003) The First World War. London: Simon & Schuster. Sutton, F. (1964) The How and Why Wonder Book of the First World War. London: Transworld. Todman, D. (2005) The Great War: Myth and Memory. London: Hambledon Wallis, J. (2016) Commemoration, Memory and the Politics of Display: Negotiating the Imperial War Museum’s First World War Exhibitions, 1964–2014. Doctoral thesis submitted at the University of Exeter. Whitmarsh, A. (2001) ‘We will remember them’. Memory and Commemoration in War Museums. Journal of Conservation and Museum Studies, 7: 2–15. Wilson, R. (2013) Cultural Heritage of the Great War in Britain. Farnham: Ashgate. Winter, J. (2006) Remembering War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Winter, J., and Prost, A. (2005) The Great War in History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Winterton, M. (2012) Signs, Signals and Senses: The Soldier Body in the Trenches. In N. J. Saunders (ed.) Beyond the Dead Horizon, pp. 229–41. Oxford: Oxbow.

2 Materiality, space and distance in the First World War Nicholas J. Saunders

The war has figuratively but powerfully dug a trench between yesterday’s ideas and those of today . . . We have all been thrown outside ourselves . . .  (Camille Mauclair 1918)

Conflict is a hydra whose complex and unpredictable impulses and responses can appear as if from nowhere and lead in multiple directions at once. As Mauclair perceived, the Great War of 1914–18 shattered the pre-war European order which hitherto had been held as a natural phenomenon (Bourdieu 1977: 168–9), and the nexus of cause and effect (Eksteins 1990: 211). The fact that the conflict destroyed the society it was fought to maintain made the ‘The Great War for Civilization’ appear increasingly ironic and tragic as the world edged towards a second global catastrophe. But war creates in the very act of destruction, not least in sensorial landscapes where the devil is in the detail, and the detail is a constellation of human relationships with material culture. Like Camille Mauclair, the dislocation of time and space represented by the war has been noted by Samuel Hynes (1990: pp. xi, 116) who conceptualized it as a ‘gap’ in history. It has, until relatively recently, also been an empty space in terms of archaeological and anthropological investigation, particularly the ability of materiality to act as a bridge between mental and physical worlds (Miller 1987: 99). Here, I briefly explore three significant overarching aspects of the materi­ ality of the First World War, its aftermath, and as appropriate, occasional legacies down to the present. The initial focus, in comparative perspective, is on the sensorial aspects of materiality, space and distance on the Western Front and the home front of Britain. The timing itself is both fortuitous and uncomfortable. We now inhabit the cusp of change in relation to 1914–18, with veterans and their immediate families no longer with us, and personal experience of the war and inter-war years no longer directly accessible. Perceptions of the war by most of today’s generation come mainly from books and television and thus they possess no experiential dimensions of conflict, and for those who visit the Western Front, there are sanitized and touristified places – a geography of conflict selected and compressed by

30  Nicholas J. Saunders itineraries dependent on cross-channel travel and aircraft schedules which themselves have changed the speed with which we move through and sense the world. We are also in the middle of a uniquely different kind of cultural time – the Centenary, which is reconfiguring our understanding of and engagement with the war through innumerable commemorations, exhibitions and media events. And these are set in the shockingly unexpected context of terrorist violence in the heart of Europe, which originates in one sense (there are of course many), from the century-long aftermath of the First World War in the Middle East. The long tail of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, whose centenary it also is (being signed on 16 May 1916) lashes out from Syria and Iraq through the announcement of Islamic State’s new Caliphate replacing the artificial nation-state borders imposed by the then imperial powers. If ever there was an example of how space, materiality and distance can be blasted together by the unpredictable legacies of a century-old conflict this is surely it. Inherent in this increasingly violent discourse is the calculation of space as an index of time. In turn, this is articulated by things remembered – a developing ‘cultural memory of war’ – a way in which we can conceptualize and represent the past in the present (Lowenthal 1988, 1996), and the ways in which we are all being forced to do so. Everyday travel, for business or leisure, now has a conflict-related premium of hours spent in security check-ins regardless of age, gender and destination. This is partly because hitherto ‘innocent’ human bodies and mundane everyday objects have become ‘weaponized’ – yet unrecognizably so until the critical moment. In a materiality­-based view of the world, an individual’s social being is determined by their relationship to the objects that represent them – the object becoming a metaphor for the self, a way of knowing oneself through things (Hoskins 1998: 195, 198). What does this say about a form of violence where the human body itself is regarded as a walking thinking bomb? It seems to have taken almost a century to have reached this point, where modern technology simultaneously confronts and facilitates violence framed by medieval values of conflict.

The front line Returning to 1914–18, the world’s first globalized industrial conflict almost instantaneously made most previous experiences and understandings of conflict either redundant or seriously devalued in attempts to comprehend how this new kind of war should be waged. For Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Austro-Hungary especially, decades (sometimes centuries) of accumulated military experience and policy-making gained in what, by comparison, were small-scale conflicts in Europe and far-flung corners of empire, counted for little as total war was engaged in August 1914. This war was, in one sense, an (arguably) unforeseen consequence of the nineteenth century’s Industrial Revolution. New technologies ran ahead

Materiality, space and distance  31 of knowledge of how best to deploy them, at least at first. While generals and politicians struggled to catch up, despite the lessons of the American Civil (1861–5) and Anglo-Boer (1899–1902) Wars, the fighting man was subjected to horrors which no human being had conceived possible (Keegan 1996: 204–84). The new weapons, particularly machine guns and artillery bombardment of high explosives, were an attack as much on human nerves as on the body. The sheer din could overwhelm men: ‘The noise of battle – and the extent of mechanised warfare . . . was unparalleled. Shells and shrapnel repeatedly scream and screech across the skies . . . testing the nerves as well as bringing danger in other forms: “The scream of shrapnel did not daunt us and, yelling and shouting, we became frantic and so did our horses”’ (EWWT n.d.). Each theatre of the war also made its own distinctive assault on the sensual experience of time and distance. As a comparator to the Western Front, the nature of the war at high altitudes on the Italian Front is instructive. In the Alps, one sound could presage an avalanche, another the dangerous movement of ice inside a glacier. While not as well known as the war in the west, soldiers’ diaries and letters give equally visceral insights into the fighting conditions in this area: Listen! A metallic noise sounded. It could be the soft jingle of the steel of an ice pick or an ax . . . two guards . . . They listen tensely, holding their breath, hands to the ears to hear better. After a while, one points to the southwest. From there came the noise. The second swings himself silently over the balustrade . . . a knife and hand grenades are his only weapons. Carefully he crawls across the shimmering snowy surface towards the southwest . . . the other listens . . . anxiety-filled minutes pass. Then, a short rattling scream of terror that immediately dies away. Deep stillness. (Keller 2009: 260) The effect of these experiences compressed time and space on many levels. The war was mainly not one of movement over large areas with single, temporally distinct, and decisive battlefield events, but rather four years of attrition focused on stationary trenches as epitomized by the Western Front. This theatre of war, together with the Eastern Front, the Italian Front and Gallipoli, saw the creation of places which, in terms of human lives lost per square metre, are some of the most expensively bought real estate in human history. For the first time also, battlefields were multi-component landscapes of death that would subsequently become large-scale symbolic landscapes of remembrance, memorialization and tourism (Lloyd 1998; Miles 2016; Winter 1995), and, ultimately, uniquely sensitive locations for archaeological research. Geographical space was transformed in such locations, where the land was physically cut and sectioned into opposing systems of trenches and dugouts, irrespective of topography and geology (Doyle 1998). According to

32  Nicholas J. Saunders Albert Demangeon (quoted in Clout 1996: 3–4), the Western Front was ‘a zone of death, 500 km long and 10–25 km broad’. One consequence was that previously pastoral landscapes (with a record of human occupation extending back to the Palaeolithic of almost two million years ago) were ‘industrialized’ by high explosive, becoming unrecognizable wastelands. The static nature of the conflict created new and terrible landscapes, and, in so doing, transformed such locations into metaphysically unstable places (Saunders 2001). Physical and imaginary landscapes collapsed into one. British soldiers came to believe that ‘hell was not . . . some exotic torture chamber under trap doors leading to the nightmare worlds of Hieronymus Bosch . . . [but was] . . . indeed just across the Channel’ (Winter 1995: 69). As these new landscapes were forming, so were the bodies and minds of those involved in the process as soldiers themselves were remade as subjects by the technology they used (Gosden 1999: 161; Pels 1998: 101). The urban factory came to the rural front, through the medium of artillery shells made by women and fired by men. The renegotiation of personal identities, and physical and social space, which took place in or near the front line was extreme, and described by Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau (1992: 81) as ‘a close connection, an osmosis between the death of men, of objects, of places’. This description seems prescient also inasmuch as it aptly describes the lethal bodies of today’s suicide bombers. The human cost of the formation of these landscapes was often described day by day, if not hour by hour, in memoirs and regimental war diaries, producing what must be the most exhaustively documented, personalized and spiritualized areas ever to be considered for scientific and historical study. And today many still lie just centimetres beneath the modern land surface, threatening as it were to burst forth into the modern world by virtue of urban renewal projects, motorway building, accidental explosions of ordnance, and sometimes archaeological excavations. Here, time, space, history, memory and chance are intermixed, most notably (and emotionally) perhaps when families who had forgotten their First World War ancestors are informed that they have been found. In such circumstances, absence is made present by a phone call or email, and temporal and geographical distance collapses again. The industrial shattering of geographical space was accompanied by an equally devastating dismemberment of the human body, literally and metaphorically (Bourke 1996). For the first time in human history, apparently empty (i.e. cleared) battlefields contained untold numbers of invisible bodies. Men simply vanished from the earth – blown to pieces if not vaporized completely by high explosive. Today, as then, ‘such places contain vast quantities of unseen body parts, from . . . thousands of recognisably human remains, to millions of microscopic bone fragments’ (Saunders 2012: p. xiii). If the human body is a way of relating to and perceiving the world (Tilley 1994; Stewart 1993: 125), then the fragmentation of corpses, artefacts and landscape joined together to fragment reality (Saunders 2000: 50).

Materiality, space and distance  33 The linking of external (physical) space and internal (mental) space served to redefine the multi-sensorial perception of the world among soldiers. Large-scale bombardments that lasted sometimes for days, broke the mould of pre-war quotidian experience. In trenches, dugouts and on the battlefields, soldiers found they often could see very little. Trench life was characterized by a thin strip of sky visible from beneath the parapet, and dugouts and tunnels were dark and suffocating places. During battle, No Man’s Land was a miasma of smoke, gas, blasted earth, craters and the dead, in which soldiers, and on some occasions, newspaper correspondents, were unable to see or make sense of anything (Booth 1996: 93). Here, the dominance of vision was undermined by the technologies of war and, in its place, soldiers developed intuition (Paterson 1997: 239) and superstition (Becker 1998: 96–103), and refined the olfactory, auditory and tactile elements of sensory experience (Eksteins 1990: 146, 150–1; Howes 1991: 3–5; Leonard 2015; Winterton 2012). In this way, ‘new meanings were attached to the lights, sounds, smells, tastes, and vibrations of war on such a massive scale’ (Saunders 2000: 55). There was a seismic shift too in literary and visual representations of space and distance. Writers and poets, such as Henri Barbusse (1926), Edmund Blunden (1928), Siegfried Sassoon (1930) and Wilfred Owen (Stallworthy 1985), struggled to represent the new world of dislocated emotions, and possibly synesthetic sensitivities, to exercise control over the perception and experience of the world (Bender 1999: 31). Artists like Paul Nash and Christopher Nevinson grasped the change in perceptions of reality produced by the derationalization of space (Gough 1997: 417–20; Cork 1994; Nash 1998: 29–30). For these artists, and others, the traditional Western representation of landscape – the civilized distillation of space and distance – had broken down, and was replaced by disorientating images of a new jagged reality. As John Keegan wrote in The Face of Battle, perhaps these writers (and I would add, artists) ‘had perceived an important slice of reality’ (1996: 283–4). They certainly acknowledged the power of war to change individuals in radical ways (Hynes 1990: 436), and contributed to a mythologizing and distancing process which began to constitute the cultural memory of the war (Fussell 1977). Dimensioning the front, mapping the topography of physical and symbolic space, was achieved in new ways which themselves created (sometimes tragically) different perceptions of distance by those in charge of strategy and those who fought on the ground. Maps of France and Belgium were covered with new names, as local landmarks, previously anonymous locations, and individual trenches were designated in English by and for British and Allied troops. Age-old toponyms and affiliations, stretching back at least to medieval times, and embodying a palimpsest of historical meanings and local folkloric significances, were supplemented or replaced by others emanating from the war experiences of Anglophone strangers in the landscape. Some sought to neutralize the horror by using (sometimes black)

34  Nicholas J. Saunders humour, such as ‘Crucifix Corner’, ‘Gangrene Alley’ and ‘Lavender Walk’, while others recalled more familiar British locations such as ‘Oxford Street’ and ‘Piccadilly’ (Chasseaud 2006: 158). Naming and renaming in this way perhaps made the landscape less threatening and less haunting by juxtaposing the awful reality of the front line with the known and safe places of home. As soldiers navigated these places, the prehistoric and medieval mixed with the modern, and the distant and the near merged in memory. Perceptions of space, and of what was and was not militarily possible, found expression in differently scaled maps. Behind the front line, the General Staff plotted advances which, on their small-scale maps, appeared often as fractions of an inch. In the front line, fighting soldiers used larger scale trench maps – expanding the fraction into hundreds of yards of deadly No Man’s Land and heavily defended enemy positions (Saunders 2009a: 27). Hopelessly optimistic forecasts of potential gains during an attack were a recurring feature of some of the most disastrous British and Allied attacks – most famously on the Somme in 1916, and at Passchendaele in 1917 (see Booth 1996: 92). These maps, together with documentary sources, and supplemented by millions of aerial photographs (Stichelbaut 2009; Stichelbaut and Chielens 2013), not only redefined space by measuring the terrible human cost of miniscule territorial gains, but provide a uniquely detailed (and poignant) biography of a ‘battlefield-landscape-as-object’ to inform and guide archaeological and anthropological investigations, not least by an overdue focus on rear-support areas. In an ironic layering of vertical space and distance, scientific archaeological trenching investigates previous wartime trenches, guided by 100-year-old trench maps produced from contemporary aerial photographs (now digitized and georectified in a Geographical Information System) which themselves overlaid and incorporated far older pre-war ditches, channels and defensive earthworks stretching back into history and sometimes prehistory (see Stichelbaut 2011). Here, temporal distance and spatial configurations are calibrated and represented by computer technology, bringing together different kinds of evidence to reveal longforgotten relationships between people, material culture and landscape (e.g. Stichelbaut and Cowley 2016).

The home front The distance from Dover to Ypres is about 115 km (70 miles), but in every other respect the two towns and the worlds they represented were light years apart between 1914 and 1918. Artillery barrages on the Western Front would shake windows and rattle cups in houses on England’s south coast, and could be heard in the smoking room of the Athenaeum Club in London – falling like hammer blows ‘dulled on felt’, according to Virginia Woolf (quoted in Booth 1996: 3). The British artillery bombardment on the morning of 1 July 1916 on the Somme saw a quarter of a million

Materiality, space and distance  35 shells being fired, and a noise that was heard in London, over 240 km (150 miles) away. Due to acoustic shadowing, where sounds from the same distance could be heard clearly, or not at all, depending on wind direction and air temperature, not everyone in London heard the Somme guns, but walkers on Hampstead Heath could hear (and, some thought, feel) the thudding of British shells pounding German lines. Imminent death on the Somme and innocent bucolic strolling in a London park were blasted together at the speed of sound. A year later, and louder still, was the blowing of nineteen British mines underneath German lines at Messines at 3.10 am on 7 June 1917 – the loudest man-made sound up to that time. The British Prime Minister Lloyd George heard the noise in his study in Downing Street, London, and in fact the sound travelled further still across the Irish Sea to Dublin. It was said that ‘battle sounds from France only reached England during the summer months whereas they were best heard in Germany during the winter’, and in a curious, arguably insensitive post-war decision, ‘Large amounts of ammunition were detonated throughout England and the public was asked to listen for sounds of explosions’ (Attenborough 2014: 118). The sounds of war which most civilians had avoided during the conflict itself they now endured during the peace. War sounds travelled, collapsing physical and temporal distance between front line and home front during the conflict and afterwards. National boundaries were breached more often by noise than by German aeroplanes, Zeppelins, or naval bombardment, and not least by the faint sounds of approaching aircraft picked up and magnified by the acoustic mirrors built at various points along England’s southern and north-eastern coasts in this pre-radar era. Unlike the Second World War, where conflict brought civilian casualties and destruction to domestic space on a regular basis, the civilian experience of the First World War was distanced and selective. Officially, it was edited by virtue of being known mainly through propagandized print and film, but privately, casualty lists, personal loss, rumour and gossip filled in the sometimes yawning gaps between what people were told, and what they knew. Civilians suffered, but they were not often direct casualties of war actions, though the quotidian for some was textured in a phenomenological sense by the low rumbling blown across the English Channel. Industrialized war reconfigured the boundaries of time, space and distance in the domestic setting of the home front, through the agency of material culture – most often in metal objects. During the war, women took the place of men needed at the front, and between 1914 and 1918, some 400,000 women left domestic service mainly to work in munitions factories (Braybon 1995: 148–9). The industrialized requirements of war production moved women from ‘below stairs’ – out of their ‘inferior’ position in the domestic space of their employer’s house – and into the comparatively

36  Nicholas J. Saunders ‘equal’ technological landscapes of armaments factories. Here they made artillery shells which, when fired at the front, called down a responding enemy barrage which sent their menfolk rushing down into the dark and dangerous world of trenches and dugouts. The symbolic distance between home and battlefield had been shortened, and, as Allain Bernède (1997: 91) says, ‘the front . . . [was] . . . nothing but the continuation of the factory’. Women and men, while physically distanced, somehow shared a similarly unstable metaphysical space. An integral part of the anthropological assessment of the First World War (and indeed any twentieth-century conflict) is the analysis of the home in wartime. As centres of emotion, homes are extensions of the self, where people, places and objects form a phenomenological unity (Sixsmith and Sixsmith 1990: 20). In other words, the home is a domestic cosmos, a place where the past is fabricated through the construction, transformation or reordering of the material world (Radley 1994: 53). War represents monumental dislocation at every level of human activity, and a study of domesticity between 1914 and 1918 (and beyond into the inter-war years as well) would provide a fine-grained analysis of people and objects in motion, often framed by emotional turmoil. As Allison (1999a: 1) observes, ‘The dwellings and dwelling spaces we inhabit house the attitudes and traditions through which we both conform to and confront the world beyond’. The potential for such studies is as distinct as it is largely untapped. Today, in France and Belgium (and beyond), there are homes, barns, outbuildings and whole landscapes (many of them subterranean tunnels and bunkers) which possess a dwelling aspect, and that sometimes have hardly altered since 1918. Some, sealed up by design or accident, conceal a Pompeii-like world of, variously, wartime newspapers, photographs, cigarette papers, equipment and clothing, unexploded munitions, and graffiti from one hundred years ago. Others have been used and lived in since the war, but have had the configuration of their architectural and social space preserved to a greater or lesser degree in 1914 form. Future research of such places will undoubtedly be informed by anthropological approaches to the sensorially experienced domestic sphere (e.g. Allison 1999b; Chapman and Hockey 1999; Putnam and Newton 1990), rather than just a simple recording of its spatial dimensions – revealing the war through the conflicted lens of living space. Recent examples of domesticated conflict spaces for the First World War are investigations inside the caves, galleries and tunnels beneath the Western Front (Leonard 2015, 2016, this volume), and a literally as well as metaphorically frozen-in-time Austro-Hungarian position at Punta Linke, 3,629 m up in the Alps north of Trento, Italy (Nicolis this volume). Beyond the First World War (though linked to it), from a century-long perspective, Diana Darke’s My House in Damascus (2014) explores the tragedy of the Syrian conflict through the prism of purchasing and living in Bait Baroudi (House of the Gunpowder Seller) in Damascus’s Old City.

Materiality, space and distance  37 Domestic spaces are medium-sized artefacts, but they are composed of innumerable smaller objects which also affected the perception of space and time, moving from the front line to the home front. During the war, soldiers made, bartered and bought souvenirs from battlefield areas and sent or took them home. The ambiguity of souvenir hunting is apparent in the coining of the term ‘souveneering’, which often was a thinly veiled euphemism for stealing or looting anything from an artillery shell case to a dead soldier’s personal effects, or fragments of wood and stained glass from the ruins of the Cloth Hall at Ypres (LC.S20; and see Dunn [1938] 1997: 411). Such items, whether raw unaltered battlefield mementoes or more elaborate bricolage objects known as Trench Art (Saunders 2003), were invested with the experiences of soldiers’ lives in battle conditions. Often, soldiers took enormous risks, and ‘not a few lost their lives souvenir hunting’ (Dunn [1938] 1997: 179). In such circumstances, ‘time itself (and an individual’s experiences within it) became embedded and conflated in objects . . .  representative of several “acquisition events” and “manufacturing events” in time and space. [It became] a semantically dense item that embodied periods and places scattered across the battle-zone landscape’ (Saunders 2009b: 49). The object became a record of military service in different locations, but could only be deciphered by the person who made or acquired it. These items were sent back to families and loved ones as objects to be placed in the living room or hallway to act as visual reminder of the husband, son or father away at the front – an objectification of spatial distance and emotional separation. As Colonel N. B. Chaffers wrote to his mother on 19 September 1915. By now you may have received two shell cartridges . . . They are quite safe, as they are only the empty cartridges from which the shell has been fired, and when engraved they make quite nice souvenirs. . . . If the maids have time they might clean them with brass polish. I should suggest putting them on the hall mantelpiece. (LC: Letter from Col. N. B. Chaffers, 19 September 1915) These were volatile objects, however, with a latent emotional charge. They could change their nature in an instant, and bring the distant battlefield crashing into the living room or parlour. Although the majority of these items were received at home as souvenirs or trophies, they could become objectifications of grief and loss if the soldier was subsequently killed in action, or, perhaps even more poignant, if his body was not recovered and he became one of ‘The Missing’. In one sense of course all the British war dead were missing inasmuch as they never came back to Britain (hence the painful significance of the ‘Unknown Soldier’ interred in Westminster Abbey). As an item of war, the souvenir which arrived in the home was a tangible connection between the living and the dead, traversing distance and time through memories associated with the object itself and the dead

38  Nicholas J. Saunders soldier. In this way, these items became ‘indices of the past, . . . objects to “remember by”’ (Radley 1994: 52), and the visible shards of the iceberg that is the whole social process (Douglas and Isherwood 1978: 74). This was the case for the Goss family, the inventors of Heraldic Porcelain. Their son Raymond was killed outside Ypres in August 1915 after previously having sent a brass shell case souvenir to his father. After Raymond’s death the family had it inscribed French ‘75’ Shell Case sent home by Sec. Lt. Raymond G.G. Goss 1/5th N. Staffs. Reg. 1915 (killed near Hill 60 in Flanders August 1915). (Pine and Pine 1986: 137) Such powerful emotions affected the way in which survivors and bereaved expressed themselves through the decoration and personalization of the home. Matter could embody differing notions of distance, stretching or conflating the experience of time through its ability to move history into private time by juxtaposing it with a personalized present (Stewart 1993: 138). The enduring quality of material objects, their ability to outlive their makers (Radley 1994: 58), could also foreground the past by triggering received memories in those who had no direct experience of the war. One such occasion is recorded in Auntie Mabel’s War by Marian Wenzel and John Cornish (1980). The object was a decorated French artillery shell case which ‘released’ the memory of Auntie Mabel in the mind of her niece, Mrs Turner. Yes, that thing by the fireplace with the flowers on it is really a shell case. . . . She brought that back from France for her parents; I thought it was an awfully morbid thing. . . . It got to Granny’s house and then it came here. . . . I often look at it and wonder how many men its shell killed. (Wenzel and Cornish 1980: 8) Sometimes, the presencing of the past, the bringing of distant places into the home through association and memory, was stimulated by smell rather than vision. These same decorated brass shell-case souvenirs required frequent polishing due to their propensity to tarnish. This activity in the home of a bereaved family combined with the pungent smell of brass polish likely had therapeutic effects for the bereaved and conjured memories of the missing loved one, turning domestic chore into sacred act (Saunders 2003: 153–4).

Between two worlds Materiality creates and constitutes a series of overlapping social universes for individuals and societies. Places – whether battlefields or living rooms – which were once secular spaces became transformed into sacred space, for

Materiality, space and distance  39 a time and to a degree, by the circumstances surrounding their spatial and symbolic reordering by war and its aftermath. The Great War for Civilization represented a cataclysmic shift in the ways in which time and distance were understood. The redefining of space as a social category (Kus 1983: 278) left a unique signature in the materiality of objects and landscapes which still lie under the top-soil of the war’s battlezones across Europe and beyond. While the surface layer belongs to the twenty-first century after one hundred years of change (including traces of the Second World War not dealt with here), the conflict world of 1914–18 lies just beneath, sometimes astonishingly well preserved, but compressed daily by the weight of the living world above. In the space between destruction and creation lies a universe of fragments in motion, which anthropology and archaeology have only recently begun to reassemble. By incorporating the study of the senses into this process we are brought closer to the various pasts which the living endured but the dead could not.

Note LC referes to Liddle Collection/reference numbers, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds.

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42  Nicholas J. Saunders Stallworthy, J. (1985) The Poems of Wilfred Owen. London. Stewart, S. (1993) On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stichelbaut, B. (2009) World War One Aerial Photography: An Archaeological Perspective. Unpublished PhD thesis. Department of Archaeology, University of Ghent. —— (2011) The First Thirty Kilometres of the Western Front 1914–1918: An Aerial Archaeological Approach with Historical Remote Sensing Data. Archaeological Prospection, 18(1): 57–66. —— and Chielens, P. (2013) The Great War Seen from the Air: In Flanders Fields: 1914–1918. Brussels: Mercator Fonds. —— and Cowley, D. (eds) (2016) Conflict Landscapes and Archaeology from Above. Farnham: Ashgate/London: Routledge. Tilley, C. (1994) A Phenomenology of Landscape, Places, Paths and Monuments. Oxford: Berg. Wenzel, M., and Cornish, J. (1980) Auntie Mabel’s War: An Account of her Part in the Hostilities of 1914–18. London: Allen Lane. Winter, J. (1995) Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Winterton, M. (2012) Signs, Signals and Senses: The Soldier Body in the Trenches. In N. J. Saunders (ed.) Beyond the Dead Horizon: Studies in Modern Conflict Archaeology, pp. 229–41. Oxford: Oxbow.

3 Assaulting the senses Life and landscape beneath the Western Front Matthew Leonard

The sensorial nature of the subterranean environments beneath the Western Front and the complex role that they played in the creation of First World War landscapes requires investigation from an interdisciplinary, archaeologically based perspective, focused on an anthropological approach to the study of the senses. The war underground was fought in cramped and claustrophobic spaces, a monotonous landscape of tunnels and caves that had little or no visual reference points to anchor the human body to the physical surroundings. This world was understood through a very particular engagement of the senses with the environment, as these underground spaces were not so much landscapes as ‘humanised realms saturated with significations’ (Douglas 2002: 108). This chapter will adopt a modern archaeological-anthropological approach to examine the engagement of soldiers and the underground spaces of the Western Front, exploring how the human senses operate to ‘create place’ (Feldman 1996: 91). It will explore the relationship between the First World War soldier’s sensorium and the subterranean landscapes of the war, showing how these unique environments can, and should, be appreciated as sensescapes, places categorized not by what could be seen but by the corporeal engagement of the entire body with its surroundings. That life on the Western Front was lived mainly below ground is widely acknowledged by scholars of the Great War (e.g. Fussell 2000; Leed 2009; Das 2008). The value of sound, too, has also been studied, ‘the rustle of grass in No Man’s Land, the click of wire, the whistle of an incoming shell, the soft crump of a mortar firing – all announce a potential death against which the only defence was the earth and ritual’ (Leed 2009: 128). Santanu Das has explored the power of a haptic engagement with the Western Front, describing the ‘geographical sense’ of the trenches (2008: 73–105). His innovatory theory of the ‘slimescape’ (2008: 35–72) describes the mud that made up much of the front as a combination of ‘organic wastes; industrial debris, iron scraps and rotting flesh’ (p. 39; see also Sassoon 1997; Blunden 2009; Barbusse 2003). Das’s slimescape also implies something greater, the sensorial manner in which this landscape was understood. Soldiers could be perceived as animals that crawled, crept, burrowed and slithered through

44  Matthew Leonard the sucking, clutching mire (Das 2008: 44–5), something requiring a reconfiguration of the human sensorium. This new kind of conflict existence, involving a close proximity with landscape, began to blur the boundaries between man and matter as the two became almost indistinguishable (ibid. 54; see also Otto Dix, Flanders in Das 2008: 57–8; Miller 2005: 11–15). Nevertheless, the experience of the trenches often tends to be seen as negative by authors and scholars alike, and here I seek to demonstrate how the subterranean landscape varied considerably, not least in terms of its depth, tunnel size, purpose and proximity to the enemy, meaning the sensorial engagement with it was also complex. More importantly, soldiers’ esoteric sensorial understanding of the Western Front fostered a very specific subterranean ‘conflict culture’, acknowledging the assertion that the ‘interplay of the senses in another culture’s perceptual system both converges and diverges from the interplay in one’s own’ (Howes 1990: 69).

The subterranean sensorium Over the last two decades, an anthropology of the senses has begun to redress the balance between the prior visual dominance of Western culture and acknowledge the role of other senses, showing that these do not operate in isolation; rather they work together, blending, interlocking and interacting, allowing the human sensorium to structure and create the material world we live in.

Figure 3.1  The Maison Blanche souterraine near Neuville St Vaast lit with candles ( Author)

Assaulting the senses  45 On the Western Front, in the absence of light, or in poor lighting conditions, sight often became virtually useless, and illumination in the subterranean landscapes ranged from poor to non-existent. When electric lighting was used, it was always dim and bulbs were spaced a considerable distance apart. More common was candlelight (Figure 3.1). New proximities of visual experience were created by these poorly lit underground conditions, the dangers of looking over the parapet, smoke and gas, nocturnal military operations, vision from a distance (e.g. aerial observation and photography), and in extreme cases the loss of or damage to the eyes. As a consequence, sight was a sense overtaken by touch. ‘The culture of touch involves all culture’ (Classen 2005: 1) and as soldiers dug themselves into the earth, and became increasingly animal-like in this regard, perforce they adopted ‘animal senses’, primarily touch, to navigate these new experiential worlds, and so became more bestial in their appearance, behaviour and attitudes. Touch is a sense that works in a complex and interrelated manner. Proprioception,1 kinaesthesia2 and exteroception3 are all sensations of touch that were vital to existence beneath the front, a place where a haptic engagement was far more reliable than sight. The eyes can deceive, yet touch delivers truth (Hurcombe 2007: 537) and even through footwear, temperature, the type of terrain, moisture levels and vibration can all be felt with the feet, a not unimportant element during the physical extremes of combat (Burchell 2014). Other parts of the body, too, and the body as a whole, are able to interact with objects and the environment because space is haptic, not visual, and inhabited via sensuous engagement (Paterson 2007: 47). Touch is not just a means of interpreting places. It is also a way of defining cultural norms and rituals, and interacting with people. It therefore, plays a central role in understanding how soldiers’ lives were reshaped by the industrial intensities of the Great War, where new proximities of haptic experience were created by cramped physical conditions, large numbers of men in a limited space, nocturnal military operations, and most damaging of all, the loss of limbs which conducted the nerve impulses to the brain and translated physical touch into visual imagery. For Western societies, seeing is often believing, ‘but what of place as heard and felt’ (Feld 2005: 182)? In the Western world we rely on our eyes, yet we are usually more affected by what we hear than what we see. Sound can be felt through vibrations as well as heard, and the sounds of traffic, wildlife, people and the weather all help to define the environment, constantly alerting us to changes (Ingold 2011: 115–25). During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, sound played a significant role in defining place (Corbin 1998: 7). During this period, rural France had a unique soundscape, dominated by the tone, volume and regularity of the village bell. Bells could keep order in the space where their peels resounded, dictating the rhythm of daily life. The care with which the bells were created, the sounds they made, size of the instruments and their quantity in each

46  Matthew Leonard village defined communities, created landscapes and played a major role in French society. By 1914 these village bells had largely fallen silent (ibid. 102) and during the war years ever more were appropriated for their metal, objects of peace turned into the matériel of conflict. As the sound of metal bells was recycled and replaced by the noise of the metal shell barrages of the war, one kind of sound-sense replaced another. This new and violent soundscape could be intensely loud, making individual noises difficult to isolate, causing disorientation and confusion, something that formed the basis of shell shock. Conversely, in a space with no sound, such as the deep tunnel systems of the Western Front and beyond, soldiers become disorientated akin to the way the deaf can often feel isolated, withdrawn, anxious and alone (Corbin 1998: 9). Language is primarily transmitted via sound, so hearing can define landscape and relate it to us, ‘we are, in a sense, the place-worlds we imagine’ (Basso 1996: 7). On the Western Front, trenches and tunnels were given names that reflected their location, danger and proximity to other objects (see Blunden, quoted in Chasseaud 2006: 2), ‘whenever the members of a community speak about their landscape – whenever they name it, or classify it, or tell stories about it – they unthinkingly represent it in ways that are compatible with shared understandings of how, in the fullest sense, they know themselves to occupy it’ (Basso 1996: 74). The cultural significance of smell, and its relationship to conceptualizations of landscape is well known. In Greek mythology spices demonstrate the classical connection between odour, taste, heat and concepts of man, the gods and contemporary understandings of the heavens and hell (Detienne 1994). The fetid smells of the underworld and the creatures, fauna and food that existed below ground are described in juxtaposition to those above, ordering the sensorium and the relationship between man and animals. The British war poets, many of who were well-educated in the Classics, narrated much of their experience of being in the war and classical literature, poetry and philosophy informed their comments regarding the changing sensorium of the conflict. The ordinary, and less educated, soldier experienced this change often at a more visceral level (and see Callow, Nicolis, both this volume). Smell and taste could foster community at the front as the aromas and flavours of food, real or imagined, united people, something seen in many diasporic communities around the world (Law 2005). ‘Food was a big subject – everyone had their favourite dishes; we talked about what our mothers were going to make us when we got home; whose mother made the best Lancashire hotpot and so on’ (Fearns, quoted in Barton et al. 2010: 220; and see Duffett, Hurst, both this volume). The synaesthetic qualities and abilities of smell and taste allowed soldiers to detach themselves from the reality of their landscape, if only for a time, making them important factors in defining the First World War combatant’s sensorium. Despite remaining at the bottom of the classical Aristotelian sensorium, these senses were

Assaulting the senses  47 vital to survival at the front, helping to define and constantly refine ideas of landscape and culture above and beneath the front lines. The further into the subterranean landscapes that humans ventured, the more sound, taste and smell rose through the sensorial ranking.

Classification and analysis of First World War subterranean sensorial landscapes As the new modern conflict landscapes on the Western Front emerged, new methods of engagement were required. This modern battlefield, better described as a battle-zone, was an intensely visceral place. It was a palimpsest of destruction and rebirth, technology and industry, mud, flesh and matériel, and a place where the visible defence lines were but the battlements of a submerged fortress. The First World War’s subterranean landscape was (is) so dynamic that defining it in terms of its physical (geological) attributes is unsatisfactory, as this provides little evidence of human interaction. The walls of trenches were the monotonous white chalk of the Somme and Artois regions, or the drab brown clayey mud of Belgian Flanders. Many underground workings on the Italian Front were inside mountains and glaciers hundreds of metres above ground level (Balbi 2009: 286). In parts of Flanders, the water table was often so high that trench walls consisted of sand bags built on the surface, with the actual trench only a few inches underground (Corrigan 2003: 95). Conceptualizing the subterranean worlds of the First World War as sensorial landscapes, defined not by their physical dynamics or military purpose but by the way that the human senses interacted with them, allows the subterranean Western Front to be divided into three distinct categories (i.e. sensorial layers). These are specific to the Western Front of the First World War, though conceptually, of course, can be adapted for investigating many other conflicts.

Category A: Trenches, shell holes, mine craters and funk holes Definition: man-made subterranean features on the front lines where at least one part is directly open to the elements. In these places the senses of sight and hearing hold primacy over touch, with smell and taste remaining at the bottom of the sensorial ladder. Category A serves as the gateway, physically and conceptually, to categories B and C. Trenches, shell holes, mine craters and funk holes4 were open to the elements but a revised sensorium was still required to navigate these partially embedded ‘underground’ landscapes. With natural and artificial light available, sight here remained near the top of the sensorium, sharing its position with hearing. The eyes could see little except the sky or the confines of the trench, so while movement through a trench was possible, sight could not anchor the soldier-body in relation to the larger environment (see Saunders 2009). The same applied to those occupying shell holes and craters in No Man’s Land

48  Matthew Leonard or funk holes in trenches. Here, a soldier would be able to see immediately opposite him, but all other vision would be severely curtailed; ‘funk holes take the body of a man in a very huddled and uncomfortable position, with no room to move’ (Das 2008: 95). These restrictions promoted hearing to a position equal with vision. Trench lines were often so close together that the enemy could be clearly heard, allowing for aural marker points to be established, setting location within the wider landscape. Trenches were crenelated, otherwise they would be vulnerable to enemy fire sweeping along their entire length (enfilade), and a hit from a shell or grenade would cause widespread damage. Here, the restriction of vision caused by their design actually saved lives. Snipers and artillery meant the surface of the front was ‘drenched with hot metal’ (Saunders 2010: 67) creating a metallic landscape above the parapet that was impossible to directly observe without risk of being shot; sound increased in importance as attacks would often be presaged by a change in the soundscape.5 The front was usually a cacophony of noise as gun fire mixed with the louder sounds of artillery – the shouts of the living and the screams of the wounded also added to the aural mix, but when the guns stopped firing an attack often followed. In contemporary civilian life, silence indicated relative safety and extreme noise, danger; on the Western Front the situation was reversed. Industrial war demanded that munitions were produced on a vast scale, but each kind of projectile had a unique sound, something reflected in the naming of each weapon – for example, the German Minnenwerfer’s shells whistled as they approached, leading the British to call them ‘Singing Minnies’. Translating this soundscape could be the difference between life and death. Hearing became so attuned that it was commonplace for soldiers to tell the type, range and probable landing place of each shell as it approached, something that sight could not do. Even in this intensely loud soundscape human emotions could be identified, filtered out from the noise: And from time to time, beneath the regular sound – the methodical work of killing machines – someone, among all those men lying down and immobile, would cry ‘Ah!’ trailing off and prolonged, the moaning of someone exhausted, pushed over the limit, which seemed to say ‘This will never finish, never, never’. (Smith 2007: 48) In the glutinous mud touch became critical. Weapons could be felt for more quickly than they could be seen. Knowledge of the haptic nature of objects, from the distinct form of a hand grenade to the difference between sharp flint and softer chalk, was a matter of avoiding injury or even of life and death. The vibrations in the ground and the metal-laden air highlights how sound could be felt, not only in terms of knowing how close rounds and shrapnel were passing overhead, but also as to what was happening

Assaulting the senses  49 underfoot. The front could be ‘felt’ in other ways too, as Wilfred Owen described in a letter to his mother, ‘I have not seen any dead. I have done worse. In the dank air, I have perceived it, and in the darkness felt’ (Owen, quoted in Das 2008: 8). Amidst this cacophony was the pervasive stench of rotting corpses, decay and human waste. Filtering the more dangerous odours of poisonous gas from the surrounding stench would have been difficult, ‘Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots of gas-shells dropping softly behind’ (Owen 1995: 64) – gas provided a new experience of sensorial warfare. The two main types, phosgene and mustard, had distinctive smells and were green or yellow in colour, allowing the senses to warn of the imminent danger. Once detected, protective masks were donned that severely impeded some senses while simultaneously creating new sensorial experiences (Winterton 2012: 232). The French soldier André Pézard wrote of the experience of wearing a mask during a gas attack: You do not see clearly with the glasses, which make you sweat around the eyelids. You have the mechanism, which dances on your nipples. The air heats up in the box of potassium. That scorches you from the bottom of your lungs to your kidneys. The brain begins to turn. The rubber cannula makes you want to throw up, and the saliva runs out of the corner of your mouth. (Smith 2007: 79–80) This new danger was most prevalent in the trenches, but as poison gas was heavier than air it would regularly sink into shell holes and even down steps into dugouts or tunnel galleries, so inclines into a subterranean system were fitted with two sets of gas curtains (one at the top and one at the bottom of the passage). A final defining factor of this category is that they always served as the gateway to other categories, ‘sensory gates that signified entry into a separate place’ (Seremetakis 1996: 29). This applied physically, as entrances and exits to dugouts, caves, souterraines6 and all types of tunnel systems were embedded within trench systems. But it also applied conceptually, as this category introduced the soldier-body to the reconfigured sensorium required for survival further underground. Vision still held primacy here, but the importance of the other senses, and in particular the senses working together, would be essential to the successful understanding and navigation of the more confined underground landscapes.

Category B: Dugouts, souterraines and subways Definition: man-made or natural features utilized for the protection, movement or accommodation of people and equipment. These vary in depth between 1m (3ft) and 40m (120ft). Only artificial light is available. Located

50  Matthew Leonard parallel to the front line or towards the rear, within these spaces sight and touch hold primacy in the sensorium, closely followed by hearing, with taste and smell still holding their Aristotelian positions. The purpose of dugouts, souterraines and subways7 was the accommodation or movement of men, and artificial illumination was usually present, so vision was still valued. The most common form of light was candle flame, which creates a unique relationship between the light and the person that utilizes it (Nead 2008: 297). Down many steps, and we reach the caves of chalk. The candle-flames throw a bewildering glimmer in the cold, quiet place. Only the waterdrops make a sound . . . candle-flames have smudged the chalk where many curious hands have held them. The grease thickens on one’s fingers. (Williamson 2009: 117) Much of France’s subterranean Western Front consists of chalk, a medium that allowed for thoughts and impressions of life at war as well as memories of home to be easily etched onto the walls (Figure 3.2). These personal artefacts possess the agency of their creators, blurring the line between subject and object (Gell 1998: 229; Miller 2005: 11–15; Boivin 2010: 129–80). Through making and interacting with things, people make themselves in the process, thereby making material culture inseparable from culture, as objectification is the process by which we create ourselves (Tilley 2013: 60–1; Miller 2010: 60). In categories A and C (see below), sound possessed enhanced qualities for survival, either by its absence or presence, but it is in category B that a change occurs, as individuals move from a space open to the surface to one that is completely enclosed. In confined spaces, sound echoes and quiet noises seem louder. The volume of sound emanating from a group or individual in category A sense-scapes was not regarded as being too important during everyday life, as these positions were well known to the enemy. Souterraines, dugouts and subways were not so well known (if at all), yet were places that amplified and changed the manner in which sound travelled, a realization of which would serve men well as they progressed deeper into the subterranean world. Observing strict silence in category B was usually unnecessary as dugouts were located in trenches, the position of which was already known to the enemy, and large souterraines and caves were usually located further back from No Man’s Land, their subterranean approaches protected by laterals8 or other underground defensive workings. As a result the noise from the surface became muffled and at times non-existent – silence giving a feeling of safety – the opposite of category A, and different to category C where the slightest noise could mean the approach of the enemy or discovery. Subways were usually lit with dim electric lighting because candles would have been extinguished by the draft of passing traffic, and

Assaulting the senses  51

Figure 3.2  These carvings created by American soldiers in the Froidmont souterraine on the Chemin des Dames show the dramatic effects that lighting can have on deeply carved designs ( Author)

chambers were dug into the sides to serve as headquarters, medical posts and sleeping quarters. Even so, they were claustrophobic, cramped and little could be seen apart from the man in front and the white of the chalk, or the brown of wooden walls. The dim lighting allowed for vision to still be viable, but the differences in the way that sound travelled, the close proximity of soldiers to the tunnel’s internal boundaries as well as to comrades to the front and rear meant that touch became ever more important. Smell and taste remained inferior in the sensorium in category B yet chalk is a porous medium, which emits a fine dust, resulting in consumables having a distinct texture and taste. In the wet, muddy wood-clad tunnels of Flanders, chalk dust was replaced with mud and these tastes were ever present in souterraines and dugouts, and were exacerbated as the structures vibrated from artillery barrages. Smells were stronger in such enclosed spaces. The immediate proximity of so many people (some wounded, some dying) and the odours of sweat, urine and faeces mixed with those of field medications, food, hot drinks and tobacco, creating often overpowering and ambiguous smells. Although the senses of taste and smell were heightened, they were not essential to

52  Matthew Leonard survival – vision, touch and hearing still dictated the way with which the environment was primarily engaged.

Category C: Fighting tunnel systems Definition: man-made and completely enclosed tunnel systems constructed for the purpose of attack or defence.9 Included within this category are laterals, listening tunnels, Russian saps and fighting tunnels. Only artificial light, and often no light at all, was available. Depths may vary from 2m (6ft) to in excess of 40m (120ft) below the surface. Within these spaces, touch and hearing became the most important senses to survival and navigation, followed by smell, taste and sight. Despite the different roles that these tunnels played, they were all claustrophobic and dangerous landscapes in which all natural light was absent and the importance of silence was paramount. To operate here, the sensorium was almost the reverse of classical Aristotelian order. Touch and hearing now became dominant, and the sense of smell surpassed sight. The category C sense-scape was a network of dark tunnels where the hands were eyes, the ears an extension of touch, and the nose an early warning system, something more akin to the experience of a mole than a twentieth-century soldier (Ingold 2007: 6). Offensive tunnels were necessarily small, often no more than 1.5m (5ft) high to minimize construction time and the noise this produced. The size ensured tunnellers could be anchored to their surroundings, and New Zealanders left their tunnels unboarded where possible, as ‘the ground talked to tunnellers who knew how to speak the language’ (Barrie 1981: 207). Light was scarce and often non-existent as there was little room for fixed illumination, candles were not always available and any form of naked flame was forbidden near to explosives (Figure 3.3). Haptic engagement took over but was not restricted to navigating the environment. The noise made by men working underground could be felt through the tunnel floor and walls, demonstrating the synaesthetic qualities of touch and sound. Pickaxes and bayonets removing chalk, equipment banging against tunnel walls, and the sound of human voices and laboured breathing could reveal the position of miners or soldiers moving through a subterranean system. In category C observing strict silence was paramount. The interception of sound was vital, too. Listening tunnels were constructed at regular intervals and technologies were utilized to detect the approaching enemy. Geophones10 enhanced hearing, and in some places central listening stations were even linked to an array of seismomicrophones11 (Robinson and Cave 2011: 9). So powerful was this equipment that entire landscapes could be visualized from deep within the earth, akin to the way the blind can picture their surroundings (see Hull 1990). When no specialized equipment was available ears would be pressed up to the chalk, mud or wooden-clad walls, hearing and touch working in unison, ‘forehead pressed

Assaulting the senses  53

Figure 3.3  Part of the La Folie system on Vimy Ridge. Here the proximity to danger was (and remains) constant. A Durand Group investigator is pictured next to a bag of ammonal high explosive ( Author)

to the face, side or wall of the gallery, one stood, knelt or lay – listening, listening, listening. Some sounds would be heard dull or muffled . . . One’s pulse rate would quicken and fright push to the fore in one’s whole being’ (Cassels, quoted in Barrie 1981: 72). The size of these subterranean features required the body and mind to adjust to an often-painful physical engagement with the landscape on a daily basis. When opposing sides came face to face underground difficulties were amplified and hand-to-hand combat occurred in tunnels not big enough to stand up in. In the dark, the only method of telling who was who was often to ‘feel if the man had any epaulettes; the Germans used to have epaulettes on the shoulder and we could tell that way’ (Westacott, quoted in Barton et al. 2010: 137). The human senses not only have the ability to comprehend the environment; they also distinguish between friend and foe (Gibson 1986: 7). Much of the Western Front in France consists of a deep chalk sub-layer and it is a common experience for air to be felt on the skin as it travels along the passages, allowing odours to disperse with relative ease. Soldiers and miners from different armies smelled distinct depending on the food they ate, the products they used to clean themselves and their uniforms, the tobacco they smoked and even the way that candles were manufactured

54  Matthew Leonard (Corbin 1996: 39), which could notify one side of the other’s presence long before they were seen. In Category C sense-scapes, the human sensorium approached but never totally replicated that of animals. Nevertheless, the change between the surface and the claustrophobic world of narrow tunnels below was a gap the sensorium regularly struggled to bridge. The elevation of touch within the sensorial hierarchy meant that weaponry was left at particular tunnel junctions and gas doors (positioned in well-known places) (Figure 3.4), as touch could locate them in the dark. Instructions were written in locations where artificial light was available, or at the beginning of new sections of tunnel to ensure that talking was kept to a minimum, and ensuring vital information would not be forgotten if sensory deprivation or lack of oxygen became a factor. Category C sense-scapes were at the limit of human endurance. As tunnels go deeper oxygen is reduced and when levels fall below 18 per cent reaction times slow, the senses dull, hallucinations can occur and the ability to function effectively becomes severely limited (Comer et al. 1967). These environments were so oppressive that no re-evaluation of the senses could cope for extended periods. Animals were used to offset weakness in the human senses, with canaries or mice regularly taken underground

Figure 3.4  The remains of a gas curtain, made of heavy leather. It would have fitted perfectly into a wooden frame cemented into the chalk walls ( Author)

Assaulting the senses  55 by miners to alert them to the presence of carbon monoxide gas, a silent killer that humans are incapable of detecting unaided (Grieve and Newman 1936: 311–15). The responsibility for maintaining human life was in effect transferred to non-human animals, thereby reconfiguring their worth in the soldiers’ eyes. Canaries and mice, animals previously considered as vermin or pets, were now the ‘tunnellers’ friends’ (ibid. 311). Without the sensorial gateways provided by the A and B stages, working normally in such confined and dangerous places would have been almost impossible; this demonstrates how human beings can adapt to their environments, but always with limitations.

Figure 3.5  A typical section of subterranean front line according to depth and feature type ( Author)

56  Matthew Leonard The underground landscapes of the Western Front were ambiguous in design with their three-dimensional aspects compounding the potential for creating spatial confusion. Categorizing the palimpsest of subterranean landscape by time, age or nationality is less than helpful, due to the constant recycling of landscape and matériel on the Western Front. It is clear that, aside from their physical classification, the most effective way to categorize and define the different types of subterranean structure is via the sensorial engagement required to create and use them. Figure 3.5 shows a stylized, but typical section of the Western Front, displaying the many different types of underground structure along with their associated depths. Figure 3.6 shows the same area of front, but this time the underground features are shown interpreted as sense-scapes and by doing so the layering of landscape becomes simplified and easier to comprehend.

Figure 3.6  A typical section of subterranean front line according to sensorial categorization ( Author)

Assaulting the senses  57 The sensorium required to engage with the different features depended on what they would be used for and the environment in which they were created. Dugouts, souterraines and subways are grouped together as the way these features were engaged with was similar, regardless of depth. Beneath No Man’s Land, tunnels needed to be smaller to minimize the noise required for their construction and maximize the speed with which they were completed. The darkness and close proximity of the tunnel’s boundaries required a more haptic engagement with the landscape, anchoring the body in place. The restriction of movement caused by the cramped conditions meant men took their time while moving, reducing noise, and alerting them to intruders coming the other way. If human senses only served to interact with pre-existing environments and could not create landscapes, then the underground structures would have been built very differently, and as a result would not have been as effective. Decisions concerning how to dig tunnels, when to deviate them, what tools to use and what to write or carve into their surfaces were all human interactions with landscape and directed the way that these spaces were made places (Feldman 1996: 91). The power of the senses and the universal human desire to survive in any environment can be deciphered in the physical characteristics of their construction. For the first time in history, the reconfiguration of the sensorium was the direct result of the demands placed on the human body (and mind) by industrialized and technologically advanced warfare. The same developments in weapon production that were meant to ensure any twentieth-century conflict was brief and decisive in fact produced the opposite effect. This in turn created a dichotomy in which soldiers utilized the most up-to-date technologies to create a world in which modernity was rapidly consumed. The intensity of industrialized conflict during the First World War created an environment like no other, and the contemporary Western rules of engaging with landscape failed. In turn, the sensorial hierarchy had to be reassessed, revised and reapplied to the creation and interpretation of these places. For this reason, engaging with subterranean warfare from a single perspective yields an incomplete picture. An interdisciplinary approach, blending archaeology and sensorial anthropology is more informative. By conducting research within this broader framework, it can be seen that life in the First World War was overwhelmingly governed by the relationship between the human senses and the landscapes with which they engaged. Traditional understandings of how the sensorium helps to construct place were destroyed and then rebuilt in the complex underground spaces of the Western Front. This knowledge is as important to understanding these new sense-scapes as traditional archaeological drawings, photographs, or military maps. Without such a nuanced multi-disciplinary perspective, a fighting tunnel might be regarded simply as a tool, or weapon, with which to attack the enemy, completely ignoring the sensorial interaction of those that occupied and created this space, by-passing the human engagement with a war

58  Matthew Leonard of matériel, and so eliding a corporeal aspect of the conflict that was shared by so many.

Notes 1 Proprioception is the perception of the position, state and movement of the body (see Paterson 2007: p. ix). 2 Kinaesthesia is the sensation of movement in the body and limbs with regard to sensations originating in the muscles, tendons and joints (see Paterson 2007: p. ix). 3 Exteroception is outwardly orientated perception (see Paterson 2007: ix). 4 A funk hole is a small space carved into the wall of a trench, designed to allow soldiers to rest or sleep with some degree of protection from the elements and artillery fire. 5 As the war progressed and the different parts of the army increasingly worked together, barrages often became shorter prior to an attack, hoping to catch the enemy unaware. Rolling barrages were also used in which shells were aimed to land just in front of advancing troops, providing a protective ‘curtain’ behind which they could advance. Nevertheless, the change in the type of shells fired, where they were aimed and how many were used signalled a change in the soundscape. 6 Souterraine is a French term meaning ‘underground’ but often a term used to describe caves or subterranean quarries. 7 Subway is a communication tunnel used for the movement of humans to and from front-line positions. Subways also often included command and signal centres, accommodation and logistic facilities. 8 Lateral is a defensive tunnel dug parallel to the front-line trench. Other, offensive, tunnels were then dug from the lateral. Sometimes it was also called a transversal. 9 Fighting tunnel systems are tunnels designed mainly for offensive purposes, either to undermine enemy trenches with explosives, intercept enemy tunnels or listen for the approach of enemy diggers below No Man’s Land. 10 Geophones are a tool used for listening underground, consisting of two microphones and acting in a similar way to a doctor’s stethoscope. Sound waves through the ground are magnified and sounds are transmitted to each of the listener’s ears, allowing a bearing to be taken on the source of the sound. 11 Seismophones are an electrically powered sound detector usually linked to a central listening station responsible for a large area of the front.

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Assaulting the senses  59 Burchell, M. (2014) Skilful Movements: The Evolving Commando. In P. Cornish and N. J. Saunders (eds) Bodies in Conflict: Corporeality, Materiality and Transformation, pp. 208–18. Abingdon: Routledge. Chasseaud, P. (2006) Rats Alley: Trench Names of the Western Front 1914–1918. Stroud: Spellmount. Classen, C. (2005) Fingerprints, Writing about Touch. In C. Classen (ed.), The Book of Touch, pp. 1–9. Oxford: Berg. Comer, N., Madow, L., and Dixon, J. (1967) Observations of Sensory Deprivation in a Life-Threatening Situation. American Journal of Psychiatry, 124(2): 164–9. Corbin, A. (1996) The Foul and the Fragrant: Odour and the Social Imagination. London: Papermac. —— (1998) Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside. New York: Columbia University Press. Corrigan, G. (2004) Mud, Blood and Poppycock. London: Cassell. Das, S. (2008) Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press. Detienne, M. (1994) The Gardens of Adonis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Douglas, M. (2002) Purity and Danger. Abingdon: Routledge Classics. Feld, S. (2005) Places Sensed, Senses Placed: Toward a Sensuous Epistemology of Environments. In D. Howes (ed.) Empire of the Senses, pp. 179–91. New York: Berg, Feldman, A. (1996) From Desert Storm to Rodney King via ex-Yugoslavia: On Cultural Anaesthesia. In C. N. Seremetakis (ed.) The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity, pp. 87–107. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Fussell, P. (2000) The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford University Press. Gell, A. (1998) Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Oxford Univer­ sity Press. Gibson, J. (1986) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Grieve, W. G., and Newman, B. (1936) Tunnellers: The Story of the Tunnelling Companies, Royal Engineers, during the World War. London: Herbert Jenkins Ltd. Howes, D. (1990) Controlling Textuality: A Call for a Return to the Senses. Anthropologica, 32(1): 55–73. Hull, J. (1990) Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness. London: SPCK. Hurcombe, L. (2007) A Sense of Materials and Sensory Perception in Concepts of Materiality. World Archaeology, 39(4): 532–45. Ingold, T. (2007) Materials Against Materiality. Archaeological Dialogues, 14(1): 1–16. —— (2011) Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Abingdon: Routledge. Law, L. (2005) Home Cooking: Filipino Women and the Geographies of the Senses in Hong Kong. In D. Howes (ed.) Empire of the Senses, pp. 224–44. New York: Berg. Leed, E. J. (2009) No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War One. New York: Cambridge University Press. Miller, D. (2005) Materiality: An Introduction. In D. Miller (ed.), Materiality, pp. 1–50. London: Duke University Press. —— (2010) Stuff. Cambridge: Polity Press.

60  Matthew Leonard Nead, L. (2008) The Secrets of Gas. In E. Edwards and K. Bhaumik (eds) Visual Sense: A Cultural Reader, pp. 297–303. Oxford: Berg. Owen, W. (1995) Dulce et Decorum Est. In M. Clapham (ed.), The Wordsworth Book of First World War Poetry, pp. 64–5. Ware: Wordsworth Editions Ltd. Paterson, M. (2007) The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies. Oxford: Berg. Robinson, P., and Cave, N. (2011) The Underground War: Vimy Ridge to Arras. Barnsley: Pen and Sword. Sassoon, S. (1997) Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. London: Faber & Faber. Saunders, N. J. (2009) Ulysses’ Gaze: The Panoptic Premise in Aerial Photography and Great War Archaeology. In B. Stichelbaut, J. Bourgeois, N. J. Saunders and P. Chielens (eds) Images of Conflict: Military Aerial Photography and Archaeology, pp. 27–40. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. —— (2010) Killing Time: Archaeology and the First World War (2nd edn). Stroud: The History Press. Seremetakis, C. N. (1996) The Memory of the Senses, Part 1: Marks of the Transitory. In C. N. Seremetakis (ed.) The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity, pp. 1–18. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Smith, L. (2007) The Embattled Self. New York: Cornell University Press. Tilley, C. (2013) Objectification. In C. Tilley, W. Keane, S. Kuchler, M. Rowlands and P. Spyer (eds) Handbook of Material Culture, pp. 60–73. London: Sage. Williamson, H. (2009) The Wet Flanders Plain. London: Faber & Faber. Winterton, M. (2012) Signs, Signals and Senses: The Soldier Body in the Trenches. In N. J. Saunders (ed.) Beyond the Dead Horizon: Studies in Modern Conflict Archaeology, pp. 229–41. Oxford: Oxbow.

4 The scent of snow at Punta Linke First World War sites as sense-scapes, Trentino, Italy Franco Nicolis

In Italy, archaeology is traditionally identified with the study of antiquity, especially classical antiquity. In contrast to other European countries, archaeology is organized into separate academic disciplines which are defined by narrow chronological parameters, such as prehistory, the classical era and the Middle Ages. There is little interest in post-medieval archaeology and even less in the archaeology of the recent past (Nicolis 2014). Consequently, there has been very little archaeological work on the First World War in Italy and what has been done has been carried out by a small number of pioneering scholars (De Guio and Betto 2011; Balbi 2009; Milanese 2010).

The White War Inspired by this pioneering work and in light of the current trend for an archaeology of the recent past (Buchli and Lucas 2001), over the past few years the Archaeology Office of the Autonomous Province of Trento has conducted fieldwork investigating the archaeology of the First World War, partly in traditional settings (such as the Luserna Plateau and the Monte Pasubio massîf) but especially in sites of the so-called White War (Thompson 2008), which took place at very high altitudes, often above 3000m above sea level, and even in glacial environments. For several years, the absence of regular and abundant snowfall in the Alps has prevented glacial basins from compensating for the effects of summer melting. The consequences of these natural events include the increasingly frequent emergence of traces left by human presence in the mountains, traces which have been sealed for decades, centuries or even millennia by layers of snow. The sensational finding in September 1991, at an altitude of 3,210m, of ‘Ӧtzi’, a 6,000-year-old Chalcolithic mummy and the extraordinary accompanying items under the crest of Mount Similaun in the upper Val Senales on the Austrian-Italian border, is now part of collective consciousness (Fowler 2001), as are the remains of large amounts of material abandoned by the armies facing each other on the Alpine front during the First World War.

62  Franco Nicolis The sudden change in conditions, caused by an acceleration in the melting of the glaciers, has led to a genuine crisis for the recovery and conservation of finds, as a result of the extreme sensitivity of the materials to changing environmental conditions and the geographical location of the sites at high altitudes, where rapid changes in weather and the Alpine terrain often cause major logistical problems and mean that operational time-frames can be very limited. There is the further problem of the plundering of sites by collectors, who by illicitly removing finds also destroy the archaeological contexts. The challenge of the emergence of an increasing number of finds, which must be dealt with using scientific methods, means that archaeologists find themselves engaged in difficult recovery procedures, aiming to acquire as much information as possible regarding cultural settings relating to very different periods. The increasingly frequent appearance of structures, materials and bodies of soldiers from the First World War created the prerequisites for the experience gained since summer 2007. Collaboration with the local museum on ‘Peio 1914–1918, the War at the Door’, has been fundamental to the work of the Archaeological Office in this research. In 2007 and 2008, two brief fieldwork seasons were conducted on Piz Giumela (3,593m) and Punta Cadini (3,524m) in the Ortles Cevedale massîf. On these occasions, the Archaeological Office provided support for the museum’s recovery operations and documentation of structures and materials. A professional excavation was carried out, detailed plans were drawn, a photographic record made of the investigated area, and all finds plotted and recorded in detail. An archaeological conservator was present on site for any necessary emergency conservation work, in view of the high risk of perishability faced by the organic finds once removed from the equilibrium environment which had preserved them for almost a century. These first two fieldwork projects allowed archaeologists to understand the practical problems and to undertake the technical and logistical preparations for working in these environments. Following these experiences, we decided to deal with a much more complex site: Punta Linke.

The Punta Linke Project Punta Linke (in the Ortles Cevedale group, Commune of Pejo, 3,629m) was one of the most important Austro-Hungarian positions of the entire Alpine front during the First World War, a front that in that area ran along the frontier between the Kingdom of Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Punta Linke Project was conducted in collaboration with ‘Peio 1914–1918, the War at the Door’ and consisted of the comprehensive investigation, documentation and recovery of the entire context of a military installation. Since 2009, our excavations have uncovered the whole of the Punta Linke site, and have recovered many artefacts. The broader context of the site was

Figure 4.1  Punta Linke: exterior view of the transit station at 3,629m above sea level ( Archaeological Heritage Office of the Autonomous Province of Trento)

Figure 4.2  Interior view of the transit station during the excavation ( Archaeological Heritage Office of the Autonomous Province of Trento)

64  Franco Nicolis characterized by the presence of two cableways, the first connecting it with the valley-bottom at Pejo (1,170m) and the second with the important garrison located on the south-eastern slope of Palon de la Mare, today known as Coston delle barache brusàde (‘the slope of the burnt huts’), at about 3,300m in the heart of the Forni glacier. The transit station for the cableway, built within the glacial deposit, consisted of a hut with flat roof and rectangular plan that on one side abutted the rock face; it had a small door and a window on one side (Figure 4.1). It was entirely made of beams and planks of wood and coated internally with a layer of tarred paper and cardboard (Figure 4.2). Inside, there was a place for the diesel engine (manufactured in Germany), which was originally placed on a cast-iron structure fixed to a concrete base. On the other side was a small workshop for the maintenance of the cableway. On the floor we found a range of accessories and spare parts, many tins that must have contained food rations, woollen gloves, crampons, glacier goggles, alpenstocks and other personal items. Among the paper items hanging on the walls of the hut, alongside a handwritten sheet with rules for the smooth operation of the cableway, we found a centre-spread of the Wiener Bilder newspaper showing people queuing for bread in Vienna, the capital of the Empire, and a postcard showing a sleeping girl addressed to one Georg Kristoff, with a text, in Czech, signed ‘your abandoned love’. Behind the hut there was a 30m-long tunnel dug into the permafrost and rock, which allowed carts to pass under the mountain ridge under cover, and then from the exit of the tunnel to take the last section of the cableway to the Coston delle barache brusàde, a stretch of approximately 1,300m. In the tunnel we found the disassembled engine and its cast-iron structure. Outside the cabin, in a store carved into the ice, we found most of the portable artefacts, probably in transit from one cableway station to another. We recovered many tools, numerous rolls of barbed wire, equipment for the cableway, many shields, helmets, a tub for sauerkraut (Figure 4.3) and ceramic insulators. Of great interest was the finding of a hundred or so overshoes made of rye straw (Figure 4.4), manufactured in a traditional way, which were worn by the soldiers during guard duties. The soles of the overshoes were sometimes made of small wooden sections; one of them bore the stamp of Kriegsgefangenenlager Kleinmünchen – the prisoner of war camp at Kleinmünchen, near Linz in Austria. In fact, these straw overshoes were often made by prisoners of war, who at Kleinmünchen were mainly Russians. Other soles had a name written on them (e.g. Antonio, Januk), probably the owners, or, rather, the users of the overshoes (Figure 4.5). The archaeological fieldwork made possible the complete recovery of the Punta Linke site and its context (Figure 4.6). We were able to relocate all the material found during the research (including the engine) inside the transit station (Figure 4.7). We left in place all the original structures of the tunnel, freed from the ice, and the material found there, including a range of tools, ropes, an abandoned cableway car and a large store of firewood.

Figure 4.3  The tub for sauerkraut, part of which was still preserved at the bottom ( Archaeological Heritage Office of the Autonomous Province of Trento)

Figure 4.4  The pile of overshoes made of rye straw during excavation ( Archaeological Heritage Office of the Autonomous Province of Trento)

Figure 4.5  Pair of rye straw overshoes from the Punta Linke excavations ( Archaeological Heritage Office of the Autonomous Province of Trento)

Figure 4.6  Exterior view of the Punta Linke transit station today ( Archaeological Heritage Office of the Autonomous Province of Trento)

The scent of snow at Punta Linke  67

Figure 4.7  Interior view of the Punta Linke transit station today; note the engine replaced on its original base ( Archaeological Heritage Office of the Autonomous Province of Trento)

Archaeology and the senses The senses are the natural means through which we perceive the world; the way in which they are used, however, is a cultural construction. Understanding how to study the meaning of sensory experience in different cultures and in historical periods is an important development in recent anthropological, historical and social research. The dominance in the Western world of some senses, especially vision, linked to rationality, and hearing, has led us to consider the other senses as inferior (lower senses) (Classen and Howes 2006: 206). Archaeology has only recently begun to reflect on the role and significance of the senses and has embarked on a journey of discovery of the sensory worlds of the past (Fahlander and Kjellström 2010; Day 2013a). The archaeology of the senses therefore tends to reconstruct the ‘sensitivity’ and the sense-scapes of the past by overcoming traditional material analysis and the empirical observation of archaeological data, and seeks to discover how the senses were felt and used in the past by different societies. Although in the volume Making Sense of Things (Fahlander and Kjellström 2010) there are no papers directly focused on olfaction and smell (albeit some contributions take it into account in a multi-sensory context), in Making Senses of the Past (Day 2013a) three chapters deal specifically with the interpretation of olfactory experience in archaeology. The first deals with the

68  Franco Nicolis production of perfumes in the palace of Nestor at Pylos in Messenia, Greece, and their use as a mechanism for social regulation and the maintenance of hierarchies (Murphy 2013); the second analyses the scents and smells of death in a Romano-Byzantine funerary context (Avery 2013); the third deals with the mechanisms of olfactory stimulation through other senses, such as sight and the representation of floral elements on pots in Bronze Age Crete, and their social manipulation to build emotional and mnemonic bonds (Day 2013c).

Modern conflict archaeology and the senses The aspect that interests us here is sensory analysis and the sensory approach, particularly regarding smell, as part of modern conflict archaeology (see Callow, Dendooven, both this volume), and in particular of the archaeology of the First World War. So far, this theme has been addressed, to my knowledge, from at least two different perspectives. The first, which we may define as anthropological, is that which investigates the sensory aspects of battle-zones, trenches, of the ‘new landscapes of the senses’ created by war, and the sensory experiences of the soldiers through a wide range of historical sources (diaries, stories, poems, etc.) (Saunders and Cornish 2009: 5; Winterton 2012: 229–30, this volume; Leonard 2015, this volume). This approach analyses a real smell through the words of those who had the direct sensory experience. In fact what is usually described is not the smell, which is always difficult to express through words – ‘Odors . . . rarely induce complex thoughts that can be verbalized’, ‘Thinking is closely related to language, and it is as difficult to talk about smells as it is to think in smells’ (Keller 2014: 171–2), but the psychological experience to which it leads. The second perspective relates to the communication of the sensory landscape of the First World War. This is part of a wider panorama of reflections on ‘telling a multisensory story’ in museums (Day 2013b: 17). It is known that since the mid-nineteenth century Western museums have been almost exclusively ‘empires of sight’ (Stewart 1999, quoted in Classen and Howes 2006: 200). But the various proposals made to overcome this problem (i.e. the use of replicas that can be touched, the reconstruction of particular contexts with a ‘real’ soundtrack, the use of smell to influence the visitor, the prohibition of sight to increase the use of the other senses) do not seem to have resolved the problem. The reproduction of sense-scapes inside a museum exhibition can help one understand the complexity of the cultural context which is being presented (whether it is archaeological, ethnographic or artistic) but will never succeed in making one perceive the true nature of the context nor immerse the sensitivity of the visitor in the sensitivity of those who have spent part of their lives in those situations. In this context, even the experiences that have been made accessible and effective in involving visitors in First World War museums nevertheless fail to establish real contact between the visitor and the real sense-scape which

The scent of snow at Punta Linke  69 is being represented. There is a disconnect here – a significant difference between hearing the roar of artillery shells exploding, for example at Forte Belvedere at Lavarone in Trentino, and the visceral terror that soldiers must have felt: the first is play-acting, the second concerns the real lives of real men (and see Keller 2009). There is a world of difference too between the gut-wrenching smell of a trench reproduced at the Dresden Military History Museum (Stevenson 2014: 153, 158, table 10.1) and the sensory and psychological hell perceived by soldiers: ‘We respond to representation differently than to things they represent’ (Keller 2014: 172). In the case of museums, however, the problem that cannot be resolved is the context, which does not correspond to reality, ‘even the most familiar odors are difficult to identify when they are not experienced in their usual context’ (Keller 2014: 172; see also Stevenson 2014: 154, 158). Indeed, often the museum space was only designed for visual display and thus creates what has been called an ‘olfactory silence’ (el-Khoury 2006, quoted in Drobnick 2014: 183).

Using senses to ‘perceive’ and ‘feel’ the war at Punta Linke A visit to Punta Linke is a sensory experience that differs from encounters in other First World War contexts. In fact, while in museums and other First World War sites the senses are activated and stimulated with reproductions or sensory representations, and so by artificial mechanisms, at Punta Linke the sensory experience is based on reality. Punta Linke is a place of memory of the war, and the highest in Europe; that memory has its own space and its own materiality, and within that space materiality is in its original location – the place of creation of the memory which is now encapsulated in materiality. The world of First World War soldiers was multi-sensory (Winterton 2012: 231; Saunders and Cornish 2009: 4–5), and through their stories we can perceive only a pale reflection of what they felt. Today at Punta Linke we find a complex sense-scape, and through a multi-sensory approach we can activate four senses: sight, which in the Western tradition is the sense of ‘knowing’ par excellence, touch, smell and hearing. In the Punta Linke sense-scape the objects can be touched and even smelt. The soundscape is missing the noise of the cableway engine because some missing parts prevent its firing up, but we can listen to the silence, which was probably the most usual and natural sound.1 Only taste is missing.2 At Punta Linke there is no trench world but rather a different war world: there was no trench warfare but there was a war of outposts and observation; there were no major battles here except on September 1918 for the conquest of Punta San Matteo at 3,678m – the highest battle ever fought in Europe. But it was not a lesser war. Here the enemy was the altitude, the cold, the ice, the avalanches, the silence. From the small window at the end of the tunnel which looked out over the Forni glacier, the soldiers although seeing what for us today is a beautiful natural landscape of snow-capped

70  Franco Nicolis peaks and majestic glaciers probably perceived a deathscape, a place where many of their fellow soldiers had been killed and from which perhaps they themselves might never return. Today the trek to the site of Punta Linke, in an environment of great charm and with a climb of a few hours along a high-altitude path, prepares visitors and hikers for a different approach than is usual to First World War sites, and helps them prepare for the unusual, a multi-sensory experience.

Memory lost? Smell! Tutto quello che dovevamo capire lo capivamo col naso prima che con gli occhi . . . tutto è nel naso, il mondo è il naso . . . l’odore subito ti dice senza sbagli quel che ti serve di sapere, non ci sono parole né notizie più precise di quelle che riceve il naso. Everything which we needed to understand we understood with our nose before our eyes . . . everything is in the nose, the world is the nose . . . smell tells you immediately without errors what you need to know, there are no words or news more precise than those the nose receives. (Calvino 1986: 12) With his own literary language, Italo Calvino deals with the theme of the ‘readability of the world’ through the senses. His aim is to ‘know’ reality without the barrier of a written text, and is convinced that the sense of smell is the most suitable for knowing the world in a way that is immediate, accurate and ‘without errors’. Calvino’s words echo those of the English war poet Wilfred Owen who, in a letter to his mother, talks of his experiences in the trenches: ‘I have not seen any dead. I have done worse. In the dank air, I have perceived it, and in the darkness, felt’ (Saunders and Cornish 2009: 5; emphasis added). The soldier Owen could not see death, but just feel it and hear it through smell and touch.3 ‘Even with eyes shut tight, you could still feel, hear and smell the war’ (Winterton 2012: 239). And at Punta Linke the most profound experience is precisely that of smell, the smells given off by the overshoes, the tarred paper, the engine, the wooden hut: it is the same smell they gave off a hundred years ago and that the ice trapped until today. At Punta Linke, the smell is constitutive of the materiality of the war, it bears witness to the originality of space, it becomes materiality itself. ‘An aroma cannot be excavated’ (Day 2013b: 14): sometimes that is not true, at Punta Linke we excavated smell,4 and archaeological finds are no longer just material objects but are ‘those objects with that smell’. In this way, the sense of smell is transformed from an ‘emotional’ to an ‘epistemological’ sense. While in the first-hand accounts of soldiers ‘we are able to make present that which is absent’ (Winterton 2012: 231) and in museums these absences

The scent of snow at Punta Linke  71 are recovered with an abstraction or a representation, at Punta Linke there is no absence of memory, or denial of memory, because all the material witnesses are still there. There is no representation or abstraction but real presence: even the smell is still present. The sense of smell has been considered, along with taste and touch, to be one of the ‘lower senses’ (Classen and Howes 2006: 206), but in reality it is ‘the most emotionally evocative sense’ (Stevenson 2014: 157), the closest to our emotions: ‘Functionally, smell may be to emotion what sight or hearing are to cognition’ (Engen 1982: 3, quoted in Stevenson 2014: 157). This is why smell is the sense of memory, the most active sense in recalling personal memories and that which more than any other brings to mind past experiences with great immediacy and clarity.5 Smell makes us feel as if we have gone back in time and we find ourselves in the place where the memory was formed, it makes us experience the feeling of ‘being there’ (Stevenson 2014: 163). Through sensory experience, we can feel the same sensation at Punta Linke as well, a strong ‘phenomenological proximity’ (Stevenson 2014: 161) with that environment. But the problem is that no visitor can ever have been in that place before. So that feeling is not the result of the reactivation of olfactory memory. That is why when we enter Punta Linke we do not enter a time machine, and we do not feel transported back to a time and a place in which a memory was formed which cannot be ours, but it is that past, that time, which comes upon us and envelops us with all its sensory and emotional baggage. The experience of Punta Linke is not a mnemonic construction but a creative act. As an expression of an individual and thus a subjective6 sensory perception, memory at Punta Linke can only be a personal memory. At Punta Linke, there are no glass cases to come between the visitor, the materiality and the sensoriality of memory, there are no lenses that filter, there are no information panels. At Punta Linke one does not have to understand the war, one should feel, breathe, smell it. At Punta Linke, war is its smell. The smell of Punta Linke is not intrusive, sometimes it is not consciously perceived, it is almost subliminal, indeed, it is often necessary to explain to visitors the presence of this elusive element that probably will not be preserved for many more years. But this characteristic can be even more decisive in perception; recent studies have shown that this kind of smell is even more effective in the activation of emotional stimuli, ‘with odors, less actually is more’ (Keller 2014: 170).

Museum as smellscape Some of the portable items found at Punta Linke were exhibited between 2014 and 2015 as part of the exhibition ‘The war that will come is not the first: 1914–2014’ at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art

72  Franco Nicolis (MART) in Rovereto (Nicolis 2014). The Punta Linke objects were included in a complex and very inspiring exhibition itinerary, conceived as an artistic figure and not as an illustrative exhibition of objects of war: every archaeological object becomes a contemporary object when it is brought to light. The exhibits were displayed in vertical lines arranged along a high curved wall; a pair of straw overshoes was placed at the bottom of each line of finds. The installation at the MART, in its geometric regularity and succession, recalls a monument, in particular that of Redipuglia – the vast war cemeteryshrine-ossuary inaugurated by Mussolini in 1938 to honour Italy’s First World War dead of the Soča (Isonzo) valley battle-zone – but without the bellicose and celebratory rhetoric of a military monument. At Redipuglia the word ‘PRESENTE’ (indicating the soldier’s presence at roll-call) is a martial cry incised in stone; in the MART installation the heart-breaking word ‘presente’ is whispered by the overshoes in straw, a key element, which not coincidentally recalls ‘the shoes in the sun’ by Paolo Monelli (1921), those of the soldiers who died in battle. In fact, this layout is not a ‘representation’: the boots indicate a real ‘presence’, almost a tomb containing the body of the soldier. Furthermore, shoes are highly symbolic metaphors in the reconstruction of contemporary ‘landscapes of trauma’: The particular emotional strength of these objects undoubtedly lies in the closeness which they evoke to the bodies of those who wore them . . . their metonymic contiguity with the human body makes them an integral part of it, the memory of the body that has become a thing, a second skin that still bears the imprint of the individual that wore them . . . The metaphorical ability to symbolise is based on metonymic contiguity and for this reason the authenticity of the find is both essential and at the same time almost intolerable. (Violi 2014: 134) The MART installation proved to be of great importance because it was linked to an artistic experience in which olfactory perception, especially that of the overshoes, is certainly significant, even if not predominant. The new prospect for a museum is that the smell is the original smell, and originality, as we have seen, is also a key factor for the boots/person metonymy. The fact that the smell was not particularly strong and intrusive has also solved a major problem in the use of odours in museums, namely getting the concentration and diffusion techniques right for the exhibition space (Stevenson 2014: 162).

Acknowledgments The Punta Linke Project was made possible thanks to the work of many people and institutions: I extend my most sincere thanks to all of them for teaching me many things.

The scent of snow at Punta Linke  73

Notes 1 Among the many firsts that that unusual war imposed on places and people, a particularly unusual first should be assigned to the old Viozhütte Mountain Refuge, used as a base of the Austro-Hungarian Army, where, at 3,545m and in time of war, classical chamber sonatas for violin and piano were played by the commander of the garrison and the medical officer. Their revival at the present-day Refuge of Mantova al Vioz, not far from Punta Linke, could recreate another aspect of the soundscape of the Great War at that altitude. 2 As archaeologists we could have experienced taste when we found the tub for the preparation of sauerkraut, part of which was still preserved at the bottom, but no one was brave enough to try a sensory experience of this type. 3 Splendid descriptions, some even ironic, of the sensory disaster experienced on First World War battlefields may be found in the masterpiece of Paolo Monelli: ‘Always that smell of cemetery in the nose. There are twenty of them crammed into a crevasse, which are slowly decomposing . . . You see the face of the medical standard-bearer change bit by bit every day, as a result of decomposition . . . But his eyes are always alive, and wide open . . . You were dead so recently, and you were already nothing, nothing more, a grey mass destined to stink huddled against the rock; . . . but you, man, are not and it is as if you never were. There is carbon and hydrogen sulphide under us, covered by a pile of rags-uniforms; and we call them dead. But tonight you stink too much, dead.’ (Monelli 1921: 97–8) 4 When, in 1992, the box was opened that contained the bearskin cap that belonged to Ötzi the Iceman, an extremely strong smell of wild animal was perceived by those who were present. The smell had been preserved for more than 5,000 years (Personal communication, dott. Elisabetta Mottes, to whom I am grateful). On the other hand, we must not forget that ‘Excavation is a multisensory experience, and perhaps unconsciously, archaeologists rely on touch and sound (and smell to a lesser degree perhaps) as well as vision to guide their actions and interpretations. Is it possible to conceive a future where site recording forms have space not just for soil color and texture, but soil smell or sound?’ (Day 2013b: 21) 5 The first symptom of Alzheimer’s disease, even before the loss of memory, is the loss of the sense of smell (Stevenson 2014: 154). It is ironic, then, that the ‘sense of memory’ has become, with a significant oxymoron, the ‘forgotten sense’ (Stevenson 2014). From the literary point of view, the best description of the construction of sensory memory is that by Marcel Proust: ‘But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.’ (Proust 2006: 63) 6 If it is true that ‘No two pairs of eyes see the same thing in the same thing’ (Hare and Hare 1827: II, 53) it is even more true that two noses do not smell the same smell in the same smell. See also Stevenson 2014: 154 and Drobnick 2014: 189.

References Avery, E. (2013) A Whiff of Mortality: The Smells of Death in Roman and Byzantine Beth She’an-Scythopolis. In J. Day (ed.) Making Senses of the Past. Toward a Sensory Archaeology, pp. 266–85. Carbondale, IL: Center for Archaeological Investigation, Southern Illinois University Press.

74  Franco Nicolis Balbi, M. (2009) Great War Archaeology on the Glaciers of the Alps. In N. J. Saunders and P. Cornish (eds) Contested Objects: Material Memories of the Great War, pp. 280–90. Abingdon: Routledge. Buchli, V., and Lucas, G. (eds) (2001) Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past. London: Routledge. Calvino, I. (1986) Sotto il sole giaguaro. Milan: Garzanti. Classen, C., and Howes, D. (2006) The Museum as Sensescape: Western Sensibilities and Indigenous Artifacts. In, E. Edwards, C. Gosden and R. B. Phillips (eds) Sensible Objects: Colonialism and Material Culture, pp. 199–222. Oxford and New York: Berg. Day, J. (ed.) (2013a) Making Senses of the Past: Toward a Sensory Archaeology. Carbondale, IL: Center for Archaeological Investigation, Southern Illinois University Press. —— (2013b) Introduction: Making Senses of the Past? In J. Day (ed.) Making Senses of the Past: Toward a Sensory Archaeology, pp. 1–31. Carbondale, IL: Center for Archaeological Investigation, Southern Illinois University Press. —— (2013c) Imagined Aromas and Artificial Flowers in Minoan Society. In J. Day (ed.) Making Senses of the Past: Toward a Sensory Archaeology, pp. 286–309. Carbondale, IL: Center for Archaeological Investigation, Southern Illinois University Press. De Guio, A., and Betto, A. (2011) Archaeology of the Great War: Molto di nuovo dal fronte occidentale. In F. Nicolis, G. Ciurletti and A. De Guio (eds) Archeologia della Grande Guerra/Archaeology of the Great War, pp. 143–76. Trento: Provincia Autonoma di Trento. Drobnick, J. (2014) The Museum as Smellscape. In N. Levent and A. Pascual Leone (eds) The Multisensory Museum: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Touch, Sound, Smell, Memory, and Space, pp. 177–96. Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield. el-Khoury, R. (2006) Polish and Deodorize: Paving the City in Late EighteenthCentury France. In J. Drobnick (ed.) The Smell Culture Reader, pp. 18–28. Oxford and New York: Berg. Engen, T. (1982) The Perception of Odors. New York: Academic Press. Fahlander, F., and Kjellström, A. (eds) (2010) Making Sense of Things: Archaeologies of Sensory Perception. Stockholm: Stockholm University. Fowler, B. (2001) Iceman: Uncovering the Life and Times of a Prehistoric Man Found in an Alpine Glacier. London: Macmillan. Hare, A. W., and Hare, J. C. (1827) Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers. London: J. Taylor. Keller, A. (2014) The Scented Museum. In N. Levent and A. Pascual Leone (eds) The Multisensory Museum: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Touch, Sound, Smell, Memory, and Space, pp. 167–75. Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield. Keller, T. (2009) The Mountains Roar: The Alps during the Great War. Environmental History 14(2): 253–74. Leonard, M. (2015) Making Sense of Subterranean Conflict: Engaging Landscapes Beneath the Western Front, 1914–2015. Unpublished PhD thesis, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol. Milanese, M. (2010) Per un’archeologia dell’Età contemporanea: guerra, violenza di guerra e stragi. Archeologia postmedievale, 14: 103–8. Monelli, P. (1921) Le scarpe al sole: Cronaca di gaie e di tristi avventure d’alpini, di muli e di vino. Bologna: Cappelli.

The scent of snow at Punta Linke  75 Murphy, J. M. A. (2013) The Scent of Status: Prestige and Perfume at the Bronze Age Palace at Pylos, Greece. In J. Day (ed.) Making Senses of the Past: Toward a Sensory Archaeology, pp. 243–65. Carbondale, IL: Center for Archaeological Investigation, Southern Illinois University Press. Nicolis, F. (2014) Dalla caverna alla trincea: L’archeologia come metodo di conoscenza dei conflitti armati contemporanei. In Anon., La guerra che verrà non è la prima 1914–2014, pp. 118–27. Exhibition Catalogue. Milan: Electa. Proust, M. (2006) Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1. (tr. C. K. Scott Moncrieff). Ware: Wordsworth. Saunders, N. J., and Cornish, P. (2009) Introduction. In N. J. Saunders and P. Cornish (eds), Contested Objects: Material Memories of the Great War, pp. 1–10. Abingdon: Routledge. Stevenson, R. J. (2014) The Forgotten Sense. Using Olfaction in a Museum Context: A Neuroscience Perspective. In N. Levent and A. Pascual Leone (eds) The Multisensory Museum: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Touch, Sound, Smell, Memory, and Space, pp. 151–65. Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield. Stewart, S. (1999) Prologue: From the Museum of Touch. In K. Marius, C. Breward and J. Aynsley (eds) Material Memories: Design and Evocation, pp. 17–36. Oxford: Berg. Thompson, M. (2008) White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915–1919. London: Barnes and Noble. Violi, P. (2014) Paesaggi della memoria: Il trauma, lo spazio, la storia. Milan: Bompiani. Winterton, M. (2012) Signs, Signals and Senses: The Soldier Body in the Trenches. In N. J. Saunders (ed.) Beyond the Dead Horizon: Studies in Modern Conflict Archaeology, pp. 229–41. Oxford: Oxbow.

5 Sensorial engagement in tourism experiences on the Western Front Stephen Miles

The Western Front is one of the most iconic and resonant cultural landscapes to have emerged in modern history. It has a potent place in human memory and ‘stands as a metaphor for the defining human activity of the twentieth century – industrialised war’ (Saunders 2001: 37). The area continues to have a magnetic draw for tourists from many countries even as the First World War (1914–18) slips from private lived experience into historical memory. Tourists have been visiting the Western Front in Belgium and France ever since the war ended (Lloyd 1998) and the Centenary of the conflict (2014–18) is now amplifying this interest. Between July 2013 and June 2014 there were 551,000 and 351,000 ‘World War One tourists’ to the Westhoek area of Belgium and Northern France respectively which represents 32.9 and 31.6 per cent of total tourist arrivals in these areas (Westtoer 2014: 19). In addition, in the first five months of 2014 there was an increase of 70 per cent of visitors to Belgian Flanders compared with the same period in 2013 (Visit Flanders 2014). Tourism has added an important new dimension to the socioeconomic impact of the war. Tourists come to see and to understand; they seek connection with events stimulated by rich and varied cultural representations such as film, TV documentary, theatre and a buoyant war publishing industry. They engage with an ‘emotional geography’ of cemeteries, museums and visitor centres which serve to ‘incarnate the facts’ of this enormously imaginative landscape. In this chapter, I will explore an under-investigated aspect of this surge in battlefield tourism – the way tourists1 utilize their senses in the way they seek to understand the Western Front. Tourists come to seek meaning through a process of engagement with the memory and heritage of war. This can be a complex process because ‘heritage . . . is not an inherited essence but an experienced process; a process in which our emotions and feelings are enmeshed with our thoughts’ (Schorch 2014: 22). The senses are important in this process in that an encounter with heritage in ‘an interpretive context can be achieved through multisensory and embodied performances, a sensory and emotive contextualisation leading to an ‘internal understanding’ and empathy’ (Schorch 2014: 28). Although this relates primarily to museum

Sensorial engagement in tourism experiences  77 interpretation it is clear that the senses are a key aspect of any ‘internal understanding’ of a ‘heritage-scape’ like the Western Front.

The historical development of the senses and the ‘the privileging of the eye’ An understanding of tourism has been governed by the privileging of the visual over the other senses. In his seminal 2011 book The Tourist Gaze, the sociologist John Urry describes the predominance of the visual in tourism where the ‘gaze’ has a structuring function to frame tourist expectations, experiences and memories. This is reflected in the creation of pre-departure place image, the consumption of the ‘site/sight’ itself and the post-trip recall. Visual consumption of places is undertaken through images and representational technologies creating an ‘imaginative geography’ where the ‘tourist’ and ‘media’ gazes overlap and reinforce each other (Larsen 2006: 247–8). This ‘scopic regime’ (Metz 1982) is socially and linguistically constructed and reflected in heritage history which emphasizes the material (e.g. buildings, artefacts) at the expense of social experience which has traditionally been trivialized (Smith 2006). One of the most important ways of visiting the Western Front is the coach tour which is described as a ‘spectatorial gaze’ (Urry 2011: 20), allowing for only limited utilization of the senses in understanding the landscape and narrative.2 The ‘privileging of the eye within the history of western societies’ (Urry 2011: 18) stems from the way the senses have been ordered through history. An anthropological assessment upholds the importance of those senses which allow for a better manipulation of nature. Thus, as with primates humans share ‘bodily prearticulations’ and sight and touch are dominant over hearing, smell and taste in maximizing adaptation to particular environments (Howes 1991: 17). Nevertheless the notion of a hierarchy of five senses can be attributed to Aristotle (384–322 bc) who considered sight the most important followed by hearing, touch, smell then taste (Stewart 1999: 19–20). Sight (vision) and hearing (audition) were considered ‘purer’ sensual forms, being rational and ‘nonsensual’ and ‘higher, aesthetic, distal, [and] intellectual’ (Howes 2014: 260). Touch (somatosensation), smell (olfaction) and taste (gustation) were considered baser and less rational senses, having a more sensory and mechanistic connection with the world. The senses have differed in their respective values over space and time. For example, hearing was thought to have been a dominant sense before visualization gained in importance with the invention of the alphabet and later printing (Ong 1991; Classen 1993: 6). Sight became more important with the rise of science and rational mental activity from the second half of the seventeenth century and later the Enlightenment (Classen 1993: 7). With the invention of radio and TV in the twentieth century the auditory became more prominent alongside the visual but it has never supplanted it, remaining the complementary sense (Ong 1991: 30). In the pre-modern

78  Stephen Miles world smell was associated with essence and spiritual truth while sight was superficial, reflecting only ‘exteriors’; the odoriferous qualities of gardens were at one time preferred to their visual beauties. In modern society smell has become discredited and we live in an olfactorily bland world: the natural odour of human beings is disguised by deodorants and other suppressants and we are insulated from noxious industrial smells through regulation. In the pre-modern world taste was often favoured over the visual and was synonymous with ‘touch’ (Classen 1993: 8); but in the modern Western world taste is a subservient sense and this might account for its distinct underrepresentation in heritage interpretation as discussed later. It is revealing that there are far fewer words to describe taste in English than in other languages (Ong 1991: 27). Despite the prominent position held by visuality in modern society it is now widely agreed that people use all their senses to engage with the world around them. This is no different when they take on the role of tourists and the tourist ‘gaze’ does not imply a unisensual approach to tourist experience. Urry acknowledged that tourists use all their senses in engaging with ‘attractions’ yet ‘the organising sense in tourism is visual’ (Urry 2011: 14–15). Leonard (2014) has commented: ‘as Westerners, we would still argue that it is our eyesight that guides us through life, even though the reality is that much of life is not seen; it is heard, felt and experienced with the entire body’. This suggests that experience is grounded in its corporeal dimensions. Urry asserted that ‘gazing is an embodied social practice’ (Urry 2011: 20) and involves much doing and touching rather than passive ‘seeing’. In understanding tourist experience we should therefore acknowledge a kinaesthetic world where the body engages with landscapes, soundscapes, smellscapes (Dann et al. 2003), tastescapes and touchscapes using a range of interconnected senses. In their engagement with the Western Front, tourists visit a wide variety of museums, visitor centres, cemeteries, memorials and war heritage sites set within a landscape which, however unprepossessing, is resonant with meaning (Saunders 2001). The senses play a constant role in the way this landscape is interpreted and understood – in other words, sensorial engagement is integral to the tourist experience.

Sensual engagement and heritage interpretation Along the Western Front the history and material legacy of the war is presented to the public through a variety of forms of heritage interpretation. The number of museums and visitor centres3 has burgeoned since the 1990s and the ‘new museology’ of innovative display and interactive audience participation using ever more cutting-edge technology (Kidd 2014) is well-established on the Western Front. In tandem with their more traditional curatorial roles museums normally have a duty to provide education and an experience conducive to learning. Knowledge can be both

Sensorial engagement in tourism experiences  79

Figure 5.1  British soldier Greg Nottle, present at the Christmas Truce 1914, In Flanders Fields Museum ( Danse la Pluie/In Flanders Fields Museum)

‘verbal’ and ‘felt’ although verbal alone is not sufficient for true learning to take place (Crowest 1999: 21). Hooper-Greenhill (1994: 11) has shown how important ‘felt’ knowledge is in heritage education and the need to depart from a didactic and word-heavy interpretation. Much of this is a legacy of our cultural programming in Western society where we are conditioned to learn ‘information’ and ‘facts’ through words, images or pictures. Crowest (1999: 4) has shown how we cannot learn the smell of deer; it can only be gained through direct experience, rather than reading about it. This suggests that the senses are a necessary adjunct in learning to provide an effective educational experience. In 2012 new galleries were opened at the In Flanders Fields Museum at Ypres which provide an interactive and multimedia-orientated sensual interpretation of the war. The most prominent aspect of this is the inter-­ relationship between sound and the visuality of the comprehensive assemblage of vitrine-displayed artefacts, simulacra, dioramas, text-based panels, photographs, films and computer-modelled figures. From the moment the visitor

80  Stephen Miles enters the gallery a ubiquitous, brooding and, at times, sombre soundtrack is heard in the background; this establishes a contemplative aura which serves to draw the visitor into the exhibition emotionally. This atmosphere is enhanced by other uses of sound (e.g. noises of explosions) and changing light effects. Arguably the presentations with the most impact are the video installations; these are computer-enhanced life-sized figures who speak to the visitor starkly about their war experiences (Figure 5.1). Amongst these are British nurses, a Canadian doctor and soldiers from each of the combatant armies. Instead of simply appearing on a screen these figures move out of and return to the shadows as ‘optically uncanny’ phantasmagoria. They deliver messages from the ‘realm of the dead’ and ‘are eerie encounters with the ghosts of soldiers and nurses, come to haunt us in the here and now’ (Arnold-de Simine 2013: 192). This sensual engagement collapses the distance between the past and present in a profound way in that these are real people who, although dead, are able to reach out to us through their personal testimonies. We can relate to them. This theme is taken up by the use of the plastic ‘poppy bracelet’, given to visitors on entry, which can be used to electronically activate personal stories about four individuals from the war. This brings together a sensual (somatosensational) and performative involvement on the part of the visitor in entering a ‘national community of empathy’

Figure 5.2  Inside the Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne showing the fosses ( Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne)

Sensorial engagement in tourism experiences  81 (Arnold-de Simine 2013: 47) and takes the experience beyond merely passive adherence to textual narrative. The use of sound to accompany textual or visual display has been interpreted very differently in the Historial de la Grande Guerre in Péronne, northern France. There is no sound in the museum at all but a powerful ‘visual language of silence’ designed to remove any ‘artificial triggers of emotion or thought’ (Winter 2010: 10). A number of exhibits of army uniforms and kit from each side in the conflict are set into the floor in horizontal recesses (fosses) instead of the more conventional upright display; this archaeological or funerary symbolism presents a sacralized space aimed to direct the eye downwards in respectful observation. The eye is drawn from the vertical (the axis of hope) to the horizontal (the axis of mourning) in a technique utilized in much Christian art. There is a deliberate attempt to ‘avoid . . . implicit spatial optimism’ (Winter 2010: 12). Alongside the fosses are video stands which play original silent film footage from both home and battle fronts (Figure 5.2). People are drawn to these films in a kind of magnetism, perhaps because the technique is so unusual; much of their prior understanding of the war would have been gained from film accompanied by fabricated sound. An innovative use of sound can also be found at the Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery Visitor Centre in Belgium, where a ‘Listening Wall’ is used for thirty audio stories from the war. These are extracts from letters and diaries which ‘whisper’ to visitors from behind the wall. There is the idea that these are still faint echoes from the past and demand more determined attention from us. The above are powerful examples of the way sight and sound can be manipulated but in these exhibitions the other senses are still underutilized. Smell has been called the ‘sensory black sheep’ (Classen 1993: 16) and is consequently a relative parvenu to the heritage interpretational world. Nevertheless the olfactory experience of Viking age York at Yorvik and the recreation of the First World War trench (prior to 2014) at the Imperial War Museum in London can be seen as instructive exemplars in the reproduction of past olfaction. Smell played a pivotal role in the way the war was described by its survivors and it is thus surprising that more has not been made of it in interpretation. At the Dresden Military Museum visitors can open a box to smell a chemically simulated reproduction of the smell of the trenches, what has been described as ‘a mixture of earth, gun powder, and death’ (Deutschland.de website 2013) and by Crowest (1999: 10) as ‘a sweet, acrid smell . . . [containing] odours related to burning materials [and] . . . not “like” anything that most people will have encountered’. It is the only smell that its creator, chemist and artist Sissel Tolaas, believes elicits a universal abhorrence in humans. No interpretation along the old Western Front has attempted this. Nevertheless at the Memorial Museum Passchendaele 1917 at Zonnebeke visitors are able to smell examples of chemically simulated gas (Chlorine,

82  Stephen Miles Mustard Gas (Yperite), Phosgene) and try on a replica gas mask just to see how uncomfortable they were to wear and how they restricted visibility (Figure 5.3). The Ijzer Tower in nearby Dixmuide has a similar experience. In addition, visitors are able to open a replica tin of Fray Bentos corned beef to smell the food served to British troops in the trenches. Smell can trigger memory recall and smells can be strongly associated with places (Dann et al. 2003) and past events; but these are personal memories and since no one is left alive who served on the Western Front to verify the experience smell can now only serve to enhance historical memory. This is problematic in that we can only reproduce smells based upon our own perceptions of what they might have been like. Individual trench smells are familiar to us – like the smell of bacon cooking – and others less so – the smell of death; but the putrid admixture of all of them was something unique in time and space. Even a scientifically based reconstruction of trench smells might not produce an authentic olfaction; whether this matters to tourists is, however, debatable and the subject of discussion beyond the scope of this chapter. The primacy of the visual has for long relegated the value of other senses in interpretation. This has been particularly true of touch, the great taboo of the museum setting, where tactility is profanation. Museum objects are insulated from the viewer by glass cases, barriers, officious attendants and alarm systems; Stewart (2002: 72) has described the museum as an ‘elaborately ritualised practice of refraining from touch’. It is remarkable that

Figure 5.3  Simulations of gas smells, Memorial Museum Passchendaele 1917, Zonnebeke ( Author)

Sensorial engagement in tourism experiences  83 museums were not always like this and touch was positively encouraged in them up to the end of the eighteenth century. The change in the philosophy of museum deictics – particularly in the Victorian era – means that now ‘the contagious magic of touch is replaced by the sympathetic magic of visual representation’ (Stewart 1999: 30). Pye (2007: 16–19) has shown how much of this has been class orientated and also to protect the special status of the curatorial profession who think they alone can be trusted to handle objects. But the very real need to protect and conserve often fragile objects from handling and the maintenance of an appropriate preservatory environment means that museums will never be able to allow widespread and unsupervised handling of their collections. This distantiation has on the one hand created ‘aura’ (Dorrian 2014: 193) but on the other prevented visitors from experiencing the special power of objects from close tactile engagement. The new ‘sensory museology’ has, however, endeavoured to overcome this taboo and in the Western world via ‘object handling sessions’ (e.g. Gadoua 2014) and an encouragement to touch selected items has resulted in the ‘rehabilitation of touch’ (Howes 2014: 259). Nevertheless, objects displayed in the main museums of the Western Front allow little opportunity for tactile involvement. This is understandable due to security concerns and that open display of fragile and valuable uniforms, weapons, letters, postcards and flags would compromise their preservation. But the Western Front does possess other contexts where objects can be handled and these are now described.

The café-museum: a tactile setting Café-museums are privately run enterprises providing refreshments in an unusual environment where the material legacy of war is displayed in close proximity to customers (Figure 5.4). They are regular stops on coach tour itineraries and often work closely with companies to provide meals and ‘comfort breaks’. Examples of these are the Old Blighty Tea Room at La Boisselle and Le Tommy Café in Pozières on the Somme, and the Sanctuary Wood (Hill 62) and Hooge Crater outside Ypres (Saunders 2003: 182). These are not new phenomena: the provision of refreshments for tourists alongside the display of souvenirs for sale has a long history in the region (Lloyd 1998) (the Sanctuary Wood café-museum was opened just after the end of the war and has been run by the same family since). A familiar presence at these places are the large numbers of rusty shell cases and fragments of shells which are the ubiquitous detritus of war continually ploughed up by local farmers in great quantities. These frequently lie in piles in the cafés for effect and to emphasize the enormous destructive power of industrialized warfare. Accompanying the rather unaesthetic quantities of ‘rust and dust’ are better preserved examples of weapons, ordnance, uniforms, helmets and other matériel. Much of this is kept in glass cabinets but items can be removed and examined on request, there being a general expectation that

84  Stephen Miles

Figure 5.4  The Old Blighty Tea Room, La Boiselle, France ( Author)

they can be touched. In addition these establishments often have rich collections of ‘trench art’, items made from the material remains of war; these could be engraved shell cases, embroidered tobacco pouches or cigarette lighters made from pieces of shrapnel (Saunders 2003). Interpretation of objects is not the priority of these cafés and there is seldom adequate explanation of the items on display. Many of them are for sale, however, and the café-museum plays a prominent role in the controversial world of collecting militaria and modern-day ‘souveneering’ for commercial gain. There are definite legal and ethical issues surrounding this practice (Saunders 2001: 47–8; Robertshaw et al. 2008: 18–19) which encourages a haphazard and unscientific amateur archaeology; items recovered are unrecorded, out of context and frequently ‘unprovenanced’. This might be an example of where tourism is an enemy of archaeology. Nevertheless, it is a context where the distance between subject (viewer) and object is removed and tourists can engage sensorially with objects in a way that would be rare in a formalized museum setting. For a war where there are now no living survivors a material legacy is vitally important for memory and understanding; the objects of war play a powerful role in providing tangibility and verification. As Lubar and Kingery (1993) note: ‘Artefacts constitute the only class of historical events that occurred

Sensorial engagement in tourism experiences  85 in the past but survive into the present’ (quoted in Pye 2007: 14). They can thus provide a vital link with the past and in the construction of ‘meaning making’ (Gadoua 2014; Schorch 2014). Touch is increasingly recognized as instrumental in this and the use of objects to provide a social and material context to past events acknowledged. Paterson (2007: 1) has remarked how touch ‘can bring distant objects and people into proximity’. ‘Seeing with the hands’ is a powerful sensation (Paterson 2007: 8) and touch can revivify distant objects, imbuing them with deep and often numinous qualities (Latham 2007). Therefore touching objects in the café-museum allows the tourist to indulge in the material reality of the war and connect previously absorbed representations of the narrative with a material presence. Touch endows objects with a ‘social life’ and, although perhaps detached from their geographical provenance, reconnects them with their original context. Clearly, touch would have meant something very special to a veteran of the war but for the descendants of these individuals there is still an associational ‘aura’ surrounding objects which would have played a role in the war experiences of their ancestors. Objects on display might be familiar with visitors as ‘props’ mentioned in familial accounts of the war, either oral or written, or from photographs; they might also resemble objects in family collections. In these instances objects on display have a much enriched ‘story’ through memory and association. Gadoua (2014: 335) has shown how objects can valorize a sense of community belonging and if this is transferred to the ‘object handling’ of the contemporary Western Front tourist then the practice is instrumental in establishing a sense of membership of a ‘memory community’. The café-museum is a suitable context for this ‘memory making’. Furthermore handling gives objects a renewed life and, as memory signifiers, a new layer of meaning (Saunders 2007). The valorization of objects is also reinforced by the way they are used by guides to demonstrate the material and technical aspects of the conflict. The café-museum is a special type of war-related Wunderkammer which plays a relatively under-recognized role in the interpretation of the Western Front. But there are other collections which impact upon the tourist experience; most notable of these are the assemblages in bed and breakfast accommodation and in small hotels. These are often owned by private guides who include viewings in their tours and use these memorabilia to explain the events of the war (and to sell them). Artefacts are often restored with great care and used alongside replica uniforms and weapons to demonstrate the heavy and cumbersome nature of First World War combat. This adds a further sensual dimension to the experience in that within this context tourists are able to experiment with discomfort in a performative manner. This has parallels to the ‘Platoon Experience’ organized by the Passchendaele 1917 Museum: this is a march, for younger Australasian tourists, from the museum to the nearby Tyne Cot Cemetery where participants dress in replica uniforms and carry the equipment of the First World War soldier (Figure 5.5). The idea is to provide a ‘realistic’ experience utilizing many of the senses (Travel Bound Education n.d.).

86  Stephen Miles

Figure 5.5  The Platoon Experience ( Memorial Museum Passchendaele 1917, Zonnebeke)

Commemoration: cemeteries, memorials and ceremonies The Western Front is a ‘geography of grief’ where the landscape is populated by large numbers of cemeteries and memorials; these are effectively the last witnesses to the momentous events of war which has left a relatively superficial impact on the landscape for those without a trained eye (Chielens et al. 2006). Once engaged in, this commemorative landscape speaks powerfully and viscerally to the emotions. Memorials are often large-scale and commemorate the missing in grandiose style but they can also be modest, relating to the actions of regiments, units and individuals on the battlefields. Much of the power of memorials lies in their sheer, brute visuality. Built in an era when vast monolithic monuments were still fashionable, structures like the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval (1932) and the Vimy Ridge Memorial (1936) made profound statements about the scale of the loss. They are also a dominant feature of the modern landscape and are key points to visit for the tourist. But when you get up close to the Thiepval Memorial and the Menin Gate in Ypres (1927) in particular, another visual dimension presents itself. Few visitors can remain unmoved by the long lists of names of the missing which appear on virtually every surface of these huge memorials; row upon row of perfectly carved and regimented lines draw the eye in a kind of emotional fixation. At once an impersonal monolithic visuality is pared down to its many constituent

Sensorial engagement in tourism experiences  87 parts as individual names are followed in a beautiful symmetry betraying a simple oneness and equality in death. The experience is repeated at the many cemeteries of the region where the neat rows of lapidary headstones again order the eye in taking in the enormity of the losses. Visuality is key here; the other senses are present but it is what is seen that is so memorable. This is not to say that the only way in which we can comprehend the industrial scale of the loss is through sight. At the Tyne Cot Cemetery Visitor Centre near Ypres the names of all the soldiers buried there are read out by British schoolchildren in a viscerally moving recording.4 This naming is a form of incantation given special resonance by auditory appreciation; it is a depth enhanced by the fact that all these names were real people now buried only metres away. These examples show how there can be a close relationship between sensual engagement and the emotions (Schorch 2014). A further example of where the senses are used in commemoration is the ongoing practice of ceremonies throughout the Western Front, both private and public. These have an important function in reinscribing and revivifying memory (‘Lest We Forget’) and are highly performative, symbolic and atmospheric. The most well-known public example is the Last Post Ceremony at the Menin Gate in Ypres which has taken place nightly at 20.00 since 1928 (Dendooven 2001). This involves the playing of the Last Post by buglers. The ceremony is attended by large numbers of people and is a huge draw for tourists to the area. An extended ceremony can include prayers, an exhortation, the laying of wreaths and a minute’s silence (Last Post Association n.d.). The ceremony borrows many aspects of religious ritual and the area becomes quasi-scared space for the short duration of the ceremony. Like others across the Western Front, the ceremony has the capacity to focus the senses in the way it manipulates space (the echoing of the bugle call around the walls) and concentrates audition (the reverent tone of the speech). There is also the dynamics of the silence, ‘an active carrier of memory’ (Winter 2013), serving to concentrate thoughts and emotions on the magnitude of loss. Maitland (2008: 136, 41) has called silence ‘the ultimate response to enormity . . . outwith language and beyond human expression’ which can intensify emotions and sensory experience. During the silence there is an intensity of feeling and perception and the names on the panels of the memorial attain greater meaning.

The landscape The senses play a role also in the tourist engagement with the landscape of the Western Front. Despite the momentous events of the war the landscape has left very little tangible evidence having been returned to nature and the agricultural necessity of cultivation soon after the war. But landscape remains ‘memory’s most serviceable reminder’ (Lowenthal 1979: 110)

88  Stephen Miles providing successive generations with a rich and often emotive locus for remembrance. The Western Front is a polyvocal space imbued with complex symbolic associations. To understand it tourists must be able to decode its meanings, unlocking a subtle topography, and the best way to do this is on the ground. Walking across the Western Front conflict landscape is undertaken collectively as well as privately with a number of tour companies providing walking tours of the area. In walking ‘the walker returns to his senses’ (Thoreau, quoted in Paterson 2009: 777) and as Ingold (2004: 330) has commented: ‘it is surely through our feet, in contact with the ground (albeit mediated by footwear), that we are most fundamentally and continually “in touch” with our surroundings’. In its regular kinaesthetic movement, walking provides a rhythm of motion which forces concentration and a sharper understanding of the landscape. In a conflict where landscape played such an intimate role in tactics and the corporeal and sensual experiences of those who fought (Leonard 2014; Winterton 2012), walking is a highly effective way of engaging closely with the battlefield. To walk is to utilize many senses and to feel the ground under the feet in an embodied and chthonic manner. A common cultural trope in the narrative of the war is the nature of the ground on the Western Front and the cloying mucilaginous mud which bedevilled soldiers, particularly at the Somme and Passchendaele. To walk across the landscape after heavy rain is to get at least an impression of what this must have been like, beyond any textual description. It is also to be exposed to the elements, to feel the wind and rain against the skin, and to feel the raw sensations of heat and cold. But we should not make too much of walking which, despite its rich possibilities for somatic interpretation, will never accurately be able to replicate the dreadful wartime circumstances of the trenches. Added to the challenge of the terrain and the elements soldiers were clearly in mortal danger in most sectors of the Front; no matter how exhausting our modern-day hikes across this landscape we will never be able to reproduce the constant fear and anxiety that was a regular feature of trench life. Nevertheless, walking the landscape is to be reminded of this fear and the destructive reality of industrialized warfare as unexploded ordnance is still frequently encountered. This is where tactility must pause and any close sensualized engagement with landscape be suspended; the need to hold back in tactile involvement provides the starkest reminder of the lethal nature of this conflict landscape.

The ‘taste-less’ Western Front Gustation has great potentialities in enhancing our understanding of the past but has been under-utilized in heritage interpretation principally for health and safety reasons. It does, however, exist in a tentative manner in the growth of ‘heritage foods’ and the increasing use of traditional ‘tastes’ in the marketing of local gastronomy (Hjalager and Richards 2002).

Sensorial engagement in tourism experiences  89 In Belgium a number of First World War-related gastronomic products are for sale such as Poppy Chocolates and Passchendaele Beer. These rely on the way the war has been branded – particularly the symbolism of the poppy (Saunders 2014) – to give it a singular identity in relation to other products. However, these products raise difficult ethical issues and might be seen as a tasteless exploitation of other people’s suffering. Moreover, they are not based upon real wartime ingredients and have little value in bringing us any nearer to the taste of food at the time. Cookbooks said to have been used in the trenches do exist but the authenticity of these recipes is open to question (e.g. The Great War Society n.d.). The ‘Tommy Tucker Lunch’ given to children participating in the Platoon Experience is one of the few examples where taste has been used in Western Front interpretation. This is described as ‘a genuine soldier’s meal of 1917’ using authentic ingredients (Travel Bound Education n.d.). There is potential for restaurants and cafés to experiment with the taste of war food but ethical sensitivities might be a barrier to this. The search for gustation in the interpretation of the Western Front must therefore remain something of a Barmecide feast (see Duffett, this volume).

Conclusion This discussion of the use of the senses in the tourist experience of the Western Front has shown how despite the dominance of the visual in the contemporary cultural milieu, a range of senses are employed in forming a complete understanding of the material and perceptual background to the area. As Urry (2011: 15) has remarked, ‘seeing is not the only practice and sense that tourists engage in and activate. There are limits on how much vision can explain’. Underpinning this has been a great rehabilitation of long neglected senses and this is brought out strongly in the context of a ‘new museology’. The ‘expanding sensorium’ has given a renewed cultural position to touch (Howes 2014) and although this is not prominently identified in the area’s museology I have endeavoured to shown how it exists in more informal contexts such as the café-museum. Nevertheless, if the tourist experience is to be understood in toto then the coordinating and organizing role of the visual must be acknowledged (Urry 2011: 18). The multi-sensorial nature of the tourist experience also demonstrates how central a corporeal engagement with the environment is in the tourist experience. Tourists are those who can immerse themselves in their environment through performative embodied practices; in engaging with the Western Front this is expressed through a range of tactile encounters as well as ‘seeing with the feet’. Any analysis of such a large geographical and cultural area as the Western Front is ambitious and can only be partial. The focus here has been mainly conceptual, and much remains to be done in terms of empirical research. Moreover, the world of interpretation and visitor engagement is

90  Stephen Miles dynamic, and innovative technologies and methods are constantly in flux. In particular, while this account has regarded tourists as a homogeneous group, this is unlikely to be the case as more research is undertaken, and a more nuanced analysis becomes possible. Different sub-groups based on gender, age, socio-cultural background, education, culture/nationality and physical and sensorial impairment are almost certain to play a role in future investigations. The broadening of opportunities for understanding the past through a wider sensorium is a positive step towards providing a deeper and more involved experience for the public. Along the Western Front these opportunities have already been grasped.

Notes 1 In using the word tourist this chapter follows the definition of a visitor given by the United Nations: ‘a traveler taking a trip to a main destination outside his/ her usual environment, for less than a year, for any main purpose (business, leisure or other personal purpose) other than to be employed by a resident entity in the country or place visited’ (United Nations Statistical Commission 2008: 10). Tourism refers to the activities of these people. It thus adapts a broad definition of a tourist/visitor. 2 Although this has been challenged by Iles (2008) who thinks that the coach passenger’s experience is more embodied and performative than spectatorial. 3 The traditional concept of the museum as a repository of artefacts and the visitor centre as a place where amenities such as toilets, catering and retailing are provided alongside interpretation is now being eroded. ‘Visitor centres’ are now as likely to display artefacts (as at the Tyne Cot Cemetery Visitor Centre near Ypres, opened 2007) as ‘museums’ are to provide visitor amenities (as with the In Flanders Fields Museum). 4 In the same way, the names of all 2,749 victims of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks are read out at the annual anniversary in New York.

References Arnold-de Simine, S. (2013) Mediating Memory in the Museum: Trauma, Empathy, Nostalgia. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Chielens, P., Dendooven, D., and Decoot, H. (eds) (2006) De Laatste Getuige: Het oorlogslanschap van de Westhoek. Tielt: Lanoo. Classen, C. (1993) World of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and across Cultures. London: Routledge. Crowest, R. (1999) Making Sense: Multisensory Interpretation and the Visitor Experience. Unpublished MA Dissertation, University of Surrey. Dann, G. M. S., and Jacobsen, J. K. S. (2003) Tourism Smellscapes. Tourism Geographies, 5(1): 3–25. Dendooven, D. (2001) Ypres as Holy Ground: Menin Gate and Last Post. Koksijde: De Klaproos. Deutschland.de (2013) The Art of Smell. Accessed June 2015. Dorrian, M. (2014) Museum Atmospheres: Notes on Aura, Distance and Affect. Journal of Architecture, 19(2): 187–201.

Sensorial engagement in tourism experiences  91 Gadoua, M.-P. (2014) Making Sense through Touch: Handling Collections with Inuit Elders at the McCord Museum. The Senses and Society, 9(3): 323–41. Hjalager, A.-M., and Richards, G. (2002) Tourism and Gastronomy. London: Routledge. Hooper-Greenhill, E. (1994) Learning from Learning Theory in Museums. GEM News, 55: 7–11. Howes, D. (1991) Introduction: ‘To Summon All the Senses’. In D. Howes (ed.) The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses, pp. 3–21. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. —— (2014) Introduction to Sensory Museology. The Senses and Society, 9(3): 259–67. Ingold, T. (2004) Culture on the Ground: The World Perceived through the Feet. Journal of Material Culture, 93: 315–40. Iles, J. (2008) Encounters in the Fields: Tourism to the Battlefields of the Western Front. Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, 6(2): 138–54. Kidd, J. (2014) Museums in the New Mediascape. Farnham: Ashgate. Larsen, J. (2006) Geographies of Tourist Photography: Choreographies and Performances. In J. Falkheimer and A. Jansson (eds) Geographies of Communica­ tion: The Spatial Turn in Media Studies, pp. 241–57. Gøteborg: NORDICOM. Last Post Association (n.d.) Accessed June 2015. Latham, K. F. (2007) The Poetry of the Museum: A Holistic Model of Numinous Museum Experiences. Museum Management and Curatorship, 22(3): 247–63. Leonard, M. (2014) A Senseless War? World War I Centenary: Continuations and Beginnings. University of Oxford, unpaginated. / Accessed June 2015. Lloyd, D. W. (1998) Battlefield Tourism: Pilgrimage and the Commemoration of the Great War in Britain, Australia, and Canada, 1919–1939. Oxford: Berg. Lowenthal, D. (1979) Age and Artifact, Dilemmas of Appreciation. In D. W. Meining (ed.) The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes, pp. 103–28. New York: Oxford University Press. Maitland, S. (2008) A Book of Silence. London: Granta. Metz, C. (1982 [1975]) The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Ong, W. J. (1991) The Shifting Sensorium. In D. Howes (ed.) The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses, pp. 25–30. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Paterson, M. (2007) The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies. Oxford: Berg. —— (2009) Haptic Geographies: Ethnography, Haptic Knowledges and Sensuous Dispositions. Progress in Human Geography, 33: 766–88. Pye, E. (2007) Introduction: The Power of Touch. In E. Pye (ed.) The Power of Touch: Handling Objects in Museum and Heritage Contexts, pp. 13–30. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Robertshaw, A., and Kenyon, D. (2008) Digging the Trenches: The Archaeology of the Western Front. Barnsley: Pen and Sword. Saunders, N. J. (2001) Matter and Memory in the Landscapes of Conflict: The Western Front 1914–1999. In B. Bender and M. Winer (eds) Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place, pp. 37–53. Oxford: Berg. —— (2003) Trench Art: Materialities and Memories of War. Oxford: Berg.

92  Stephen Miles —— (2007) Killing Time: Archaeology and the First World War. Stroud: Sutton. —— (2014) The Poppy: A History of Conflict, Loss, Remembrance and Redemption. London: Oneworld. Schorch, P. (2014) Cultural Feelings and the Making of Meaning. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 20(1): 22–35. Smith, L. (2006) Uses of Heritage. Abingdon: Routledge. Stewart, S. (1999) Prologue: From the Museum of Touch. In M. Kwint, C. Breward and J. Aynsley (eds) Material Memories: Design and Evocation, pp. 17–36. Oxford: Berg. —— (2002) Poetry and the Fate of the Senses. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. The Great War Society (n.d.) The Doughboy Cookbook. Accessed June 2015. Travel Bound Education website (n.d.) Accessed June 2015. United Nations Statistical Commission (2008) International Recommendations for Tourism Statistics. Madrid and New York: United Nations. Urry, J. (2011) The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (3rd edn). London: Sage. Visit Flanders (2014) Contented British Visitors Flock to Flanders Fields! 9 July. Accessed June 2015. Westtoer (2014) Persconferentie WOI-toerisme. 7 Oct. Accessed Apr. 2016. Winter, J. (2010) Designing a War Museum: Some Reflections on Representations of War and Combat. In E. Anderson, A. Madrell, K. McLoughlin and A. Vincent (eds) Memory, Mourning, Landscape, pp. 10–30. Amsterdam: Rodopi. —— (2013) Silence as Language of Memory. Paper delivered at the Challenging Memories: Silence and Empathy in Heritage Interpretation Conference, Buckfast Abbey, Devon, 17–19 July. Winterton, M. (2012) Signs, Signals and Senses: The Soldier Body in the Trenches. In N. J. Saunders (ed.) Beyond the Dead Horizon: Studies in Modern Conflict Archaeology, pp. 229–41. Oxford: Oxbow.

6 ‘Dead air’ The acoustic of war and peace – creative interpretations of the sounds of conflict and remembrance Paul Gough and Katie Davies What does war sound like? During the 2014 centenary of the start of the First World War the question has driven historians, archivists and artists to attempt recreations of a comprehensive sonic landscape of this Great War. There are no known authentic audio recordings of battle from the period but sound engineering has contrived to recreate the sounds of this first modern war (see Cornish, this volume). Focusing on the Western Front, historians have created a typology of sound by identifying the particular qualities of each weapon type that was used there. For the 2014 BBC Scotland documentary Pipers of the Trenches British writer and historian Michael Stedman collaborated with Paul Wilson, dubbing mixer at the Digital Design Studio, Glasgow School of Art, to create an audioscape intended to replicate a period of intense fighting during the Battle of the Somme in 1916. The result is a rather colourful, though truly cacophonous, soundscape that assaults the ears. Although individual components can be identified, the chaotic collage is essentially impressionistic. It tells us something about warfare in extremis, but perhaps less about the actual and separate acoustics of that conflict. It may be easier to describe the sounds of specific weapons. The 18-pounder field gun used by the British Army, for example, which was likely – at the height of a barrage – to be firing three or four rounds a minute,1 produced a singularly loud and sharp noise on firing, and then a second noise on the explosion of its shell.2 Combatants recalled the perpetual rumble of distant detonation during a heavy barrage. A skilled ear could identify each different gun, its calibre, the path of its shell (which might be spotted momentarily overhead like a meteorite) and the probable point of impact. In the memorable words of one historian, the firing of a small field gun gave off a crack ‘like a fat man hitting a golf ball’, a medium artillery piece sounded ‘like a giant newspaper being torn, its shell a farm cart coming down a steep hill with its brakes on’.3 In the same poetic vein, the heavy gun has been likened to a blow on the skull, its giant metal projectile rolling in a leisurely arc across the sky, ‘for a time the listener felt he could run beside it. Then it speeded up like an express train rushing down a tunnel’ (Winter 1978: 117). Shells emitted

94  Paul Gough and Katie Davies different sounds, a near miss might whistle or roar; shells crossing dense woods or wide valleys gave off a deceptive echo; those that fell in enclosed places gave a double bang and no warning at all. As Denis Winter notes, the strain of listening for all these sounds did something to the brain, ‘A man could never be rid of them’ (1978: 116). Reflecting on the sheer variety of noise, Julia Encke notes that unlike the eye the ear could never be closed. Soldiers learned how to discriminate between the various war noises in order to anticipate looming danger and increase their chances of survival. Put simply, the deadly variety and monstrous cacophony of noise at the front line ‘laid siege to the ear’ (Encke 2014). Nor was the sound restricted to the dangerous edges of battle. At the height of the great artillery barrages on the Western Front the firing could be clearly heard on the cliffs of Beachy Head in southern England. What is reputed to be the loudest man-made explosion ever made, the immense simultaneous nineteen mine explosions of over 455 tons of ammonal explosives detonated under the Messines Ridge in April 1917, is said to have woken Prime Minister Lloyd George in Downing Street and been audible as far away as Dublin. Only recently has the acoustic of military history been afforded scholarly attention. Focusing on the auditory dimensions of the First World War, historians of culture, media, and musicology have analysed how contemporary filmmakers, composers and writers created surrogate sound to both lend authenticity to ‘silent’ films, and to express attitudes of ‘sorrow, grievance and denunciation’ (Hanheide 2014). Such interests have entered the creative domain of a number of contemporary European artists who have become drawn to the aural landscape of loss, memory and power. Less concerned with ‘the beleaguered ear’ of the front-line soldier, the artists explored in this chapter have an interest in the very opposite of the disturbing acoustic of warfare; instead they have become fascinated by the sounds of silence, particularly those associated with the rituals of remembrance.

Jonty Semper and the sounds of silence On Remembrance Sunday (11 November) 2001, conceptual artist Jonty Semper released a double CD album, Kenotaphion, which captures the empty sounds of seventy years of silences recorded at Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday ceremonies at the London Cenotaph.4 Each November the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is obliged to transmit the ritual two minutes of silence. Kenotaphion presents such absences. On live television this is achieved gracefully, even if a little unimaginatively. Live radio is a little more problematic. Indeed, the deliberate or accidental absence of music or chatter on live radio is known as ‘dead air’. Semper had first been struck by the incongruity of broadcasting commemorative silence when watching television coverage of the funeral of

‘Dead air’: the acoustic of war and peace  95 Princess Diana in September 1997. Questioning the easy (and widely prevalent) assumption that ‘the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship’ (Anderson 1983: 7) he released, in collaboration with the British arts commissioning agency Locus+, a limited edition one-minutelong vinyl recording of that silence. Developing this idea across generations of ritual silences, it took Semper four years to locate every surviving recording of the remembrance silences, the earliest of which is taken from a British Movie-tone newsreel from 1929. There are none for some years, including 1941 to 1944 when the ceremony was suspended, and for several of the earliest recordings Semper had to splice together fragments of scratchy newsreel, scrutinizing each frame to see when exactly the crowds of mourners doffed their hats. Semper relishes the differences in each year’s recording and expects his listeners to find these equally fascinating. Deliberately, and in the true spirit of authentic sonic art, he has retained the variable sound quality. Nothing is evened out or digitally ‘corrected’. Tracks are often full of crackle, tape hiss and microphone fizz. ‘This’, states Semper, ‘is raw history’, so the chime of Big Ben ‘sounds faint in some years deafening in others. In 1932, somebody near the microphone was coughing miserably; in 1969, there were protesters yelling in the background; in 1982, there was torrential rain; and in 1988, a baby cried’ (Kennedy 2001). Rather paradoxically, some of the early newsreel recordings of the silence even have a voiceover commentary. Each Cenotaph ceremony recording is unique; each has its own subtle characteristics, not only because of the background noise, interruptions and recording quality, but also for the different durations and intensity. As the ritual silence ebbs away, the reassuring sounds of marching, or the beat of the bass drum will soon fill the void. The empty tomb – the Kenotaphion of the title – is soon to be bedecked with tributes, ‘blooming like a floral aneurysm’ (Gough 2009: 14) as the living pay homage and the surrogate dead march past in their endless columns. Through such performative acts, the sensory texture of human community introduces new complexities and readings into the monumental space. Personal, emotional, collective and individual sensations tremble in the balance at this site of loss and mourning. Semper brings us deep emotional complexity by entangling the sensory fabric of the social order with monumental space. Through his unique record of memorialization, ‘dead air’ is enlivened by its own ceremonial existence.

Katie Davies and invisible borders Through her practice as a filmmaker and installation artist Katie Davies explores how society, territory and political debate are controlled. In her short films she aims to realize the sensation of border as ‘an experience of artifice and human division’ (Davies 2013: 243). In 2007 she worked with the UN Armistice Commission and the US Armed Forces to film from

96  Paul Gough and Katie Davies within the Korean Demilitarised Zone. In 2009 she documented a sequence of British citizenship ceremonies. Her research explores ‘border’ within a wider debate on marginal spaces. She uses digital video montage to articulate the experience of living with shifting and porous thresholds of experience. In her practice video montage can offer a challenge to conventional interpretations of borders, offering alternative readings of liminal and ‘inbetween’ geographical and psychological spaces. In much the same way that Semper explored an annual ritual of remembrance, Davies focuses on key ceremonies and uses digital collage to unpack an initial definition of border as a structure of power. Through her filmic methodology, she renders visible (and aural) what is most often invisible, or fugitive. In recent years she has extended this approach to the repatriation ceremonies at Wootton Bassett (since 2011, Royal Wootton Bassett) in southern England, creating raw material which would later become the artwork The Separation Line.5 From early 2007 until late 2011, RAF Lyneham, near Wootton Bassett, received the British dead bought back from the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The draped coffins of 345 service personnel passed through the small Wiltshire town of Wootton Bassett in 167 repatriation ceremonies. These started as impromptu gatherings, coordinated by town members of the Royal British Legion. Military families started to gather to stand and pay their respects as well, and within months would be joined by crowds of respectful mourners from across the UK. During that period, Davies made fourteen separate visits to the ceremonies, filming each time, gathering material for her montage that would become The Separation Line. Reflecting on her own upbringing in a British Armed Services family, Davies later wrote how she became fascinated with the ceremonies because of what they made visible and apparent: I recognized within the townsfolk that I met at Wootton Bassett, who were mostly employed by the British Armed Forces . . . of belonging to a military culture that somehow renders its members expatriate as they leave and enter civilian life. This distinction between military and civilian life may be slight, but its impact is significant nonetheless. (Davies 2013: 245) Davies was keen to capture individual instances of human interrelatedness and the multiplicity of structural ties that she recognized from both her own experience and in the closely observed sights, sound and ambience of the para-formalized ceremonies in Wiltshire. Her ambition was to study the repatriations from ‘street level’, filming alternative aspects and perspectives that were different and distinctive from current documentaries and news coverage. Underpinning her fieldwork was a fascination with the bounded process of repetition, drawing on the work of John Welchman who defines a border as a ‘conduit of power driven across the territory of differential traces’

‘Dead air’: the acoustic of war and peace  97 (1996: 168). Davies suggests that video practice can render the concept of border as a power structure into something that can be seen in many ways. Through the unblinking lens of her camera, she captures the full demography of townsfolk, visitors and the military. The work offers fascinating juxtapositions: polarized military stereotypes appear to dissolve, as the officers and other ranks stand close together, paying their respects to the dead. Probably many will return to the conflict zone within days of attending this ceremony for their fallen comrades. At Wootton Bassett one of the many invisible borders that Davies came to recognize was that between being alive and not, where the living acknowledge mortality by participating in a ritual for those who had fallen in a battle far away. For Davies it became clear that those who came to take part both identified with their own mortality and felt a moral obligation, or sense of duty, to those who had met an untimely death. The challenge for her as a video practitioner was to make this understanding tangible, to somehow convey the sense she took from observing and being part of these crowds into something those experiencing her work could share. She sought to translate her own experiential fieldwork, the experience of the real, into an encounter with the representational. Rather uniquely for an artwork about homage and memory, The Separation Line is an immersive sensorial experience – spatially, haptically and aurally. As an installation this is achieved in part by the way it is physically displayed, back-projected onto a four-by-two-and-a-half-metre screen which stands on the floor of an exhibition space. A soundtrack emits the leftto-right sound of the traffic and the street noise, and is played from speakers located adjacent to the screen and across the viewing space. Although it is in fact a montage of fourteen different events, the film lasts the actual duration of the repatriation ceremony, some nine minutes and fifty seconds, the time it takes a cortège to travel the length of the High Street in this small English market town. Temporally, the installation presents the repetition of this ceremony as a rising toll as each dead soldier is returned. In a reflective essay Davies deconstructs the physical responses and behaviours of the audiences who stand in front of the projected image (Davies 2013). Indeed, they do more than stand. Viewing the projected image on this scale elicits a particular reaction. As in the video they arrive to watch, they gather – in a line directly opposite – as if ‘receiving’ the projected High Street face-to-face with its digital participants. Both ‘sides of the street’ face one another on a human scale. Surround-sound further immerses the viewers. On the near ‘side’ of the street the ‘digital participants’ mirror the ‘installation audience’ on the other side of the road. The two ceremonial audiences face one another – the filmed (the actual) and the viewer.6 Through the performance of the ceremonies, the town became a symbol of political edict, national identity and sovereignty. The author explains how her work transcends these symbolic machinations because those involved (both within and observing the video work) maintain positions of both performer

98  Paul Gough and Katie Davies and participant. This allows the sharing of an experience, one that is in opposition to the dividing and restructuring mechanisms of borders. Davies has observed (as have others) that a sensory mirroring takes place as the ceremony plays out with the installation audience in position. Facing the digital participants on the roadside, the installation audience in the gallery – responding, perhaps, and reflecting upon the faces, the voices and the collection of individuals presented – they unconsciously take on the postures, and seem to also reflect the feelings, of those they observe. The mirroring of body language across the street, a shift between standing to attention and at ease, the wringing of hands behind the back, and most notably the rocking from the heels to the balls of the feet and eventual lifting up straight on the toes were all postulated, communicated by the civilians who were attending. (Davies 2013: 246) The viewers of the film have assumed a position of performer and participant, as part of an embodied sensuous performance. Physical attributes are communicated by the civilians on the kerbside and mirrored in the sensory response of the installation audience. As such it reveals a fascinating sensorial dialogue as each set of participants reflects upon past experiences brought into their own present. As a moment of twinned vicarious participation, The Separation Line projects its gallery audience spatially, aurally and psychologically into the midst of the repatriation ceremonies; the very positioning of the projection screen with its ‘street level’ position requires the viewer to become witness to this collective experience, an experience that brings a distant overseas war home by rendering it undeniably present. Sound plays a crucial part in this too, though at first encounter it appears rather tangential to the exacting and unyielding language of the camerawork. In Davies’s piece, there is a very strict visual protocol to the editing. Not only is the film’s duration dictated by the actual length of the ceremony along the High Street, there are no wide-angle views, no single shot down the street, nor any alternative perspective to that of the participants’ immediate view. It is frontal and full-facing, both frustrating and fascinating, but there is no doubting its emotional power. As a piece that deals with borders, visible and invisible, tangible and intangible, the film attempts to render visible the ceremonial borders experienced by its subjects. As a montage of many different ceremonies, parallels are proposed between the cortège passing repeatedly and the flow of moving images capturing the event at the edge of the filmic frame, acting as a border between two corresponding and fixed realities. The Separation Line makes a reflection upon mortality by placing the audience in the same position as the town’s participants, involving them, by virtue of a faux proximity and the sensory impact of surround sound,

‘Dead air’: the acoustic of war and peace  99 in a recreational installation that is ultimately representational of the event. Through these sensorial touches, the work alters the audience’s position from passive to active and from viewer to participant (Davies 2013: 253). This fascination with borders, with edges and the ‘hidden differentials’ between zones, helps emphasize that it is not the video image itself that makes the border visible, but rather the experience of the border as a liminal sensation which the installation, and the audience reaction, makes palpable and perceptible. For Jacques Rancière this shared experience is at the heart of what constitutes ‘[A] theatre without spectators, where those in attendance learn from, as opposed to being seduced, by images: where they become active participants as opposed to passive voyeurs’ (Rancière 2009: 4). However, in The Separation Line there is a confronting narrative culmination, a denouement that relies not on visual spectacle but on its absence. As the hearse approaches and is almost in shot (at precisely six minutes seven seconds), the screen is black for forty seconds and the audience is denied its filmic realization. Rather than the evocative, but visually clichéd, shot of a passing hearse we are confronted instead only with sound, with absence and perhaps denial. Plunged unexpectedly into darkness, the silence of a few seconds before is filled with the mechanical passage of the vehicle: approach, presence and retreat. The audience crosses another border – blinded – we are immersed in the dreaded nothingness of a life lost, as the vehicle’s engine clatter fades in its passing to be merged with the tolling of a church bell before the sombre crowd reappears.7 After much experimentation and deliberation Davies reached this important decision to rely only on a soundtrack. She writes: ‘As they hear the hearse pass, the phenomenon of experience remains, precisely because the body as the spectacle of the ceremony has not been pacified or fetishized by my own authorial translation’ (Davies 2013: 254). In this attempt to capture the very sound of absence, Davies draws on Lefebvre’s observation that ‘the element of repression . . . and the element of exaltation [can] hardly be disentangled; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the representative element was metamorphosed into exaltation’ (Lefebvre 1991: 220). The black screen, a filmic pause, represents the commemorative moment of marking time itself through stopping, performing stillness and most significantly performing silence. The ultimate horror of conflict is transformed into a state of dignity, gracefulness and splendour where the acoustics of war and peace collide.

Francis Alÿs and the geometry of sound A journey implies a destination, so many miles to be consumed, while a walk is its own measure, complete at every point along the way. (Alÿs 2005)8

100  Paul Gough and Katie Davies Francis Alÿs is a Belgian artist whose international work occupies the intersection between art, architecture, performance and social practice. Whereas Davies’s filmic practice is predicated on a fixed tripod position located perpendicular to her chosen motif, Alÿs puts a premium on movement and collaboration. Walking, and the intense observation of the socio-cultural and socio-economic conditions of politically charged places through which he wanders, is at the centre of his practice, as is collaboration. The realization of many of his artworks requires the active participation of many, sometimes hundreds, of participants, players and stakeholders. For his best-known work When Faith Moves Mountains (Alÿs, 2002) he recruited 500 volunteers in the Ventanilla District outside Lima to work together to move a huge sand dune by just ten centimetres. Regarded variously as a wry comment on the heroic futility of collective effort, or a social allegory offering bleak comment on the dire Peruvian economic situation, the resulting fifteen-minute film installation has been shown globally to critical acclaim. But it is one of his suite of London-based works that interests us here. The sensorial is central to each, in particular the roles of sound, touch and the ‘control and command’ of space. Railings (2004) is a video of the artist walking clockwise around central London’s Fitzroy Square on a crisp winter day, tapping and trailing a wooden drumstick across metal railings. Alÿs creates a percussive, occasionally bell-like noise to the bemusement of the occasional passer-by who stumbles upon this playful intervention in the capital city. In the film Nightwatch (2005) Bandit, a wild fox, was set loose at night in the National Portrait Gallery, his movements recorded by the gallery’s surveillance cameras. A year earlier Alÿs similarly ‘let loose’ a troop of British soldiers in London, each guardsman having been issued a set of instructions designed to determined their dispersal and eventual reunification. It is this artwork, Guards, we shall consider in some detail. Alÿs originally intended this conceptual project for a group of musicians who would be distributed across a city on a quiet Sunday morning. ‘We were hoping’, he later recalled, ‘that they would try to make bird calls and that once they met there would have been a battle of melodies which would eventually end up in a growing noise produced by the instruments calling each other.’ However, he found the outcome disappointing. It was, he felt, too similar to his previous piece filmed in Venice, Do It (1999), where two musicians each carrying half a tuba wander the city looking for one another so they might ‘achieve harmonic unification’.9 Instead Alÿs, having already made (or planned) his two film pieces about London’s trademark railings and urban foxes, looked to another emblem of the city, the red-uniformed military guardsman, as the city’s distinctive cipher for his new venture. The image of a guardsman standing sentinel outside the palaces of imperial London is, to many, one of the most visible material signifiers of the capital. Ceremoniously attired in imposing bearskin hat, pristine scarlet tunic and maintaining an unflinching verticality, the guard is the

‘Dead air’: the acoustic of war and peace  101 apotheosis of military control and moral order. His is the body imperial. But it is also the body impractical and theatrical, compromising ceremonial rectitude and a strict regimen of tightly orchestrated movements. Immaculately attired, the sensorial impression of the guardsman is rooted in his vivid colour, overbearing height and physicality, and the unassailable sense of power and authority he exudes. When seen and heard en masse, in serried geometric blocks of a parading troop, the senses are assailed by a matrix of non-visual materialities – the synchronized crunch of heavy boot on gravel, the barked almost unintelligible commands. And there is also a haptic materiality – the texture of bearskin, the polished gold buttons, the metallic tinkle of medals, the rhythmic pull of serge cloth over limbs. Such material impressions became part of Alÿs’s palette when contriving his newest artwork for London. The structure and singular narrative of Guards is simply told: we are located in the City of London, or more specifically the financial quarter, the ‘Square Mile’, the seat of financial power and authority, its perimeter marked by discreet sculptures of dragons and other mythical beasts. The sunlit streets are quiet, even deserted; it is possibly a Sunday morning. Various camera positions at street-level catch an occasional passer-by, strutting pigeons, the chiming of a cathedral bell. We then cut to a long alley where a guardsman strolls. The dissonance is palpable for we see what appears to be an authentic guardsman dressed as if for a parade, but who looks rather nonchalant, even forlorn; his weapon held loosely at his side as he strolls along the empty city pavement. We cut to another street and another guardsman. It could perhaps be the same one filmed from a different viewpoint. He stares rather wistfully into the window of a fashion store. Then we see a third who rests his weapon across his knees as he perches on a street bench. Cameras mimicking CCTV locations pan and tilt to follow each of these solitary soldiers. Next, a camera captures two guardsmen in the same frame; as they approach each other, straighten up, mark time, shoulder arms and together stride off; they are now a pair with purpose, though exactly that purpose is not revealed. There is no background music, no barked military commands, no dialogue, only the rhythmic beat of boots marching in step. Just as the solitary soldiers had become a pair, so the two guardsmen then become three. Fragment by fragment, scene by scene from the Barbican to Mansion House, from the formal Guildhall to a crooked medieval alley, we realize that there are many other individual guardsmen seeking each other out, as they form small squares of two by two, or rectangles of two by three. Cameras frame them from the rooftops, from the street, and then at pavement level. Four guards become six; six doubles to twelve. The deserted streets now echo to the crunching of their exact step; there are few other sounds, a sprinkle of cars, and the occasional bemused bystander, most of whom simply ignore the unusual presence of armed and ceremonially uniformed soldiers marching with purpose through their neighbourhood.

102  Paul Gough and Katie Davies Besides the striking visual impression of these bold blocks of scarlet amidst the grey urban domain, the film has also a powerful sonic sensation; the synchronized, percussive force of stamping boot is cleverly edited so that it creates cumulative waves of crisp crunching, rapped out with an insistent, irresistible tempo. Indeed Alÿs describes the film in terms of sound composition, recounting how it became a more minimal and serial piece – serial in terms of music and minimal because what they were doing was re-forming or re-building this perfect square of eight by eight soldiers. So there was this growing element of the sound of the steps, which had more to do with Steve Reich, and the construction of this very rigid structure a la Carl Andre at the same time. (Robecchi 2005) As an immersive visual and aural narrative Guards offers a memorable sensory experience, perhaps at its most dramatic when shot from a bird’s eye view. The red phalanx in its requited and unified form becomes eight rows by eight columns – sixty-four soldiers. Without breaking step, the Company marches across road junctions, ignores traffic markings, marches against the flow of one-way streets, swerves around parked cars and marches up steps ‘as if it were the most natural thing in the world’. It is as one bemused critic wrote ‘a gorgeously costumed army of robots’. Alÿs’s directorial touch is light. The film cuts rhythmically from aerial viewpoint to kerbside shots; there are no individual portraits, no cutaways; each man is absorbed into the militarized geometry. Even in the compressed architectural space of the city it is the uniforms’ colour, the purposeful velocity of the marching square and the synchronous lockstep that predominates. However, there seems no obvious point to the marching, no clear purpose to their authority and collective momentum. This confusion is sustained until the very end of the film; as the square of soldiers stomps through the square mile, it abruptly breaks into a slow march – an indication of a break in the narrative, but also proof of the innate control of this highly disciplined force. And then, just as suddenly, the troop resumes full power and marches off towards a bridge, where they suddenly break rank, their velocity dissipated as they stroll onto the pavement, tear off their heavy furry hats and mop sweated brows, chat to each other and, in an extended long shot, wander into the distance in a ragged line. In Alÿs’s words, transformed by ‘breaking from anonymous military mass to individual agents’. The final credits indicate Alÿs created the project over many years; achieving a matrix of complex permissions, working with the cooperation of the Ministry of Defence, the British Army and the City of London Police, achieved in collaboration with 7 Company of the Coldstream Guards and the not-for-profit London-based arts organization, ArtAngel. Like many of Alÿs’s creations Guards has a deceptively simple quality, yet it addresses many concerns: how order might be established from disparate

‘Dead air’: the acoustic of war and peace  103 elements, how discipline and beauty can be co-created by the interplay of structure and randomness. When a fox is let loose in the National Portrait Gallery we gaze upon its nervous roamings, just as the solitary guardsmen are left free to wander the backstreets of central London. Both images disturb: the lone soldier because, as a uniform(ed) body, he is always representative of another, larger, potentially aggressive, even repressive, body. As animal, the fox reminds us of our own ‘wild’ body and its ambiguous relationship to institutions. Furthermore, Guards acknowledges that landscape is invariably a function of war. Underneath the tarmac of the marching guardsmen are the stones of ancient Roman roads laid during the subjugation of Britain. Perhaps more so than their weaponry, roads were the greatest achievement of the Roman Empire’s military technology and remain as a shadow over London, an ancient echo of a history of conflict across the dead air of faded remembrance.

Conclusion Rather than worrying about the appalling details of history, these three artists are each interested in the very opposite of the disturbing acoustic of warfare and its human screams and sighs, addressing instead the sounds of war and peace, examining the drama of conflict through ritual, remembrance, and silence, and in so doing exploring the unseen borders around political edict, national identity and sovereignty. Historians such as Stedman make an important contribution to our understanding of war through recreation of its horrific soundtrack: others have begun to examine the complicated acoustic geography of conflict. Starting with the most slavish exploration of the very sounds of remembrance (the two minutes of reverential silence of some seventy years), this chapter slowly takes us to more abstract reminiscences of the ‘dead air’ of broadcast silences, to the repatriation of British soldiers from another foreign battlefield via a sensorial experience triggered by spontaneous homage and the paying of deep respect. Through a powerful immersive installation we have seen how the viewer becomes performer; how ‘dead air’ is revisualized as an eternal blackness; and how the viewer experiences the crowded emptiness of a procession of military coffins, bearing those who will take no more breath. In exploring the final artwork, Guards, we have seen how past and present appear to march together with an unstoppable syncopated and sensorial power through silent streets. Like Semper and Davies, Alÿs asserts the many materialities of conflict and its aftermath, whether the crackling silence of official remembering or the vicarious spatial and haptic experience of observing the return of the dead.

Acknowledgements This chapter would not have been possible without the continuing support of Paul Cornish and Nicholas Saunders, and the several artists whose work

104  Paul Gough and Katie Davies is discussed. Thanks are due to the Director and staff at the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol and the Director and staff at Manchester Art Gallery for staging The Separation Line in 2014, and to Rilke Muir for her insightful contribution to the development of ideas embedded in the chapter.

Notes 1 It was theoretically capable of firing twenty, but three or four would be the usual maximum permitted, due to the amount of wear on the gun. 2 Stedman and Wilson also worked with BBC UK to present soundscapes online through its iwonder website, where the replicated sounds of a range of weaponry and the cacophony of the Great War can be explored. See: 3 These phrases are taken from Denis Winter’s Death’s Men (1978: 116–17); however, a number of Winter’s similes draw from George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, specifically p. 83. 4 See: 5 Available at 6 The work was shown in two major exhibitions linked to the centenary of the start of the First World War: The Sensory War 1914–2014. Manchester Art Gallery, 11 Oct. 2014 to 22 Feb. 2015, and Shock and Awe: Contemporary Artists at War and Peace, Royal West of England Academy, Bristol, 19 July to 17 Sept. 2014. 7 This dramatic treatment is even engaging on the small screen. 8 An oft-quoted statement attributed to Francis Alÿs, Seven Walks, an exhibition commissioned by ArtAngel, 28 Sept. to 20 Nov. 2005 (21 Portman Square, London and the National Portrait Gallery, London). The Seven Walks (2005) project, which intervened into the city’s daily patterns and rituals, was a collaboration with the UK commission agency, ArtAngel. For seven years Alÿs walked the streets of London. Each walk was enacted in a different part of London with the subsequent films, paintings and drawings comprising his first major exhibition in the UK. 9 See Alÿs (2004), and ‘Modern Art Notes’, at

References Alÿs, F. (2002) When Faith Moves Mountains. —— (2004) Railings. —— (2005) The Seven Walks project. Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities (reprint 1991). London: Verso. Davies, K. (2011) The Separation Line. Short film directed by Katie Davies. —— (2013) Border Imaging: Revealing the Gaps between the Reality, the Representation, and the Experience of the Border. In J. Kazecki, K. A. Ritzenhoff and C. J. Miller (eds) Border Visions: Identity and Diaspora in Film, pp. 241–58. Toronto: Scarecrow Press.

‘Dead air’: the acoustic of war and peace  105 Dorment, R. (2010) Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception – Tate Modern’s Best Yet. Daily Telegraph, 21 June. Encke, J. (2014) The Beleaguered Ear: On Fighting Underground and Learning to Listen in the Great War. In Max Weber Foundation Lecture Series, First World War Noises – Listening to the Great War: War Noises on the Battlefield, 10 June. German Historical Institute, London. Gough, P. (2009) Peace in Ruins: The Value of Mementoes, Temporary Shrines and Floral Tributes and Markers of the Public Sphere. In A. Harutyunyan, K. Hörschelmann and M. Miles (eds) Public Spheres After Socialism, pp. 11–18. Bristol: Intellect Books. Hanheide, S. (2014) Reflections of War Sounds in German Concert Halls. In Max Weber Foundation Lecture Series, First World War Noises – Listening to the Great War: War Noises in German Music, 24 June. German Historical Institute, London. Kennedy, M. (2001) CD Art and the Sound of Silence. Guardian, 9 Nov. Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. Orwell, G. (1938) Homage to Catalonia. London: Secker & Warburg. Rancière, J. (2009) The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso. Robecchi, M. (2005) The Celebrated Walking Blues: Michele Robecchi Talks with Francis Alÿs. Contemporary Magazine, 78. Welchman, J. (1996) The Philosophical Brothel. In J. C. Welchman (ed.) Rethinking Borders, pp. 160–86. London: Macmillan Press. Winter, D. (1978) Death’s Men. London: Allen Lane.

7 Moaning Minnie and the Doodlebugs Soundscapes of air warfare in Second World War Britain Gabriel Moshenska

Familiar sounds were no longer heard; church bells were silenced; they were only to be as a warning of invasion. Whistles, tube type used by the police as well as the rattling pea type, were to warn of gas attack, while hand bells and football ricketys were only to be used as an indicator of some kind of alarm which escapes me now. Works horns, used to indicate starting, lunch breaks, and stopping times, steam operated like those fitted to ships’ funnels, were briefly silenced but were soon brought back into use to maintain production. (Rountree 2004)

Introduction First broadcast in 1968, the BBC television sitcom Dad’s Army depicted the comic antics of the Walmington-on-Sea Home Guard, and remains an icon of British comedy. As the theme tune fades in the closing credits of the show an air raid siren sounds the ‘All Clear’, the tone that signalled the end of an air raid or alert period in British towns and cities during the Second World War. For many of those watching Dad’s Army the sound would have been deeply and possibly painfully familiar, triggering memories of wartime: one man, a child during the war, recalled almost sixty years afterwards ‘How welcome was Minnie’s steady “all clear” note when the raids were over. Whenever that note sounds at the end of an episode of “Dad’s Army” it still brings a lump to my throat and reminds me of those difficult times’ (Beckett 2003). Even in areas where no enemy aircraft ventured and no bombs fell, the air raid siren sounding for drills, real alerts and the all clear formed part of a nationwide soundscape of air war and civil defence that left marks in the minds and memories of those who lived through the years 1939–45 in Britain. For young people these memories, formed not only by the experience and understanding of war but (to a far greater extent than for adults) by its smells, tastes, sights, sounds and touches, can be extraordinarily powerful, with long-lasting adverse effects and the ability to return unexpectedly in response to an assortment of sensory triggers. As a teenager my grand­ father was rescued unharmed from the bombed wreckage of his family home,

Moaning Minnie and the Doodlebugs  107 protected by a steel ‘Morrison’ shelter, but for the rest of his life he found the smell of plaster dust too much to bear. It is likely that the psychological impact of the Second World War on those who lived through it will endure for decades. This legacy of trauma exists for every episode of violence past and future: at this moment, century-long-lasting psychological damage is being done to young people in conflict zones around the world. For many of these people the recall of their childhood memories or traumas will be sudden, overwhelming and triggered by a sense: a loud bang, a smell of smoke. This phenomenon is known as involuntary autobiographical memory, and can manifest on a spectrum from a sudden recollection to a debilitating anxiety attack (Berntsen 1996; Hinton et al. 2006). During the Second World War the famed child-psychoanalyst Anna Freud studied children in Britain and found very high levels of trauma: after the war it was estimated that almost one in five of these ‘children of the Blitz’ displayed enduring adverse psychological effects (Freud and Burlingham 1943; Werner 2000: 213). My aim in this chapter is to explore the sense-memories of people who lived through the Second World War in Britain as children, focusing on sound-memories of air warfare. Of all the dimensions of the Second World War the war in the air had the widest-ranging direct impact on the population, but for most children it was experienced from the relative safety of an air raid shelter or refuge as a soundscape of sirens, aircraft, bombs and missiles. By exploring memory narratives of wartime childhood collected more than half a century after the conflict ended, I aim to characterize the soundscape of air warfare both as it was experienced and as it was and is remembered. My principal source for this work is the archive of the BBC People’s War project, a remarkable crowd-sourced oral history project which ran from 2003 to 2006, collecting more than 47,000 stories through a nationwide network of libraries, community groups and other partners (Noakes 2009). This study of soundscapes of air warfare builds on my earlier work on the material culture, memory and senses of Second World War childhoods, including studies of children’s gas masks; children as collectors of militaria such as badges, bullets and shrapnel; children’s claiming of bombsites as playgrounds; their experiences of air raid shelters and gas warfare training (Moshenska 2008, 2010a, 2010b, 2014, 2015). These studies form parts of a wider historical anthropology of children’s material and sensory experiences of modern conflict.

Britain at war More than six months separate Britain’s entry into the Second World War from the first civilian casualty of bombing: James Isbister, killed in an air raid on Orkney that was primarily aimed at the naval base of Scapa Flow. In the early stage of the war both Britain and Germany directed their bombs at maritime, industrial and infrastructure targets rather than civilian

108  Gabriel Moshenska populations (O’Brien 1955). From the middle of 1940 the Luftwaffe attempted to smash the Royal Air Force’s fighter force, targeting airfields and factories, before shifting focus in early September to the bombing of cities: what became known as the Blitz (Overy 1980). While the majority of these raids were still focused on strategic targets such as docks, factories and warehouses the civilian populations living in the vicinity of these targets were inevitably affected, and the Luftwaffe’s bombing accuracy fell as they shifted to night bombing in the face of heavy losses. The Blitz on major cities and strategically significant towns lasted until May 1941, when the German war effort shifted focus onto the invasion of the Soviet Union. Low-intensity aerial bombing continued throughout the following years, but in early 1944 the Luftwaffe launched a new strategic bombing offensive against British cities, partly in response to the Allies’ devastating bomb attacks on German cities such as Hamburg. What became known as the ‘Baby Blitz’ finished in May 1944: the following month, just one week after Allied forces landed at Normandy, the first V1 cruise missile struck London (Calder 1991). Thousands of these ‘Doodlebugs’ hit London and the southeast of England for several months until the advancing Allied troops over-ran the launch-ramp sites. By that time the first V2 ballistic missiles had struck London; a campaign that would continue until March 1945. By the war’s end tens of thousands of tons of bombs and thousands of missiles had left more than 67,000 people dead and hundreds of thousands injured or made homeless. Roughly 10 per cent of the casualties were children. The war in general, and the bombing war in particular, affected British children in a variety of ways. The much-heralded evacuation of children and mothers of infants away from urban areas led to dislocation from families and friends, and placed many at risk of physical or sexual abuse, and general neglect. Conscription into the armed forces separated men from their families, sometimes for the duration of the war: many fathers returned to unrecognizable and resentful families (Turner and Rennell 1995). The movement of men into the forces saw a wider range of jobs become available for women, which further affected family dynamics, particularly for middleclass families where the mothers would have hitherto been less likely to have sought employment outside the home. One of the effects of evacuation, conscription and bombing was to disrupt, interrupt or abruptly end many children’s education. These decays in the normal social fabrics of childhood alarmed authorities who feared an upsurge in juvenile delinquency and general criminality (O’Brien 1955). Police and courts cracked down harder on what was perceived to be a threat to social harmony, while civil defence training for children whether in the form of air raid drills or gas mask training were aimed at instilling a quasi-military discipline in children’s minds and bodies (Moshenska 2010b). The most direct impacts of the war on children came in the forms of injury, trauma and death. The children of Britain responded to these hazards, changes, new freedoms and new restrictions in a variety of different ways. Some exploited the

Moaning Minnie and the Doodlebugs  109 lack of parental or pedagogical supervision to explore the dangerous new landscapes of bombed buildings, military installations and civil defence sites, turning ruins into playgrounds. Some integrated the suddenly abundant militaria into their worlds of trade and exchange, mixing shrapnel and military badges in with cigarette cards and comics. Some subverted the most immediate symbols of the war, using gas masks as fart-noise-makers and gas mask cases as footballs or weapons. Some did, as feared, turn to petty crime: air raid shelter vandalism became a nationwide problem, while some enterprising young people stole weapons and ammunition from the military or Home Guard, with a few employing them in armed robberies. But by far the most common response to the war was a rapid and at least superficially easy adaptation to new environments, amongst them the soundscapes of air warfare.

Soundscapes and stories Soundscape is a concept developed by the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer as part of an ambitious research project into sonic environments around the world. Schafer distinguished soundfields, the areas within which specific sounds could be heard but defined by their creation, from soundscapes, the overlapping soundfields that make up an individual’s sonic environment (Schafer 1993). Soundscape is defined in terms of the hearer, as explained by geographer Paul Rodaway: The ‘soundscape’ is the sonic environment which surrounds the sentient. Soundscape is shorthand for ‘anthropocentric sonic environment’ . . .  The hearer, or listener, is at the centre of the soundscape. It is a context, it surrounds and it generally consists of many sounds coming from different directions and of differing characteristics. It is the sonic equivalent of landscape. (Rodaway 2002) To examine children’s responses to the soundscapes of war I have extracted narratives of wartime childhood from the digital archive of the BBC People’s War project. This project was established by the BBC with the aim of creating a learning resource for the future study of the Second World War, particularly by school students. The project planners recognized that: As the survivors of the wars of the last century get ever fewer, there is a great need for their children and grandchildren to find out what they did, where they served, and what really happened to them . . . The official records for the Second World War contain only some of the answers and most of them are unavailable to the general public. (BBC 2015)

110  Gabriel Moshenska The archive is based on user-generated content uploaded onto the website, and the project encouraged people to add their own stories or to assist friends and relatives in doing so. Trained volunteers in museums, libraries, community centres and elsewhere helped to record or transcribe stories onto the site: a total of more than 47,000 by the project’s end in 2006 (Noakes 2009). Of these, some 6,500 relate to ‘Bombing and the Blitz’, and more than 14,000 – by far the highest number of any category – relate to ‘Childhood and Evacuation’. To gather stories for a historical anthropology of the soundscapes of wartime childhood I used sound-related keyword searches to identify narratives with relevant themes, and these were roughly categorized and coded. The following discussion is structured around some of the main recurring themes that emerged during my analysis and sorting of the stories.

Soundscapes of air warfare What does air warfare sound like? It depends where you stand: all soundscapes are specific to a place, a time and a person. The rural and urban experiences would most likely differ significantly, and the civil defence teams fighting fires and digging casualties out of the rubble would have a more immediate experience of the sounds than those more safely ensconced in air raid shelters. The children of Second World War Britain were mostly amongst this latter group: whether from a garden shelter or an Underground station platform, the real action was out of sight: the air war was experienced as soundscapes.

‘Moaning Minnie’ the air raid siren I well remember the first air raid siren sounding. I was scared out of my wits. That awful wailing sound up and down, up and down, in tone. (Elliott 2003) On the first day of the Second World War a French aircraft was mistaken for a German raider, triggering the first air raid warning of the war. For many people this first experience of taking shelter in fear, which came soon after the outbreak of war was announced on the radio, suggested that catastrophic bombing and invasion were imminent: ‘It seemed almost immediately afterwards that the first air raid warning siren sounded – a sound I shall never again hear without a small shiver’ (Hassall 2005). Another recalled of the day, ‘That evening, the sirens went and I remember being terrified. I thought an army of German soldiers would walk up the lane where I lived and kill us. We soon got used to hearing the sirens’ (Allison 2005). In most places the sirens were mechanical or electrical; in

Moaning Minnie and the Doodlebugs  111

Figure 7.1  Second World War air raid siren in Lowestoft War Memorial Museum (Source: Robert Jarvis, Wikimedia Commons)

some places hand-bells or whistles were used (Figure 7.1). A reminiscence of wartime Durham recalls a different and more familiar ‘soundscape’ of air raid warnings: Soon we heard the wail of the cathedral siren, no doubt at first to test the efficiency of the siren and also to make the public aware of the sound and the action to be taken. We all learned very quickly of a ‘warning’ and a ‘clear’ sound of the sirens. We needn’t have worried too much about the cathedral siren because at each air raid the pit buzzers would sound all around the city and in those days we were surrounded by pits. (Clark 2003) In some places workplace buzzers and klaxons were restricted in their normal usage, but this was often over-ruled in the interests of workplace efficiency and productivity. Where sirens were used, they had two settings: to warn of an imminent raid it sounded a rising and falling wailing sound; to mark the ‘all-clear’ a single tone was sounded. The sirens were also frequently tested.

112  Gabriel Moshenska Our local Air Raid Siren was put on a very tall post beside the railway bridge at the Wormwood Scrubs end of Old Oak Common Lane. A policeman operated this . . . When it was tested it produced a loud blood-curdling sound that couldn’t be ignored. Starting as a low moan it rose to a high screaming wail, then dropped down to a moan, then back up to a wail, doing this several times before finally fading away leaving a loud silence. It was quickly named: ‘Moaning Minnie’. All the grownups told us that if we ever heard that sound we must run home as fast as we could. Lucky I got those new plimsolls for my fourth birthday! (Brooks 2005) Another woman recalls, similarly, that ‘My earliest memories were of coming out of the infant school by the park in Manor Road and the siren started to warn of an air raid. I felt very frightened and ran home’ (Whitnell 2005). Aside from running home, the proper response to the siren was to take refuge in the nearest available air raid shelter where, as one testimony recalls, ‘the waiting would begin’ (Palmer 2004). Fairly early in the bombing war the Luftwaffe shifted their main efforts to night raids, partly in response to significant losses. Most air raid shelters were designed to be used for a few hours at a time rather than overnight, with benches rather than bunks (O’Brien 1955). While some families began to pre-emptively sleep in shelters, whether at home, in the Underground, or in sites such as Chislehurst Caves in Kent, others maintained some semblance of normal domestic life, taking refuge in the shelter only when necessary, and suffering broken sleep as a result: ‘I remember the many times, usually at night, when we would wake to the wail of the air raid siren and sleepily make our way to the Anderson shelter erected in the garden for safety’ (Francis 2005). Like the Dad’s Army example discussed earlier, the most striking thing in the People’s War accounts of air raid sirens is the extent to which the fear that they instilled has endured: ‘sixty odd years later, my son was amused to see me react to music playing in his car which included the sound of an air raid warning siren, he said that I immediately began looking up into the sky, covering all angles to check for approaching danger!’ (Warren 2003). The degree to which the siren could act as a trigger for powerful involuntary memories can be seen in the significant number of accounts that describe physiological responses to the sound: Living in London during the Blitz was an experience printed indelibly on my mind. Even now, when I hear the wail of a siren in a play or documentary on television, I experience a certain amount of that feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach. (Hall 2003) At least the red and grey air-raid siren on a pole just round the corner was audible for miles! Its rising-falling howl for an air raid, and steady wail of ‘all clear’ is unforgettable and still prickles the hairs on the back of my neck. We seemed to have heard it most nights at one time. (Etherington 2004)

Moaning Minnie and the Doodlebugs  113 First there was the air raid siren (and even to this day the sound of this on radio or television will send shudders up my spine). (Farrell 2004) I still feel funny and my stomach turns over at the sound of a siren. (Whitnell 2005) The sound of the siren was enough to send shivers of fear through you and even after sixty years I still shudder when I hear that sound. (Polley 2003) Like the sound of a siren and the goose bumps that immediately appear over my body, even now, whenever I hear it. (Smith 2004) After the war, when the siren started to sound because there was a fire, I used to grab my clothes and run to the air-raid shelter. It’s stuck in my mind. (Buttress 2005) Air raid sirens are not infrequently used (as mentioned above) in radio and television programmes to give a 1940s ‘feel’ or colour to a drama or documentary. Similarly, there is a growing practice of using the siren as part of memorial events for victims of the Blitz. Given the frequency and power of the negative responses described above, and similar stories that I have heard in conversation with family, friends and colleagues, I would argue that its use should be more carefully restricted.

Aero engines I remember that I could identify a plane by the sound of its engines – spitfires, bombers, friend or foe, and dived for cover if it was foe. (Cochrane 2003) Supercharged V12 aero engines developing upwards of 1,000 horsepower are loud; large formations of single- and multi-engined aircraft are even louder. Before the invention of radar several nations experimented with and even operated large-scale listening devices, dishes or tubes made of metal or concrete, to search for the sounds of distantly approaching aircraft and provide early warning of attacks. The identification of aircraft as friend or foe was an important part of training for anti-aircraft gun, balloon and searchlight crews, the Royal Observer Corps and others. It was also popular amongst children, many of whom collected cigarette cards or read posters and pamphlets that aimed to teach the different types of aircraft. Actually spotting an enemy aircraft was a bit more difficult: in theory at least any Luftwaffe presence over any part of Britain should have triggered an air raid warning, and children along with most adults would be expected to take shelter, not to stand and stare, and this rule was generally but by no means

114  Gabriel Moshenska universally followed (O’Brien 1955). From the relative safety of the air raid shelter the only means of identifying aircraft was by their engine noise. The following stories give good overviews of the soundscapes of air raids from within the shelters: The air raid siren sounded and the class filed out to our shelter. It was like a large Anderson shelter in the playground. (There was one for each class.) After a while we heard a plane. We knew that it was German from the sound which was distinctive and very different to the sound of English planes. In quick succession we heard the whistles of bombs falling and then exploding. Three were to my left and then one was to my right. The sound of the plane faded into the distance, then the ‘All clear’ sounded and we went back to our lessons. (Robins 2003) The Air Raid Warning would sound, the wailing siren rising and falling in a way that chilled the blood, we would go down to our shelter, and the waiting would begin. Soon came upon our ears the sound that we learned to dread, the characteristic throbbing of aircraft engines as the Enemy bombers approached, then the sound of our own anti-aircraft guns and, almost immediately, the thump, thump of exploding bombs. (Palmer 2004) In these and other descriptions the German aircraft engines are described as ‘a noisier deeper sound’ or ‘a deep monotonous hum with a drop in pitch every second or so’ (Cleaver 2006; Vaudin 2003). One recalls that ‘to this day I can vividly remember the sound of the very distinct undulating pitch of the engines of the German bombers’ (Collier 2005). Only one of the stories that I studied noted the main reason for this difference in tone: he ‘had learned to identify British fighters, bombers and gliders, and the difference in sound between synchronised British engines and the pulsating, unsynchronised German engines’ (Stevens 2003). In fact, the British Spitfire and Hurricane fighter aircraft had only one engine so there was nothing to synchronise. In contrast the Junkers, Dorniers and Heinkels that made up the majority of the German bomber force, along with the heavier Messerschmitt 110 fighter, were twin-engined (Bridgman 1989). If the two engines of these aircraft were not carefully tuned to matching pitches the resulting vibrations could create resonance in the airframes, causing discomfort and annoyance to the crews. These vibrations were the throbbing or undulating sounds that could be heard from the ground, making the bombers distinctive and, to many ears, more threatening: I was supposed to go next door if the siren sounded but I never did. I would sit in the kitchen, which was in the centre of the house, and wait until I could hear the sound of the bombers approaching. It was very

Moaning Minnie and the Doodlebugs  115 scary. I could hear the noise of their engines getting nearer and nearer and, after a while, I could tell by the sound whether the planes were ours or the enemy’s. Somehow the German planes seemed to have a much harsher sound than the British ones. (Hall 2003) The bomber engines, while not as inherently terrifying as the air raid sirens, have also left behind powerful memories in people’s minds. One man recalled that A few months ago, I fell asleep while the film Dambusters came on the television. I woke with my heart fluttering and a strange feeling in my chest I could not explain. I then realised that the sound of the Lancaster engines had revived that old feeling. (Anon. 2003) Another stated that ‘Even to this day though and I am now 75, when I hear an aeroplane going over it still seems a threat in my mind’ (McRickus 2005).

Guns and bombs During air raids I would sometimes be joined under the shelter top by my grandmother. The antiaircraft guns, which were situated in Gunnersbury Park, about a mile away, would make a fearful noise and I can clearly see my Grandma as she jumped in fright at every salvo. We would wait with bated breath as we heard the all too familiar whistling sound of falling bombs, followed by the inevitable explosion, which came as a relief as we selfishly gave thanks for someone else’s tragedy. (Chudley 2003) The definitive component of the soundscape of air warfare is undoubtedly explosions, whether of falling bombs or rising anti-aircraft artillery. The Luftwaffe employed a range of high explosive bombs ranging in size from 2kg cluster bombs to the most common 50kg and 250kg, and the rarer 1,000kg aerial mines and 1,800kg ‘Satan’ bombs (Jappy 2001). Several people recall the ‘whistle’ made by a falling bomb, which grew louder as it approached, and one noted that Most of the noise was caused by a combination of the unsynchronised bomber engines, whistling and exploding bombs. The whistling was unnerving, although rumour had it that you never heard the one that hit you! (Hassall 2005)

116  Gabriel Moshenska One of the stranger accounts of the bombing of London recalls the burning of a factory full of oil drums, with the heating causing the drums to expand to bursting point, producing a series of extraordinarily loud bangs over several hours (Polley 2003). The stress of listening to the whistles of falling bombs grow closer must have been considerable, as attested in one recollection: ‘I can remember the bombs dropping and that’s probably why I can’t sleep well now because I can hear every little noise’ (Jackson 2005). In contrast to the fear of the bombs, accounts of the loud banging of antiaircraft artillery describe the sound as ‘comforting’, and one compares it to ‘large timbers “clonking” against each other’ (Etherington 2004): certainly there was an improvement in morale from knowing that somebody was ‘hitting back’. One night in particular was different when a new explosive sound punctuated the crash of the bombs and the banging of the anti-aircraft guns sited in the recreation ground just up the road. An almighty barrage of a different nature made us wonder what was happening. The next day we learned that HMS Cossack had been moored in the docks and had contributed its gunfire to the assault on the enemy bombers. This was a tremendous morale booster to everyone. (Johns 2004) One recalled that ‘Initially, there was no defence when the planes came over, and we felt very helpless. But eventually, anti-aircraft guns were put in place all around London’ (Hall 2003), while another takes a more sceptical view: ‘I think we were in almost as much danger from the shrapnel, which resulted from the gunfire, as we were from the bombs! No doubt the guns had some deterrent effect on the German planes but they didn’t seem to hit much’ (Polley 2003). It is the case that anti-aircraft artillery was primarily aimed at deterring bombers from specific areas and forcing them to fly higher and therefore bomb less accurately: it was relatively rare for a German aircraft to be destroyed solely by the 3.7 inch calibre anti-aircraft guns that made up the bulk of Britain’s anti-aircraft artillery in this period (Dobinson 2001) (Figure 7.2). Of all the components of the soundscape of air warfare it was gunnery and bombing, particularly in places that were bombed night after night for weeks or months at a time, which had the most corrosive effect on mental wellbeing: The racket of the anti-aircraft guns would be followed by an eerie echo around the night sky. Interspersed with this noise would be the occasional screaming whine of a descending bomb followed by its inevitable thundering explosion. You lived all the time in a state of tenseness, listening for the next sound. I don’t know how we all got up and went about our business the next day, but we did. (Hall 2003)

Moaning Minnie and the Doodlebugs  117

Figure 7.2  3.7 inch anti-aircraft gun at Nothe Fort, Weymouth (Source: Jim Linwood, Wikimedia Commons)

In response, some people mention being given earplugs to wear, and one recalled that ‘Dad had put a gramophone on the table in the shelter and played records to try to take the sound of both the planes and bombs falling away’ (Turner 2003).

V1 missiles The Germans then began a further blitzkrieg with thousands of unmanned flying-bombs – the Doodlebugs or V1s, followed later by the devastating V2 rockets. The sound of the throbbing engines of the flying-bombs cutting out followed by a terrifying thud and shudder, still echo in my head. (Murch 2004) In the last year of the war the German military unleashed its ‘Vergeltungswaffe’ or revenge weapons: the V1 and V2 missiles. The V1 was a cruise missile, a pilotless aircraft powered by a pulse-jet engine, and carrying a warhead of almost a ton (Figure 7.3). The V1s were launched from static

118  Gabriel Moshenska

Figure 7.3  V1 missile in the museum at Peenemünde (Source: Petr Brož, Wikimedia Commons)

ramps on the north coast of France, although later some were launched from specially adapted aircraft. With a basic autopilot based on a gyroscope, the V1 could fly a predetermined distance in a straight line. After a set distance the noisy, rattling, fire-belching ramjet engine would stop, and the controls would be set to a dive. The V1 would crash into the ground and explode (Ogley 1992). As contributions to the soundscape of the air war V1s were formidable: their engines were loud and distinctive, one story compares them to ‘an old motorbike struggling to climb uphill’ (Wright 2005), but it was the silence between the engine cutting out and the warhead’s detonation that became distinctive and is most widely remembered today: Buzz bombs had no ‘rules’ like aircraft. You did not feel like pointing your wooden Tommy gun at them; keeping your head down and praying that it would continue its flight past you was all that mattered. The dreadful moments when the sound stopped, the rocket tilted downward and the light at the end went out and the explosion followed were terrifying and never to be forgotten. (Brushwood 2004) I remember the sound of the Doodlebugs. It was very chilling when they fell silent and you knew there was about to be an explosion. (Avard 2005)

Moaning Minnie and the Doodlebugs  119 The deadly drone of a doodlebug – will it pass over? Will the engine stop? ‘Please God, don’t let the engine stop!’ (Smith 2004) The cutout of the engine served as a very short warning to take cover: ‘we were taught to get into the nearest ditch or behind any substantial wall, if out in the open lay down flat supporting your weight on your hands and toes, as if in a “press up position”’ (Collier 2005). The response to the V1 threat included redeploying a large number of anti-aircraft guns in the south of England, and the use of fast pursuit aircraft such as the Hawker Tempest and the first operational British jet fighter, the Gloster Meteor (Ogley 1992). Over a few months as the defences improved the number of V1s reaching targets in Greater London fell significantly, but in total around 9,500 were launched at England in the course of the campaign, with some 2,400 hitting London and causing more than 6,000 civilian deaths (Dobinson 2001).

Discussion The soundscape of air warfare in Second World War Britain was dramatic, dynamic and damaging. From the air raid sirens at the outbreak of the conflict to the missile strikes in its dying days, the history of the war could be traced in sounds, some of which have achieved legendary status within the popular perception and representations of its history. The wailing air raid siren and the buzzing V1 are well-known enough to be literary tropes and television clichés: the ‘myth of the Blitz’ is so firmly embedded in British popular culture through film and other media that the soundscapes of the air war feel familiar even to many who did not experience them first-hand (Calder 1992). The soundscape as defined by R. Murray Schafer is an individualized, experiential concept: two people in the same place at the same time might have similar but still distinctive sonic experiences, each the centre of their own soundscape. The sounds of air warfare in Second World War Britain contained many common elements that make connections possible over time and space: the cycle of warning siren/aircraft/anti-aircraft guns/bombs/allclear siren made up the common pattern of air raids for most of the war, while the V1s added their own signature at a later stage. From within the relative safety of the air raid shelter people added their own elements to the soundscape: radios, gramophones and songs to drown out the sounds of war or earplugs to muffle the sounds. Other sounds that are mentioned in the stories collected include the rattle of shrapnel from anti-aircraft shells falling on roofs and pavements; the rumble of heavy-rescue vehicles and fire engines; the thud of bullets fired by low-flying aircraft at ground targets; often experienced from the unusual acoustic environment of a metal or concrete box buried in the ground.

120  Gabriel Moshenska From the stories collected and extracted above it is clear that the soundscapes of war left indelible marks on the children of Second World War Britain, to the extent that sounds such as air raid sirens can still trigger flashbacks, feelings of nausea, goosebumps and other symptoms. The psychological impacts of prolonged exposure to bombardment are reasonably well-known but it is eye-opening to see them described in honest and painful terms by so many people. The endurance of this trauma across entire lifetimes and its impact on future generations should be a factor in any discussions of present and future conflict, and for the care of those who have escaped from or endured those conditions. As I write, small children are arriving by boat in the south of Europe, fleeing a conflict in Syria that has seen the large-scale use of aerial bombing against civilian populations. Alongside asylum and the necessities of survival they will need psychological support for what for many will be a lifelong trauma, easily triggered by the sounds of aircraft and explosions.

Acknowledgements WW2 People’s War is an online archive of wartime memories contributed by members of the public and gathered by the BBC. The archive can be found at .

References Allison, M. (2005) Wartime Memories. Anon. (2003) The Sound of a Lancaster Engine. Avard, J. (2005) Evacuation to Devon and Life in Chislehurst, Kent. BBC (2015) WW2 People’s War: The Original Idea. Beckett, M. (2003) Was it a V1 or a V2? Palmer’s Green and Southgate. Berntsen, D. (1996) Involuntary Autobiographical Memories. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 10: 435–54. Bridgman, L. (1989) Jane’s Fighting Aircraft of World War II. London: Studio Editions. Brooks, B. (2005) East Acton: ARP and Evacuation 1939. Brushwood, I. (2004) Wartime Childhood: In Downham and Devon. Buttress, C. (2005) My Childhood Memories. Calder, A. (1992) The Myth of the Blitz. London: Pimlico. ——. (1991) The People’s War: Britain 1939–1945. London: Pimlico Chudley, J. (2003) Childhood War in Ealing.

Moaning Minnie and the Doodlebugs  121 Clark, P. (2003) Childhood Memories of the Second World War: Durham. Cleaver, P. (2006) Childhood Memories of World War II. Cochrane, J. (2003) World War Two Childhood Memories: From Sidcup to Southampton. Collier, M. (2005) My Wartime Childhood. Dobinson, C. (2001) AA Command: Britain’s Anti-Aircraft Defences of the Second World War. London: Methuen. Elliott, V. F. (2003) Please Take me Home: Evacuation to Winchester. Etherington, J. (2004) A Wartime Childhood in North Kent – 1942 to 1945. Farrell, M. (2004) Mrs M. Farrell’s Evacuation Story. Francis, J. (2005) Childhood Memoirs Freud, A. and D. Burlingham. (1943) War and Children. New York: Medical War Books. Hall, J. (2003) North London during the Blitz. Hassall, A. (2005) Childhood Memories of War in London. Hinton, D. E., Pich, V., Chhean, D., and Pollack, M. H. (2006) Olfactory-Triggered Panic Attacks among Khmer Refugees. In J. Drobnick (ed.) The Smell Culture Reader, pp. 68–81. Oxford: Berg. Jackson, D. (2005) Playground Bombsites. Jappy, M. J. (2001) Danger UXB: The Remarkable Story of the Disposal of Unexploded Bombs during the Second World War. London: Channel 4 Books. Johns, D. (2004) Childhood Recollections: in London and Bletchley. McRickus, J. (2005) Vase or Vaze! Moshenska, G. (2008) A Hard Rain: Children’s Shrapnel Collections in the Second World War. Journal of Material Culture, 13(1): 107–25. —— (2010a) Gas Masks: Material Culture, Memory and the Senses. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 16(3): 609–28. —— (2010b) Government Gas Vans and School Gas Chambers: Preparedness and Paranoia in Britain, 1936–1941. Medicine, Conflict and Survival, 26(3): 193–204. —— (2014) Children in Ruins: Bombsites as Playgrounds in Second World War Britain. In B. Olsen and Þ. Pétursdóttir (eds) Ruin Memories: Materiality, Aesthetics and the Archaeology of the Recent Past, pp. 230–49. Abingdon: Routledge. —— (2015) Spaces for Children: School Gas Chambers and Air Raid Shelters in Second World War Britain. In H. Orange (ed.) Reanimating Industrial Spaces, pp 125–37. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

122  Gabriel Moshenska Murch, J. (2004) My War Years: Evacuation from Sutton to Wales. Noakes, L. (2009) The BBC ‘People’s War’ Website. In M. Keren and H. R. Herwig (eds) War Memory and Popular Culture: Essays on Modes of Remembrance and Commemoration, pp. 135–49. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. O’Brien, T. (1955) Civil Defence. London: HMSO. Ogley, B. (1992) Doodlebugs and Rockets: The Battle of the Flying Bombs. Westerham: Froglets. Overy, R. J. (1980) The Air War 1939–1945. New York: Stein & Day. Palmer, M. (2004) The War in the West: A Child’s Perspective. Polley, A. (2003) The Time of my Life: WW2 Childhood Memories. Robins, J. (2003) Bombs and Jet Plane: Childhood Memories in Gloucester. Rodaway, P. (2002) Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense and Place. London: Routledge. Rountree, G. (2004) In Peace and War: A Govan Childhood. Schafer, R. M. (1993) The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions/Bear & Co. Smith, M. (2004) Memories  .  .  .  History. Stevens, A. (2003) Memories of a Very Young Lad: in Farnham. Turner, B., and Rennell, T. (1995) When Daddy Came Home: How Family Life Changed Forever in 1945. London: Vintage. Turner, J. (2003) Childhood Wartime Memories: in Luton. Vaudin, P. (2003) Friend or Foe? Warren, C-A. (2003) Happy Hampshire Childhood. Werner, E. E. (2000) Through the Eyes of Innocents: Children Witness World War II. Oxford: Westview. Whitnell, M. (2005) Childhood in Wartime Fishponds, Bristol. Wright, R. (2005) Evacuation and Doodlebugs.

8 The Cave Mouth Listening to sound and voice in Okinawan war memory Rupert Cox and Angus Carlyle

In 2010, while working as head of the Psychosomatic Internal
Medicine Department at
Kyodo
Hospital in Okinawa, Japan, Dr Ryoji Aritsuka was interested to come across a number of cases of insomnia among his elderly patients. Further investigations revealed symptoms of late onset post-­traumatic stress disorder, shared among this group of his patients because they were all survivors of the Battle of Okinawa in 1945 (Chunichi Shimbun 2014). Surprisingly, the psychological trauma of the Okinawan survivors of this conflict had not been officially established nor systematically treated in the more than sixty years since the end of the Second World War. This situation led to Dr Aritsuka’s collaboration in 2012, with specialist Ms Fujiko Toyama, formerly of the Okinawa Prefectural College of Nursing, in a study of 401 randomly selected survivors of 75 years or older from eight areas including
Itoman, Yomitan and Zamami which are in the vicinity of the present-day American military bases on Okinawa (Ryukyu Shimpo 2013). Their study1 showed that 40 per cent of Okinawan survivors living today are likely to meet the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Two aspects of their report stand out, one which is well established in studies of PTSD, the other which is distinctive and possibly particular to the situation in Okinawa. The first aspect was the intergenerational transmission of symptoms of this disorder to family members in forms of schizophrenia, depression and insomnia. The second aspect and distinctive element of their condition in Okinawa, is its recurrent aggravation by the noise of overflying military aircraft operating from the American bases. Dr Aritsuka summarized the issue as follows: A lack of mental health care under the U.S. occupation after the war and the base issues, including noise caused by the military aircraft, contribute to the disorder . . . This rubs salt into the mental wounds, making it difficult for them to recover. (Ryukyu Shimpo 2013) In total some 60 per cent of the survivors in the group studied by Aritsuka’s team reported the cause for the flashbacks of the battle as ‘when I look at or hear noise pollution from U.S. bases or military planes’ (Kimura 2013).

124  Rupert Cox and Angus Carlyle This finding resonates with those of an earlier acoustic survey and epidemiological study (Hiramatsu et al. 1997) of the effects of aircraft noise on the health of residents living in the vicinity of the United States Air Force (USAF) base of Kadena on Okinawa, which is the starting point for the collaboration and exhibited artwork that this chapter will describe. The leader of that study and our collaborator, Kozo Hiramatsu, is an acoustic scientist who has developed a particular understanding of the ways that military aircraft sounds animate the geographical features of the post-war environment of the military bases and in doing so may reactivate traumatic experiences for many survivors of the Battle of Okinawa who still live in these areas. It is the experience of one of those survivors, Yogi-san, who Hiramatsu came to know through his research in the 1990s, that is the subject of the extended interview at the core of our collective sound-art work. Since the end of the war, Yogi-san has lived by the boundary fence and at the end of the runway of the Kadena air base, in a small community in the Chatan district known as Sunabe that ends in a coral lagoon (Ino) at the edge of the Pacific Ocean.2 His experiences of a life lived in the acoustic shadows of US military aircraft were part of the study that Hiramatsu led, which concluded that: Results of the analysis of the responses in terms of the noise exposure suggest that the exposed residents suffer psychosomatic effects, especially perceived psychological disorders, due to the noise exposure to military aircraft, and that such responses increase with the level of noise exposure. (Hiramatsu et al. 1997: 452) However, such results did not reveal the less voluminous but affective qualities of features of the environment of Sunabe that he experienced during wartime as a child – notably the cave where he hid beneath Sunabe from the invading bombardment of the American forces and which he left in order to escape to the northern Yanbaru area of Okinawa. These kinds of experiences that remain as sounds, which have the capacity to call up traumatic pasts because of their relationship to the sounds of overflying aircraft, were revealed by Hiramatsu in his research as he began to interview survivors, using them in the case of one woman survivor to write her life-history (Hiramatsu 2001). This work anticipated some of the findings of Aritsuka’s study and led to the collaboration presented here which uses art-making and a gallery installation to explore how the particular qualities of military aircraft sound in this environment may achieve the kinds of effects for survivors that Hiramatsu and Aritsuka have reported. The US military bases in Okinawa were built in the immediate aftermath of the battle in 1945, with the US air force base of Kadena being constructed on the remains of a Japanese airfield from which Kamikaze aircraft operations had been conducted against the invading US forces. The community of

The Cave Mouth: Okinawan war memory  125 Sunabe was located on the coastline of what would become the beachhead for the American forces and a campaign that the Okinawan prefectural government calculates as resulting in the deaths of 120,000 of the 450,000 or so residents (Kimura 2013). The bases account for more than 70 per cent of all the US forces stationed in Japan. Since the end of the war and the reversion of the island to Japanese rule in 1972, they have been a focal point for questions, debates and protests about the economic and political relationships of Okinawa to mainland Japan and to US interests in geo-political security in the region. Surveys such as those led by Hiramatsu about the effects of the bases on the health and welfare of Okinawan residents living nearby and among them especially those who experienced the war, are therefore loaded with political as well as personal significance. For the survey team in the 1990s, measuring the occurrences of military aircraft sound in the lived spaces around the edge of Kadena base meant deploying sound-level meters and producing noise maps to show the spatialization of sound in the environment (Cox 2011). These devices and the WECPNL index (Weighted Equivalent Continuous Perceived Noise Level), used to calculate the effects of noise as a yearly average, relied on a ‘doseresponse’ formula where it might have been supposed that there would be a direct, graduated relationship between the scale scores of health effects and noise exposure. However, this was not the case and it became clear that at lower volume levels there was no steady correlation between noise exposure and health effects and that the response increased as the ‘dose’ (aircraft volume) became higher (Hiramatsu et al. 1997: 456). What these survey results pointed towards was the importance of recognizing the dramatic, sudden and steep rise in volume levels created by overflying fighter jets which ruptured the routines of everyday life. These sounds arrived without warning because of the speed of the jets and because the hollow, sucking roar of the jet engines were initially indistinguishable from the sounds of the waves drawing up on the edge of Sunabe’s lagoon. While landscape topography was missing from the variables that were used by the survey to explain the responses to aircraft sound, those that were – ‘marital condition, type of house, sex, length of residence, age and WECPNL’ (Hiramatsu et al. 1997: 457) revealed gender to be an important indicator of a tendency towards neurosis. In part this can be explained by women’s domestic roles, making them much more susceptible to the shock effects of the aircraft overflying their homes, but other studies, including Dr Aritsuka’s, show the importance of family war experiences. In his study one woman survivor, now in her eighties and living in the vicinity of US Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, not far from Kadena, reported that her flashbacks had increased since US Osprey transport aircraft were deployed there. She stated in her interview that ‘When I see the planes flying at low altitude, I am screaming in my mind, “Go home, go home”’ (Kimura 2013). Another woman, Hiroko Henzan, 9 years old at the time

126  Rupert Cox and Angus Carlyle of the battle of Okinawa and now living on Iejima Island, began suffering from insomnia and nightmares of being attacked by US airplanes some ten years ago. She recalled the events of 17 April 1945 when US troops landed on Iejima and she and her sister, whom she was carrying away from the fighting, were shot. At the end of six days of fighting around 1,500 islanders had died and Henzan was among those forcibly evacuated to another island. For Henzan these experiences were relived as flashbacks, triggered by the sounds of the Osprey aircraft that currently use Iejima Island for exercises (Kimura 2013). These interviews with women survivors, which show that there are links between family war experiences and symptoms of PTSD brought on by the appearance of US military aircraft have been examined by Kirsten Schultz (2002) for the way that they may lead to later-life political activism against the US bases. Here also, US military aircraft sounds feature prominently as an environmental factor that can bring on traumatic experiences for survivors and be a cause of stress for their children. It is not only the trauma of events during the battle which are identified in these accounts but the militarization of the spaces where homes and communities had once stood and subsequently from which military aircraft have flown. Here is one woman recounting her experiences: Then the battle ended, the bombs and offshore shelling ended, and someone told us all to go home. Everybody thought we were saved. . . . We walked all day to where our home had been. It looked like it was snow sparkling in the moonlight where our house had once been. The next morning, we saw that it was actually crushed coral, used to begin the construction of an air base. Where our house had been, there were now fighter planes and an airbase. It wasn’t just my family that had walked back from the camp, everyone from our community had walked back together. What had once been a very verdant green was now white and none of us could go back to our homes. We all had to go somewhere else. (Schultz 2002: 274) What emerge from these survivor accounts and the studies behind them, about the way that military aircraft sound can be a trigger for symptoms of war trauma and activism, are fundamental questions in the study of PTSD. These questions have to do with how PTSD may be approached as a universal or as a culturally specific condition and of its etiology as a physiological or psychological disorder (Jones and Wessely 2005). Anthropology has played a role in investigating these questions, beginning with the First World War work of Cambridge psychiatrist Charles Myers, whose reports about treating soldiers in the ‘forward psychiatry’ units on the Western Front did much to bring the term ‘shell-shock’ into the public domain. Myers’s anthropological background was as a member of the Cambridge University expedition to the Torres Straits islands in

The Cave Mouth: Okinawan war memory  127 1898 where he had studied hearing perception and music of the islanders as evidence of a different, less evolved mentality (Herle and Rouse 1998). Another expedition member, the psychiatrist W. H. Rivers, who was Myers’s senior colleague at Cambridge, hypothesized from their sensory experiments on the Torres Straits islanders that there were two levels of neurological functioning. In simple terms, one was visual and concrete and called ‘the protopathic’, while the other was verbal and abstract and called the ‘epicratic’. It was the evolutionary lower order of functioning, the regressive protopathic level, that Rivers turned to in explaining the symptoms of shell-shock as a form of maladaptation, brought on by the soldiers’ conflict between self-preservation and duty (Jones and Wessely 2005: 19). Myers hypothesized similarly that the functional symptoms of shell-shock were ‘the unconscious expressions of a repressed traumatic neurosis’ (but not infantile sexuality as Freud argued) (ibid.). To treat this form of repression and give the patient some control over these traumatic events, Rivers and Myers both turned to hypnosis, with Rivers also engaging in dream interpretation and psychoanalysis. This psychological understanding and treatment of the symptoms of shell-shock by Myers and Rivers was at odds with the initial position of the neurologist Frederick Mott who worked away from the front line at the Maudsley hospital, the specialist treatment and research centre for shellshock in London. Until Mott had direct contact with the returning soldiers, he theorized from a physiological perspective that shell-shock was caused by the immediacy of an explosion, a form of commotio cerebri, resulting in compression and decompression of the brain (Jones and Wessely 2005: 19). Mott’s initial categorization of shell-shock was in line with a history of theorizing about the causes of war trauma as ‘cerebro-spinal shock’ and ‘wind contusions’ and anecdotal evidence from the front (ibid. 2). One such anecdotal story, categorized by the term commotionné rather than ‘trauma’ was that of Pierre, an infantry man in 1915, who developed auditory hypnogogic (pre-sleep) hallucinations of a drum rumbling in his right ear after being buried by an explosion and hearing what sounded like the rumble of drums as charging Germans overran his position (Thomas 2009: 58). Such physical explanations were also a forceful presence in the British cultural imagination through films such as The Trembling Hour (1919) that showed a shell-shocked veteran’s illogical fury towards a friend brought on by the crashing of a loud thunderstorm (Micale and Lerner 2001: 295) The issue of causation of shell-shock was not resolved during the war or afterwards when it was sidestepped for political reasons by the commission formed to investigate the phenomenon. Ultimately they decided that, while the existence of the condition could not be denied, its abuse by overuse meant that it could not be admitted either (Jones and Wessely 2005: 46). This meant that later designations of the condition, such as ‘blast concussion’, used during the Second World War, were designed deliberately to avoid the association with, and potential overuse of, the term ‘shell-shock’.

128  Rupert Cox and Angus Carlyle The Second World War brought a recognition of the potential neurosisinducing effects of aerial bombing as it was being deployed in cities like London during the Blitz as a form of psychological warfare as well as an instrument of physical destruction (Lewis 1942; Somasundaram 1996: 1465). The reports of the psychological effects of the German bombing of London by Aubrey Lewis, director of the Maudsley Hospital at the time, were significant in showing the importance of what has subsequently become known as ‘social suffering’ (Kienzler 2008) with the meaning of aerial bombing being worked out collectively among communities as well as experienced individually. This shift in emphasis is borne out in research since Lewis’s studies which show the importance of understanding how collective trauma and social meaning are part of the condition of PTSD (Somasundaram 1996: 1465). Anthropological studies have been a crucial element in this understanding by providing situated detail of the social complexities at play in the construction of meaning of the impact of violence on individuals and communities and have led to a critique of PTSD as a Western clinical model of war trauma. This critique argues that the characterization of PTSD as a disorder universally typified by the ‘re-experiencing of an extremely traumatic event accompanied by symptoms of increased arousal and by avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma’ (American Psychiatric Association 2000: 429; Kienzler 2008: 219) does not take into account how suffering is a social experience in that it is first, an interpersonal engagement with pain and hardship in social relationships; second, a societal construction that serves as a cultural model and moral guide of and for experience; and third, a professional discourse that organises forms of suffering as bureaucratic categories and objects of technical intervention. (Kleinman, 1995; Kienzler 2008: 225) Describing this social experience then becomes a matter of biography and the recounting of experiences in words rather than through numbers and charts. This has been part of the approach that we have taken in creating our collaborative artwork that draws directly on an extensive interview that Hiramatsu conducted with Yogi-san in the cave beneath Sunabe, where he had hid together with his family and many members of the community from the American bombardment that preceded the invasion. At the same time we have been concerned to recognize the importance of the measurements and spatialization of contemporary aircraft sound in acoustic surveys and noise maps because they pointed towards the importance of sound in the environment and the forms of listening that are at stake for those with traumatic war experiences like Yogi-san. The link we are making between particular sounds and traumatic memories of violence therefore draws on the acoustic and psychological sciences’ use of scales, graphs and numbers as well as on the social construction of

The Cave Mouth: Okinawan war memory  129 meaning evidenced through biography. It also pays attention to the sense of place that comes from listening to particular sounds of the environment. Such sounds may be embedded in cultural memory and lead to the transmission of trauma from one generation to the next. This is the case in the situation of Salvadoran families in a rural depopulated area, whose experiences of the political violence and terror carried out by the death squads in El Salvador’s civil war of 1980–92, were investigated by the anthropologist Julia Dickson-Gomez between 1995 and 1997 (Dickson-Gomez 2002). This investigation was to understand symptoms of the condition that is known locally and elsewhere in Latin America as nervios, meaning a disturbance or upset in ‘matters of mind, body and spirit’ (Jenkins 1991; Dickson-Gomez 2002: 426). Dickson-Gomez found that the sounds of barking dogs at night were a reminder of the terror families felt when statesanctioned death squads had arrived at neighbours’ homes to take people way and kill them and as such was a way in which the memory of these events was passed on between the generations. This kind of nervous listening, that has to do with situations of darkness and collective confinement, where the senses are deprived and then overloaded, is reminiscent of descriptions of the London Blitz where Steven Connor has identified a ‘bifurcation of visuality and hearing’ where subjected listeners are forced to ‘rely on hearing to give them information about the incoming bombs . . . and have to learn new skills of orientating themselves in this deadly new auditory field’ (Connor 1997: 210; Somasundaram 1996: 1470; see also Moshenska, this volume). In order to understand the culturally inflected meanings of these kinds of visual and auditory sensorialities in the Japanese context there is an interesting term, bukimi, meaning ‘weird, ghastly or unearthly’, which has been used to describe the sense of fearful anticipation before the Hiroshima and Nagsaki bombings. As Paul K Saint-Amour has it, drawing on critiques of Freudian analytic theory, this feeling of an uncanny anticipation came not from the singularity of the event of the atomic bombings but is one ‘of repetition – the repetition, say, that inheres in awaiting an expected catastrophe others have experienced’ (Saint-Amour 2000: 60). That is to say that ‘the traumatic event is felt belatedly, after a period of latency, through symptoms that often include the return of repressed memories’ (ibid. 62). This may be an interesting way of thinking about the cultural nuances of the effects of aircraft sound for survivors like Yogi-san, where it is the repeatedly anticipated arrival and weird sense of dread of the sounds of overflying jets that leads to the symptoms of PTSD such as insomnia described by Aritsuka. However, while bukimi may help in establishing a broader, Japanese context for the experiences of survivors like Yogi-san living in the audible domain of the present-day bases, he himself does not use the term in the verbal account we draw on in our artwork. His dialogue with Hiramatsu is an expression of their relationship which was formed through the acoustic science survey, and like many other survivors, he relies on and uses the scientific authority of the terms and numbers of acoustic science to

130  Rupert Cox and Angus Carlyle

Figure 8.1  Ino Lagoon at the edge of Kadena USAF base ( Authors)

discuss these experiences, and in a series of ongoing legal disputes with the Japanese government to claim compensation for the suffering caused by aircraft noise. Yogi-san’s words are also an expression of an auditory sense of place because they are spoken in the space of the cave he used as a refuge during the American invasion and because in his dialogue with Hiramatsu he is giving voice to the experiences of living with the sounds of overflying military jets and the way they make the post-war changes in the material geography of the Sunabe community audible (Figure 8.1). These material changes, which in Sunabe have meant the appropriation and purchase of community land for the base itself as well as for off-base housing, and the use of a portion of its lagoon for the building of visual approach indicator lights for incoming aircraft, are part of island-wide infrastructural changes in its post-war geography, dictated by the political and economic importance of the US military bases. For Gerald Figal, writing about the link between the military bases and the post-war development of island tourism, these kinds of changes in local topography are unnoticed by most visitors for whom the meaning of Okinawa oscillates between the ‘tragic war history’, signified by battlefield tourism and peace museums, and the ‘tropical paradise’, signified by the resort hotels built along most of Okinawa’s public beach spaces (Figal 2012: 18). This latter signification of tropical nangoku, literally, ‘south country’ Okinawa relies on atmospheric tropes of palm trees, hibiscus plants, white sandy beaches, blue ocean and coral lagoons.

The Cave Mouth: Okinawan war memory  131 However, this image obscures a long series of protests by Okinawan civil movements that show how certain of these features of the environment, such as coral, have become materials of memory or what Pierre Nora (1989) in referring to the way that certain objects may act to crystallize collective remembrances has called lieux de memoire (Nora 1989). Coral, which in the Sunabe lagoon has mostly died because it was crushed by American military vehicles during the invasion or subsequently was acidified by runoffs of chemical pollutants from the Kadena base, has elsewhere been a focal point for intense debate about the presence of the US bases and the Okinawan economy. A rare success story was the case of the Shiraho coral reef on Ishigaki island, where a planned airport was halted by the intervention of the then governor Masahide Ota in 1991, following a concerted residents’ movement and criticisms from scientists and the Japanese environmental agency.3 Elsewhere, such as at Henoko, next to the city of Nago, where there has been a series of protests since 1997 about the impact on the coral reef and its population of sea turtles and dugong, there has yet to be any resolution to the question of whether a planned relocation of troops and extension of the existing base will be inside, outside or on top of the existing reef (Hook and Siddle 2003: 124). The sentiments stirred up by these protests have to do in part with the way that coral were part of the nutritionally and symbolically important food webs that the lagoon represented for Okinawan communities. It was Ino – the space between the land and the sea where the vitality of the community was located. Considerations of how coral can be regarded as an element of organic memory, expressing an ecological idea of relations between the land and the sea for communities like Sunabe, brings us to the most vital and troubled feature of the Okinawan environment for war survivors, like Yogi-san. These are the limestone caves or gama which are a major feature of the Okinawan landscape and were sites of fierce fighting and significant atrocities committed by Japanese troops during the Battle of Okinawa. Best known among these are the Himeyuri-no-tō caves where Okinawan student nurses or Hineyuri were forcibly enlisted to work in field hospitals for the Japanese military. Many died or were killed in these caves and as in other sites where many Okinawan bodies were found after the battle and their bones collected and buried in mass ossuaries or ireitō, meaning literally a ‘spirit consolation tower’, there is a physical sense in which their bodies have become part of the soil (Figal 2012: 41). These ossuaries, which can act as memorials and in the case of the Himeyuri-no-tō caves also a museum, can be troubled spaces not only because of what took place within them but because they have to negotiate the different claims made upon them by Japanese nationalist narratives and Okinawan counter-narratives of the war. In the case of certain caves like Chibi chiri cave in Yomitan Village, close by Kadena air base where there were compulsory group suicides (shūdan jiketsu) of eighty-two civilians during the American landing, there has been considerable controversy over the attempt by the Japanese Education

132  Rupert Cox and Angus Carlyle Ministry in 2007 to try and erase all mention in school education textbooks of Japanese military involvement in ordering these actions. The raw physicality and continued immediacy of these events for some Okinawans was brought home to us during our own visit to the life-size diorama depicting a recreation of one of these caves inside the Okinawa Peace Museum in Mabuni, in 2010. The museum guide’s explanation of the exhibit and the actions of the Japanese soldiers in these caves was repeatedly punctuated by his action of stabbing an imaginary person with a bayonet. This unruly aspect of the caves, in resisting attempts to contain the memories they may give expression to, is dramatically articulated in the fiction of the Okinawan writer Medoruma Shun. Born after the war, his stories like Fūon ‘Sound of the Wind’ (1985) and Mabuigumi ‘Spirit Recalling’ (1998) are about the war’s aftermath and the effects on those who survived it (Bhowmik 2010: 210). They incorporate what the critic Suzuki Tomoyuki calls ‘ill will’ (akui), and a ‘spirit of contrariness’ against conventional narratives because they do not make the Okinawans simply victims of the war but show them as individuals who continuously and actively negotiate the tensions between public and private memory (Bhowmik 2010: 211). In the fantastical story Fūon, the protagonist Tokushō who has traumatic memories of abandoning a friend in the cave where they were hiding during the battle must confront him in the form of a phantom soldier and deal with his swollen leg that mysteriously contains limewater from the caves with magical properties (ibid. 212). The other-worldliness and moral dilemmas of Medoruma’s war-traumatized protagonists offer a glimpse into the experiences of those like Yogi-san, for whom the sounds of military aircraft are not easily signified as icons of victimhood and suffering nor simply translated into universal terms of acoustic science or the psychology of PTSD (Figure 8.2). What we have attempted in this collaborative piece, through a process of art-making and installation design, is to situate the words of Yogi-san within the sonic environment that makes them evocative and meaningful. The work, titled The Cave Mouth and the Giant Voice was originally commissioned by Esther Teichmann and Chris Stewart for the 2015 Staging Disorder exhibition which sought, according to the curatorial thematic articulated in the catalogue, to explore ‘the contemporary representation of the real in relation to photography, architecture and modern conflict’. This exploration was conducted primarily through seven bodies of photographic work from the first decade of this millennium. Six of the participating photographers found detail in the representation of a variety of fabricated training environments – redolent of film or theatre sets and hence congruent with the eponymous notion of staging – that had been designed to immerse Israeli, US or NATO troops, private military contractors or the British police in spatial approximations of anticipated conflicts. The seventh photographer, Richard Mosse, shifted the lens somewhat in his contribution, capturing constructions deployed to rehearse emergency scenarios involving

The Cave Mouth: Okinawan war memory  133

Figure 8.2  Yogi-san in the gama (limestone cave) beneath Sunabe ( Authors)

passenger jets. The photographic projects in Staging Disorder were impelled into a conversation with four new artworks that drew their impetus from sound arts practices: Peter Cusack’s Sounds from Dangerous Places, Cathy Lane’s multichannel composition Preparations for an Imaginary Conflict, David Toop’s textual reminiscence Sonic Boom and our collaboration The Cave Mouth and the Giant Voice. The Cave Mouth could be approached as a film work. Indeed it has been screened in a stereo version at conferences in 2015 of the Association for Social Anthropology (Symbiotic Anthropologies) and at Cambridge University (Sound Studies: Art, Experience Politics). Although looped to repeat during the exhibition opening hours, Cave Mouth did possess a discernible length, the end of its ten minutes and twenty seconds advertised by the glow of the projector diminishing and the amplified sound receding. The work observed the filmic conventions that anticipate a palpable duration, it demands a recognizable screen towards which an audience can orientate and expect a soundtrack to be continuous and within the thresholds of audibility. Additionally, the words that were projected on screen and the sounds that were amplified largely conformed to structural expectations of a particular narrative momentum that would move outwards from an establishing introduction towards an emotional and intellectual culmination. Although inside a more experimental register, the opening sequences

134  Rupert Cox and Angus Carlyle of Cave Mouth could plausibly be interpreted as classic ‘scene-setting’: after the appearance of the title, the white onscreen text spelling out the definition of Ino as ‘. . . Okinawan language // meaning the space between the land and the sea // a lagoon’ paralleled by speakers relaying the hollow sucking roar that then resolves itself into lapping, splashing, hissing waves. While such a filmic interpretation of Cave Mouth is certainly accessible we are convinced the work was most optimally constituted in the installation for which it was originally designed, a conviction that depends on a commitment to the particularities of the interview with Yogi-san. In Staging Disorder, our collaborative work was installed in the gallery within a five-metre-long rectangular volume, bound on its sides by temporary stud-walls, one of which was interrupted by an open entranceway, beneath a ceiling of poured concrete that simultaneously functioned as the base of a busy walkway. On the external wall that contained the entrance, our 300-word interpretation text offered visitors a compressed historical context for the Battle of Okinawa, located Yogi-san’s testimony within that context, and announced an artwork constituted by ‘projected subtitles and by a composition of environmental sounds’. That same exterior wall housed a container for the exhibition catalogues in which was printed our longer introduction to the work and a full transcription of the interview with Yogi-san. In the interior of the installation structure six loudspeakers were arranged in an adaptation of the conventional ‘surround sound’ configuration and a projector beamed the moving image down the room’s long axis above the heads of an audience who offered us various responses during Staging Disorder’s month-long run: among these, the review that ‘a full experience of it certainly requires time, a proper immersion into the acoustic flux’ (Gabriel 2015) and from others, unsolicited, came ‘heavy’, ‘disturbing’, ‘harsh’, ‘dense’, ‘delicate’, ‘meditative’, ‘weird’, ‘upsetting’ and ‘hypnotic’. The intention behind the installation had been to incarnate our own form of staging, one that resonated with the corporeal place invoked in Yogi-san’s narrative. The ‘gloomy dense space’ attributed to our work was created less as an approximation of a ‘black cube’ auditorium4 and more as an analogue of the cave beneath Sunabe where Yogi-san had hidden during 1945 and where he took us in 2013 to relate his story. He bent over first to switch on industrial lights which sent our shadows racing around the sharp surfaces, revealing the stalactites and stalagmites, making visible what had previously been audible as gritty and crunchy responses to our footsteps: strands of dead coral and fragments of rock, the rain of the last night still percolating through. In the installation, with the projection only comprising intermittent white text formatted against a black background, with the freshly painted black floor and black walls and with black scrim covering the lights on the amplifier and rear speakers, the interior did seem to present something of a subterranean atmosphere.

The Cave Mouth: Okinawan war memory  135 With visual cues muted in the subdued light and the sparse projected text constructed from Yogi-san’s story and its context unfolding at a deliberate graphic rhythm, the auditory dimension of the work found its emphasis. We had been careful to calibrate the audio in the installation to an identifiably human scale, ensuring that acoustic events that might be recognized as part of the routines of everyday Okinawan life were played back from speakers both from a position akin to where the recorded sources would have been located and at a volume level that matched something like its quotidian index. To illustrate this process of calibration by reference to the sequence that follows the establishing introduction described above, the wet footfalls came from speakers located at floor level, the warning cries of a wading bird emerged from a speaker in the centre of the room and the aircraft overflight delivered its strongest energy from speakers situated behind the audience at ear height. By the same token, the speakers’ output of nasal breathing, of swishing lower body motor actions and their slithering results, muttering and faint voices all matched a similar presence to what we had heard when making the original field recordings, establishing a kind of baseline against which the affective impact of the sudden rupturing onset of the overflight could be measured by the audience. In an orthodox stereo film playback scenario a lot of this detail of direction and scale tends to disappear. The third movement of the soundfilm that animates our installation – after first the scene-setting of the waves and hollow roar and then secondly the subsequent walk with the fishermen across the Ino coral lagoon that finishes with an overflying military cargo plane gaining height after leaving Kadena airbase – locates the listener in a vicarious version of the Sunabe cave. Each of the two earlier outdoor sequences of the waves and the lagoon could be said to possess a relatively circumscribed acoustic horizon5 within which the assembled elements of recorded material are relatively decipherable in terms of their original source. In the third sequence, once the listener is metaphorically drawn into the cave, that clarity dissipates and apart from the perceptible familiarity of dripping liquids on solid surfaces, what is heard takes on a sonority of low shudders and drones, frayed higher frequencies and fragments of voices that, with the audience straining to concentrate, might at one point exude the colour of something conversational and later seem to take on the character of something broadcast through a loudspeaker. The recording used as the basis of this final sequence of Cave Mouth was made in the lower part of the gama after Hiramatsu, Rupert and Yogi-san had headed up the metal stairs to the street level. Apart from the dripping of water in close proximity to the microphone, the other sounds that made themselves heard at this point in the installation’s temporality are ones that have been triggered by a release of mechanical energy at some physical remoteness from the recorder, beginning their sonic journeys in the streets of Sunabe or over the perimeter security fence within the US base itself. One explanation for the muffled ambiguity of some of these sounds is the

136  Rupert Cox and Angus Carlyle distance they have travelled to reach the microphone down in the cave. Another explanation derives from the fact that it was not only the cave that was an acoustically porous environment: with overall sound levels more reduced in this part of the installation’s loop, the room with its thin stud walls and uninsulated entrance-way exhibited its own porosity, confusing the audience as to whether this grinding scrape came from a speaker or whether those opaque thuds came from actual heavy feet weighing down on the walkway above.6 Synchronized with the metaphorical duck of the head into the Sunabe gama, the focus of the onscreen text shifted from more contextual captions to subtitles that betray their origins in utterances from a live exchange. As such, from the more enigmatic, denser soundworld that accompanies the descent into the cave there emerges a sonic shadowing of the difficulties of history, of its persistence and complexity. This complexity is something that Brandon LaBelle hears as inherent in underground spatiality where sound . . . expands according to the acoustical dynamics of a given space, can be heard as a proliferating multiplication – a splintering of the vector of sound into multiple events, turning a single sound into a mise-en-scène of audible figures. It disorients the origin, supplanting the sound source with an array of projections and propagations. It mirrors back while also fragmenting any possibility of return. (LaBelle 2010: 41) This figure of the echo, of reverberation, of the sonic effect where a ‘sound continues after the cessation of its emission’ through the sound signal reflecting off the various surfaces it encounters on its propagation path (Augoyard and Torgue 2005: 111) might be emblematic of the circumstances we have been describing in Okinawa. Rather than reverberation ‘“naturally” producing in us a hushed awe (despite our being relatively inured and desensitised to sonic effects)’ (Doyle 2005: 42), that is attributed to modern public buildings, the recordings from within the textures of the hollowed limestone, partially open as they are to the external environment and relayed in the third sequence of the Cave Mouth installation, function differently. The reverberation transmitted in our Cave Mouth composition is closer to what Don Ihde suggests: ‘with the experience of echo, auditory space is opened up. With echo the sense of distance as well as surface is present. And again surface significations anticipate the hearing of interiors. Neither, in the phenomenon of echo, is the lurking temporality of sound far away. The space of sound is “in” its timefulness’ (Ihde 2007: 69). The reverberation in the Sunabe gama suggests a persistence of auditory effects that possesses some symmetry with the proposition that elements of the contemporary Okinawan soundscape provoke traumatic flashbacks to embedded experiences of conflict. The only instance of Yogi-san’s recorded speech that is available to the audiences’ ears in The Cave Mouth and the Giant Voice is not announced

The Cave Mouth: Okinawan war memory  137 as such. Its rendition, caught reverberating down the shaft of the stairs into the rough chamber with its stalagmites and stalactites, is too opaque to make accessible the ‘timbres, tones, inflections, accents, turns of phrase and all those other qualities that tell so much about age, background and in some cases the physical and emotional state of the speaker’ (Lane 2008: 8). The most that might be decoded is that the vocalizations have, as suggested earlier, a ‘conversational’ hue. Nevertheless, in the installation, with his words steadily unfolding on screen and printed in the catalogue, Yogi-san’s testimony, ‘the voice of the other, unlike the face of the other, is invisible and cannot be seen. It has not one but many surfaces, and it reverberates with the echoes of all the other voices past and present, heard and unheard’ (Lipari 2014: 193). This figure of echo as a sonic affect of place and of the coporeal remembering of that place in the listening experiences of individuals like Yogi-san is what this art-installation aimed to give expression to. As such, it is a form of ethnography by design, a composed documentary that takes understandings of PTSD out of the arena of clinical diagnostic categories and through a combination of words, the withholding of illustrative images and immersion in environmental sounds, locates the intensities of the experiences that are at stake in the carefully constructed detail of the installation itself. This is an approach to investigating the relationship between conflict and the senses

Figures 8.3, 8.4, 8.5  (continued)

(continued)

Figures 8.3, 8.4, 8.5  Examples of text used in the film The Cave Mouth and the Giant Voice (R. Cox and A. Carlyle, 2015;  R. Cox and A. Carlyle)

The Cave Mouth: Okinawan war memory  139 that takes seriously the idea that media can be deployed and calibrated to express the different ratios and agencies of the senses that are particular to the condition of PTSD in places like Okinawa (Figures 8.3, 8.4, 8.5).

Notes 1 The study used the widely recognized ‘Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R) as a measure of trauma and indicator of PTSD. The concept of PTSD was not introduced formally into the Japanese mental health field until the 1990s (Moriyama 1990 in Goto and Wilson 2003: 196). 2 Yogi-san is the subject of an article by Cox (2010). 3 Lawyers involved in supporting the Shiraho struggle have gone on to act on behalf of the Kadena residents in a series of legal actions against the US aircraft noise. 4 ‘Internationally the black cube is becoming more common – a space that is darkened for projection and acoustically damped for sound.’ Kelly 2011: 17. 5 For Barry Blesser and Ruth Slater’s conceptualization of an acoustic horizon see their Spaces Speak (2007: 22–34 and 177). 6 The question of whether sounds should always be traced to identifiable sources is an acute one within sound arts practices. A useful discussion of some of the issues thought to be at stake can be found in Kim-Cohen 2009: 175–209.

References Augoyard, J., and Torgue, H. (2005) Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Bhowmik, D. (2010) Fractious Memories in Medoruma Shun’s Tales of War. In D. Stahl and M. Williams (eds) Representing and Responding to Trauma in Postwar Literature and Film, pp. 203–29. Brill Japanese Studies Library. Leiden: Brill. Blesser, B., and Slater, R. (2007) Spaces Speak: Are you Listening? Experiencing Aural Architecture. London: MIT Press. Chunichi Shimbun (2014) Editorial: Japan Screams of Fukushima Must Not Be Ignored like Those of Okinawa. (Tr. K. Knight.) 20 Mar. Connor, S. (1997) The Modern Auditory. In R. Porter (ed.) Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, pp. 203–23. London: Routledge. Cox, R. (2012) Military Aircraft Noise and the Politics of Spatial Affect in Okinawa. In C. Stevens and J. Hankins (eds) Sound, Space and Sociality in Modern Japan, pp. 57–71. London and New York: Routledge. —— (2010) The Sound of Freedom: US Military Aircraft Noise in Okinawa. Anthropology News (American Anthropology Association) (Dec.): 13–14. —— and Hiramatsu, K. (2011) Sounding Out Indigenous Identities in Okinawa Japan. In J. Hendry and L. Fitznor (eds) Anthropologists, Indigenous Scholars and the Research Endeavour: Seeking Bridges towards Mutual Respect, pp. 355–74. London: Routledge. Dickson-Gomez, J. (2002) The Sound of Barking Dogs: Violence and Terror among Salvadoran Families in the Postwar. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 16(4): 415–38. Doyle, P. (2005) Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording 1900–1960. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Figal, G. (2012) Beachheads: War, Peace, and Tourism in Postwar Okinawa. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

140  Rupert Cox and Angus Carlyle Gabriel (2015) Staging Disorder. Smiths Magazine, 21 June. Accessed Dec. 2015. Goto, T., and Wilson, J. P. (2003) A Review of the History of Traumatic Stress Studies in Japan: From Traumatic Neurosis to PTSD. Trauma, Violence, and Abuse, 4: 195–209. Herle, A., and Rouse, S. (eds) (1998) Cambridge and the Torres Strait: Cente­ nary Essays on the 1898 Anthropological Expedition Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hiramatsu, K. (2001) Okinawa no Hansen bâ chan Matsuda Kame kô jutsu seikatsu [A Grandma of Anti-War of Okinawa: A Narrative Life History of Kame Matsuda]. Tokyo: Tosui-shobo. —— Yamamoto, T., Taira, K., Ito, A., and Nakasone, T. (1997) A Survey on Health Effects Due to Aircraft Noise on Residents Living around Kadena Air Base in the Ryukyus. Journal of Sound and Vibration, 205(4): 451–60. Hook, G. D., and Siddle, R. (eds) (2003) Japan and Okinawa: Structure and Subjectivity. New York and London: Routledge. Ihde, D. (2007) Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound (2nd edn). New York: State University of New York Press. Jenkins, J. (1991) The State Construction of Affect: Political Ethos and Mental Health among Salvadoran Refugees. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 15: 139–65. Jones, E., and Wessely, S. (2005) Shell Shock to PTSD: Military Psychiatry from 1900 to the Gulf War. Maudsley Monograph 47. Hove: Psychology Press. Kelly, C. (ed.) (2011) Sound (Documents of Contemporary Art. London: MIT Press. Kienzler, H. (2008) Debating War-Trauma and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in an Interdisciplinary Arena. Social Science and Medicine, 67: 218–27. Kimura, T. (2013) 40% of Battle of Okinawa Survivors Suffer from PTSD. Ryukyu Shimpo, 19 June. Kim-Cohen, S. (2009) In the Blink of an Ear. London: Continuum Press. Kleinman, A. (1995) Writing at the Margin: Discourse between Anthropology and Medicine. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kleinman, A., Das, V., and Lock, M. (eds) (1997) Social Suffering. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. LaBelle, B. (2010) Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life. London: Bloomsbury. Lane, C. (2008) Introduction. In C. Lane, Playing with Words: The Spoken Word in Artistic Practice, p. 8. London: CRiSAP/RGAP. Lewis, A. (1942) Incidence of Neurosis in England under War Conditions. The Lancet, 6207 (15 Aug.): 175–83. Lipari, L. (2014) Listening, Thinking, Being: Toward an Ethics of Attunement. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Micale, M., and Lerner, P. (2001) Soldiers, Civilians, and Psychiatry in France, 1914 –1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miyume, T. (2003) Myth, Protest and Struggle in Okinawa. New York and London: Routledge. Nora, P. (1989) Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire. Represen­ tations. Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory (Spring) 26: 7–24. Ryukyu Shimpo (2013) Battle of Okinawa PTSD symposium held at Hitotsubashi University, Ryukyu Shimpo, 27 July.

The Cave Mouth: Okinawan war memory  141 Saint-Amour, P. (2000) Bombing and the Symptom: Traumatic Earliness and the Nuclear Uncanny. Diacritics, 30(4): 59–82. Schultz, K. (2002) Family War Experience and Later Life Political Activism among Okinawan Women. Journal of Family History, 27(3): 273–91. Somasundaram, D. (1996) Post Traumatic Responses to Aerial Bombing. Social Science of Medicine, 42(11): 1465–71. Thomas, G. M. (2009) Treating the Trauma of the Great War: Soldiers, Civilians, and Psychiatry in France, 1914–1940. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press.

9 Emplacing the Italian Resistance The dystopian fight against Fascism and Nazism (1943–1945) Sarah De Nardi

Reinstating the senses in a messy battlefield: the vibrant places of the Italian Resistance For almost seventy years, the anti-Fascist and anti-Nazi Resistance in Europe have been framed as the event engendering and legitimizing the rise and flourish of European democracies after the chilling Nazi parenthesis (Cappelletto 2005). Resistance was the key, as it were, to understanding the opposition and rejection by people across frontiers of the occupation and oppression of a destructive, inhumane and bloodthirsty regime. In Italy, the Resistance (or ‘Liberation War’ as the non-academic press tends to call the phenomenon) served as the inevitable event or process that gave rise to the Constitution and, consequently, to the democratic Republic (Di Scala 1999: 67; Cooke 2011). Most importantly, the Resistance made away with unpalatable Fascism, consistently remembered as a deeply embarrassing legacy for Italy, a modern nation striving to move forward after the war. Above and beyond social-cultural and political interpretations of what the Resistance was, this chapter reasserts the spatial and the sensual in the conflict unravelling in central and northern Italy between September 1943 and May 1945. It conceptualizes the meaningful connections between persons, places and events in the context of the civil war and Resistance movement. Memories and storytelling of the eventful ‘twenty months’ of the Resistance permeate virtually every city and town in northern and central Italy, and are promoted and conveyed by and through the work of dedicated associations – gatekeepers or custodians of memory – through publications and education. It is crucial to understand how people moved, felt and perceived the places of their resistance. The challenge, which prompted the writing of the present chapter, was to ponder on these embodied events, map them, bring them to life and discover how they settle into our own personal worlds as feelings and affects. With the rapid emergence of the vibrant multi-disciplinary subfield of conflict studies, with its keen interest in sensory history, attention has been channelled towards the role of the body and the senses in shaping experience of conflict, the self, belonging and identity patterns (Saunders 2009;

Emplacing the Italian Resistance  143 Moshenska 2008; Navaro-Yashin 2012; Black 2013; Drozdzewski 2014). Scholars working across disciplines are now ever more keen to bring back ‘the energetic, the physical, and the sensual back [into the social sciences]’ (Wetherell 2012: 9). In the case of the World Wars, scholars across disciplines have sought to emphasize the material and social functions of the senses in shaping cultural experience (Saunders 2003; Navaro-Yashin 2012; Black 2013). At the same time, much sound scholarship has been devoted to the central role of materiality, places and emotion in conflict and warfare, whether in forms of manipulation of objects or mementoes (Saunders 2003, 2009), the establishment and negotiation of remembrance monuments (Foote and Azaryahu 2007; Drozdzewski 2014), the othering of the enemy (De Nardi 2015) and conceptualization of post-conflict territories (Legg 2005; Henig 2012). But rather than being places of mourning or deathscapes (Maddrell and Sidaway 2010), the places of resistance contain an intrinsic liveliness, reaching out from the past to the present via the mechanism of affect and the medium of oral history interviews. Not only should the vibrancy of places of conflict be celebrated, but also their nature as material culture. For Jones (2011: 4) ‘notions of being-in-place are powerful, even fundamental to everyday life . . . Within this memory is key as it is one means by which people are in place/landscape.’ Place identities and histories, elusive, circular and messy as they may be, present intriguing avenues for anthropological inquiry as much as mementoes, relics and photographs (cf. De Nardi 2014b). In particular, the experiential element of the resistance struggle and the nature of partisans’ lives of hiding, subterfuge, fear and danger in the mountains have been largely neglected by historical-geographical scholarship. My contention is that, in order to truly understand recent conflicts such as the Second World War in Italy, one must start from places as a way of ‘envisioning the world, experiencing and reshaping it’ (Daniels 2011: 182). In order to do this, this chapter engages with the issue of place experience and perception in the Veneto region in north-east Italy through an exploration of two interconnected themes: sense of place with its formation and rehearsal practices, and its opposite – dystopic displacement, uprooting and the sense of losing one’s bearings. By sense of place I mean the sense of being emplaced, of being somewhere, and the associated feelings, sensations and moods inspired and embedded in landscapes and locales. By dystopia I mean a topsy-turvy and destabilizing ‘being-in-the-world’, or even a ‘negative’ (almost intended photographically) dwelling perspective (Ingold 1993, 2000). Both sense of place and its corruption, dystopia, tap directly into the sensory vibrancy and affective energy intrinsic in conflict spaces. Other terms I have employed here are intra-action and affect. In Karen Barad’s conception (2003), intra-action presupposes that feelings, emotions and moods are not already present in two or more subjects, ready to be transferred piecemeal: intra-action posits instead that this energy is co-created and co-negotiated continuously. This is possibly partly due to

144  Sarah De Nardi the ebb and flow of affects which, in more-than-representational theory, are intended as the excess of the sum of all the things we feel, as well as the moods and atmospheres intrinsic in non-human subjects (cf. Richard and Rudnyckyj 2009: 61). Affect is the glue holding together the messiness of human lives and non-human destinies, suspended (and upended?) between past, present and future. I draw on archival material and oral history data to weave a compelling story of places inspiring a sense of intense danger and solitude, but also the story of relief in finding transitory shelters, unexpected hideouts and welcoming nooks and crannies in the hostile warscapes of northern Italy. As Radstone reminds us, ‘past happenings and their meanings are discursively produced, transmitted and mediated’ (2007: 137). I would add that past happenings are sensorially emplaced, too. Thus, in the interview process, an embodied exchange of memories and impressions takes place. I also draw on insights from affect theory (especially Wetherell 2012; Bondi 2014) to illustrate and interpret selected excerpts from interviews and diaries. A novel interpretation of that material repositioning of the senses in the experience of conflict is warranted now that, at seventy years from the end of the Second World War, we still do not really know how the guerrilla warfare and unarmed resistance mounted by Italians against Fascism and Nazism were experienced in the field, that is, by those engaging in acts of resistance in the heat of the moment, perceiving unfolding events through overwrought senses. Retracing elements of wartime sensoria is fundamental, but emplacing or situating the experience of the protagonists of the Resistance even more so as this approach better frames our understanding of it. Emplacing experience – or even ‘a-where-ness’ (cf. Osborne 2001) – through a focus on perception and the senses further elucidates dark spots in the memory of the events. Indeed, directing our lens on places and how they were ‘felt’ might bring out hidden meanings, intentions and aspirations of those involved. Emplacing experience can push our knowledge beyond the abstract historicity of most published accounts onto uncomfortable terrain: lived experience in grim, hostile and dangerous places. The human mind’s revulsion with chaos ultimately manifests itself in the urge to repair it – to supply it with comprehensibility and order. This is not to say that this order is necessarily a positive one for all: sadistic soldiers, jackals preying on the victims of war, lonely refugees, resistance fighters, and poets seeking to subvert the hold of violence all produce themselves in the midst of chaos in a way that somehow makes sense to them. (Nordstrom 1997: 192) •• •• ••

Why did you do that? Why did you do that thing there and not somewhere else? How did you feel in that place?

Emplacing the Italian Resistance  145 Simply put, the above questions inform a cultural geography of conflict and guerrilla warfare framed within discourses of emotion and the senses. I began asking these and similar questions in 2009 when I embarked on a study of Resistance landscapes in my home region of the Veneto in northeast Italy. By interviewing thirty-two respondents who had participated in the active or passive resistance in the region, I intended to engage with the notions of place and landscape from a bottom-up perspective, starting at the point of interaction (or intra-action) of person and place. My respondents were aged between 17 and 23 at the start of the resistance movement in the autumn of 1943; of the thirty-three participants, only one respondent was British: an agent of the Special Operations Executive, sent to provide intelligence and support to the Italian fighters. This man ended up living and working alongside the Italians: he was a ‘partisan’ to all intents and purposes and as such eligible to answer my questions about place experience. My inquiry was ethnographic in nature: I was far less interested in military maps of combat areas than in photographs of bombed out town squares, or villages burnt by the Germans (Figure 9.1) and elevated to immortality through melancholy photographs. I was interested in the enduring, haunting and vibrant quality of places of resistance and fighting (affects), rather than in any abstract conflict geography represented by strategic locations, operation zones and base camps (cf. Drozdzewski 2014). On their own, without the sensual human element in place (literally), these locations are meaningless. How did people feel when they had

Figure 9.1  Cadolten, village destroyed by the SS ( Nino De Marchi)

146  Sarah De Nardi to hide under a potato field, in a cramped cave, in a foresters’ hut, or on a precipice overlooking a ravine? These interviews revealed a deep sense of loss and disorientation in memory: these two ‘feelings’ seems to be the predominant theme haunting the places and landscapes of the Resistance and civil war (De Nardi 2015). The Italian language has a wonderful adjective to indicate the confused emotional and mental state of one feeling out of place and disorientated: spaesato. Literally, this term translates as ‘without a village’. It was a term often used by my ageing respondents in describing what they went through during the war, literally: some activists had seen their villages go up in flames following German and Fascist reprisals. Placelessness is, for want of a better word, the closest the English language can get to the sense of being despoiled of one’s village. This overwrought and destabilized sensorium had geopolitical roots: due to a concomitant military occupation and zero-tolerance policy towards the populace and resistance enacted and harshly enforced by the Germans, northern Italian landscapes turned from busy, everyday homelands to war zones virtually overnight (De Nardi 2015). It is worth remembering that Italy had entered the Second World War on the German side, but it soon became clear that most Italians did not wish to be a part of Hitler’s grand designs, much less aid him in his destructive campaign (Battaglia 1953). On 8 September 1943, the Italian King signed an Armistice with the Allies, and Italy switched sides (Ginsborg 1990). A radio announcement on the day made it clear that the Italian Army would be dissolved and that Italians must no longer resist or attack the Allies: it also ambiguously hinted at the need by Italians to fend off attacks ‘from any other direction’ (Behan 2009). Unequivocally this turn of phrase warned the populace against the Germans’ imminent revenge. What was one to do? Soon after the announcement, special troops sent by Hitler sprung Mussolini from his prison (Ginsborg 1990; Cooke 2011); he was then installed as the head of the satellite Republic of Salò, the Italian puppet at the beck and call of the Germans. Yet Mussolini’s reinstatement as a leader brought great joy and hope for the future glory of Italy alongside Germany to die-hard Fascists, once more reunited in their ideological struggle (Behan 2009). What this unfortunate chain of events meant for the cultural landscape(s) of northern Italy, forcibly overseen by the Salò Republic although in fact under Berlin’s sway, is still a bone of bitter contention. Some have refused the label of civil war (Pezzino 2005) preferring to stress the importance of the opposed causes of Fascism and anti-Fascism as independent projects competing to return Italy to its Roman imperial laurels, carving out a righteous place in the sun within Europe and the Mediterranean (Cooke 2011). In geopolitical terms northern Italy was carved into two sectors: the northern Alpenvorland in Sudtirol and upper Veneto (the Belluno province) and the Adriatische Küstenland in Venezia-Giulia were annexed to the Reich, whereas the other provinces remained officially under the thumb of

Emplacing the Italian Resistance  147 Mussolini’s thugs (De Nardi 2015). People living in the northern provinces and on the Adriatic coast found themselves in a dystopic situation in which they were governed directly by Berlin, without Italian Fascist intervention. This situation created some unprecedented occurrences: if a suspected armed rebel or political dissident was hounded by the Fascists and if they happened to know of a ‘fair’ German official in the Berlin-governed area, they could find sanctuary behind the lines, safe in the knowledge that no Fascist would have any authority in those parts, irrespective of how powerful or high up in the party ranks they may be (Brescacin 2013). This interesting geopolitical situation was embedded in the sensorial responses of local people inhabiting those parts, and shaped their experience of the war years (De Nardi 2015). In a sense, even in the midst of civil war and occupation, a political and administrative geography could effectively map out an emotional topography of safety for those in need.

They lost their landscapes, and then lost their way Mountain dwellers and those inhabiting the borderlines between Italy and the Reich-administered buffer zones were the ones most likely to survive. Compared to the extent and number of horrific massacres perpetrated by Germans against civilians in Emilia Romagna and Tuscany, people of the northern Veneto survived the war relatively well. Furthermore, the Resistance in the Veneto uplands (but also in the mountainous regions of Lombardy and Piedmont) was more or less iconic to the whole of the movement in spatial and political terms. Popular lore celebrates the mountain-dwelling partisans as noble, almost romantic figureheads dwelling in ancestral forests and only leaving the woods to attack the Nazi foreigners occupying their cities and plains. Leading scholars, however, remark that the Resistance was far more fractured and divisive than this simplistic narrative implies (Passerini 2005; Cappelletto 2003; Mammone 2006). However, much of the topographical setting of the Resistance in most of the region considered here is composed of the woods and the mountains of northeast Veneto. The dense evergreen Cansiglio woodland in particular made a strong impact on the experience of the interviewed individuals. Experience and awareness of the dense and dark forest, of a twilight atmosphere, inspired mixed feelings. On the one hand, many of the interviews I conducted and diaries I saw reveal a thankful sense of safety towards the forest’s cover, an environment in which individuals, if accustomed to its topography, could hide without fear of capture. On the other hand, the woodland was also experienced as claustrophobic and isolating; further, while the more remote locations were safer hiding places than areas nearer to towns and major thoroughfares, the very act of hiding out and inhabiting inaccessible locales implied much less opportunity to access vital provisions and food. The strategy of ‘fending for oneself’, which had to be adopted during periods of intense searches and reconnaissance campaigns on the ground

148  Sarah De Nardi by the enemy, forced groups or bands to break up (Brescacin 2013). The separation and uncertainty of safe locations to turn to created intense anxiety and uncertainty in the interviewed individuals, especially when people were forced to go into hiding for days on end in cramped conditions in rock shelters, caves or even in holes purposely dug in hillsides in order to escape detection (De Nardi 2014a). At all times, but especially at night when Resistance groups were most active, every band of partisans organized a strict night-watch roster. The roster meant that individuals on duty were often left to their own devices and confronted with a very likely prospect of drowsiness and somnolence – which could lead to death. The acute solitude and bleakness of the night watch are a frequent feature of the veterans’ stories—the storytellers dwell with bitter-sweet melancholia on memories of lonely, silent hours spent in their watch spot, alone with their thoughts, often hungry and debilitated by harsh living conditions, chronically sleepdeprived and anxious (cf. Black 2013). A deep sense of alienation accompanied the daily lives of resistance activists as they carried out their illicit and highly dangerous activities. A young girl at the time, Lavinia, remembers that: I was looking over my shoulder: always, always. My village was in the hands of the Germans and the villagers sympathized with the Nazi cause: it was a nightmare scenario where I could trust no one. In every house, behind every shutter, lurked the danger of my discovery and death or deportation following a hot tip by a local. I felt so utterly lost (spaesata). Also a young girl at the time, Anna, told me that: During intense periods of frequent searches by the Nazi-Fascists the Partisans came up to our house in the hills in Susegana; from this spot we could see whether lorries and tanks advanced up from the under­ lying plains. My house on the hill, we had good visibility (sic) . . . we could hear and see things going on down there. When we did spot a lorry we gave the alarm and urged the boys to hide. We had an advantage, you see up there. We told the partisans, best to go and hide further uphill. Up there, there was a tunnel, a sort of tunnel dug up during the First World War where we sometimes used to stack hay from the fields. And behind our house and beyond these fields we had woodland, and in these woods was that tunnel. So the partisans went and hid up there. What this concealment and collaboration meant in practice was that Fascism, occupation and the ensuing civil war had deprived the people of the northern countryside of their landscapes, and that they had lost their bearings almost literally in the places that were once so familiar. The reliance on acute and keen senses (‘we could hear and see things’) was paramount

Emplacing the Italian Resistance  149 in Anna’s family’s support for the Resistance. The hideaway in the tunnel behind her house provided a suitable place for the hiding of bodies (guilty bodies, according to Fascist and Reich law) where in pre-war times hay had been stored (‘where we sometimes used to stack hay from the fields’, my emphasis). The local everyday geography, and the local everyday taskscapes (cf. Ingold 1993) had been corrupted, distorted and reworked due to peril and necessity (cf. Drozdzewski 2014).

The loss of the senses: displacement and blindness We have already considered the extent to which familiar landscapes and taskscapes became perilous and transformed beyond recognition almost overnight as Italy switched sides on 8 September 1943. Here, I suggest that familiar sensoria also changed, and that an added strain on the senses characterized much of the activity of the armed Resistance – whose active members were guerrilla fighters in constant need to fend for themselves. Precariousness and constant danger required armed partisans to be constantly on the move. An enforced semi-nomadic lifestyle’s physical strain on the senses and the body cannot be underestimated. Cesare remembers how: Partisan actions were characterized by a strong mobility: we moved around continuously. The rapid dislocation from one place to the next, without long pauses at any given spot, was essential and this was the best advantage we had over the enemy. We roamed the mountains and hills; ours was a strategy of secrets and improvisation, made of continuous, rapid moving on. Mobility was a must: however, bear in mind that we were young and fit and adaptable and this enforced nomadism, as it were, did not bother us too much. We were young and inebriated with the noble, patriotic choice we had made. But we were always tired, as you would expect, with appalling living standards, eating little and seldom, sleeping on hard surfaces, on rocks. Another fighter, Adriano, recalls how: During the searches up in the woods we simply had to go down to the plains. We were scared, because we, as 50 men, could not survive easily in the plains, where every village had a Fascist precinct. (. . .) Every night we moved on to a new location. Always in the countryside, with a tent, I mean, two or three tents, camping, pitching our tent for one night only, and the next day at dawn we moved on. After each action, or sabotage, we moved to the next village, here and there, all over the place. Some of us knew the area very well, thank god, but not I – I was from the hilly region to the west. It was scary, being so exposed, away from the woods.

150  Sarah De Nardi Adriano’s words barely encapsulate the feelings of disorienting precariousness and anxiety experienced by the individual at the time. His sense of fraught danger can barely be conveyed by a typescript as it exceeds verbal conventions. Affect is the best way to attempt to capture the intensity of the sensorial maelstrom experienced by young men and women at the time, as affect privileges the bodily rather than the representational. Bondi (2014) argues that an oral history interview focused on sensory experience exceeds the verbal and that visible and invisible messages are routinely expressed during such an exchange. In some ways, the nocturnal nature of much Resistance activity implied a loss of the senses. Another important aspect shaping the corporeal experience of Resistance landscapes, for instance, is given by night marches. Resisters felt it was safer to move about from one place to another under the cover of darkness. At least three of my interviews reveal that small groups of individual fighters regularly negotiated narrow, perilous mountain paths on dark nights, advancing in single file, not talking, with all their senses alert to any sign of danger. One of the veterans, Giuseppe, recalls that: Sometimes you couldn’t see the person in front of you – it was that dark. So what you do, to maintain a sense of connection, a human contact, is you grab a strap of their rucksack and hold on to it for the duration of the march. This was reassuring, and it also meant that in case of danger you didn’t need to speak or emit any sound – you just tug at the rucksack strap of the person in front to alert them and stop, and listen. This loss of bearings, and momentary heightening of one’s sixth sense as eyesight diminished, created an intensely unsettling experience for the fighters. With a great strain on the body and the senses, those who were more fragile and more sensitive to duress were hit the hardest. Aldo recalls how: At night we marched for kilometres on end. During the day we could rest a little. Mostly in shepherds’ huts if the owners were on our side and willing to run the risk and shelter us . . . Even so, we were still anxious, on edge. [. . .] You felt so lonely, especially at night. You thought of your previous life, how lovely and peaceful and calm and happy it was, you know, being at home. This last quotation in particular exemplifies a trope often found in the testimony of those for whom the Resistance was an especially traumatic, unpleasant affair: the trope of the golden age. Partisan Aldo felt so unhappy during his experience of the Resistance up in the hills, that anything else would have been preferable. Preceding events and periods must have been preferable to the duress of fighting like scared animals in the wilderness. Although Aldo complains that he used to be in a better place (emotionally and materially) before the war, the fact remains that, in reality, before the

Emplacing the Italian Resistance  151 Resistance he and all Italians had lived under a dystopian Fascist regime. In fact, everything had been far from peaceful and idyllic (cf. Portelli 1997: 153ff.). Intriguingly, Pavone (1991: 24) reports the words of an ex-fighter reminiscing on the aftermath of the Resistance episode: ‘We behaved well towards one another; in truth we loved each other more [after the Allied armistice of 8 September]’. These words resonate with Aldo’s evocation of a ‘better place’, and reveal the emotional and irrational reworking of memory. With Aldo, we are dealing with an intense intimation of nostalgia for the locus amoenus of a brief moment in time (and space) free from the claustrophobic regime and its intolerant despot Mussolini, rather than with the recall or conjuring up of an actual historical mentality. The nostalgia (literally, the yearning to return, physically, to those days) that takes hold of Aldo is irrational, tinged with an unrealistic, rosy hue of happiness and fraternity where life had been chaotic and uncertainty about the future predominated. Here again, emotion and the senses inflect the experience and business of partisan resistance. Nostalgia is central to the emotional reaction to one’s dystopian displacement. Further, when asked how he experienced the places of his Resistance, Giuseppe stated: Wherever I went I felt, you know, normal enough; well, no, I was a little anxious perhaps. Not as much as one of my friends, however. When we got to Col Alt [a hill] and he realized he was far removed from his family and familiar surroundings on this strange hilltop, he started crying saying that he missed his family, and that his dad was poorly and needed him. We told him that if he felt that way he shouldn’t stay and he should not be ashamed to go back home. So he did. In spatial terms, the above quote tells us much of the state of mind of young fighters, destabilized and separated from their everyday places and forced into nightmarish, uncharted waters. The ‘strange hilltop’ perfectly encapsulates the upending feeling of placelessness, based on the lonely feeling of being far from one’s familiar surroundings and affects.

Final considerations An already precarious, unstable world of guerrilla warfare and constant fugitivism was further exacerbated by the nocturnal, alienating and uncomfortable conditions in which individuals were forced to operate not by choice, but by necessity. A theme of discomfiture, if not a sense of a dystopian upsidedown reality emerges from the interviews and is closely intertwined with the sensorial dimension of partisan lives. The protagonists’ displacement is due to the fact that they, whether armed or unarmed, had to learn a whole new way of dwelling in, and navigating once familiar places. It was a way that felt unnatural to them: a cultural geography shaped by danger and violence. Partisans in particular also had to adjust their body clocks to new rhythms

152  Sarah De Nardi (the strenuous night marches, for one). Most importantly, all activists had to learn the landscape afresh, in that they had to learn and assimilate a geography and topography of sightlessness, dim visibility, and often total silence that is typical of remote locations and woodlands. In a heightened ‘a-where-ness’, individuals involved in the Resistance in any way had to learn to fend for themselves and be alert for even the slightest sign of danger under considerable pressure in uneasy warscapes, be it villages, mountain sides or woods. This chapter has argued that the Resistance was messy, unpredictable and grounded in bodies and places. We might conceive of the relationship between person and place during the civil war, resistance and occupation as an intra-action of beings, things and atmospheres feeding into one another in meaningful ways. If we regard affect as a filter through which we might make sense of elusive, hard to pin down senses of places and sensoria of conflict, the added social and cultural dimension of affect – as energy or drive to action, whether social or political – adds a further layer of significance to this approach. Notwithstanding Italian efforts to normalize events and to turn the Resistance into a uniform epic of noble patriotism without victims, one must look beyond the hollow rhetoric: the Resistance was much more complex than that. Far from just serving as a foundational myth crafted to appease the Allies at the victor’s table and whitewashed into a communion of ideals, bravery, patriotic ardour and likeness of minds, the Resistance conflict was also constituted by a complex web of experiences tinged with loneliness, nostalgia, disorientation, fear and homesickness. If a holistic understanding of the Resistance episode is to be gained, the sensorial and emotional aspects of the conflict deserve mention and attention. Sense of place and the loss of the senses are two sides of a coin represented by the complex interactions and intra-actions effected by the civil war and resistance episodes. Reasserting the sensorial and spatial in the stories relived (and embodied) by the veterans, survivors, their families and their mementoes facilitates a better comprehension of this historical period. Places of presence coexisted with places of absence or negative, disorientating sites in mutually constituted warscapes. Places of safety, and affective spaces existed alongside places that were lost, destroyed, or abandoned. Therefore, I have sought to bring to life the vibrancy of the lived places of the Resistance and civil war: places that existed, developed, struggled, changed and perished alongside brave (human) bodies in the field.

References Barad, K. (2003) Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3): 801–31. —— (2007) Meeting the Universe Half Way. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Battaglia, R. (1953) Storia della Resistenza Italiana. Turin: Einaudi. Behan, T. (2009) The Italian Resistance. London: Pluto.

Emplacing the Italian Resistance  153 Black, M. (2013) Expellees Tell Tales: Partisan Blood Drinkers and the Cultural History of Violence After World War II. History and Memory, 25(1): 77–110. Bondi, L. (2014) Understanding Feelings: Engaging with Unconscious Communication and Embodied Knowledge. Emotion, Space and Society, 10: 44–54. Brescacin, P. P. (2013) Quel sangue che abbiamo dimenticato: Guerra civile nel Vittoriese, 1943–1944. Vittorio Veneto: TIPSE. Cappelletto, F. (2003) Long Term Memory of Traumatic Events: From Autobiography to History. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, ns 9: 241–60. —— (2005) Public Memories and Personal Stories: Recalling the Nazi-Fascist Massacres. In F. Cappelletto (ed.), Memory and World War II: An Ethnographic Approach. London: Berg. Cooke, P. (2011) The Legacy of the Italian Resistance. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Daniels, S. (2011) Geographical Imagination. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, ns 36: 182–7. De Nardi, S. (2014a) ‘No one had asked me about that before’: A Focus on the Body and ‘Other’ Resistance Experiences in Italian World War Two Storytelling. Oral History, 43(1): 5–23. —— (2014b) An Embodied Approach to Second World War Storytelling Mementoes: Probing beyond the Archival into the Corporeality of Memories of the Resistance. Journal of Material Culture, 19(4): 443–64. —— (2015) The Enemy as Confounding Other: Interpersonal Perception and Displacement in Italian Memories of the Resistance and German Occupation of 1943–1945. History and Anthropology, 26(2): 234–54. Di Scala, S. (1999) Resistance Mythology. Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 4(1): 67–72. Drozdzewski, D. (2014) Using History in the Streetscape to Affirm Geopolitics of Memory. Political Geography, 42: 66–78. Favero, G. (2003) Inesorabile Piombo Nemico. Roncade: Piazza Editore. Foote, K. E., and Azaryahu, M. (2007) Toward a Geography of Memory: Geographical Dimensions of Public Memory and Commemoration. Journal of Political and Military Sociology, 35: 125–44. Ginsborg, P. (1990) A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943–1988. London: Penguin. Henig, D. (2012) Iron in the Soil: Living with Military Waste in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Anthropology Today, 28(1): 21–3. Jones, O. (2011) Geography, Memory and Non-Representational Geographies. Geography Compass, 5: 875–85. Ingold, T. (1993) The Temporality of Landscape. World Archaeology, 25(2): 152–74. —— (2000) The Perception of Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. Legg, S. (2005) Contesting and Surviving Memory: Space, Nation, and Nostalgia in Les Lieux de Mémoire. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 23: 481–504. Maddrell, A., and Sidaway, J. D. (eds) (2010) Deathscapes: Spaces for Death, Dying, Mourning and Remembering. Farnham: Ashgate. Mammone, A. (2006) A Daily Revision of the Past: Fascism, anti-Fascism, and Memory in Contemporary Italy. Modern Italy, 11: 211–26. Accessed Apr. 2015.

154  Sarah De Nardi Moshenska, G. (2008) A Hard Rain. Children’s Shrapnel Collections in the Second World War. Journal of Material Culture, 13(1): 107–25. Navaro-Yashin, Y. (2012) The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nordstrom, C. (1997) A Different Kind of War Story: The Ethnography of Political Violence. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Osborne, B. S. (2001) Landscapes, Memory, Monuments, and Commemoration: Putting Identity in its Place. Canadian Ethnic Studies, 33: 39–77. Passerini, L. (2005) Memories of Resistance, Resistances of Memory. In H. Peitsch, C. Burdett, and C. Gorrara (eds), European Memories of the Second World War, pp. 288–96. Oxford: Berghahn. Pavone, C. (1991) Una guerra civile: Saggio storico sulla moralità della Resistenza. Turin: Bollati Boringheri. Pezzino, P. (2005) The Italian Resistance between History and Memory. Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 10(4): 396–412. Portelli, A. (1997) The Battle of Valle Giulia. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Radstone, S. (2007) Reconceiving Binaries: The Limits of Memory. History Workshop Journal, 59: 134–50. Richard, D., and Rudnyckyj, D. (2009) Economies of Affect. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, ns 15: 57–77. Saunders, N. (2004) Matters of Conflict: Material Culture, Memory and the First World War. London: Routledge. —— (2009) People in Objects: Individuality and the Quotidian in the Material Culture of War. In C. White (ed.), The Materiality of Individuality, pp. 37–55. London: Springer. Wetherell, M. (2012) Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding. London: Sage.

Part II

Sensing bodies

10 Odour and ethnicity Americans and Japanese in the Second World War Susannah Callow

Cat Island, a small, sandy outcrop in the Gulf of Mexico, has played intriguing roles in two conflicts of recent centuries. In 1814, it was the site of an attempted British invasion (Cuevas 2011). In the Second World War, the island became the location of a ‘pioneering’ training programme for the US Army centred on olfaction – a misguided attempt to target Japanese personnel in the heart of Pacific combat zones. The idea that the presence of the enemy could be detected by smell was apparently linked to a preformed essentializing view of the ethnicity of the Japanese enemy – a characteristic ‘essence’ (Prentice 2007) perceived to be inherent in the biological make-up of Nisei soldiers in the US Army (second-generation descendants of Japanese immigrants). The human body is more than a synaesthetic receiver and translator of external stimuli. Through its physical attributes, and its centrality to our human sense of self and identity (Callow 2014), the body can itself contribute to the visceral, multi-sensory experiences of conflict, including its odorant qualities as a cultural artefact and a physical object creating olfactory signals which are perceived to relate to genetics and ethnic identity. Here, my aim is to add to the understanding of American anti-Asian prejudice and how it relates to sensory experiences of Second World War, in personnel training and combat interactions with the Japanese enemy. The boundless nature of odours, their subjectivity and context-specific nature, necessitate an anthropological approach grounded in description and memory (Classen et al. 1994). This historical study of perceptions of ethnicity explores oral history testimonies, documents and monographs to reconstruct attitudes and reactions to sensoriality, and how these are intensified by olfaction. The chapter also explores the interplay between different senses (Howes 1991) and their relationship to embodiment. Political and social relationships between America and Japan in the mid-twentieth century as physically embodied and experienced through the senses, are also addressed. The aim is also to demonstrate the potential for interpretive analyses of the volatile relationship between olfaction and identity, to obtain a meaningful ‘thick description’ (Geertz 1973: 3) of conflict and its multifaceted material and sensorial entanglements.

158  Susannah Callow

Analytical framework: olfaction and ethnicity Odour results from ‘an interaction between a chemical stimulus . . . and an olfactory receptor system’ (Neuner-Jehle and Etzweiler 2012: 154). Odours contribute readily to the wider ‘unit of sensory experiences’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 218). Thus, to trace how experiences of objects, landscapes and people are mediated by olfaction, is to become closer to a rounded phenomenological study of a place and moment in time. The association between negative odours and ethnic minorities or ‘race’ is increasingly recognized as a key anthropological and sociological concern (Beer 2007; Low 2005; Manalansan 2006; Sliwa and Riach 2012). Anthropologists have long noted that smell is the ‘lowest’ sense – its cultural role is repressed and ignored widely in contemporary Western societies (Classen et al. 1994). The sense of smell, furthermore, is closely connected to identity and boundary formation (Classen et al. 1994: 8). Largey and Watson (1972: 1028) also suggest olfaction ‘is particularly associated with racial, class, and sexual identification’. This can relate to food, hygiene practices or bodily odours. The relationship between olfaction and ethnicity is neither predictable, linear, nor universal. As with other aspects of corporeality (Butler 1993), the interpretations ascertained from observation or recording of reactions to sensoriality are temporally, geographically and socially situated (Classen et al. 1994). As an embodied and yet boundless phenomenon, powerful and ephemeral, odours have a curious liminal quality but are nonetheless transformative of the social self, and of perceptions of a range of characteristics of others, including morality (Low 2009). The extent to which body odour varies biologically in relation to ethnic origin, however, is a contentious concept. The genetic component of odour reflects differing locations of sweat glands, a variety of patterns of bacterial populations on the skin, and dietary choices (Preti 2010). Olfaction is also a concern of evolutionary biologists, as the variations in body odour may correlate with our immune systems, and preferences for particular smells might represent an ability to detect a member of the opposite sex with a compatible immune system. This does not confer any connection between body odour and ethnicity, however. There is extensive variation in genes between individuals within any population which could be described as an ‘ethnic group’ (and the term itself is debated as the boundaries are rarely fixed or clearly demarcated (Eriksen 1993; Gil-White 2001; Wimmer 2013). Nonetheless, ethnicity is known to be ‘embedded’ in ‘power relations’, within and between human groups (Gonzalez-Ruibal 2012: 249). Nevertheless, there is clearly a sociological and cultural association between olfaction and ethnicity, despite the questionable evidence for distinctive ethnic bodily odours. Furthermore, besides variabilities in detectable odorant chemicals emitted by the body itself, perfumes, oils and other ointments applied to the body can contribute to its sensory outputs. Thus odour variations are as likely to exist for cultural as much as biological reasons.

Odour and ethnicity  159 Scholars are increasingly revealing that contexts of modern conflict frequently subvert existing notions of the senses, and may even entirely reconfigure their importance for individuals (Leonard 2015; Winterton 2012). Accusations of foul smells may be used as a slur against a particular individual or ethnic group – a method reified by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime more widely against Jewish people. König (2013) suggests that by using a situational, relational approach to sensoriality one can explore how odour can denote otherness, including in conflict. Her ethnographic research suggests that some ethnic groups in Borneo claimed to be able to distinguish themselves from their neighbours by smell – crucially, only during times of conflict. Concepts of unpleasant body odour are deployed to label – i.e. to ‘other’ their enemies and neighbours. One group, the Dayak, claimed that it was possible to sniff out the Madurese when in hiding. Symbolism is ascribed to these classifications. The odours themselves, König argues, are socially constructed categories, which may be intended to create a hierarchy and assert power – ‘The idea of smell and its symbolic meaning’ is the most prominent feature (König 2013: 125, 132). The concept of ‘racial’ ‘smell’ was also evident in mid-twentieth-century American beliefs about non-white American civilians, as Smith (2006) has described. Stereotypes of a ‘black smell’ were used by segregationists as an argument which inspired notions of ‘pollution’ and disgust. Applying Douglas’s (1966) framework of pollution/purity to the above, it seems that the unwelcome intimacy of body odour and its liminal, unbounded nature were included in contemporary discourse as a means of denigration, and of creating boundaries which would help reaffirm belief in the superiority of one’s own ethnic group. Here, I attempt to build on such understandings, to analyse the role of olfaction in the Second World War, and its mediation of existing concepts of ‘otherness’.

Context: Japanese and American racism and Nisei soldiers in the US Army The relationship between Japanese and American soldiers in the Pacific during the Second World War may be characterized, in many instances, by deepseated racial stereotyping, extreme disrespect and often unsanctioned levels of interpersonal violence including mutilation of human remains (Callow 2014; Fussell 1989; Harrison 2006; Spector 1984; Weingartner 1992). As well as being portrayed as morally and ethically opposite to the supposed characteristics of a typical American citizen (Dower 1986), the body of the Japanese and Japanese American was the site where ‘ethnicity, national allegiance, and race literally intersected’ (Aoki 1996: 39). Patterns of racial prejudice and ethnocentrism in this conflict were complicated further by American soldiers of Japanese descent serving in the US armed forces. These Nisei living in the USA often experienced the conflict in a vastly different

160  Susannah Callow way compared to others deemed to be ‘white Americans’. This accompanied widespread prejudice towards any ethnic minority groups in the US forces. As with other ethnic minorities in the US military, Japanese-American military personnel experienced extensive discrimination. Nisei soldiers’ outward appearance, and other features such as cultural behaviours, use of language, or names, which identified them as ‘other’, frequently led to mistreatment by their peers and mistrust by members of the public. The accounts of Nisei soldiers and official documents which discussed them demonstrate that the combatants experienced a range of reactions. These reactions came from those fighting alongside them, whilst those at the top of US Army Command similarly mistrusted the Japanese and disapproved of the use of Nisei citizens in military roles. Familial links to Japan itself, and their ethnicity, raised the suspicion of espionage. As an example, a 1941 letter from a Lieutenant Colonel suggested it was essential that ‘white’ officers oversaw the Nisei soldiers to prevent them being ‘double-crossed’ by Nisei translators (Weckerling 1941). The loyalty of white Americans, by contrast, was ‘unquestioned’. This reflects a generalized fear and disregard widely prevalent in postPearl Harbor USA. Suspicions of Japanese ‘sympathizers’ and ‘agents’ living in the US, as a hidden menace ‘within’ the nation-state (Aoki 1996: 39), led to restrictions of the roles of the Nisei in the military. When enlisted, they were often under suspicion. Some fell victim to mistaken identity as enemy soldiers, whether on home soil (Wanatabe 1996; McNaughton 2007: 113) or when serving in the Pacific (McNaughton 2007: 188). Their appearance was the justification for Japanese-American servicemen being forced to play the role of Japanese soldiers during training (ibid. 230). The prejudice experienced by Nisei combatants was partly because of America’s political relationship with Japan, but also as part of a wider tradition of ethnocentrism and orientalism (Said 1978; Tamura 2012). This led to mistrust at the highest level; social and institutional segregation, discrimination and restriction of involvement in military activities were widespread. The admirable contribution of Nisei as recruits in general, and the insight provided by their linguistic skills as translators made them particularly valued (Harrington 1979). The involvement of Nisei soldiers in one particular army training initiative, however, disregarded their skills and abilities and was based on flawed assumptions about ethnicity, heredity and body odour – a training programme which employed the combatants as ‘bait’ for tracker dogs. The programme relied upon there being a connection between their Japanese heritage, and an innate ethnic ‘smell’. Specifically, the JapaneseAmerican recruits were believed to smell the same as a Japanese soldier. That is to say, the US military put its faith in canine scent receptors being able to identify an unalterable ‘Japanese’ body odour. They could then be employed to identify Japanese soldiers on the battlefield (Duus 1983: 47–9). The testimony of Ray Nosaka (2005: 39), a combatant of the US 100th Infantry

Odour and ethnicity  161 Battalion, records his contribution to this experiment. Nosaka, born in Honolulu to Japanese parents, recounts being selected for a ‘secret mission’. It was readily apparent for the twenty-five recruits that this was training exclusively for the army dogs. The daily routine involved the soldiers hiding in an alligator-infested swamp, whilst the attack dogs were sent to find them. The training in which Nosaka participated lasted for four months. In his own words: ‘They said [we were sent] to “train the dogs,” but we called it “dog bait.” We were the bait’ (Nosaka 2005: 44). Perhaps predictably, the project failed and the army dogs could not detect the difference between combatants of varying ethnic backgrounds. These events highlight that the intersection between ethnicity and olfaction held a crucial psychological and emotional influence for constructions of reality, for American society and its combatants. As Classen et al. (1994: 169) have discussed, odour can form a ‘potent symbolic means for creating and enforcing class and ethnic boundaries’. In this context, the psycho-social separation between American and Japanese combatants in the Second World War was transposed onto the Japanese-American immigrant population. Belief in the odorant characteristics of ethnic otherness had a significant role in combatant discourse during combat in the Pacific theatre. A 1943 manual for US soldiers entitled The Jap Soldier stated that ‘members of a Marine battalion in the Solomons agree that at night a Jap can often be detected by a characteristic odor, which resembles the gamy smell of animals’ (Goodfriend 1943: 54; Weingartner 1992). The wider report encouraged US soldiers to use their sense of smell to detect danger – whether a gas attack, or enemy soldiers. Although there may have been a practical element to this, particularly detecting toxic gases, an additional purpose of the advice would be to reduce fears surrounding their engagement. The enemy was portrayed as devious and untrustworthy, and readily able to engage with the natural surroundings to carry out stealthy manoeuvres. A belief that there existed a connection between odour and ethnicity was not confined to the higher echelons of US army thinking, nor was it exclusive to military manuals. Contemporary accounts, autobiographies and oral history testimonies demonstrate that faith in the enemy’s distinctive odour pervaded the belief systems of many American combatants. Richard Wexler’s testimony records a colleague stating that ‘Japs’ ‘smelled different’ to Americans (Wexler 1997). A member of the US Field Service wrote from India, describing how ‘our clever little adversary the Jap . . . smells like third-grade sardines’ (Anon. 1944). A US newspaper in 1943 reported a US soldier returned from Guadalcanal believed he could locate a Japanese sniper ‘by smell’; ‘They just smell plumb funny. Honest. They smell like pigs. It helps you find them, even when you can’t see them’ (Evening Independent 1943). The porcine reference suggests zoomorphic dehumanization. The descriptions of the enemy’s body odour followed an established pattern of insults concerning bodily odours (Low 2009).

162  Susannah Callow Other claims of ethnic odours were more ambiguous. US Marine Technical Sergeant was quoted in the American press, stating: ‘The Japs have a distinctive smell, a rather musty odor – something like skunk cabbage’ (a strongly odorous swamp plant) (Cameron Herald 1943). A ‘Jap stink’ was claimed to have prevented marine Al Schmid from sleeping – he stated that the origins of the odour was a powder burnt by the Japanese (Butterfield 1944: 83). Sergeant Carrington claimed that a Japanese smell – albeit only detectable by a ‘good bulldog’ – was due to the combatants’ hygiene rituals – ‘they take baths all the time, but it’s some kind of powder they use after bathing, like sandalwood’ (quoted in Anon. 1943: 7). The suggestion of bathing regularly using perfumed powders during active service on the Solomon Islands seems improbable. Moreover, there may be a suggestion of femininity in this description, which could be intentionally derisory. Another US newspaper quoted a US Corporal: ‘The difference in race, or eating customs, or habits of personal cleanliness made the Japs have a smell that we could recognize. In the lines at night our nostrils sometimes said, “Japs are near”’ (Barney Ross, quoted in Shaffer 1943). Kerry Lane’s memoir makes the claim that he could smell Japanese soldiers passing: a ‘heavy odour of fish and garlic’ (Lane 2004: 233). Chester Nycum’s testimony reports an Indian combatant who ‘swore he could smell a Japanese soldier’ (Nycum n.d.). Hobert Bodkin recalls in his testimony – ‘I was on guard duty that night and I smelled a Jap. You could smell them if the wind was right. I smelled one and I woke my partner up and he couldn’t smell it at first. Then, all at once, he could.’ (Bodkin 2009). Some combatants suggested the Japanese could be smelled from ‘twenty-five yards away’ (Fahey 1963: 45–6), and their positions could be ‘easier to smell than see’ (Miller 1959: 133). The mythology surrounding a Japanese ‘smell’ perhaps created a sense of psychological support. Descriptions of the enemy’s distinctive smell fostered the belief that that the enemy soldier, who might be extremely well-trained, skilled at camouflage and guerrilla warfare, has an odorant identity which acted as a kind of ‘early warning’, preventing ambush or stealth attack. As a subjective sense, it could perhaps provide comfort for new recruits that it was possible to detect the enemy, when other senses, especially sight, were challenged by the Japanese use of the darkness and terrain as shelter or camouflage. In confirmation of this, US Navy supply officer Sterling Schallert’s (1999: 12) oral history testimony recalled that the ability to ‘smell’ a Jap was considered a sort of sixth sense, which provided extra protection. This would be especially beneficial for new recruits or less experienced combatants. As a small, yet significant fragment of a wider battlefield ‘smellscape’ (Porteous 1985), the ‘smell of the enemy’ was at once sinister and comforting. It provided confirmation of the enemy’s otherness and liminality, and an early warning, preventing ambush or stealth incursions. In this way, the combatants’ belief and trust in the sense of smell was empowering; it had a distinct psychological and emotional role for many combatants.

Odour and ethnicity  163 Despite the number of references to a distinctive odour produced by Japanese individuals, it is probable that this was mostly fictive and socially constructed. It has been shown that the olfactory accusations levelled at the Japanese combatants in the Pacific covered a wide array of different features with varying derivations – genetic, dietary or hygiene rituals. Furthermore, encounters with a wide range of overpowering odours are detailed in veterans’ diaries and memoirs (e.g. Sledge 2010; Leckie 2010; Spector 1984; Tregaskis 1943) – from lack of sanitation, or decomposing human remains. This makes it probable that odorant substances emitted by individual combatants would only be detectable at close range. It is claimed, therefore, that the idea of a Japanese odour was fictive. There may not have been an actual ‘ethnic smell’ to detect. Rather, American antipathy towards their enemy was ‘transposed into the olfactory domain’ (Classen et al. 1994: 169) to serve a particular social and personal purpose, as an early warning of proximity and thus a protection against injury and death. The often negative cultural associations of body odour in many societies (Classen et al. 1994) could relate to odours being considered a polluting force which transcend the body’s surfaces in a perturbing way. The inbetweenness of body fluids and odours, as ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas 1966: 41) may be said to create uncomfortable liminality – that includes the disorder created by mutilation in conflict (Snyder 2014). A faith in ‘sniffing’ the enemy could provide a means to resolve that discomfort and disorder (ibid. 4), and transform it into an advantage. Reports of combatants, local guides and scouts ‘sniffing’ out enemy soldiers, could be described as creating a sensory ‘map’ for combatants new to conflict. The Pacific theatre, according to the soldiers who experienced it, was a disorientating combat environment, featuring highly unfamiliar, unpredictable conditions and terrain. Typical sensory modes of sound and sight were often obscured by tunnels, caves, bunkers or darkness; stealth attacks often deliberately obfuscated the senses (Leckie 2010; Sledge 2010; Spector 1984; Tregaskis 1943). For combatants, perceptions of bodily odours thus provided a helpful and comforting way to ‘map’ surroundings, creating structure from confusion. Utilizing the concept of habitus as an adaptive social action (Bourdieu 1985), sense of smell provided a pathway through this new cultural and social domain, transmuting their identities and physical capabilities almost as a superpower. It markedly exaggerated difference and separation between self and enemy, and provided an illusory protective ability, heavily redolent of that enemy’s otherness. The classificatory role of the senses (Beer 2007; Smith 2006; Synnott 1993) was reified by US soldiers, conforming to well-worn frameworks of orientalizing (Said 1978) discrimination and prejudice. Conviction in the distinctiveness of a ‘Japanese smell’ has its origins with widespread prejudice against the Japanese in early to mid-twentieth-century America (Dower 1986). The inferiority, illegitimacy and low moral status of Japanese peoples was claimed to lie not with the army or the political structure, but to be

164  Susannah Callow inalienable corporeal malignancy. The attempt to augment canine abilities to permit ethnic odour detection reflected a belief in a concept of biological ‘race’ – a credence which dominated contemporary America – the general public and many academic circles (Jackson and Weidman 2004). Notably, the Japanese had a similar view of American soldiers, whom, they believed had a strong body odour, leading to frequent comparisons to animals (Dower 1986). A 1944 Japanese magazine describes ‘the breath and body odour of the beast’ as evidence of American savagery (quoted in Dower 1986: 247), and there were possible links also to genetic inferiority, with non-Japanese body odour claimed to be connected to ‘animalistic sexual desires’ (ibid. 219). Equally, the superiority and racial purity of their own population was widely given credence in mid-twentieth-century Japan (Dower 1986). Inferences of sub-humanity, similarly, could have aided US combatants to reduce the moral constraints against killing or injuring their enemy through psychological dehumanization (Callow 2014: 64–9; Kelman 1973: 48–50). These ideas relied upon the divisive nature of odour and its boundarycreating characteristics. The psychological mechanisms which have been encouraged and required for new military recruits throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have trained combatants to think of enemies as different, or ‘other’ (Hale 2004). Many societies have sought to classify human difference as something which lies in the body (e.g. LivingstoneSmith 2011). An immutable sign of ‘otherness’ such as skin colour or odour can be central to cognitive constructions of otherness, and often used as labels. The concept of an inferior immutable ‘essence’ is frequently encouraged by political and ideological propaganda and rhetoric. In conflict, it may be employed as a way to help individuals deal with the responsibility of killing another person – if that person is cast as subhuman they may be outside of the realm of social, moral or ethical concern. The widespread occurrence of dehumanization and its use to ostracize individuals or social groups from moral concern is widely discussed in psychology (Haslam and Loughnan 2014), and is noted by military theorists (see Grossman 1995 for a detailed discussion). Crucially, suppressing the enemy’s humanity reduces moral consideration for their well-being (Harris and Fiske 2006). To this end, the odour itself – even if it only existed in the mind – exacted social and cultural agency. Thus the body can be said to be an agent (Latour 2005), as a material object, which alters perceptions of individuals and their identities. In this situation, it evidently contributed to the construction or remaking of ethnic boundaries (Wimmer 2013). Many Pacific islanders, employed as guides by the US Army, were claimed by the latter to have almost a supernatural ability to ‘sniff out’ the enemy. This adds another layer of the ethnic denigration of a minority people, by suggesting their similarity perhaps to animals, which rely more than humans on their olfactory sense. Several US veterans noted that Pacific island ‘Natives’, often employed as scouts by the US Marines, were particularly talented at ‘smelling Japs’ (Chamberlain 2002; Rogal 2010: 66;

Odour and ethnicity  165 Schallert 1999). Marine Kerry Lane (Lane 2004: 118–19) noted that ‘native’ scouts on Guadalcanal were used ‘like bloodhounds’ to ‘sniff’ Japs. The hunting imagery, discussed in detail by Harrison (2006), associated with the idea of enhanced sensory attributes, and the use of an animal metaphor, implies zoomorphic dehumanization of the scouts, perhaps associated with their ethnicity (Callow 2014: 167–8). This points directly to the cultural repression of the significance of scent (Classen et al. 1994). Individuals could still benefit psychologically from the concept of a ‘Japanese smell’, as a way to increase their chance of survival; however, the ability itself was transferred to their non-American, non-white allies. Thus, odour confirmed the American soldier’s separation from local indigenous populations, and would reaffirm the morality of social hierarchies which placed non-white peoples as subservient. The clear propaganda value obtained from newspaper reports of ‘smelling the enemy’, as described above, blurs the boundaries between ‘race’, ethnicity and corporeality, reified in a militarized and highly pressured cultural context. The homogenizing, essentializing belief in a Japanese ‘smell’ is indicative of the wider negative traits associated with peoples of Japanese descent in much mid-twentieth-century American thought (Spector 1984). This is echoed in official military and civilian pro-war propaganda, and parallels the heavy-handed treatment of Japanese-American civilians under the internment programme. There are also resonances of the lack of trust and respect demonstrated towards many minority groups serving in the US military (McGuire 1993: 99–101; Spector 1984: 391, 405).

Concluding comments US–Japanese engagements in the Pacific were mediated by a network of communicatory structures and conduits, not least through multi-sensory encounters with the body and its odorant qualities. This case study, above all, illustrates the potency and volatility of the intangible olfactory characteristics of the human body, and their significant psychological and political agency in modern conflicts, seized as a source of military advantage. Bodily odours themselves – subjective, transient and unrecorded – were secondary in value next to their political and psychological significance. The socially constructed nature of identity, ethnicity and corporeality, and the psychosocial roles of propaganda in mid-twentieth century conflicts, were situated in the gulf between perception and reality. Complex, significant psychological undercurrents striated these social interactions. ‘Ethnicity is simply a way of aggregating individuals for collective ends which is seized and used by politicians for political advantage’ (Robertson 1997: 269). In the US, that ‘political end’ was shielding the American people from the possibility of defeat, and creating public support for their participation in the conflict. The forced interaction of peoples because of an international conflict reignited American pessimism and

166  Susannah Callow antagonism towards Asian cultures and societies – an increasingly dominant post-war configuration of ‘orientalism’ (Said 1994). Perceptions of this otherness were often embodied, as they had been during the Philippine-American War (1899–1902) (Welch 1974). In the Second World War, they were directed at the enemy body’s pollution and liminality. Immutable odour emitted by a ‘Japanese body’ became a multi-vocal symbol (Turner 1974: 55), representing volatility, animal-like pollution, disgust and femininity. Moreover, such odours were portrayed as a fatal flaw, which could ultimately lead to US victory. Odour became a signifier of personal and cultural inferiority. Amidst psychologically challenging, unstable social environments, there appears to be a focus on identifying embodied ‘otherness’ as a form of sense-making, creating concrete social and moral boundaries. The flexible boundaries of the body and the dangerous ‘pollution’ (Douglas 1966) caused by permeating odours, highlights the potent agency of corporeality in mediating human interactions and influencing psychological constructions of self and other. Notably, the racist fear of an ‘enemy within’ described above – the Nisei – resonates with twenty-first-century media-fuelled social anxiety in Britain and the USA, erroneously conflating religious extremism and violence with ethnicity and immigration. This research confirms the need for anthropologists and archaeologists to consider the contributions of the human body as a material artefact/ actor (Latour 2005), mediating the production of social identities. The embeddedness of corporeality in networks of material agents in contemporary conflicts (Callow 2014) becomes apparent. Odours influenced the creation of ethnic boundaries in contested landscapes, and provided a psychological advantage – through confidence in early detection of the enemy’s presence, and suppression of their humanity, reducing moral concern for their well-being. Historical studies of odour can therefore elucidate aspects of cultures and social interaction in conflict, constructing a complex, theoretically grounded ‘ontology’ of olfaction in a specific cultural context. The composite nature of sensoriality in the Pacific theatre has been explored from a new perspective, providing a deeper and richer interpretation of the entangled ‘webs of significance’ and meaning which ensnare human actors in such landscapes (Geertz 1973: 5). This accompanies the postmodern theoretical rejection of the visual domain as the dominant experiential sense (Howes 2003); the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology are strengthened by a deeper understanding of the transformative power of odour.

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170  Susannah Callow Weckerling, J. (1941) Letter to Lieutenant Colonel C.C. Dunsenbury from Lt Colonel J. Weckerling re Loyalty of JA Soldiers. Accessed Jan. 2014. Weingartner, J. (1992) Trophies of War: US Troops and the Mutilation of Japanese War Dead, 1941–1945. Pacific Historical Review, 61(1): 53–67. Welch, R. E. (1974) American Atrocities in the Philippines: The Indictment and the Response. Pacific Historical Review, 43(2): 233–53. Wexler, R. (1997) Oral History Interview. Accessed Oct. 2014. Wimmer, A. (2013) Ethnic Boundary Making, Institutions, Power, Networks. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Winterton, M. (2012) Signs, Signals and Senses: The Soldier Body in the Trenches. In N. J. Saunders (ed.), Beyond the Dead Horizon: Studies in Modern Conflict Archaeology, pp. 229–41. Oxford: Oxbow Books.

11 Ingestion and digestion on the Western Front Rachel Duffett

The First World War presented the British Army with unprecedented logistical challenges, feeding the millions of men in its ranks was a task for which there had been no preparation. The nutritional problems experienced sixty years before in the Crimea, where more men had been admitted to Scutari Hospital suffering from scurvy than from war injuries, had precipitated a programme of reform of both the content and the delivery of the rations. Whatever the improvements and strategies put in place, the size of the task could not have been anticipated – over 1.8 million soldiers on the Western Front by March 1918. The changes in rationing reflected the nutritional understanding of the period: energy values were all that mattered. The men’s calories – almost 4,200 a day for frontline troops – were frequently delivered without regard to their form; other issues were not part of that equation and taste was always secondary to energy values. It is evident that even the limited variety of meals and foodstuffs described in the ration scales and the official army cook books proved difficult to deliver under the conditions of the conflict. Warfare was not conducive to fine dining for the ranks, although it is probable that, even if the soldiers had been served delicious food daily, it would have lacked the savour it had in peacetime consumption and have been tainted by the general misery of their position. There was little that institutional feeding could do to comfort men who had to endure the conditions of the First World War, but there was much it could offer as a magnet for the men’s dissatisfactions, both the specifically dietary and the more general. The soldiers’ songs, diaries, letters and memoirs are full of complaints about the rations they received from the army. Expectations could be very high and it is difficult to see how those of Private S. T. Eachus, who arrived in France in June 1916, could reasonably have been met in a theatre of war. Eachus was vehemently critical of army food and wrote in his diary, ‘have heard a good deal about German atrocities, but certainly in some respect the British are quite as bad and cruel, for weeks together we have not had a second vegetable, often none at all’ (Eachus, 16 August 1916). Most people, soldiers or civilians, were unlikely to rank the lack of a second vegetable on a par with the ‘Rape of Belgium’, but the bitterness of the grievance indicates the indignation and sense of injustice

172  Rachel Duffett that inadequacies in the ration could trigger in the rankers. The army’s provisioning systems were founded upon the need to fuel the soldiers, whilst for the men eating was experienced as a social and emotional act not merely as a nutritional event. The men’s consumption was more broadly framed than the criteria of those responsible for provisioning, and the high calorie count of a foodstuff did not necessarily make it palatable. The military’s provisioning processes were fixed by the ration scales published by the War Office, but military regulations permitted substitutions and when the specified item was unavailable a replacement was offered. Commonly, the army’s criteria of what constituted a suitable alternative were not those of the rankers. Cavalryman Ben Clouting was less than pleased when he and seven others received a two-day ration consisting of a 56lb cheese, a tin of biscuits and several tins of plum jam (van Emden 1996: 133). Officers, too, were occasionally bemused; Captain J. C. Dunn recorded in his diary in March 1917, ‘a battalion issue of sardines instead of meat is odd’ (Dunn 1987: 302). The disregard for their palates emphasized to the soldiers the salutary fact that they were regarded as bodies that needed to be stoked with calories rather than human beings who were entitled to civilized meals. The men might not always have liked the army food as specified in the ration scales, but they liked it a good deal better than the random mixtures which were all too frequently distributed. A key substitution for the army was that of hardtack biscuit for fresh bread, an alternative which was very unpopular with the men. When it was not an irritant, biscuit was something of a standing joke for many of the rankers. A Bruce Bairnsfather cartoon in the popular ‘Old Bill’ series shows two soldiers crouched round a rather feeble-looking fire; the character’s pal urges him to ‘chuck us the biscuits, Bill. The fire wants mendin’ (Marsay 2000: 34). There were more artistic uses for biscuit, Sergeant M. Herring, through some judicious carving, created a rather fetching picture frame in which to display a memento of his wife and twin children (IWM EPH1513), an unusual kind of trench art (Saunders 2003: 40). The problem of biscuit consumption was one that concerned many rankers. F. E. Noakes thought that the biscuits resembled those given to dogs but were ‘not unpalatable to hungry men with good teeth’ (1952: 50). Unfortunately, hungry men far outnumbered those with good teeth and, at points in the soldiers’ service, when in transit or in lines distant from more varied sources of supply, tins of bully beef and hardtack biscuit were the only food available. Hardtack could be converted into palatable dishes, but it required considerable time, effort and additional ingredients and all of these, unlike the biscuit, were in short supply. The British Army understood that proper feeding was important, not just physically, but also for the men’s morale. The demands of the war meant that the need to concentrate on providing energy superseded other niceties. Commanding officers tried to give their men a good breakfast on the morning of an attack and rum, with its courage-enhancing properties, was often

Ingestion and digestion on the Western Front  173 a key ingredient. The officers were not wholly enthusiastic regarding the provision of a rum ration and one set of Trench Standing Orders states that ‘the issue of rum in the trenches is as a rule undesirable’. The concern was that the difficulties in supervising its distribution meant that all too often it resulted in a few men becoming very drunk, rather than all the men receiving the egg-cupful to which they were entitled. The author of the orders, Major E. B. North, also notes that the issue of rum to sentries was inadvisable as it made them sleepy and ‘unfit for the alert duties of a sentry’. Nevertheless, the orders do grudgingly acknowledge that, if it is considered necessary, and it could be assumed that the hour before an advance would fall into such a category, a morning issue immediately after ‘stand to’ is best (Bull 2008: 83). From the men’s accounts, it seems that bacon was almost as popular as rum in terms of what constituted a cheering breakfast. Unfortunately, shortages probably resulting from the same less than equitable distribution that afflicted the rum ration meant that it was common for soldiers to miss out on the meat. A. W. Green remembered ruefully that, on the morning of the attack in which he was subsequently captured, ‘The bacon didn’t get as far as our platoon’ (Green IWM 12209: introduction). Eric Hiscock reserved most of his criticism for bully beef, which he describes as ‘constipating provender’ (1976: 24). Its high fat and protein, but low fibre content had unpleasant digestive consequences for many men. Constipation was something of an occupational hazard for the rankers in the trenches, and the limited sanitary facilities at the front may have been as much to blame as the restricted diet. Men who found sleeping and eating in close proximity to other men inhibiting were likely to find defecating in a tin in an open trench even more of a challenge. Bell and Valentine point out that one of the key rules of consumption adults learn is that ‘defecation must be separated in time and space from cooking and eating’ (2003: 51). The division of these activities was not easy when men were crowded together in the cramped and exposed conditions found in many front-line areas. All stages of ingestion and digestion had to be shared with other men, and what would in civilian life have been confined to the ‘privy’, or private place, was now made public. Soldiers’ did not generally make reference to their toilet arrangements in their accounts. O. I. Dickson was unusual in that he raised the subject in an oral history interview, ‘the only thing that was disturbing was the latrines. That was the difficulty, great difficulty . . . That was bad’ (interviewed 10 December 1974, Essex). Jonathan Swift described the horrors of defecation: the stench that is the one thing whose power no other thoughts can resist, and in the close confines of the trenches it can be imagined that there was no escape from its reach (Miller 1997: 69; see Dendooven, this volume). Dickson’s comments were made in an aside during his conversation with his interviewer, but it was hardly a subject for letters or for the memoirs of valiant veterans. Latrines were a matter of some importance, however, to the army and their manuals make numerous specific references to their construction and management (see Dendooven, this volume). The provision of proper toilet

174  Rachel Duffett arrangements was easier in the camps where a sanitary policeman was supposed to be appointed to each latrine to ensure that every man covered his excreta with earth (Field Service Pocket Book 1914: 52). A similar specificity is evident in An Officer’s Manual of the Western Front, which make it quite clear that the maintenance of the men’s good health was dependent upon the cleanliness of their sanitary amenities (Bull 2008: 62–3). The detailed requirements that included the provision of latrines and urine tins on a scale at least equal to 2 per cent of the troops seem somewhat at odds with the men’s dark hints and stories of improvised toilet arrangements involving entrenching tools and a forceful hurling of the contents into No Man’s Land. Military commanders could be very demanding regarding sanitary arrangements and energetic in the enforcement of the creation of proper facilities. One such was General Sir Cameron Shute, who was notorious for harrying the men of the Royal Naval Division because of their unconventional habits, the lack of official latrines being one of them. A. P. Herbert was moved to write a satirical poem about ‘that shit Shute’ which begins with the following: The General inspecting the trenches Exclaimed with a horrible shout, ‘I refuse to command a Division Which leaves its excreta about.’ (Kendall 2014: 228) The proximity of shit, the inability to assert the boundaries of normal behaviour, may have facilitated the bonding between men. Intimate bodily functions were no longer hidden behind the facades of normal life and soldiers were stripped bare of the artifices of civilized behaviour, perhaps making them more open and receptive to forming the intense relationships that many veterans remembered. Men, whether in close captivity or in the trenches, were exposed to the fundamentals of life in a way that, for all its horror and disgust, offered the possibility of a deeper connection between them than was usual in the civilian world. Records indicate that the high fat diet was a matter of self-­congratulation for the military, as it was regarded as beneficial in the fight against disease. One Medical Officer wrote in 1919: ‘splendid feeding with plenty of meat and fat [protected the men against] pneumonia and consumption’ (Bosanquet 1996: 459). The pre-war diet of most of the rankers was generally deficient in meat and fat, and a surfeit of it was not necessarily welcomed. Sidney Mintz writes that the American soldiers of the Second World War had ‘never before had so much meat . . . thrust before them’ (1996: 25). The same could be said of these earlier British rankers and the quantity of ‘bully’ (i.e. boiled beef) with which they were presented – they too were ambivalent regarding its pleasures. If the meat ration had been presented as the more familiar bacon or sausages it would have been considerably more welcome. For many rankers, the sudden increase in the quantity of fat and meat in

Ingestion and digestion on the Western Front  175 their diet was too rich, and, as they were not being accustomed to it, such food was not always palatable or digestible. Subsequent knowledge has determined a physiological explanation for the impact the fatty ration had on the men’s gut. Fat is not an easily digested food and the presence of high levels of dietary fat cause the secretion of a hormone which inhibits gastric emptying, in order to allow the prolonged time required for absorption (Eckstein 1980: 53). The soldiers’ high fat intake resulted in a slowing of peristalsis, making constipation common place. Diarrhoea was also common in the trenches, generally due to dysentery or gastroenteritis and even a small increase in the rate of peristalsis results in the malabsorption of nutrients, as the food passes too quickly through the gut – particularly worrying in a diet that was generally short of the necessary vitamins and trace elements. Food poisoning from badly prepared or poor-quality ingredients was frequently the cause of the men’ suffering and the army’s exhortations that meals should be prepared in hygienic conditions do not always appear to have been heeded. The Field Service Pocket Book (1914) stresses that camp kitchens should be kept clean, food protected from dust and flies and refuse disposed of properly. The challenges of cooking on the move suggest it was likely that the practice was far more difficult than the theory suggests and failures in cleanliness were no doubt commonplace. Whatever efforts may have been made in matters of food hygiene, these were frequently undermined by the lack of pure drinking water. An inability to quench the men’s thirst was a problem of which the army was well aware but unable to resolve effectively. Regulations state that all drinking water should be boiled, filtered or treated with chloride of lime in order to avoid outbreaks of cholera, dysentery and enteric fever (ibid. 52–3). Chloride of lime, a bleaching substance, may have purified the water but it also made it undrinkable, ‘even in the hottest weather’ (Halstead 2005: 11 January 1917). The army also suggests that men needed to be trained to exercise restraint in the consumption of the limited water available: it was best to moisten the lips and mouth and drink only small quantities as large draughts could be injurious to the men’s health. One suspects that this concern had its origins in a desire to preserve limited water supplies as much as it did in a determination to ensure the fitness of the soldiers. W. V. Tilsley’s account of his experiences claims that on one especially hot day, when the water supplies had been exhausted, men were reduced to drinking their own urine, or at least wetting their dry lips with it (1931: 11). The regular front-line diet of bully and biscuit exacerbated the problems as the dry and fatty ration relied upon a good supply of water with which to wash it down. Additionally, the high salt content of bully beef added to the men’s thirst. This combination of factors also naturally increased the incidence of constipation. Thirst drove the soldiers to drink from the puddles that formed in the shell-holes around the trenches. Unfortunately, a drop in the water level often revealed that the depressions contained corpses or body parts, and the gastric consequences could prove serious.

176  Rachel Duffett Soldiers’ accounts make numerous references to bouts of sickness or diarrhoea resulting from what they believed to be ‘ptomaine poisoning’, the contemporary term for what would now be called food poisoning. The consumption of tainted food was common, given the general lack of food hygiene, the virtual absence of washing facilities and the propensity of the cooks to use up all food, regardless of its age or condition. Deborah Lupton notes the particular horror associated with acts of poisoning: how the contamination of food and being compelled or tricked into eating a poisonous substance is particularly disgusting or defiling to the person (2007: 322). It might be supposed that to be made ill by army food carried a special bitterness for the ranker. Whether volunteer or conscript, he hardly expected to be poisoned by the institution to which he had entrusted himself. Death on the battlefield, or from festering wounds, was a terrifying but somehow proper end for a fighting man; expiring in the throes of gastroenteritis or salmonella poisoning was not. Poisoning was for the soldiers a fear usually associated with an enemy whom they believed to be sufficiently unsporting to engage in such despicable acts. On the occasions that the front line did advance, it was often accompanied by rumours of the local wells having been poisoned by the fleeing Germans as a final act of revenge.1 It was not only water supplies that were at risk: W. A. Quinton swapped food with German rankers during the 1914 Christmas Truce, but was warned by one of his pals that the chocolate he had received might be poisoned (Quinton IWM 6705: 26). Whatever their source, digestive problems brought a particular type of misery to the men in the trenches. Santanu Das describes the distress caused by the men’s inability to police the ‘boundaries of the body’. The membrane between bodily fluids and trench mud was felt to become permeable, feeding the fear that it was no longer possible to separate inside and outside, the self and the world. It is likely that concerns regarding food and digestion played a key part in such a feeling as, under pressure, whether from poor-quality rations or the impact of fear, the likelihood of involuntary spilling bodily fluids through defecation or vomiting was high (Das 2005: 44–52). The routines of active service are likely to have compounded intestinal upsets. Research indicates that shift workers, who like the rankers have to eat at times that their bodies are urging them to sleep, suffer from far more stomach disorders than other workers, as a result of the strain that a lack of routine inflicts upon their digestive systems (Bennett 1988: 127). Stomach problems are cited in a number of accounts of courts martial which resulted in military executions. Private Thomas Davis defended his absence from sentry duty on the grounds that stomach cramps had forced him to the latrine; he said that he was there for almost two hours and he was about to return to his post when he had a further attack. Robert Browning was executed for sleeping whilst on sentry duty; in his defence he claimed he had ‘recently been much troubled with indigestion and pains in my head’ (Corns and Hughes-Wilson 2005: 137–40). In these cases, defences of diarrhoea

Ingestion and digestion on the Western Front  177 and indigestion were unsuccessful, perhaps because the army, and all of its members, had come to accept intermittent low-level stomach disorders as part of military life. It was not only food and water that affected the digestion; the results of high velocity shelling could turn the strongest stomach. Miller writes in his study of disgust, ‘there are few things that are more unnerving and disgust-­evoking than our partibility’ (1997: 27). The connection between the psyche and the stomach is well documented: ‘stomach disturbances – sometimes called “emotional diarrhoea” . . . were, and still are, noted as among the most common symptoms of anxiety in combat’ (Roper 2000: 194). In ‘Re-remembering the Soldier Hero’, Michael Roper notes the fascination the stomach and its workings exercised over the men, both during and after the war. It is a fascination founded upon the ability of food and the digestive process to provide a physical basis for the manifestation of emotional states. Fear and terror in the trenches could be converted into vomiting and diarrhoea without the assistance of gastroenteritis. Similarly, distress, as well as boredom and monotony, could provoke a hunger that far exceeded the body’s physiological need for food; W. V. Tilsley describes a response to the contents of food parcels that bordered on the compulsive: ‘for half an hour Bradshaw and his chum wolfed grub’ (1931: 148). The circumstances in which they found themselves could cause the rankers to eat for comfort, in a manner recognizable to our twenty-first-century understanding of eating disorders. The consumption of food represented one of the few areas of physical control which remained to some degree within the men’s own determination. In addition to gastric illnesses, the rankers experienced a number of other food-related health problems. A key difficulty for many of the working and lower middle-class recruits was that of poor teeth. The British Army had a history of resistance to the recruitment of dentists, mainly because army surgeons felt that they were capable of dealing with such matters, a view vigorously endorsed at the start of the twentieth century in the medical journal, The Lancet (Godden 1971: 3). A handful of dental surgeons had been engaged by the army after the Boer War, but their impact was restricted by limited funding. The army’s first attempt at dental provision was disbanded in 1908 and care was provided by civilian dental surgeons on a part-time contract basis. When the BEF travelled to France in 1914 not one dentist accompanied them. It was only when General Haig developed excruciating toothache at height of the Battle of Aisne in October of that year that the cost of their absence was realized. Haig was forced to await the arrival of a French dental surgeon from Paris and this experience caused him to contact the War Office and request the recruitment of army dentists for the BEF. Following his intervention, twelve dentists arrived in November and a further eight by the end of 1914 (Godden 1971: 5). While this was better than nothing and the British Army’s dental service continued to grow throughout the war, it always remained at an unsatisfactory level. At its

178  Rachel Duffett peak there was one dentist for every 10,000 men, comparing unfavourably with the Canadian and Americans where the ratio was one for every thousand (Messenger 2005: 422). The matter of teeth was of great significance in an army where so many of the men suffered from the consequences of a lifetime of poor diet and little or no dental attention. Jokes about the state of the nation’s teeth reached the pages of Punch. In August 1914 it published a cartoon of a disgruntled man at a recruiting office protesting to the Medical Officer who has just rejected him because of his rotten teeth: ‘Man, ye’re making a gran’ mistake. I’m no wanting to bite the Germans, I’m wanting to shoot ’em.’ (Punch 2007: 24). In the first months of the war, defective teeth were a major cause of unsuitability for service amongst the men who volunteered for the army. Patriotic dentists across the country stepped forward and offered to treat men for free in order to get them to the standard required by the army. C. J. McCarthy of Grimsby took out an advertisement in the local paper promising gratis treatment to the first twenty-five volunteers rejected because of their teeth that presented themselves at his surgery (Beckett 2006: 12). The extent of tooth decay throughout the working classes caused the army to review its recruitment dental policy and make it less stringent. Whereas previously a minimum number of teeth had been required, this was dropped as grounds for rejection, and from February 1915 onwards, men could be passed ‘fit, subject to dental treatment’ (Godden 1971: 6). If a man’s teeth were in a sufficiently good state to pass the recruitment process, they were still not necessarily sound enough to deal with the density of army biscuit. As noted above, even men with good teeth found it a challenge and for men with bad teeth, it could verge on the torturous. Many soldiers preferred to struggle on and some endured considerable pain rather than seek help; it was widely accepted that a visit to the army dentist could make matters worse rather than better. The pressure of time on dentists, who often saw forty to fifty men in a morning, meant that time-consuming remedial dentistry was rarely employed. Filling teeth was usually rejected in favour of the speedy but drastic option of extraction. Rankers who could no longer bear the pain of rotten teeth often found themselves equally uncomfortable after a dental appointment. C. R. Keller had most of his back teeth pulled to no avail and felt that the pain his teeth subjected him to was quite as bad as those who got a ‘Blighty’ wound in their arm or leg (Keller IWM 11876: 8 December 1916). Dentures were commonplace amongst the men, no doubt as a result of a treatment strategy that relied upon extractions rather than the more timeconsuming fillings. False teeth presented an additional problem in that the loss of a set effectively rendered the soldier useless: the conditions at the front did not permit the creation of a soft diet for toothless men. The consequences of the loss of false teeth were recognized by those in command. Canon J. O. Coop, who served as chaplain with the 4th West Lancashire Brigade of The Royal Field Artillery, wrote home to his wife that one of the men had

Ingestion and digestion on the Western Front  179 a self-inflicted wound and ‘to make more certain [his escape from the front line] he had thrown away his false teeth because he knew that men who lost their teeth were sent to base’ (Coop IWM 1696: 6 October 1915). Of course, dentures made the biscuit even harder to eat and action was required to make it more easily edible. The favourite concoction involved adding biscuit to a tin of boiling water and then pounding and stirring it to a porridge-like consistency, a tin of jam was added just before serving and the result was more or less palatable. Different cultures offered different alternatives and W. V. Tilsley drew attention to what he regarded as a novelty, the manner in which Indian troops ground theirs up to produce ‘tasty pancakes, cleverly made from “dog” biscuits, they called chupattees [sic]’ (1931: 74). In fact the British connection with Indian breads is specified in the cookery section of the Field Service Pocket Book, which provides a recipe for ‘chupatties’. The chief ingredient is ordinary flour not ground biscuit, but one suspects that the instruction to flatten the mixture to the still very thick ¼ inch before frying would have resulted in a rather stodgy result (1914: 51). Difficulties with teeth were exacerbated by the men’s poor rations, specifically the impact of low levels of ascorbic acid; a substance the body does not store in any great quantity and thus needs to consume regularly. Scurvy as a manifestation of a lack of ascorbic acid was widely understood, but scurvy is the third stage of a progressive illness caused by the deficiency. The preceding stages, unrecognized by contemporary medicine, appear to have had a particular relevance for the poorly nourished First World War rankers. Stage two, which generally occurs when ascorbic acid has been deficient in the diet for around six months, results in tissues, especially gums, becoming swollen. Small haemorrhages occur within the swollen tissue and infection frequently sets in, this causes the teeth to loosen and the mouth becomes extremely sore (Eckstein 1980: 193). The frequent references to bad teeth and gums were likely to have been a reflection of the poor army diet, as well as deficient nutrition in civilian life. The lack of understanding of stage two ascorbic acid deficiency meant that it was only when matters worsened into full-blown scurvy, as they did amongst the Indian troops in Mesopotamia in 1915, that the medical services intervened. In a diet where fruit other than jam was virtually unheard of and vegetables other than potatoes, and even those lacking in the latter years of the war, were rare it is likely that many men were suffering from this intermediate, submedical stage of the disease. The impact of a front-line position on a man’s appetite varied; much depended upon the section of the line in which they were based and, of course, the man’s personal reaction to battle conditions. Christopher Haworth remembered that the bombardment had a physical impact on him, but it was not hunger: ‘shelling makes me frightfully thirsty: it always does’ (1968: 127). A biochemical explanation of the impact of fear on digestion indicates its repressive impact on gastric and intestinal secretions (Eckstein 1980: 54). An accompanying lack of oral secretions would explain Howarth’s dry mouth and hence, thirst. Fear could often overwhelm hunger and one

180  Rachel Duffett German soldier described how he had managed to carry hot food up to a trench being shelled on the Somme, but ‘most of the men were so exhausted by the relentless firing that they couldn’t be bothered to eat it’ (Palmer and Wallis 2003: 200). G. L. Raphael’s diary entry for 12 April 1915, reads intriguingly ‘Hell on earth and rations 1 small loaf between 5 men’ (Suffolk Diary). The juxtaposition of terror and food is striking. Raphael was enduring heavy shelling in a front-line trench and, one would suppose, in fear of his life, yet the shortfall in rations is still worthy of an entry in his diary. Raphael’s impetus may have come not so much from the desire for more bread, but from an indignation that his suffering was unacknowledged, as evidenced by the army’s inability to provide him with a decent meal. In general, a quieter sector, without the appetite suppressant of high velocity shells made men hungrier than the more dangerous positions. Norman Gladden recalled, ‘It is surprising how much and how frequently one can eat when there is nothing to do’ (1974: 87). One officer noticed the rankers’ interest in food and wrote home that ‘the terrible monotony of the trenches concentrates all the men’s thoughts and desires on food and drink’ (Bet-El 2003: 110). The tedium was exacerbated by the lack of variety in the rations, the day-to-day monotony of tinned meat and biscuit. Popular representations of trench warfare do not generally include ‘boredom’, a state that it is a world away from the incommensurable horror more conventionally associated with the conflict. It is hard to believe that Gladden’s sense of ennui was to the fore on the occasion he ate a meal under bombardment, in a shallow shell-hole surrounded by corpses. Despite the conditions, his appetite remained keen, although he wrote ‘in retrospect I am surprised at my callousness in thus being able to enjoy a snack in the presence of horrifying death’ (1974: 145).

Acknowledgements The author is grateful to the organizers of the conference and to Manchester University Press for the use of material from The Stomach for Fighting: Food and the Soldiers of the Great War.

Primary Sources Essex Regimental Archive Transcript of interview with O. I. Dickson dated 10 December 1974. Imperial War Museum (online catalogue) Canon J. O. Coop (letters). IWM Documents. 1696. S. T. Eachus (diary). IWM Documents. 11667. A. W. Green (diary). IWM Documents. 12209.

Ingestion and digestion on the Western Front  181 M. Herring, IWM Collections EPH1513 (ephemera). C. R. Keller (memoir). IWM Documents. 11876. W. A. Quinton (memoir). IWM Documents. 6705. Suffolk Regimental Archive G. L. Raphael, GB554/Y1/217 (diary).

Note 1 The Germans certainly did deliberately pollute wells during Operation Alberich – preparatory to their withdrawal to the so-called ‘Hindenburg Line’ in 1917.

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182  Rachel Duffett Mintz, S. (1996) Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Noakes, F. E. (1952) The Distant Drum. Tunbridge Wells: Courier Printing. Palmer, S., and Wallis, S. (eds) (2003) A War in Words: The First World War in Diaries and Letters. London: Simon & Schuster. Punch (2007) Mr Punch’s History of the Great War (2007) Stroud: Nonsuch Publishing. Roper, M. (2000) Re-remembering the Soldier Hero: The Psychic and Social Construction of Memory in Personal Narratives of the Great War. History Workshop Journal, 50: 181–204. Saunders, N. J. (2003) Trench Art: Materialities and Memories of War. Oxford: Berg. Silbey, D. (2005) The British Working Class and Enthusiasm for War 1914–1916. London: Frank Cass. Tilsley, V. W. (1931) Other Ranks. London: Cobden-Sanderson. Van Emden, R. (ed.) (1996) Tickled to Death to Go: Memoirs of a Cavalryman in the First World War. Staplehurst: Spellmount.

12 Trench crap Excremental aspects of the First World War Dominiek Dendooven

This chapter is a brief exploration of a rather smelly zone of seldom-explored First World War history. While such senses as hearing and seeing are fairly well represented in the historiography of the First World War, as well as historiography in general – beyond the First World War – that of smell is not. Despite some exceptions, such as books on the ‘Great Stink’ of London (1858) or sanitation in the nineteenth century in general, smell is often missing from history books. Yet smell is an extremely powerful sense – one that lingers, and which carries childhood memories over many decades. In the acclaimed TV documentary series The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century, Paul Fussell is asked what the trenches were really like. His answer was – ‘The first thing was it smelled bad. It smelled bad because there were open latrines everywhere. There were bodies rotting everywhere. Nothing could be done about them. You could throw a shovel full of quick lime on them to take some of the smell away, but the odor of the trenches was appalling.’1 But there is more. French historian Alain Corbin argued in his groundbreaking work The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination for the gradual banishment of smell from the public sphere in Europe since the eighteenth century (Corbin 1986). Man was not supposed to smell any longer and bad smells were ever more frequently associated with animals. Bad smells became a huge taboo. On the Western Front in the First World War however, soldiers were ‘animalized’: they lived in primitive conditions in trenches and dugouts, literally within the earth. In this context the issue of how to deal with excrement became even more important. The association of crap with all things animal or, more pointedly, bestial, remained strong, as is shown by many examples of antiGerman propaganda. On the other hand, in 1914 huge and fascinating differences in the attitude towards human defecation and more generally towards hygiene were encountered. Hence, it was not impossible in Germany to be given a patriotic piss-pot for Christmas. One nice example, recently acquired by the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres (Figure 12.1) bears the Iron Cross, the date 1914, and refers to ‘War Christmas’. The rim is decorated with the

184  Dominiek Dendooven

Figure 12.1  German chamber-pot, Christmas 1914 ( In Flanders Fields Museum, Ypres, Belgium)

imperial German colours of black, white and red. While such a Christmas gift might point towards a higher level of hygiene amongst German troops, French troops had a fairly bad reputation in this respect. Numerous were the complaints from British units when they had to take over filthy French positions. The well-known diarist Father Van Walleghem, a Roman Catholic priest at Dickebusch, 5 km west of Ypres made similar remarks about the French troops billeted in his parish: The French soldiers we have here are mostly from the south and they are terribly Filthy . . . Filthiest of all the French are when they go to do their necessities. They do not know our kind of toilets. And while some go there, they won’t sit on it, but stand on it and they get the whole place at once into a terrible mess. This is a fashion both with officers as with simple soldiers.2 After 6 January 1915 when the French left Dickebusch and were replaced by British troops, the priest noted the contrast with the British and their developed sense of hygiene. The British soldiers were indeed probably the cleanest of all fighters, as by the time the First World War broke out, the products of William Lever and Thomas Crapper and their peers had found their way into many different strata within British society. A new popular children’s rhyme, mentioned in several Flemish diaries, went: ‘De Fransen eten en smeren, de Engelsen wassen en scheren, de Duitsers vechten als beren en allen zien de meisjes geeren’ (The French eat and smear, the English wash and shave, the Germans fight as bears and all love the girls). The British concern with hygiene is also clear from the Army’s Field Regulations. The Manual of Elementary Military Hygiene of 19123 and reprinted at the outbreak of war, prescribed in detail how to build permanent, semi-permanent and temporary latrines and how excreta should

Trench crap  185 be disposed of. On the march, the handbook insists on ‘the need of sanitary police to control and prevent the casual fouling of the vicinity of halting-places by men who retire to ease themselves’. Urine-pits and shallow latrine-trenches were to be dug as soon as the halting-place was reached. These were to be filled in as soon as the ‘fall in’ was sounded and the spot was expected to be left clean. Despite the absence of designated water closets, latrine accommodation in permanent camps was quite sophisticated. The most important issue was to empty the receptacles and bury the contents at least once daily, well away from the camp site. Again, the regulations stress the enforcement of individual sanitary discipline. Despite the fact that the dampness of the material makes it difficult, burning was considered the ideal mode of disposal, certainly when the amount was excessive. This was usually the case along the Western Front. The layout of a sanitary area in an established camp had an ideal form (Figure 12.2) (Manual 1912). In temporary camps the latrines had to be located some 100 yards from the part occupied by the men and as far as possible from the kitchen. The usual latrine for temporary quarters was a trench with or without a seat surrounded with a canvas screen. Unlike the Germans the British preferred not one long trench but ‘a series of short parallel trenches, across which the user straddles, and directs both solid and liquid excreta into the cavity’. For a group of 500 men, 15 trenches were foreseen. As a rule a trench lasted only one day. When digging the latrine trenches, the sods and excavated

Figure 12.2  Manual of Elementary Military Hygiene, 1912, p. 68 ( In Flanders Fields Museum, Ypres, Belgium)

186  Dominiek Dendooven earth were placed immediately behind the trenches. On the second day, the trenches were filled in with the remaining excavated earth and the second day’s trenches were dug in the interspaces of the first row. On the third day, a row of trenches was dug similar to and parallel with the first row and one foot in front of them. And so on. The canvas screen surrounding the latrines was each second day moved forward. Apart from general concerns regarding hygiene and the prevention of diseases, sanitary regulations potentially had a direct military significance as well. In his report on the defence of Liège and the swift surrender of several of the twelve forts surrounding the town, Belgian general Leman not only blamed the big German shells, but also explicitly the latrines. Most latrines were located in the outer-ditches, or counterscarps, of the forts, and these were destroyed in the very first stages of bombardment, or became inaccessible. The Belgians at least had some sort of patented indoor latrine device but these worked so badly that within two or three days the atmosphere in the entire fort was so poisonous that some garrisons were contemplating surrender on these grounds alone. Most of the garrisons were psychologically shattered after three days bombardment, and General Leman’s report almost mentioned toilet stench more than shelling damage as the causal factor for surrender. Only the Fort of Loncin had more modern toilet facilities inside the central citadel itself. This might help to explain why it was the last of the Liège forts to surrender (on the 15 August 1914) (Leman 1960). The Germans too had regulations regarding the layout and use of latrines. Most German latrines consisted of a one long trench, allowing several men to empty their bowels at the same time. However, as an announcement dated 1 April 1916 makes clear, many German military doctors also advocated the use of individual latrine trenches (Hirschfeld 1930: 199). In the German Army sanitary policing was considered a serious issue. Healthcare education and the propagation of hygiene was a hot topic in Germany just before the First World War, as shown by the organization of the First International Hygiene Exhibition in 1911, and the founding of the (still extant) German Hygiene Museum one year later in the Saxon capital of Dresden. Germans were in general quite outspoken about sanitary issues, including all things lavatorial or even sexual. Belgians in occupied Belgium found it rather shocking to hear how openly and directly the German occupiers spoke about sex, brothels and latrines (De Schaepdrijver 2005: 85). That openness is also reflected in the huge number of photographs and even postcards showing German soldiers on the loo, a depiction rarely, if ever, encountered regarding British troops. Such images were even accompanied by scabrous texts (Figure 12.3), ‘Ein auf dem Kriegsschauplatze im Weltkriege’ (an adventure on the battlefront in the World War) (Hirschfeld 1930: 200). Quoting popular sayings such as ‘zum Reisen braucht man schuhe, zum scheissen braucht man Ruhe’ (to travel one needs shoes, to shit one needs peace) it deals with a common fear

Figure 12.3  ‘Ein Abenteuer auf dem Kriegsschauplatze im Weltkriege’. Plate published on p. 199 of Magnus Hirschfeld’s classic work Sittengeschichte des Weltkrieges (1930) ( In Flanders Fields Museum, Ypres, Belgium)

188  Dominiek Dendooven among soldiers at the front line, during the First World War as today, and on all sides – of being shelled during a visit to the latrine. While browsing the internet when researching this chapter I came across a quote by an American serviceman in 2004: ‘The biggest fear was getting killed by a shell while sitting on the shitter. “Im sorry to inform you Ma’am, but your husband died honorably for his country . . . sitting on a shitter!”’4 And this brings us back to the reality of the trenches: all sanitary regulations were theory and were only practicable as such behind the front line. In the trenches where thousands of men lived together in very confined space and in uncomfortable circumstances, it was all together a different matter and sanitary conditions depended heavily on the particular situation on that place at that time. The German photographed by a comrade in a muddy trench near Ypres in May 1915 (Figure 12.4) was probably using a simple bucket.5 Despite the man’s smile at being caught in the act, this picture that was published in an official souvenir book reveals the complete lack of privacy in the trenches. But even there, the armies paid a great deal of attention to their latrines. They were well aware that if human waste was not disposed of properly, unnecessary casualties through avoidable diseases would follow. The average man produces 2.4 pounds’ weight of faeces and urine per day. In the

Figure 12.4  From the 1914–15 souvenir book of Reserve-Infanterie-Regiment 236 ( In Flanders Fields Museum, Ypres, Belgium)

Trench crap  189 average company-defended position this is one ton a week, over a frontage of about 200 yards (Corrigan 2003: 85). Trench latrines usually consisted of pits dug to a depth of 4–6 feet and approached by a short trench to the rear of the line. A sketch from the 1/6th London Field Ambulance on trench latrines and urinals corresponds more or less with the situation as it was established at Yorkshire Trench, north of Ypres (National Archives WO 95/2725/2)6 – a short trench at the back of one of the traverses lead to the latrines, as was discovered during archaeological excavations of this site more than a decade ago. In the case of a front-line trench, latrines could even be built in an advanced position, presumably to discourage any inclination to linger. On many occasions, and especially in the flat landscape of Flanders where the high water table and the clay made digging deep pits difficult, buckets or other receptacles were used. Similarly shell holes could become de facto toilets. In any event, these latrines exuded an all-pervading smell which came to be firmly associated with trench warfare in the minds of veterans. Because of the smell, many officers and some soldiers chose to go out into No Man’s Land with a spade after dark. It was wise if taking this option to first warn the sentries that you were doing so, to avoid being accidently shot as you crept back. Battalions leaving the line were tasked with filling in their own latrines and preparing fresh pits for the incoming relieving force. Buckets or other receptacles would be emptied at least on a daily basis. Each company would typically assign two men to sanitary duties. The men charged with this much-despised task were called the ‘goo-wallahs’ or ‘shit wallahs’ by their comrades in arms. It would be their responsibility to maintain latrines in good order. Inevitably given the widespread distaste for the job, it would often be men punished for breaches of the army code who were assigned sanitary duty. Aside from the inevitable smell associated with faeces, the area of the latrine was heavily dosed with quick-lime: the combined smell was powerful (and repulsive). Men seldom spent much time visiting the local latrine. Not only was the smell deemed offensive but it was also considered a dangerous place to linger. Enemy forces would often detect increased activity in such sites and subject the area to artillery bombardment.7 These trench latrines now seem to offer unexpected opportunities to researchers. The abstract of a recently published article in the Journal of Parasitology, ‘First World War German Soldier Intestinal Worms: An Original Study of a Trench Latrine in France’ reads: Microscopic examination of sediment samples revealed the presence of 3 common human parasites, i.e., Trichuris trichiura, Ascaris lumbricoides, and Taenia sp. A review of paleoparasitological studies in Europe shows that these 3 parasites have infected humanity for centuries. Despite this recurrence, literature shows that knowledge regarding many helminths was limited, . . .  (Le Bailly et al. 2012: 1273)

190  Dominiek Dendooven

Figure 12.5  British standard issue latrine bucket ( In Flanders Fields Museum, Ypres, Belgium)

Standard issue latrine buckets (Figure 12.5) were fairly well made for the purpose: stable and deep. Apart from the normal use, latrine buckets could occasionally be used for different purposes. Belgian nurse Jane de Launoy recollects in her war diary how she saw the buckets being used to transport coffee and how her Scottish friend and colleague Georgiana Fyfe told her of having eaten excellent French fries, prepared in an enamel piss-pot (de Launoy 2000: 113–14). On the other hand, when proper latrine buckets were lacking or lost, all kinds of receptacles could be used, even biscuit tins and helmets. The German steel helmet especially seems to have been a popular device for such use. Not only did the helmet provide the highest capacity, but it also offered the Allied soldier the possibility of performing the highly symbolic act of emptying his bowels in a quintessential German object. This symbolic and yet practical use of the steel helmet persisted even after the war had ended. German steel helmets were sometimes salvaged by farmers and turned into shovels to empty cesspools and dunghills (and see Gygi 2009). And this brings us neatly to the symbolic and metaphorical use of faeces in propaganda and speech. In Flemish soldiers’ slang from the First World War going to the loo became ‘zijn batterie opstellen’ (bringing one’s battery into position) and the act itself became ‘naar Willem gaan telefoneren’ (phoning William [the German emperor]) or ‘een brief naar Willem sturen’ (sending a letter to William). The similarity between the German steel helmet and a piss-pot gave rise to the use of the word ‘jerries’ for a latrine bucket in English soldiers’ slang (De Bruyne 1994: 338). The German soldiers’ slang the word ‘latrine’ became a synonym for gossip as the multi-seater field latrine was the place to share communications and rumours, true or not (Komrij 2008: 211).

Trench crap  191 There was more than slang however. Juliette Courmont has demonstrated in her 2010 book L’odeur de l’ennemi 1914–1918 (The Smell of the Foe) how in France the idea was common that the Germans spread a revolting smell. This permeated the spaces they occupied, even beyond the defecation with which they seemed to mark their presence. Indeed, accounts of how German troops had covered rooms they had occupied with faeces were common, especially during the invasion of Belgium and Northern France (Audoin-Rouzeau 2008: 116). This belief in the Germans giving off ghastly smells was not just a peripheral phenomenon expressed by French popular propaganda. Private journals, letters and press articles testify to a more established belief in a distinctive German odour. It was a deep-rooted prejudice that even tempted men of science. Doctor Edgar Bérillon explained the terrible smell of the Germans as the result of an absence of emotional restraint, which caused excessive perspiration. According to this well-known medical authority, this was a racial characteristic that illustrated the bestial nature of the adversary. Indeed, Bérillon went so far as to develop a racial theory to support his original dubious hypothesis, a scientific practice all too common throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Due to lack of research into this subject, it remains an open question whether similar beliefs concerning the bad smell of the foe were common in other Allied countries or in Germany, and if racial theories such as that of Dr Bérillon were developed outside France. Nevertheless, only in French propaganda was a clear connection between Germans and crap expressed so often, so explicitly and so crudely. A major source of fun in France and a rewarding propaganda subject was the introduction in Germany, quite early in the war – at least from February 1915 onwards – of special war bread, designated KK Brot: an abbreviation of Kriegs-Kartoffel-Brot or war potato bread, i.e. bread made with potato flour. Coincidentally, caca happens to be the most common French word for faeces. The result was an endless flood of postcards making fun of the Germans eating human excrement (Figure 12.6). Other postcards plainly compare the Germans with pieces of shit (Figure 12.7). Some postcards and other novel items were a little more subtle. One such dates from the first year of the war and stems from the German Chancellor’s notorious description of the treaty guaranteeing Belgian neutrality as a scrap of paper. Kaiser Wilhelm, after having eaten too much iron, is in urgent need (of defecating) and asks his general for a scrap of paper. Only the treaty on the neutrality of Belgium is available. ‘A scrap of paper’ is also what was written on a roll of British toilet paper featuring an image of the German emperor. (IWM EPH 5245). In somewhat less subtle tones, Kaiser Wilhelm also appears on an advertisement for ‘antiprussophile and hygienic paper’, sold in France in 1915. Wilhelm sticks out his tongue and asks for his ‘dessert of 11 August’, which may or may not refer to the date France declared war on the Habsburg Empire. The purported brand-name Papier A.Q. is a pun: A.Q. is pronounced in French similarly as ‘à cul’, ‘for arse’ (IWM Art.IWM PST 1534).

Figure 12.6  French postcard ‘I work for the German people. With this his bread is made’ ( In Flanders Fields Museum, Ypres, Belgium)

Figure 12.7  French postcard ‘Whatever his smell, it brings good luck. Crush without fear this dirty bore’ where the French expression sale emmerdeur (dirty bore) contains the word merde (shit) ( In Flanders Fields Museum, Ypres, Belgium)

Trench crap  193 Similar items were to be found in Germany. A booklet was produced entitled in the imperial German colours, The Lying Communications of our Foes – Best German Toilet Paper. It contained sixty pages of tearable paper with on each sheet a press communiqué from London or Paris reporting on the course of the war. It was intended for use by the German soldiers in the field (Komrij 2008: 225). There is an equivalent here of the word ‘bumf’ or ‘bum fodder’ in British soldiers’ slang. This was usually used for toilet paper – also called ‘six by four’ as the officially prescribed dimensions were 6 × 4 inches – but bum fodder could also indicate all kinds of written instructions, memoranda and other official papers (De Bruyne 1994: 338–9). One can conclude that human defecation was and is a major taboo, even more so than sex. This is not less so in historiography. There is no glory to be had from disposing of human waste, something well understood by English singer-songwriter Robb Johnson. In his 1997 song-cycle Gentle Men, he commemorated his two grandfathers, both veterans of the First World War. As a bandsman in the territorials, his paternal grandfather Ernest Johnson was ordered to pack his instrument away until ceremonial occasions required and was drafted into the 6th London Field Ambulance, RAMC. The unit’s diary for 19 August 1915 reads ‘By command, the band of this unit proceeded to St. Omer at 12.30 p.m. to play for the Brigade of Guards at the revue held by Lord Kitchener’. A fortnight earlier, on 3 August 1915, the same men performed an altogether very different task: ‘Experiments have been conducted during the past week with a view to inventing an incinerator for burning excreta’.8 War might be glory, but it’s also a question of what to do with all that shit. You’re taught to cut away the uniform and clean the wound of mud you learn that underneath the uniform all there is is flesh and blood But if your children ask you: ‘Daddy, What did you do?’ Tell them: ‘I played for Kitchener, And the red, white and blue.’ I learned a lot of words for ‘mother’ Punjabi and Urdu, And my first German Called for his mother, too. And if they ask you for some glory You just say you did your bit, When the latrines were overflowing It was us that burned the shit. (Robb Johnson, ‘I Played for Kitchener’, 1997)

194  Dominiek Dendooven

Primary Sources: Kew, National Archives WO 95/2725/2 London, Imperial War Museum IWM Art.IWM PST 1534 IWM EPH 5245 Sound Archive 528: Webb, Percy (British NCO; served as machine gunner with 7th Bn Dorsetshire Regt in GB, 1915–16; served with 6th Bn Dorsetshire Regt on Western Front, 1917–18)

Ypres, In Flanders Fields Museum, Research Centre Diary Achiel Van Walleghem 1914–1915. Reserve Infanterie Regiment 236. Leipzig, n.d. 55 pp.

Notes 1 (Dec. 2014). 2 In Flanders Fields Museum, Achiel Van Walleghem diary entries for 24 Nov. 1914 and 6 Jan. 1915. 3 The one I consulted bears the stamp of 1st Field Company of the 2/1 East Lancs Royal Engineers, dated 2 July 1915. 4 (Dec. 2014). 5 In Flanders Fields Museum, 1914–1915. Reserve Infanterie Regiment 236. 6 Sketch published in Chielens and Johnson 1997. 7 (September 2013) and IWM, Sound Archive, Webb, Percy, in an interview of 20 Mar. 1975; Corrigan, 2003: 134. 8 National Archives, WO 95/2725/2.

References Audoin-Rouzeau, S. (2008) Combattre. Paris: Le Seuil. Chielens, P., and Johnson, R. (1997). Gentle Men. Zonnebeke: Vredesconcerten Passendale. Corbin, A. (1986) The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Corrigan, G. (2003) Mud, Blood and Poppycock. London: Cassell. Courmont, J. (2010) L’odeur de l’ennemi. Paris: Armand Colin. De Bruyne, T. (1994) Soldatentaal 1914–1918. Aartrijke: Uitgeverij Emiel Decock. de Launoy, J. (2000) Oorlogsverpleegsters in bevolen dienst: 1914–1918. Gent: Snoeck. De Schaepdrijver, S. (2005) An Outsider ‘Inside’: The Occupation Diary of Georges Eekhoud. In S. Jaumain, M. Amara, B. Majerus and A. Vrints (eds) Une guerre totale? La Belgique dans la Première Guerre mondiale. Nouvelles tendances de la recherche historique, pp. 79–95. Brussels: Algemeen Rijksarchief.

Trench crap  195 Gygi, F. (2009) Shaping Matter, Memories and Mentalities: The German Steel Helmet from Artefact to Afterlife. In N. J. Saunders and P. Cornish (eds), Contested Objects: Material Memories of the Great War, pp. 27–44. London: Routledge. Hirschfeld, M. (1930) Sittengeschichte des Weltkrieges. Leipzig and Vienna: Verlag für Sexualwissenschaft Schneider & Co. Johnson, R. (1997) Gentle Men. Studio album by Roy Bailey, Robb Johnson, Vera Coomans, Koen De Cauter and the Golden Serenaders. IRR 030, 1997. Komrij, G. (2008) Kakafonie oftewel encyclopedie van de stront. Amsterdam: Ulysses. Le Bailly, M., Landolt, M., and Bouchet, F. (2012) First World War German Soldier Intestinal Worms: An Original Study of a Trench Latrine in France. Journal of Parasitology, 98(6): 1273–5. Leman, G. (1960) Le Rapport du général Leman sur la défense de Liège en août 1914. Brussels: Académie royale des sciences, des lettres et des beaux-arts de Belgique. Manual of Elementary Military Hygiene (1912) London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office.

13 Sense and sensibility The power of print in post-war recuperation Jeffrey S. Reznick

In February, 1919, Corporal Sydney Flower of the United States Base Hospital, Camp Merritt, New Jersey, introduced readers to the new magazine he had begun to edit for his institution: ‘Mess-Kit’, he wrote, is ‘written by the enlisted man for the enlisted man. . . . [It] is . . . his voice’. Flower continued: This magazine, belongs first to the Khaki [Army] and the Serge [Navy]; afterwards to humanity generally, and particularly to patriotic humanity. Its field is very wide; its contents are varied; its uses many. In this number . . . you will find Cup, Plate, Knife, Fork, Spoon, and a good meal, for the small sum of One Dime, served with some little attention to the picturesque. You have only to draw up your chair. You are welcome. Just as Flower’s welcome held contemporary importance, inviting war-weary readers to explore The Mess-Kit, it holds historical value as it entices scholars to examine the phenomenon of conflict-related material culture known as inhouse magazines – or ‘house organs’ – published between 1918 and 1919 by dozens of US Army military hospitals and associated facilities located across the country.1 Endorsed by the Surgeon General’s Office and taking up the latest features of contemporary print culture, these magazines were brought to life by editors who playfully interwove varieties of cartoons, embellishments, photographs and texts, and by wounded soldiers and military staff who contributed articles, jokes, poems, illustrations and other material. Columns such as ‘Ward Gossip’, ‘Funny-isms’, ‘Nurses Department’ and ‘Recreation News’ informed and entertained readers and encouraged them to participate in the social life and programmes of the hospital camp. Profiles of charitable organizations such as the Jewish Welfare Board, Knights of Columbus, Salvation Army and Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) described how recreational activities were as integral to hospital life as medicine and surgery. Advertisements from local businesses showed the support that army hospitals received from surrounding communities and offered windows onto the commercial and civic life of the towns where

Sense and sensibility: the power of print   197 soldier-patients spent time while on leave from their institutional confines. Purchased by readers, these magazines helped to support hospital activities, and in many instances a portion of the publication revenues funded recreation programmes for soldier-patients and staff. Production and consumption of the magazines also served as ‘safety valves’, helping to relieve the stress experienced by front-line soldiers and their caregivers, distracting from bullet, shell and bayonet wounds, as well as influenza2 and other infectious diseases, gas exposure, gangrene and shell shock. This chapter examines the complexity of these publications – their individual histories, overlapping development, and varied textual, visual and physical forms – to demonstrate how they are a rich resource for revealing more completely the American experience of the Great War. It does so by focusing on selected key themes, showing how they reflect the multi-sensory experiences of American soldier-patients and their military and voluntary-aid caregivers. It also deals with them materially, by focusing on the sensory aspects of their physical creation and development, conveying how contemporaries understood these publications to be a means in themselves to rehabilitate wounded men and to help these men reconnect to the home front.3 The subject matter here, therefore, intersects with varied aspects of the anthropology of the senses dealt with throughout this volume, and extends previous critical research (e.g. Classen 2005; Das 2005; Howes 1991, 2006; Scarry 1985; Seremetakis 1994; Smith 2008, 2015; Towheed and King 2015).

Rest and recovery Hospital magazines registered the multi-sensory experiences of sick and wounded American soldiers in a multiplicity of ways. Among the most prominent experiences to appear were those associated with the contemporary influenza pandemic and the quarantines imposed by authorities to help limit its spread. Accounts in hospital magazines testified to the impact of the flu on all five senses, as well as the senses of balance and temperature. As J. P. McEvoy, a soldier-patient recovering at US Army General Hospital Number 18, Waynesville, North Carolina, captured vividly in his poem ‘The Flu’: When your back is broke and your eyes are blurred, And your shin bones knock and your tongue is furred, And your tonsils squeak and your hair gets dry, And your doggone sure that you’re going to die, But you’re skeered you won’t and afraid you will,

198  Jeffrey S. Reznick Just drag to bed and have your chill, And pray the Lord to see you through, For you’ve got the Flu, boy, You’ve got the Flu . . . When your toes curl up and your belt goes flat, And you’re twice as mean as a Thomas cat, And life is a long and dismal curse, And your food all tastes like a hard boiled hearse; When your lattice aches and your head’s a-buzz, And nothing is as it ever was, Here are my sad regrets to you – You’ve got the Flu, boy, You’ve got the Flu. What is it like, this Spanish Flu? Ask me, brother, for I’ve been through, It is by Misery out of Despair; It thins your blood and braves your hair; It thins your blood and braves your bones, And fills your craw with moans and groans, And sometimes, maybe, you get well. Some call it Flu – I call it hell!!4 Accounts of the communal impact of the influenza pandemic similarly evoked the sensory impact among soldier-patients, hospital staff and volunteers. Spread of the disease triggered limits on the provision of various kinds of activities. Authorities intended these activities to appeal positively to the senses and to help maintain discipline and order in and around the institution. Among the precautions introduced by authorities at US Army General Hospital Number 18 were bans on musical concerts and ‘movingpicture shows’, activities which denied soldiers the sights and sounds of entertainment. As readers learned: The Red Cross moving picture shows were to have begun last Monday night and held for three nights in the week, but, by order of the Commanding Officer, these shows were indefinitely postponed on account of the influenza situation. It is hoped that conditions will soon become normal again.5

Sense and sensibility: the power of print   199 At the same institution, the pandemic also ‘interfered with the work of the YMCA . . . in that it has stopped the ‘movies’ which had become one of the chief amusements of the men’. Just as sights and sounds denied became the focus of some hospital magazine content, so too did taste and smell as the pandemic prompted hospital authorities to ban communal meals. Despite such bans – and in many cases due to them – ridicule of hospital food by soldier-patients grew unabated as they recalibrated their senses to the circumstances at hand. ‘On account of the present Influenza Epidemic in town’, reported the Plattsburgh Reflex of US Army General Hospital Number 30, ‘the men at this post are forbidden to eat in restaurants. As General Mess is the only alternative it has been predicted that all of our ailments will not be due to Influenza’.6 In his poem entitled ‘You Get an Orderly’, Lieutenant John Pierre Roche offered his own perspective on the pandemic, infused with observations of sensory experiences that were denied, heightened and humorously confused by the symptoms of the flu: Before I fell a victim To the wiles of Spanish ‘flu’ I’d gathered from the posters And certain movies, too, That when it came to nurses You always woke to view Some peach from ‘Ziegfeld’s Follies’ Who slipped the pills to you. I’ve read the artful fiction About the angels fair Who sat beside your pillow And stroked your fevered hair And made you kind of careless How long you lingered there In the radiant effulgence Of a lovely baby stare. That may be true in cases, The way it is in plays, But mine was no white lady Of lilting roundelays; For while I was a blessé The nurse who met my gaze Was Private Pete Koszolski, Who hadn’t shaved for days.7 Also due to the influenza pandemic, hospital authorities banned a variety of physical activities involving soldier-patients, hospital staff and volunteers, which included dances, games and gathering together to write letters

200  Jeffrey S. Reznick to loved ones. Curtailing experiences of touch, sound and sight, these bans themselves became subjects of ridicule in hospital magazines, and such ridicule often addressed sensory limitation, modification and deprivation. Alluding to the requirement that faces be covered in and around US General Hospital Number 18, one anonymous contributor to its magazine Bombproof joked: ‘The masks make kissing perfectly sanitary’. And referencing the restrictions on gatherings in public spaces, the institution’s YMCA facility nonetheless remained a ‘little home’ that was ‘still open to supply the men with stamps, stationery, books and magazines’. However, ‘the rule is: “Get your supply and keep moving”.’ As readers of Bombproof learned further, gratefulness and appreciation – indeed productive rest and recovery – could be hallmarks of the hospital, despite the flu pandemic denying some sensory experiences: Life without disappointment might appear to be dreamy, abstract and unreal. The large tent that was designed for the Y. M. C. A. has been used as an emergency for cases of influenza. Thus where we hoped to have joy, pleasure and happiness, is sorrow pain and sadness. But let us look for the silver lining in the cloud. Perhaps we have grumbled at this and that when we should have been commending. Have we been ungrateful when we should have been thankful? However, it may be, when influenza has written its record in U. S. A. General Hospital, No. 18, and the quarantine is lifted, we will be grateful and more appreciative of the blessings of life.8

Reconnecting and recreation As the influenza pandemic subsided, authorities lifted quarantines and hospitals returned to regular schedules of community activities intended to connect men to each other and to reconnect them to life on the home front. Sensory experiences previously denied or modified emerged anew. Hospital magazines exemplified this change in a variety of contexts, including information about music and musical performances, about visually reading books and hearing books recited, and about the spirit and taste of a relatively new American food and the traditional American feast of Thanksgiving. Music – listening to it, physically performing it, and seeing it performed – was a therapeutic activity which in some instances soothed the auditory sense of soldier-patients and in other instances assaulted it. The ‘main object’ of the jazz orchestra of US Army General Hospital Number 30 was to ‘cheer the boys and relieve the incessant monotony of camp life’. In fact, the orchestra ‘originated during the quarantine’ and first appeared at the hospital’s Armistice Celebration, ‘where it received a hearty welcome’. Moreover, since the Armistice, it became ‘permanently engaged to furnish the music for the Officers’ Dances, the N. C. O’.s Dances; the dances to be held by the Nurses; and at the games of our Athletic teams’.9 Appreciation

Sense and sensibility: the power of print   201 of music was also apparent at Army Hospital Number 17, Markleton, Pennsylvania, where: Mr. D. E. Stout, of Connellsville, has become the personal friend of several of the men at this post. He came here some time ago, and assisted a group of the men to put on a minstrel for the Liberty Day celebration. He is an old hand at the game, and the boys took to ‘Father’ as they called him. The minstrel was a success. After the ‘Flu’ epidemic was over, Mr. Stout, invited the men to come to Connellsville and repeat the performance. All of the proceeds, after the expenses were paid, to go to the amusement fund of the Hospital. The men decided to rehearse and give the show here on Thanksgiving evening and then go to Connellsville.10 The prolific and popular writer Berton Braley offered his own positive view of music in his poem ‘Around the Fire’, which the editors at US General Hospital Number 18, Waynesville, North Carolina, deemed appropriate to reprint in Bombproof, given the prevalence of music in the lives of soldiers generally and especially during their time recovering from illness and injury: When we’ve finished washing the plates of tin, When the darkness falls and the gang comes in, That’s the time when the tales and the talk begin, In the circle about the fire; The talk of the way the day was spent, Of the things we did and the roads we went, Of pleasant ventures that brought content And sated the heart’s desire. The pipes are lighted, the fellows sit Or sprawl about as the shadows flit, And there is freedom of thought and wit Till the light of the embers dims; And then comes singing – from foolish tunes Of ‘pretty maidens’ and ‘kindly moons’, To old, old songs like your mother croons, Soft lullabies – or hymns. The night breeze rustles the leaves above, And we talk of the things we are fondest of, The men we like and the girls we love, Who make life worth the fight. Till the ash grays over the glowing coals And the spirit of drowsiness controls, And each man into his blanket rolls, With a sleepy word, ‘Good-night!’11

202  Jeffrey S. Reznick While Braley’s poem offered a romantic view of music pleasuring the senses, other content in hospital magazines presented a more realistic view of music in and around the institution, where it could be irritating noise deserving of mockery. Such was Private Henry Goldstein’s view of ‘That Dippy Jazz Band’, involving ‘some banjo player’ that played alongside others in a chaotic scene at Camp Merritt, New Jersey (Figure 13.1). Similarly, as a writer observed in Over Here, the magazine of US Army General Hospital Number 3, ‘The band in Barrack 4 is doing well – in fact it is doing better than the neighbors’. Readers learned further about the eclectic mix of personalities and instruments that combined to create the chaos: Charley Richter leads with the violin; he is accompanied by Whitey Inglefritz, who does the Hula Hula; Mark Calhoun, who plays the flute; and Louis Scherer, the champion jazz drummer who, thus far, has been obliged to do his drumming on a chair. Then there is Al Heisler, who is a sort of all-round assistant.12 The activities of reading and listening to librarians and others reading books and magazines were also sensory-rich experiences conveyed by hospital magazines. Leading this aspect of hospital life was the Library

Figure 13.1  Henry Goldstein, ‘Observations at Jewish Welfare Building, “That Dippy Jazz Band”. The Mess Kit 1(6) (August 1919), 20–1 (Image  and courtesy US National Library of Medicine)

Sense and sensibility: the power of print   203 War Service of the American Library Association which, according to the official wartime history of the US Army medical department, not only ‘provided for free distribution of library books to both duty personnel and patients’ but also ‘expert administration or supervision . . . by trained librarians’. Moreover, ‘in reconstruction hospitals’ the initiative ‘strongly supported educational work by supplying every technical book for which patients demonstrated a real need’.13 Sight, touch, and sound inhabited this programme, as accounts in hospital and related magazines plainly reveal. The editors of The Plattsburg Reflex observed that their institution’s library ‘included comfortable wicker rockers and easy arm chairs, lending a cheering-inviting aspect’ to the space. ‘Come in and try them’, they concluded, and ‘make use of the hospital library – it is yours’.14 The editors of Over Here pointed out to their readers that a variety of donations of library furnishings, including ‘wicker furniture and cushions presented by the Mercy Committee of New Jersey, and the table runners given by Mrs. Freeman’ help to ‘make the library very comfortable for the many convalescent soldiers who spend much of their time there’.15 Similarly evocative of sensory experience was the description of the information-rich library environment – and equally informative librarian – of US Army General Hospital Number 3, from an article in Over Here titled ‘What the soldiers reads’: A day spent in a library, listening to the many questions asked the librarian, is enlightening. One gets the impression that a librarian is a walking encyclopedia. ‘Where is the Province of Tegucigalpa?’ ‘What style of wiring is used in the motor in the mining locomotive manufactured by the General Electric Company?’ ‘I want a book on etiquette: I got a girl now’ . . . These are typical of the questions a librarian is called upon every day to answer.16 The librarian at US General Hospital Number 18 offered her soldierpatrons a comparable depth and breadth of printed and illustrated to read – indeed see – and hold in their hands to gain ‘practical help [in] starting . . . various shop occupations’, to ‘brush up on their pre war jobs’, and simply to help pass the time. As the institutions magazine Bombproof explained: As fast as men return from camps and from overseas, building and other normal activities will be resumed and carpenters and builders will be needed. There are many books at the Hospital Library useful to men who are going into this work. Griffith’s Carpentry and Townsend’s Carpentry and Joinery are handy volumes, practical and well illustrated . . . There are special books there also, on building, on plumbing, architecture, decorating, concrete construction, painting and other building trades. The Library offers, too, books with no

204  Jeffrey S. Reznick pretense at usefulness except to amuse as for instance, books of cartoons and other kinds of humor. ‘That Rookie from the 13th Squad’ is an old acquaintance to many, as are also the cartoons of W. E. Hill, illustrator for the New York Tribune . . . Visit the Library and make your own selection, or let the Library come to you.17 Humorous views of both hospital librarians and libraries counterbalanced such formal editorial perspectives. ‘Davis was in the library, reading – and scratching his head’, readers of Over Here learned from a short article cleverly titled ‘Sounds Plausible’. ‘The Librarian watched him quite a while and then asked, “Davis, why do you scratch your head?” “Because”, said Davis, “I’m the only one who knows where it itches”.’ 18 And from another article in the same magazine, readers learned about a distinctive electric desk lamp, and appreciation of its utilitarian value by the resident librarian, Miss Martin, who ‘was elated the other day when a friend donated’ it. ‘The first patient who visited the Library that day said, “Gee, it’s just like a drugstore lamp.” The next one said. “Reminds me of a police station”. Nevertheless the Librarian likes the lamp.’19

Thanksgiving, and doughnuts No other activity drew out so distinctly the multi-sensory experiences of soldier-patients than eating, indeed the acts of smelling, tasting and touching food, not merely every day but especially during the holiday season and periods of rest that featured doughnuts provided by volunteers of the Salvation Army. The smells and tastes of a traditional menu, the sounds of conversation and celebration, and the sights of decoration punctuated these occasions, as this account of Thanksgiving 1918, by the editors of Bombproof, playfully reveals: When Sergeant Glumm hopped out in the rain and blew the ‘get-upp’ whistle early Thursday morning, it looked like Thanksgiving day was going to be a good day for ducks but before half the morning was spent old Sol appeared over the top of the mountains and turned the tables. Thus proved a bad day for ducks and turkeys, too. There were many rumors and much talk about what a big turkey dinner there was to be, but when the hungry mob in single column entered the mess hall, saw the beautiful decorations and the long inviting tables spread, heard the swaying music of a ten-piece orchestra and smelled the tempting odors of the feast, the affair proved to be far beyond expectations . . . Especially appreciated was the orchestra, which was ‘comprised of patients and musicians’ and ‘gave a continuous concert of good snappy numbers that pleased’.

Sense and sensibility: the power of print   205 But no feature of the occasion was more beloved than the sight and smell of the traditional menu, which included ‘oyster soup, crackers, turkey and dressing, giblet sauce, baked corn, candied sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, celery, olives, jelly, plum pudding, ice cream, coffee, nuts and fruit’.20 Leadership of the hospital subsequently conveyed their thanks for the taste of the meal, and the sounds of that festive day, acknowledging the sensory richness of the occasion: Boys in the army like good eats, and we had everything that goes with a perfect and complete Thanksgiving dinner, and the only thing we heard was an occasional ‘I’m too full’ but of course, the management wasn’t responsible for that end of it. True, the pomp and display, and we may add the music, were absent − but soldiers don’t eat music and display, and no doubt they would have only distracted us and made us enjoy our feast less. Also, we must not forget the kindness of the Red Cross for their contribution of cigars and cigarettes which made us feel like a millionaire after our home-like dinner.21 Similarly, the editors of Star Shell thanked one particular friend of the hospital, Mr George W. C. Drexel, for supporting that institution’s Thanksgiving

Figure 13.2–4  (continued)

(continued)

Figure 13.2–4  Clockwise from left. The Mess Kit. Salvation Army Number 1(7) (September 1919); ‘Life Preservers of the A.E.F.’ and ‘Salvation Lassie O’Mine’, in The Mess Kit. Salvation Army Number 1(7) (September 1919), 17 and 23, respectively (Images © and courtesy US National Library of Medicine)

Sense and sensibility: the power of print   207 meal by providing the sound of music through ‘more than a hundred Victrola records and a small machine’, the touch of comfortable clothing, including ‘sweaters, bathrobes, helmets and socks’, entertaining games, including ‘crokinole boards, checker boards, playing cards, [and] quoits’, and the sight of reading material, including ‘books and magazines’.22 Magazine editors and soldiers alike expressed equal appreciation of the doughnuts provided by Salvation Army ‘lassies’. The entire September 1919 issue of The Mess Kit was dedicated to articulating such appreciation, both visually and textually, of these women and the food they prepared and served. ‘The Ultimate Consumer’ of Salvation Army doughnuts – a happy soldier who is obviously enjoying the taste of the treat – appears prominently on the cover of the issue (Figure 13.2). Inside, readers learned that these ‘lassies’ – like the doughnuts they offered for comfort and nourishment – were ‘Life Preservers of the A.E.F’ (Figure 13.3) and appreciated also for the hot beverages and warm blankets that appealed to the soldier’s sense of temperature, for being the eyes of men who could not see for themselves, and for generally watching over men who potentially could not watch after themselves in the face of temptations of drink that could impair judgement – indeed balance – and women who could impair the loving touch of wives and girlfriends at home (Figures 13.2–4).

Conclusion: sensory presence/sensory absence As military hospital and related institutional magazines conveyed the multi-sensory experiences of soldier-patients, these publications were themselves both valued products of such present experiences as well as purveyors of profound sensory absence. There was perhaps no better articulation of the former view than that offered by Martha Alberta Montgomery, who served as the head reconstruction aide at the US General Hospital in Fort Des Moines, Iowa, before she transferred to Walter Reed Army General Hospital where she was the Reconstruction Aide supervisor, where she taught wounded soldiers writing, drawing and painting as occupational therapy. As ‘strict products of soldier talent’, Montgomery keenly observed, hospital magazines ‘furnished meaningful occupation’ and ‘afforded diversion from affliction . . . instilled into all a pride in their organization’. They also ‘aroused local interest in . . . uplift work’, ‘drew the public into sympathy with Army life and plans . . . for soldier care, comfort, and amusement’, and ‘served as a medium for reaching men for re-enlistment in the various branches of the service’. A sensory perspective plainly infused Montgomery’s view: ‘Soldier talent secures the material, soldier talent edits, and in many instances soldier talent actually produces the paper on the press’.23 The editors of The Come-Back, the official newspaper of Walter Reed, echoed Montgomery’s view clearly atop their masthead: ‘Published every Wednesday by and for the patients and enlisted personnel at the Walter Reed Army

Figure 13.5  Masthead of The Come-Back, Walter Reed Army General Hospital, Washington, DC (8 January 1919), 2 (Image © and courtesy National Museum of Health and Medicine)

Sense and sensibility: the power of print   209 General Hospital, Washington, D.C.’. Notably, here also the editors detailed the expansive local circulation of their newspaper, demonstrating another physical – indeed physical and geographic – outcome of the underlying production work24 (Figure 13.5). And all of these views appear in the official wartime history of the US Army Medical Department: In order to keep all these publications going, a considerable force of patients, enlisted personnel, and officers was necessary in every hospital publishing a paper. The disabled men desiring to learn any part of the printing or newspaper business were placed on the actual jobs in the print shops, working with and under the supervision of skilled men in their special fields. While some men were actually learning the operation of linotype and monotype machines, printing presses, etc., others were being instructed in editorial, reportorial, illustration, and other lines of newspaper work.25 Juxtaposed to these material perspectives – indeed the very presence of sensory experience in the creation of hospital and related institutional magazines – was the function of these publications as purveyors of sensory absence. Bringing this perspective into sharp relief was ‘The Port of Missing Men’, a feature which appeared regularly in nearly every magazine, and frequently with an illustrated banner title which conveyed visually to readers a distant and limitless horizon populated by soldiers unseen and unheard – missing for any number of reasons due to the war – but who nonetheless remained clearly in the minds of military and voluntary-aid authorities, and loved ones at home (Figure 13.6). As the editors of The Mess Kit explained to their readers: If you are anxious about a relative or friend in the military service who has been reported missing, who has not written to you, or whose whereabouts is unknown, you are likely to get a trace of him, if he can be found at all, by writing a letter to ‘The Port of Missing Men’, Surgeon General’s Office, Washington, D,C., giving the full name, and last known address, of the missing man, his rank, and organization, and

Figure 13.6  The Mess Kit. Salvation Army Number 1(6) (August 1919), 34 (Image  and courtesy US National Library of Medicine)

210  Jeffrey S. Reznick any detail that might help a comrade in identifying his description. The Surgeon General’s Office will pass your inquiry on to the 28 or more Army Hospital papers which carry a column under this heading – ‘Port of Missing Men’, wherein these requests for help in finding missing men are printed each week. Instead of writing your inquiry to The Surgeon General’s Office you could, if you prefer, pick out from the attached list of Army Hospital papers the one published nearest your home and send your inquiry direct to that paper . . . 26 Two months later, these editors explained further, the number of publications ‘carry[ing] a column or more in each issue devoted to this service [of “The Port of Missing Men”]’ had grown to fifty, ‘covering the territory from New York to San Francisco’.27 Commensurate with this growth – which was itself a direct result of sensory engagement directed to producing these publications – was the paradoxical and widespread phenomenon of sensory separation: not seeing, not hearing, and not being able to touch those who departed for the war and had not returned. In this way, despite their ephemeral nature, hospital and other publications foreshadowed the broader cultural phenomenon of separation that became the hallmark of the immediate post-war years, as a generation of Americans sought to forget the war – indeed to separate themselves and their senses from it.

Acknowledgements The author is grateful to the Intramural Research Program of the National Institutes of Health, National Library of Medicine, for supporting his work on this chapter. He also thanks Paul Cornish and Nicholas Saunders for their generous support, as well as Shauna Devine, Laurie DuQuette, Stephen Greenberg, Ken Koyle, Maryn McKenna, Michael North, Bernard Reznick, and Michael Rhode. The author presented earlier versions of this chapter at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Society for Military History, during its Presidential Panel that was co-organized by the society and the American Association for the History of Medicine; at the University of Newcastle in 2006, as part of the international conference The First World War and Popular Culture; and at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center Centennial Symposium, held in 2009.

Notes 1 Thirty-five of these publications were circulating by 23 Apr. 1919. Their combined weekly circulation was 140,000 copies, with individual weekly circulations numbering between 500 and 30,000, and the average weekly circulation between 1,500 and 4,000 weekly. See US Army, Office of the Surgeon General (1923: 319). 2 The so-called ‘Spanish’ flu pandemic swept the world during 1918–19, with a death toll estimated as being well in excess of 50 million. Mortality was particularly high among fit young adults, making it a particular danger in military camps and troop-ships.

Sense and sensibility: the power of print   211 3 The digitization of increasing numbers of these ephemeral publications – rich with texts, images, and medical and related cultural information – provides extensive opportunity to study them using tools of the digital humanities. This chapter offers a foundation and departure point for such analysis. See Reznick (2014). 4 Bombproof, 1(17) (9 Nov. 1918), 9. US General Hospital Number 18 (1918–19). 5 Bombproof, 1(16) (2 Nov. 1918), 8. 6 The Plattsburg Reflex, 1(1) (25 Dec. 1918), 7. US General Hospital Number 30 (1918–19). 7 Over Here 1(16) (14 Mar. 1919), 6. Roche’s poem appeared originally in The Saturday Evening Post. See US General Hospital Number 3 (1918–1919). 8 Bombproof, 1(16) (2 Nov. 1918), 11. US General Hospital Number 18 (1918–19). 9 The Plattsburg Reflex, 1(1) (25 Dec. 1918), 6. US General Hospital Number 30 (1918–19). 10 Star Shell, 1(4) (10 Dec. 1918), 7–8. US General Hospital Number 17 (1918–19). 11 Bombproof, 1(7) (31 Aug. 1918), 4. US General Hospital Number 18 (1918–1919). 12 Over Here, 1(16) (14 Mar. 1919), 6. US General Hospital Number 3 (1918–1919). 13 US Army, Office of the Surgeon General, vol. 5, p. 168. 14 The Plattsburg Reflex, 1(14) (28 Mar. 1919), 6. US General Hospital Number 30 (1918–19). 15 Over Here, 1(21) (21 Feb. 1919), 5. US General Hospital Number 3 (1918–19). 16 Over Here, 1(30) (20 June 1919), 5. US General Hospital Number 3 (1918–19). 17 Bombproof, 1(25) (4 Jan. 1919), 4ff. US General Hospital Number 18 (1918–19). 18 Over Here, 1(21) (18 Apr. 1919), 5. US General Hospital Number 3 (1918–19). 19 Over Here, 1(18) (28 Mar. 1919), 5. US General Hospital Number 3 (1918–19). 20 Bombproof 1(20) (30 Nov. 1918), 1ff. US General Hospital Number 18 (1918–19). 21 Bombproof, 1(21) (7 Dec. 1918), 2. US General Hospital Number 18 (1918–19). 22 Star Shell, 1(4) (10 Dec. 1918), 7. US General Hospital Number 17 (1918–19). 23 Montgomery (n.d.). 24 The Come-Back (18 Dec. 1918), 1. The external circulation of The Come-Back ultimately reached 30,000 copies, and, significantly, profits of sales enabled the hospital to purchase ‘a cylinder press and a printing outfit valued at $13,000’ which enabled the newspaper to continue its production. US Army, Office of the Surgeon General (1923: 319). 25 US Army, Office of the Surgeon General (1927): 227. 26 The Mess Kit, 1(2) (Apr. 1919), 4. US Base Hospital (1918–19). 27 The Mess Kit, 1(4) (June 1919), 14. US Base Hospital (1918–19).

References Classen, C. (2005) The Book of Touch. Oxford: Berg. Das, S. (2005) Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Howes, D. (1991) Introduction: ‘To Summon All the Senses’. In David Howes (ed.) The Varieties of Sensory Experience, pp. 3–21. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. —— (ed.) (2005) Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. Oxford: Berg. —— (2006) Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Montgomery, A. (n.d. [c. 1918]) The Hospital Publication in Reconstruction Work of the Army. TS, p. 3. Alberta Montgomery Collection, Otis Historical Archives, National Museum of Health and Medicine, Washington, DC.

212  Jeffrey S. Reznick Reznick, J. S. (2005) Healing the Nation: Soldiers and the Culture of Caregiving in Britain during the Great War. Manchester: Manchester University Press. —— (2014) Embracing the Future as Stewards of the Past: Charting a Course Forward for Historical Medical Libraries and Archives. RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage, 15(2): 111–23. Saunders, N. J. (ed.) (2004) Matters of Conflict. Abingdon: Routledge. Scarry, E. (1985) The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press. Seremetakis, N. (1994) The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Towheed, S., and King, E. (2015) Reading and the First World War: Readers, Texts, Archives. London: Palgrave Macmillan. US Army, Office of the Surgeon General (1921–9) The Medical Department of the United States Army in the World War. 15 vols. Vol. 5. Military Hospitals in the United States (1923). Vol. 13. Physical Reconstruction and Vocational Education (1927). Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office. US Base Hospital (1918–19) The Mess Kit, Camp Merritt, NJ. —— (1919) The Silver Chev, Camp Grant, IL. US General Hospital Number 3 (1918–19) Over Here. Rahway, NJ. US General Hospital Number 18 (1918–19) Bombproof. Waynesville, NC. US General Hospital Number 30 (1918–19) The Plattsburg Reflex: A Weekly Magazine, Plattsburgh Barracks, NY. US General Hospital Number 42 (1918–19) Biand-Foryu. Spartanberg, SC. US General Hospital Number 17 (1918–19) The Star Shell. Markleton, PA. Walter Reed Army General Hospital (1918–19) The Come-Back. Washington, DC.

14 The ‘white death’ Thirst and water in the Chaco War Esther Breithoff

The Chaco and its war Thirst is a powerful sensation. First felt as a mere discomfort in the throat, it keeps niggling away until satiated. If left unquenched, however, dehydration soon manifests itself as an all-encompassing presence that inevitably consumes the body and the mind, wreaking havoc on the senses. During conflict, the physical weakness and feelings of disorientation produced by the lack of water are intensified by the horrors of modern warfare. During the Chaco War between Paraguay and Bolivia (1932–5), thirst wove itself into the sensorial experience of war amidst thorny cacti and hissing bullets. Firmly in the grips of dehydration, thousands of men lost their lives to this invisible killer, who, without shedding a drop of blood nonetheless created an often gruesome and manifold entanglement of people, nature and material culture. The Gran Chaco is an extensive alluvial lowland plain stretching approximately 250,000 square miles west to east from the foothills of the Andes to the shores of the Río Paraguay (Paraguay River) and north to south from the Mato Grosso do Sul in Brazil to the Argentinian provinces of Formosa and Chaco. The Gran Chaco can be divided into three main areas: the Chaco Bajo (Low Chaco), the Alto Chaco (Upper Chaco) and the Chaco Central (Central Chaco) or Chaco Boreal. Today, the Paraguayan part of the Gran Chaco (henceforth the Chaco) comprises around 60 per cent of the country’s total area whilst also constituting the republic’s most inhospitable and thus least populated region (Renshaw 2002: 31). Described by British exploratory journalist Julian Duguid as a ‘Green Hell’ and a ‘colossal block of forest, so vast that the mind refuses to grasp the full immensity of its range’ (Duguid 1950: 19), the Chaco is both frightening and mesmerizing at the same time. Covered largely in dry forest, palm trees, cacti and patches of high grass and shrub savannah, the thought of getting lost in a labyrinth of thorns and dust is indeed terrifying. Duguid furthermore states that, at first sight, this ‘Green Hell’ seems ‘motionless in the sunlight’ and ‘just a wood, silent, empty’

214  Esther Breithoff (Duguid 1950: 20). Closer inspection reveals however that under its monotonous greenish-brown coat, the Chaco bush is surprisingly beautiful and very much alive! Second only to the Amazon in extent, the Chaco’s ecosystem is teeming with a myriad of plants and animals, many of which are poisonous. Whereas thermometers can measure below zero, and frost is not uncommon during the night in the dry and short winter months, nightfall rarely brings relief from the stifling atmosphere during the summer months of October to April. Summer also brings a short but heavy rainy season, which briefly leaves the Chaco in colourful bloom before turning large desert areas into muddy swamps and infesting the bush with swarms of mosquitoes. July finally sees the start of the much-dreaded dry season, which is characterized by months of severe drought that drain the Chaco of all colour and transform the bush into a ‘waterless hellhole’ (English 2007: 17). Water played a key factor in the Chaco War fought between these two neighbouring nations over ownership of this remote stretch of land. With armies composed almost exclusively of Aymara and Quechua indigenous miners and workers from the Bolivian highlands and mestizo farmers from Eastern Paraguay equipped with fully mechanized but often dubious leftover materiél from the First World War (Pendle 1967: 26), the Chaco conflict has become known as South America’s first ‘modern’ war (De Quesada and Jowett 2011: 3). Despite the largely indigenous occupation of the Chaco at the outbreak of the war, neither Paraguay nor Bolivia acknowledged the natives’ exploitation of the land and its resources. The region was never considered indigenous territory, nor were the native populations recognized as citizens of either nation-state. Instead, the latter saw the Chaco as an empty geographic entity, a ‘wilderness’ that, nonetheless, formed an integral (if slightly neglected) part of their respective civilized patria. Indigenous people just happened to live there. In fact, according to the general public and military perception of the time, these ‘barbarians’ simply formed part of the Chaco flora and fauna (Capdevila 2010: 22). It was thus neither the Bolivian nor the Paraguayan nation-state’s aim to occupy indigenous territory nor to combat, subject, expel or exterminate its indigenous inhabitants (Capdevila 2010: 16–17). In fact, in its essence, the Chaco War was not a war of conquest but a ‘defence’ of the patria against an invading neighbour (Capdevila 2010: 15, 27, 28). The causes of the Chaco War remain disputed. Although rumours of possible oil sources were sparked in the 1920s, oil does not seem to have played a decisive factor in the outbreak of the war (Zook 1960: 72). In the case of Bolivia, possession of the Chaco was of strategic and economic importance. Having lost her coastal province to Chile in the War of the Pacific (1879–83), Bolivia was struggling with her new status as a landlocked country. She thus sought access to the Atlantic Ocean via the Chaco and the Paraguay River to secure a fluvial output for the export of the tin she produced in the mines of Potosí and Oruro (Cote 2013: 741). Moreover,

The ‘white death’  215 in order to satisfy the increasing demand for petroleum to fuel the mining industry, Bolivia turned attention towards the Chaco. During the 1920s the Standard Oil Company had secured concessions on a huge tract of oil lands in the Sub-Andean region on the western edge of the Central Chaco but was in constant conflict with Bolivian authorities over legal regulations. The only way for Bolivia to develop her oil sector was by developing the Chaco, the country’s much dreaded region to the east which was ‘merely’ inhabited by Guaraní indigenous people (Cote 2013: 741 and 742). Considered by the Aymara and Quechua populations native to the Altiplano as a ‘desert wilderness’ and avoided by foreign investors due to its harsh climate and barren soils, the Bolivian east remained unexploited, at least from a Western point of view (Cote 2013: 741). Bolivia decided to base its legal rights over the region on territorial regulations dating back to Spanish colonial rule (Farcau 1996: 5–15). Across the border, Paraguay believed that it was entitled to the territory through its occupation and exploitation of the area. Still in grave financial debt from the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–70), the government turned towards selling large plots of land west of the Paraguay River. Missionaries from various religious denominations, such as the Anglicans and the Salesians, also settled the region in an effort to convert the Chaco’s indigenous populations (Chesterton 2013). However, it was not until the advent of war in the 1920s that Paraguay invited Canadian and Russian Mennonites to settle and farm the central part of the Chaco (Friesen 1997). Concurrently, the belligerent nations were busy organizing their armed forces, building fortines (military outposts) and slowly advancing into the Chaco whilst closely observing each other’s movements. The decisive factor in the building of fortines was access to potable water. The lack of proper roads and transport possibilities, and the sheer distance that both armies had to travel to reach the heart of the disputed territory meant that a local water source was key to the troops’ survival. Whoever controlled a well or a lake consequently controlled the surrounding area. The progression of the war was thus ultimately dictated by the respective armies’ access to and control over water sources in the area, making ‘Water more important to warfare in the Chaco than fuel’ (Klassen 1993: 71). Unsurprisingly, the discovery of a large freshwater lake by a Paraguayan patrol with the help of Chamacoco (now Ishir) indigenous guides in 1931 further incited the tensions between the two nations. As control over a potable water source as big as Lake Pitiantuta/Chuquisaca in the centre of the arid Chaco scrubland was strategically vital for both sides, armed skirmishes soon followed and war was officially declared on 10 May 1933 (Farcau 1996: 29–36, 112). Before long, the Chaco’s grey-brownish coat was drenched in a sea of blood amidst which the insect-infested trenches, the din of artillery bombardment, the cries of the wounded, and the smell of rotting bodies, triggered a powerful sensorial awareness in the soldiers similar to that felt by those fighting on the ravaged battlefields of the First

216  Esther Breithoff World War’s Western Front (Breithoff 2012: 152; see also Eksteins 1990: 146, 150–1; Saunders 2003: 128–9).

Sensing the Chaco War is a powerful multi-sensorial experience that can be further heightened when soldiers find themselves in an alien environment. In order to better grasp our surroundings, Bender states that engagements with landscapes need to be multi-sensorial as the latter ‘are not just “views” but intimate encounters. They are not just about seeing, but about experiencing with all the senses’ (Bender 2002: 136). Yet, we often take our sensorial engagement with the world for granted: the sound of cars, the smell of rain and the taste of coffee are all ordinary everyday experiences for most of us. Stressful situations such as armed conflict can heighten our senses and intensify sensorial awareness. In his work on intimacy during the First World War, Santanu Das explores the relationship between the sense of touch and modern warfare. Das believes that ‘it is through this sense that we have access to the reality of our own bodies’ (Das 2005: 20). In times of war, this intimate ‘skin knowledge’ (Howes 2005a: 27) becomes violated by the disfigurement and destruction of body and mind through the annihilating forces of technological warfare (Das 2005: 23). With the constant threat of imminent death hanging over him, the soldier instinctively goes into survival mode ‘listening for, and reacting to, auditory signals of warning: remaining alert for, and reacting to, visual signals or indications of danger, and, in darkness using the body to feel and know the immediate environment’ (Winterton 2012: 231). John Brinckerhoff Jackson called soldiers ‘part-time hunters’ as they ‘develop an acute receptivity to the messages sent out by the environment’, which they then pass on to new recruits (Brinckerhoff Jackson 1980: 15). As a result, senses are fused and create new sensorial perceptions such as the so-called ‘shell sense’, which alerts the soldier to the danger of artillery fire through his spatial and auditory awareness (Stephen Foote, in Das 2005: 83). In conflict situations the perversion of the senses or state of ‘sensorial overdrive’ is further increased when soldiers find themselves in an unfamiliar landscape. Amidst the alien surroundings and the apocalyptic chaos of industrial wars, the soldiers’ sense of ‘how to go on in the world’ (Tilley 1994: 16) is erased as they struggle to orientate themselves in, make sense of, and above all, survive in the face of an absurd supermodernity where all previously inculcated bodily comportment is lost (see Burchell 2014). In the context of the Chaco War the lack of water and the excruciating effects of thirst on the human body and mind opens up a uniquely Chacoan dimension of sensoriality amidst the horrors of industrial war and within and with a landscape that was alien and thus full of new sensory impressions to most of the soldiers. The experience of war in the Chaco created an enmeshment of material realities and sensations that were often difficult

The ‘white death’  217 to process and demanded new engagements with the landscapes and ‘sensescapes’ (Howes 2005b: 143–5) of the Chaco. During the long and agonizing marches under ‘the rain of sun pins that pierced through the foliage burned from the heat’ (Céspedes 1973: 138), the soldiers’ tongues became heavy and their vision blurred. As a result, their minds would frequently trick them into believing that they could hear the sound of running water or see the precious liquid shimmering in the shape of a lagoon or a small dirty puddle, but it generally revealed itself as a mirage in the landscape (Anon. 1980). The bodies of men who succumbed to thirst and dehydration lined the dust trails in the Chaco. The sight of dead comrades and gnarled enemy bodies had a strong effect on the survivors. The former’s hollow cheeks, sunken eyes and open mouths, which seemed to be desperately pleading for water, were a constant and very real reminder to those that were passing by that a similar fate would await them if they lost or emptied their water canteen. After days without a drop of liquid, every cell in the soldiers’ bodies was desperately craving water. Yet, when it suddenly came in the form of a torrential rainfall, water often turned from a long-awaited saviour into a dreaded assassin. The emergence of large swamps and flooding of trails made the terrain impassable, and the transport of much-needed medical, food and military equipment provisions impossible. Like the fields of France and Belgium, the grasslands of the Chaco were repeatedly covered in thick mud, in which supply trucks and mules would sink (Farcau 1996: 102). Worse still, the trenches and battlefields became a deadly mix of mud, human body parts, metal splinters and diseases and the soldiers and their equipment were literally drowning in it (see Das 2005: 39; Saunders and Cornish 2009: 5). The fear of getting buried alive under the brown and clingy ‘slimescapes’ that ‘confused the categories of solid and liquid’ was ever-­present (Das 2005: 35). Mud thus merged both the physical and psychological into a constant threat of ‘dissolution into formless matter at a time when modern industrial weaponry was eviscerating human form: it brought the soldiers to the precipice of non-meaning in a world that was already ceasing to make sense’ (ibid. 37). Moreover, men would get drenched, their soaking uniforms clinging to their haggard frames and they caught colds and even pneumonia (Farcau 1996: 100). Yet, while the soldiers both eagerly anticipated and cursed the rainy summer months, they did not find relief during the short-lived winter weeks either. Many a soldier who lay dying of pneumonia or thirst somewhere in the impenetrable scrub must have wondered who they were actually fighting.

The ‘white death’ It was however thirst that was without a doubt the most tormenting sensation a soldier had to endure before he eventually succumbed to the ‘white death’ (Roa Bastos 2005: 194). Indeed, as Augusto Roa Bastos once poetically wrote: ‘Thirst, white death, walks arm in arm with the

218  Esther Breithoff other one, the red one, in dusty hoods’ (Roa Bastos 2005: 182–3). During the First World War, ‘white death’ signified death by avalanche or freezing to death on the Alpine front as opposed to a red death by enemy artillery fire (Keller 2009: 265). When it comes to the Chaco War, it is generally believed that more men died of ‘white thirst’ (Céspedes 1973: 14) and disease than by bullets. Amongst the thorny plants, venomous snakes and disease-carrying mosquitoes of the Chaco, Paraguayan veteran Silvio Macias poignantly states that ‘The tragedy of the Chaco, is the spectre of thirst’ (Macias c.1940: 1). Similar to the situation in the Italian Alps, the enemy rifle or grenade did not pose the biggest and most immediate threat to a soldier stationed in the Chaco. Instead, it was the bush itself, or perhaps more appropriately the men’s unfamiliarity with the Chaco landscape and its resources, that represented the greatest challenge to survival. Whereas men stationed in the mountains had to endure freezing temperatures and snowstorms at extremely high altitudes (Keller 2009; see also Balbi 2009), the Paraguayan and Bolivian troops had to face the hostile thicket and heat of the Chaco where ‘the juice of cacti replaces water’ (Zook 1960: 23). The indigenous Bolivian soldier, acclimatized to the colder conditions of the Altiplano, struggled in the desert-like Chaco temperatures and was plagued by an all-encompassing thirst. The agonizing memory of thirst and its physical and psychological consequences continued to haunt many soldiers after the war and was repeatedly detailed in personal accounts of the conflict. Céspedes writes that: Thirst, with its bitter incandescence, chapped our lips and swelled our tongues. No one sweated anymore. A demon licking my throat took control over my pharynx, and I felt my blood like resin/gum. My mouth seemed strange, like a cardboard box covered in dried paint, something unusual and unpleasant. The act of swallowing was repeated mechanically, hitting my throat a painful blow at every instant. (Céspedes 1973: 139) Thirst is a primary biological function and as without water we would not be able to survive, drinking is a fundamental human need (de Garine 2001: 1). During the course of a day, a healthy adult loses about 1.5 litres of water as urine and faeces, and around 800ml evaporates through the skin and the simple act of breathing. In order to compensate for this loss we need to drink and eat food with high water content. A person’s age, general health and exposure to high temperatures can greatly influence their body’s water loss (Vargas 2001: 14). In the Chaco War, the general scarcity of water meant that the soldiers’ physical constitution was suffering. Coupled with the high Chaco temperatures and lack of shade, this resulted in thirst being a constant companion. In addition, illnesses such as malaria and typhus caused ravaging fever, diarrhoea, vomiting and excessive sweating.

The ‘white death’  219 Consequently, the men’s already ravaged bodies were losing even more water and, without the intake of sufficient liquid to recuperate the loss, slowly began to shut down. However, thirst and dehydration do not only affect a person’s body. The effects of water deprivation seize a person’s mind and control their entire existence. During combat in the Chaco, men would leave their positions upon spotting an indigenous well in No Man’s Land and run towards it under enemy fire. Augusto Roa Bastos writes that piles of bodies would surround a well with some of them having submerged their faces in the water ‘where they have remained drinking in all eternity. Others’ he continues ‘are hugging each other closely, quietly and satisfied. Khaki and olive green uniforms mixed up, joined together by coagulated crimson, sewn into an indestructible brotherhood’ (Roa Bastos 2005: 184). Bolivian veteran Emilio Sarmiento adds that men frequently went delirious with thirst, which caused ‘a feverish anxiety and the nerves created obsessive manifestations’ (Sarmiento 1979: 72). As the human body is incapable of storing water, carrying a caramayola (also caramañola) or canteen was crucial in order to avoid dehydration. The water shortage meant that the caramayola often was a soldier’s only life source and his most important piece of equipment. The canteen thus quickly became a ‘símbolo vital’, a symbol of life (Sarmiento 1979: 70). The aluminium container was always kept close to the body as the loss or theft of it could result in the imminent death of its owner. As caramayolas were rarely filled up to the brim, every drop was precious and not to be left out of sight. Besides their canteen, the Paraguayan soldier also carried hollowed out bull horns or tin jugs for holding water (De Quesada and Jowett 2011: 7). On various occasions these jugs found alternative uses. After heavy downpours, for example, the clattering sound of jugs used to scoop out the accumulated rainwater that was a nuisance and brought colds to the already frozen stiff soldiers, could be heard (Zotti 1974: 87). During times of rest, the smooth exterior of the caramayolas and mugs served as a surface for engravings and personal and artistic expression (Figure 14.1). Fighting in a landscape where months pass without a single drop of rain and temperatures soar up to 50°C, finding a potable water source is crucial. The number of lakes and pozos indios (indigenous wells) was limited and often they did not carry enough water to sustain a whole battalion. Inside the fortified military posts the little water available was often contaminated by decaying corpses (Sarmiento 1979: 71). The scarcity of natural water sources and the armies’ general lack of local knowledge meant that most of the water for the troops had to be brought in from outside the Chaco. The isolated location of the central Chaco, the lack of proper roads and the shortage of trucks turned the supply of water into one of the major challenges of the war (Figure 14.2). During times of drought, the Chaco’s earth consists of a fine dusty sand, which made the vehicles’ wheels spin under their heavy load. Traversing the Chaco during the rainy season was, however, an even greater

220  Esther Breithoff

Figure 14.1  Base of a tin mug with engravings of a rifle and a possible fortín at the Museo Mitológico Ramón Elias, Asunción, Paraguay (Author)

challenge as many of the rudimentary roads became completely impassable, and the aguateros or water carriers became stuck in viscous mud. Due to the precarious financial state of both the Bolivian and Paraguayan governments, only a small number of trucks were available for transport. Most of the time mules and designated soldiers, carrying up to thirty caramayolas dangling from their body, acted as water carriers. Aguateros lived in constant danger of being attacked and robbed by thirsty soldiers from both sides. On numerous occasions their vital cargo did not reach its final destination due to pillaging, bumpy roads or evaporation, leaving countless men left fighting in the trenches without a drop of water (Roa Bastos 2005: 183). An anonymous source gives a heart-rending description of the tragic fate of the human water carrier: The caramagnolas, hopeful anticipation of the thirsty, target of he who risks his life for a sip. And there marches the man with his thirty caramagnolas zigzagging, while the lead encloses his silhouette in a closing circle. He throws himself to the ground, crawls like a feline, seeks shelter behind immobile and naked tree trunks; he arrives or does not arrive, depending on his luck. When he arrives, he will have lost half of the caramagnolas perforated by bullets, riddled by the bursts of gunfire; or he never arrives, because when advancing with his precious load he is made to turn around with a gunshot to his forehead . . . THIRST. The aguatero almost always dies this way. (Anonymous 1980)

The ‘white death’  221

Figure 14.2  Original Ford Cuatro water carrier outside Museo Boquerón, Fortín Boquerón ( Author)

Faced with the challenging conditions of the region, army officials realized right from the start that ‘the clue of the Chaco is in the hands of the Indians’ (Belaieff as quoted by Chesterton and Isaenko 2014: 632) and that their troops could not solely rely on water being transported to the military outposts from outside the Chaco. In his early expeditions of the area, Russian-born General Juan Belaieff outlined local terrain, climatic and hydraulic conditions and noted what type of plants were indicative of potable water sources in a pamphlet written for the use of the Paraguayan military (Belaieff 1934: 25–8). Nonetheless, countless soldiers died of thirst because they did not know the local plants (Schuchard 2008: 175). In contrast to the region’s indigenous communities who feel deeply connected to the Chaco, the soldiers considered the Chaco’s alien nature an enemy, a threatening ‘Other’ from which they felt deeply detached. Faced with an unfamiliar flora and fauna, the men thus quickly realized that the Bolivians did not pose the only threat, as one Paraguayan soldier recalls: ‘The resistance of the desert presented itself as almost insurmountable. Victory had to be achieved against the enemy and against nature’ (Bustamante Rodríguez 1983: 83). John Renshaw observes that in extreme droughts, entire indigenous groups are forced to survive on a tuber plant locally known as Yvy’á

222  Esther Breithoff (Jacaratia hassleriana), which due to high mineral contents causes stomach cramps if used for more than a couple of days (Renshaw 2002: 86). The plant, which above ground reveals nothing but a fine leafy stem, hides an enormous turnip-shaped fruit 60–80cm below the earth’s surface. The watery flesh can be chewed in little pieces or wrung into a container or straight into the mouth. Paraguayan veteran Anibal Zotti describes a fellow soldier carving a number of holes into the lid of an empty meat can, which he then used as a peeler to slowly grate thin slices of the tuber, while at the same time collecting its juice inside the can. This was a slow and unrewarding process as it took a whole hour to fill half the can with liquid. Not wanting to waste anything, the remaining grated bits were turned into a type of starchy tortilla seasoned with grease and salt (Zotti 1974: 250–1). Although mentioned in various memoirs as a water source that the Paraguayans could identify (see Zotti 1974: 37, 250–1; Sarmiento 1979: 760; Bustamante Rodríguez 1983: 83) one cannot help but wonder how many soldiers might have stamped on the little shrub, delirious with thirst, unaware of its buried treasure? Soldiers would drink the water stored in the metal jackets of their water-cooled machine-guns, which they then refilled with their own urine (Zotti 1974: 37; Céspedes 1973: 164). In many cases, however, even urine was too precious to be wasted and many a soldier – albeit reluctantly – filled his canteen with the yellow liquid (Céspedes 1973: 139; Sarmiento 1979: 73).

Comforting the senses Being trapped inside the Chaco scrubland, this ‘prison of plants’ with its thorns and deadly diseases, instilled the soldiers with a dread of being ‘devoured by the jungle’ that mixed with the constant fear of being hit by enemy artillery fire (Sarmiento 1979: 76). This all-encompassing feeling of impotence and inescapability weighed heavily on the homesick men who dreamed of being back with their loved ones. Nonetheless, there were a few things that allowed the soldiers temporary respite from the sensorial intensity of the war and the Chaco bush. Men on both sides had the rural tradition of drinking mate, a type of tea made from yerba mate. Yerba derives from the Spanish word hierba (herb) and is made from the dried leaves of Ilex Paraguariensis, a small tree native to subtropical South America. The leaves are harvested, dried and then crushed to a loose powder and placed into a guampa. A guampa is a drinking vessel usually made from gourds but bamboo and cattle hooves and horns are now also frequently used. The yerba is steeped in hot water and sipped through a metal bombilla (straw), which acts both as a straw and a sieve (Folch 2010: 9) (Figure 14.3). Mate cocido or boiled mate is a blend of yerba and sugar, which caramelizes when placed under a stack of embers. To finish, the mixture is added to boiling water and, depending on personal preference, topped off with a little bit of milk (Folch 2010: 24). Yerba mate is high

The ‘white death’  223

Figure 14.3  Paraguayan soldiers posing with a freshly dug up Yvy’á (© Museo Militar Asunción).

in vitamins and medicinal properties. It is also believed to enhance mental clarity and ‘lift one’s spirits’ – properties which have earned it the name of ‘green gold’ (Benítez Alvarenga 1997: 24, 64). When water was available during the Chaco War, both mate and cocido constituted a valued part of the soldiers’ morning routine (Paniagua 1994: 44). The men would allegedly filter the often foul-smelling water through the strong and bitter tasting leaves in order to mask the stench. As the smoke from a fire inside the trenches would have given away their position to the enemy, the soldiers had no other choice but to have cold mate, also known as tereré (Benítez Alvarenga 1997: 52–3). Consumption of the tea (hot or cold) did however move far beyond their body’s biological demands and the desire to satisfy thirst. In fact, mate and tereré are part of a ritual with a serving and drinking etiquette that is vigorously respected by those who participate (Folch 2010: 9–10). Mate and tereré are about sharing as according to Derlis Benítez Alvarenga:

224  Esther Breithoff Tereré creates a space for the peaceful and fraternal gathering amongst friends; a gathering with the other where time is a gift that allows the sharing of the good and bad, the joys and pains. It is the space where one listens and is being listened to. In short, it is the space that every human being needs, for his own eminent condition (Benítez Alvarenga 1997: 13–14) In the trenches of the Chaco, preparing yerba mate was a comforting tradition that linked them with their distant pre-war lives. More poignantly perhaps, the ritual of passing around the guampa amongst comrades created a temporary safe haven in which the soldiers experienced collective solace from the horrors of modern war. Faced with the excruciating effects of thirst, a soldier’s sense of comradeship was often tested. After hearing his superior’s words of caution to the squad about rationing the little water they had before a battle, Zotti remembers securing his canteen tightly to his belt on the eve of the Battle of Boquerón and although thirst was torturing him he did not take a sip. He soon drifted off, listening to the water swishing inside the container when he suddenly awoke startled. His thoughts immediately turned to his caramayola and he only calmed down upon feeling it still securely attached to his belt. Yet, to his big surprise it was empty. It was only later that he learned that one of his comrades had stealthily crawled over, opened the lid, inserted a bombilla, and drained the canteen of its meagre contents (Zotti 1974: 36). The desperate water situation during the Chaco War had turned the bombilla, an instrument used to strengthen social relations during mate and tereré ceremonies, into a tool for survival. Although it is generally accepted that the indigenous populations were preparing mate long before the Spanish conquistadores discovered the drink and its properties (Folch 2010: 11), Paraguayans believe that the national modern-day widespread tradition of drinking tereré is rooted in the Chaco War (Benítez Alvarenga 1997: 52–3). In fact today, tereré is more than just a drink in Paraguay: it is a national identity and a source of national pride, linking the Paraguayan with both his Guaraní indigenous roots and his mestizo forefathers who died as heroes in the defence of the patria (Benítez Alvarenga 2013: 43). On the Bolivian side, mate also formed an integral part of Andean culture and the soldiers’ routine. For the Aymara and Quechua recruits it was however coca, the leaf from a small Andean shrub (Erythroxylon), that provided them the greatest relief from the hardships of industrial war (Bustamante Rodríguez 1983: 143). The coca leaf has been shown to provide vitamins, help digestion and altitude sickness, and suppress hunger, cold and stress (Gootenberg 2008: 16). To benefit from its effects, a wad of leaves is stashed inside the hollow of the cheek and sucked on for about an hour. A small portion of powdered alkaline ash is usually added to release and enhance the plant’s medicinal properties. According to the archaeological record, the chewing of coca leaves goes back to at least 3,000 years

The ‘white death’  225 ago (Rivera et al. 2005). Although briefly forbidden as ‘an invention of the devil’ by the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century, the Spanish soon realized that indigenous miners could subsist on a minimum of food and drink and work longer hours when sucking on coca leaves (Gagliano 1994: 49–51). When war broke out between Paraguay and Bolivia in 1932, Céspedes notes that ‘With his bag of coca and stoicism, the Indian does not need anything else to work. Now, during the war, he also needs a light machine-gun or a rifle, the first instruments of mechanical precision that civilisation put into his hands’ (Céspedes 1973: 113). As the ration of coca leaves was limited in the Chaco, the men were often forced to go weeks without the familiar bulge in their cheeks (Céspedes 1973: 114). Left without the calming numbness, the soldiers now had to face the physical and psychological effects of war with heightened senses. In the flat and frightening scrubland, the coca leaf must have nonetheless been a comforting presence and link with the much-missed Andean mountain range. In a world that was continuously changing and ceased to make sense to the soldiers, the coca leaf allowed them to temporarily escape their confusing realities and find solace in the deep-rooted constancy of the coca chewing tradition. Thus, amidst the absurdity and horrors of modern industrialized warfare the coca-chewing indigenous soldier embodied the transcendence of temporal realities by fusing an indigenous tradition going back more than three millennia and twentieth-century supermodernity.

Concluding comments On the eve of war, the Paraguayan and Bolivian armies had arrived with trucks and carts full of mechanized weapons, ready to take the Chaco by armed force. Yet, despite their modern technologies, the soldiers struggled to survive. They soon realized that without indigenous knowledge of the region man was powerless and modernity became worthless and ridiculed in the face of the Chaco bush. In a world the men could no longer comprehend, thirst exposed them to new sensorial realities, in which man, nature and the material culture of conflict were all enmeshed. Indeed, thirst and its powerful effects on body and mind operated on both a practical and symbolic dimension and, by doing so, brutally linked the soldiers to the Chaco – often for eternity. Although the soldiers entered the bush determined to model it after their respective national political beliefs, they came out of it with their own personal and social identities shaped by natural forces and modern war, from which they found only temporary relief during tereré sharing and coca chewing rituals. The multi-sensorial experience of conflict not only affected their health but also their sensibility and spirituality, and slowly their soul to the point that ‘misery gradually consumed soldiers’ individuality’ (Zotti 1974: 121). In the Chaco, the myth of mechanized warfare as the ‘modernist superartefact and the supreme signifier of universal progress and modernity’

226  Esther Breithoff (Buchli 2002: 4; also González-Ruibal 2006: 177) was thus exposed as a perverse illusion that killed thousands of people without even pulling a trigger. Here, ‘white death’ came to act as both a terrible manifestation of modernity gone wrong (González-Ruibal 2006: 177) and a reflection of the absurdity of the Chaco War and industrial conflicts in general, as one anonymous source notes: ‘Water, sister of the Chaco, you who makes warriors beg, armed with all the weapons, they lack you, the most essential weapon, the indispensable one’ (Anon. 1980).

References Anonymous (1980) Anécdotas de la Guerra del Chaco. Asunción: HOY. Balbi, M. (2009) Great War Archaeology on the Glaciers of the Alps. In N. J. Saunders and P. Cornish (eds) Contested Objects: Material Memories of the Great War, pp. 280–90. Abingdon: Routledge. Belaieff, J. (1934) Fortifications de Campaña. Asunción: Talleres Gráficos La Rural. Benítez Alvarenga, D. (1997) El Tereré: Algo más que una bebida en Paraguay. Asunción: Editorial El Lector. Bender, B. (2002) Landscape and Politics. In V. Buchli (ed.) The Material Culture Reader, pp. 135–40. Oxford: Berg. Breithoff, E. (2012) The Many Faces of the Chaco War: Indigenous Modernity and Conflict Archaeology. In N. J. Saunders (ed.) Beyond the Dead Horizon: Studies in Modern Conflict Archaeology, pp. 146–58. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Brinckerhoff Jackson, J. (1980) The Necessity for Ruins and Other Topics. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Buchli, V. (2002) Introduction. In V. Buchli (ed.) The Material Culture Reader, pp. 1–22. Oxford: Berg. Burchell, M. (2014) Skilful Movements: The Evolving Commando. In P. Cornish and N. J. Saunders (eds) Bodies in Conflict: Corporeality, Materiality, and Transformation, pp. 208–18. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Bustamante Rodríguez, L. (1983) Con las Alas Rotas. Asunción: Talleres de la Imprenta Militar de la Dirección de Publicaciones Militares de la FF.AA. de la Nación. Capdevila, L. (2010) La guerre du Chaco Tierra adentro: Déconstruire la representation d’un conflit international. In L. Capdevila, I. Combès, N. Richard and P. Barbosa (eds) Les hommes transparents: Indiens et militaires dans la guerre du Chaco (1932–1935), pp. 15–34. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Céspedes, A. (1973) Sangre de Mestizos: Relatos de la Guerra del Chaco. La Paz: Librería y Editorial ‘Juventud’. Chesterton, B. M. (2013) The Grandchildren of Solano López: Frontier and Nation in Paraguay, 1904–1936. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. —— and Isaenko, A. V. (2014) A White Russian in the Green Hell: Military Science, Ethnography, and Nation Building. Hispanic American Historical Review, 94(4): 615–48. Cote, S. (2013) A War for Oil in the Chaco, 1932–1935. Environmental History, 18(4): 738–58. Das, S. (2005) Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The ‘white death’  227 De Garine, I. (2001) For a Pluridisciplinary Approach to Drinking. In I. De Garine and V. de Garine (eds) Drinking: Anthropological Perspectives, pp. 1–10. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. De Quesada, A., with Jowett, P. (2011) The Chaco War 1932–35: South America’s Greatest Modern Conflict. Oxford and Long Island City, NY: Osprey. Duguid, J. (1950) Green Hell: Adventures in the World’s Largest Forest. London: Pan Books. Eksteins, M. (1990) The Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. New York: Anchor/Doubleday. English, A. J. (2007) The Green Hell: A Concise History of the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay 1932–35. Stroud: Spellmount. Farcau, B. W. (1996) The Chaco War: Bolivia and Paraguay, 1932–1935. New York: Praeger. Folch, C. (2010) Stimulating Consumption: Yerba Mate Myths, Markets, and Meanings from Conquest to Present. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 52(1): 6–36. Friesen, M. W. (1997) Neue Heimat in der Chacowildnis. Loma Plata: Druckerei Friesen. Gagliano, J. A. (1994) Coca Prohibition in Peru: The Historical Debates. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. González-Ruibal, A. (2006) The Dream of Reason: An Archaeology of the Failures of Modernity in Ethiopia. Journal of Social Archaeology, 6(2): 175–201. Gootenberg, P. (2008) Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Howes, D. (2005a) Skinscapes: Embodiment, Culture and Environment. In C. Classen (ed.) The Book of Touch, pp. 27–39. Oxford: Berg. —— (2005b) Sensation in Cultural Context. In D. Howes (ed.) Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, pp. 143–6. Oxford: Berg. Keller, T. (2009) The Mountains Roar: The Alps during the Great War. Environmental History, 14(2): 253–74. Klassen, P. P. (1993) Kaputi Menonita (eine freundliche Begegnung im Chacokrieg). Asunción: Imprenta Modelo S.A. Macias, S. (c.1940) La Selva, la Metralla y la Sed. Place and publisher unknown. Paniagua, F. (1994) Con los pies descalzos: Entre el polvo y la sed. Asunción: Ind. & Com. Pendle, G. (1967) Paraguay: A Riverside Nation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Renshaw, J. (2002) The Indians of the Paraguayan Chaco: Identity and Economy. Lincoln, NE, and London: University of Nebraska Press. Rivera. M. A., Aufderheide, A. C., Cartmell, L. W., Torres, C. M., and Langsjoen, M. (2005) Antiquity of Coca-Leaf Chewing in the South Central Andes: A 3,000 Year Archaeological Record of Coca-Leaf Chewing from Northern Chile. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 37(4): 455–8. Roa Bastos, A. (2005) Hijo de Hombre. Buenos Aires: Editorial La Página S.A/ Editorial Losada S.A. Sarmiento, E. (1978) Memorias de un soldado de la Guerra del Chaco. Caracas: El Cid editor. Saunders, N. J. (2003) Trench Art: Materialities and Memories of War. Oxford: Berg. —— and Cornish, P. (2009) Introduction. In N. J. Saunders and P. Cornish (eds) Contested Objects: Material Memories of the Great War, pp. 1–10. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.

228  Esther Breithoff Schuchard, B. (2008) Etnias y Estados nacionales durante la Guerra del Chaco : Contribución al problema de la identidad indígena (el ejemplo de los isoceñoguaraníes). In N. Richard (ed.) Mala Guerra: Los indígenas en la Guerra del Chaco (1932–35), pp. 171–82. Asunción and Paris: Museo el Barro, ServiLibro & CoLibris. Tilley, C. (1994) A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments. Oxford: Berg. Vargas, L. A. (2001) Thirst and Drinking as a Biocultural Process. In I. De Garine and V. De Garine (eds) Drinking: Anthropological Perspectives, pp. 11–21. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Winterton, M. (2012) Signs, Signal and the Senses: The Soldier Body in the Trenches. In N. J. Saunders (ed.) Beyond the Dead Horizon: Studies in Modern Conflict Archaeology, pp. 229–41. Oxford: Oxbow. Zook, D. H. (1960) The Conduct of the Chaco War. New Haven, CT: Bookman Associates. Zotti, A. (1974) Siempre Vivos: Memorias de un ex-Combatiente de la Guerra del Chaco. Asunción: Imprenta Militar de la Dirección de Publicaciones de las FF.AA de la Nación.

15 Jan Karski, from eye witness to moral witness What to do with your senses? Annette Becker

In 1981 the conference The Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps took place in Washington, DC. There, in the section ‘Discovering the “Final Solution”’, Jan Karski spoke for the first time publicly about the Holocaust since he had given lectures across the USA to accompany the publication of his book Story of a Secret State in 1944. Although he had been interviewed by Claude Lanzmann in 1978, the movie Shoah was not finished in 1981, and nobody knew about Karski. In Washington, Karski was also a neighbour, and was teaching at Georgetown University. How could a man who kept such ‘secrets’ live in this city, and have never spoken before. How was it possible not to know him, furthermore, not to know what he knew? He understood the importance of the day: ‘It is my duty to participate. (. . .) I, among many, did play a part in this story, and my usefulness to this conference lies in reporting it for the record’ (Chamberlain and Feldman 1987: 179). What did Karski see, what did he hear, what did he know, what did he say, what had the people he met understood, known, believed, refused to understand and forgotten? What did he say about the Polish Underground, what did he try to convey of the extermination of the Jews?1 I will concentrate here on one example, the visit of Karski to what he thought was Belzec extermination camp, but was, in reality, the Izbica-Lubelska transit camp. I will show how Karski gives us a way to conceptualize the perception of the Holocaust both during its perpetration and after, and of his changing perception of himself as a Catholic Pole and member of the Underground to a messenger of the Jews, almost reinventing himself as a Jew: from eye witness to moral witness; from a Catholic Pole who speaks about universal suffering, to special messenger of the Holocaust. This message has been conveyed by his senses, through his eyes, his nose, his mouth, his ears.

The eye witness: ‘Here is the Jeremiad of Western Civilization, realistic, appalling’ In ‘To Die in Agony’, chapter 30 of his 1944 book, Story of a Secret State,2 Karski speaks of Belzec, even if we know nowadays it was Izbica.3 It is important to emphasize the veracity of the Karski report in the light of

230  Annette Becker the most recent scholarly research on Operation Reinhard. This was the programme for the extermination of Jews living in the Nazi-established ghettos in the Generalgouvernement region of occupied Poland and Ukraine. Between March 1942 and November 1943 an estimated two million Jews were murdered with carbon-monoxide gas in three specially constructed camps at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka (Pohl 1993). The first accounts of Karski’s mission appeared in the United States before his book, in two issues of the magazine Collier’s: in every account, he is more and more involved physically, as if his body was entering the ghetto of Warsaw, then the transit-camp (in fact only the station), of Izbica. In November 1943, Karski tried to keep a distance, a double one. First, he did not give his name (even a pseudonym) for security reasons (we are in 1943), so he is ‘Mr. B’. Second, he describes the atrocities not as he has seen them, but through accusations against Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger,4 chief of the SS and Police in the Generalgouvernement. In the article, Karski repeats the name Krüger again and again: It was Krüger who raised the number of concentration camps in his district from 22 to 41, and who started the practice of putting barefooted men, women and children into box cars spread inches thick with quick lime. It was K. who set fire to synagogues after crowding them with Jews, and who first conceived the idea of pumping poison gas into halls where human beings were packed like cattle. (Creel 1943: 20) In Collier’s in March 1944, and still anonymous, Karski is characterized by Martha Gellhorn as a young man, ‘good looking, too thin’.5 He gives an eye-witness report of scenes which gave him ‘nightmares for weeks’. ‘There were Jewish women and children and old people as well as men; they were packed 130 to a cattle car. There were 46 car loads of them, and the train was run 12 kilometers outside a town, and it took the Jews 7 or 8 hours to die. The whole train was moving with their cries’ (Gellhorn 1944: 11). Karski was already asking questions about the quick lime which are still debated among historians: was it used to kill or to clean? For Karski, it was both. The train moves because of the quick lime and, he says, with the cries. In this he shows strong empathy with the victims, which is also manifest in his description of the horrors of Izbica. Karski was smuggled in disguised as a Ukrainian (he says Estonian) camp guard. The money the Underground had to pay for this disguise is like an echo of the bribes the guards took from the Jews (when it was possible) to ‘save’ their lives for a few more hours or days, before asking for more money (or flesh by rape) before their victim was finally consigned to death. German guards, Ukrainians, Poles, Estonians or others, gave Karski a first-hand perspective on their collaborations and accommodations, and the impossibility of them ever being ‘real’ (neutral) by-standers.

Jan Karski, from eye witness to moral witness   231 In the reports, and subsequently in his book, it is striking how Karski explains dehumanization through the screams and the stench. He speaks more about what he heard and smelled that about what he saw. What is fascinating is that his own body followed the same pattern. When he returned, he had to be stripped naked of his false appearance as a guard – it was impossible for him to wear any longer the clothing of the perpetrators. He felt compelled to wash – so much so that he flooded the wash room. But it was impossible to get the stench out of his mind; the quick lime had continued to kill Jews in the railcar but also has passed into him: he vomited again and again. And during the shooting of Shoah, in 1978, when he tells the same story he makes strange movements with his mouth, as if trying to fight again the smell, the stench, the noise, inside himself. It looks like a body memory of this day, as if he wants to wash his mouth of the awful words which he has to utter in order to describe this day. In 1943 he spoke about his nightmares, in 1944 and after, as they had become part of him. By vomiting, he was not only a camera, a recording machine – as he repeated time and again in his different reports – but a human being.6 On the contrary, he insisted: ‘I have no other proof, no photographs. All I can say is that I saw it and that is the truth.’7 He had also cut his wrists with a razor blade, for fear of speaking under torture, when captured during one of his first missions for the Polish resistance. He had been taken to hospital and saved by the Underground, but for the rest of his life his body bore the awful scars of the episode, and which denied him any anonymity. Perhaps his body, even more than his words, could tell the truth? The truth. Which truth? ‘The Lord assigned me a role to speak and write during the war, when, as it seemed to me – it might help. It did not’ (Chamberlain and Feldman 1987: 181).

‘Statistics don’t bleed’: from eye witness to moral witness While Karski was directly linking Nazi atrocities with the extermination that was taking place, he was unable to convince his British and American interlocutors that what was happening was far worse than a giant pogrom. Reports about the extermination were coming from across occupied Europe, but were widely considered as exaggerations. Worse, there was a total confusion between Nazi atrocities in general and the specificity of the extermination of the Jews, even if some had understood, like the writer George Orwell as early as 1942, that ‘unfortunately the truth about atrocities is far worse than that they are lied about and made into propaganda. The truth is that they happen’ (Orwell 1943). As early as July 1942, the Jewish Chronicle published an article titled ‘Massacre’: ‘The average mind simply cannot believe the reality of such sickening revelations, or that men, even the vilest and most bestial, could be found to perpetrate such disgusting orgies of sadistic mania.’ Karski subsequently met Arthur Koestler, and became one of the sources for his 1943 book Arrival and Departure (in which Koestler fictionalized

232  Annette Becker the Belzec/Izbica story). Koestler wrote in the New York Times about the similar witnesses and photos. A dog run over by a car upsets our emotional balance and digestion. 3,000,000 Jews killed in Poland cause but a moderate uneasiness; Statistics don’t bleed, it is the detail which counts. We are unable to embrace the total process with our awareness, we can only focus on little lumps of reality. People died to smuggle them (the photos) out of Poland (. . .) nine out of ten average American citizens (. . .) answered it was all propaganda lies and they didn’t believe a word of it. (Koestler 1944) So Karski said in 1981: ‘When the war came to its end, I learned that the governments, the leaders, the scholars, the writers, did not know what had been happening to the Jews. They were taken by surprise. The murder of six million innocents was a secret’ (Chamberlain and Feldman 1987: 181). A secret, after all he had been through to reveal the truth? Karski could not believe that they could not believe. And he was right, there was no secret. As a historian, I was very struck by a ‘discovery’ I made in the British National Archives at Kew in 2011. In a Foreign Office file (declassified only in 1972) were photographs that had been smuggled to England in early 1942, showing dying children and corpses in ghettos. They were so horrifying that a label had been put on the file by the archivists: ‘Warning, some images may cause distress’. In September 1942, the officials of the Foreign Office called them ‘horrific’. These photographs were not Karski’s, and arrived two months prior to the microfilm which he couriered. Knowledge of these images was not restricted to the political elite however. The same pictures exactly were published in Britain at the time, accessible to all, in Szmul Zygielbojm’s pamphlet Stop Them Now: German Mass Murder of Jews in Poland (Zygielbojm 1942). The debate in 1942 in England (and also in the United States, up to 1945) was between those who knew and did not know they knew, and those who saw and did not see what they saw or could not accept it. As The New Yorker stated in its review of Karski’s book: ‘The demands made upon our emotions so exceed our ordinary capacity for either sympathy or excitement that we almost cease to feel at all and simply begin to take things for granted’ (Wilson 1944). For most people, the fate of the Jews was labelled ‘German Atrocities in Poland’ with few mentions of the Jews in particular. The idea of winning the war and punishing the perpetrators after victory was put before any action could be taken specifically for the Jews. Karski met Shmul Zygielbojm in London, and an angry conversation between the two appears to have initiated a change in Karski himself. Zygielbojm knew a lot about what the British thought, but he had not seen for himself. Karski later recalled that Zygielbojm said to him ‘I did not come here to talk to you about what is happening here. I know that myself. I came

Jan Karski, from eye witness to moral witness   233 to hear what is happening there, what they want there, what they say there’ (Zygielbojm 1942: 364). When Karski spoke in the United States, he already knew that Zygielbojm had committed suicide in despair at the lack of action being taken to save the Polish Jews. I believe that the extreme veracity of his report was also a way to answer Zygielbojm’s quest and perhaps to ease the sense of guilt he (Karski) had about his death. Yes, Zygielbojm knew so much, but what Karski had to say was even worse. He described Zygielbojm listening to him ‘something like disintegrating . . . Apparently he did not see himself what I saw.’8 That is why, in the film Shoah, Karski cries, he ‘disintegrates’ like Zygielbojm did in 1943. This is also probably evidence of trauma, and survivor’s guilt (Niederland 1961). Karski, in his different reports, became much more than an eye witness, he became a ‘moral witness’ in the sense described by Avishai Margalit (2002). He saw the horrors of evil and went through the suffering. He was even a paradigmatical case, as he suffered from evil and took risks to account for it, in the name of humanity as a whole, going from personal to universal. The scars on his wrists can be seen as the physical evidence of this. Also, he had himself become a refugee: he could not go back to Poland, first because of the Nazis, then because the Communists took over his country.

A new man: toward a self-judaization In his 1944 book, Karski described the companions of his first mission, in 1940. He was ‘contacted by a man who would smuggle me across the lines. Cell of the Jewish Underground. Its main task was to bring Jews from Germany into Russian-Occupied territory where they were safer’ (Karski 2012: 101). If he was already among the Jews, they just walked together, then he left them for his Underground missions, and in the book there are no more mentions of Jews until his departure for England. At this point we read his description of the Warsaw Ghetto, and later the ‘To die in agony’ chapter on Belzec/Izbica. These form but a tiny part of the book, the greater part of which is devoted to his activities in the Underground, as the book’s title Story of a Secret State suggests. Before leaving Poland in 1942, his body had, in a sense, turned Jewish while in Izbica, but not yet his mind. He insisted on receiving mass before his departure for the mission and a scapular hung about his neck, which ‘brought safety and tranquility’ (Karksi 2012: 384). In 1943, he spoke much more about the Poles in general, and of the Underground. But he added ‘Never in the history of mankind, never anywhere in the realm of human relations did anything occur to compare with what was inflicted on the Jewish population of Poland’ (2012: 346). The messenger spoke about the reality he knew, inspired by the words of a Zionist leader from the Warsaw Ghetto, who told him ‘You other Poles are fortunate. You are suffering too. Many of you will die, but at least your nation goes on living. After the war Poland will be resurrected (. . .) But the Polish Jews will no longer exist. We will be

234  Annette Becker dead. Hitler will lose his war against the human, the just and the good, but he will win his war against the Polish Jews. No, it will not be a victory; the Jewish People will be murdered.’ It was an evening of nightmare, but with a painful, oppressive reality that no nightmare ever had. (Karski 2012: 349) Without knowing it, the Zionist leader was giving the true definition of a genocide – as defined by Raphael Lemkin at exactly the same time – wherein the death of a people is an end in itself, not a war crime or a collateral disaster due to the war (Lemkin 1944).

Conclusion At the 1981 conference, Karski gave an amazing conclusion to his speech, explaining what happened to him when he discovered not only that everybody pretended not to have known (about the extermination), but, even worse, nobody wanted to know in 1944–5. Then, I became a Jew like the family of my wife, who is sitting in the audience – all of them perished in the ghettos, in the concentration camps, in the gas chambers – so all murdered Jews became my family. But I am a Christian Jew. I’m a practicing Catholic. And, although I’m not a heretic, still my faith tells me: the second Original Sin had been committed by humanity: through commission or omission, or self-imposed ignorance, or insensitivity, or self-interest, or hypocrisy, or heartless rationalization. This sin will haunt humanity till the end of time. It does haunt me. And I want it to be so. (Chamberlain and Feldman 1987: 181) After this extraordinary speech, two important Israelis who had listened to him, Gideon Hausner (State Prosecutor during the Adolf Eichmann trial), and Yitzhak Arad (director of Yad Vashem) invited Karski to Israel where he was accorded the status ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ in the following year, 1982. I believe it is because he was not Jewish that Karski could, during the 1980s and since become at last the ‘perfect messenger’ and could finally open up the reality of the Holocaust to a whole new audience – including young democratic Poland after 1989. In the new Museum of Yad Vashem, Jan Karski is shown on a television monitor, explaining his report and the way he thought people had not understood him. We see him seeing and telling. As Elie Wiesel said, on the day of the opening of the new historical exhibit, ‘There is something more frightening than a messenger who cannot deliver his message – when the messenger has delivered the message and nothing has changed.’ Wiesel had written to Karski himself, the one who had delivered the message: ‘For me you represent the tragic condition of the messenger whose message has been transmitted but not accepted.’

Jan Karski, from eye witness to moral witness   235 To cope with the tragedy, Karski went through a new part of his life which I call auto-judaization: he wanted to be part of the people he had been trying to save, but failed. His speech when he became honorary citizen of the State of Israel in 19949 is typical of this way of thinking: ‘This is the proudest and the most meaningful day in my life. Through the honorary citizenship of the State of Israel, I have reached the spiritual source of my Christian faith. In a way, I also became a part of the Jewish community. . . And now, I, Jan Karski, – by birth Kozielewski – A Pole, an American, a Catholic, have also become an Israelite.’10 And the people who, as is the Jewish custom, still put stones on his Christian grave in Mount Olivet cemetery in Washington continue to believe so.11

Notes 1 For a first analysis of Karski in the films after 1978 see Becker 2012. 2 The section heading quotes an advertisement by the publisher of Karki’s book, one example among many in the American press in 1944 and 1945. Chicago Tribune, 3 Dec. 1944. 3 Lanzmann went on saying Belzec in Shoah, when it was possible at the time to see it was not true: but it was necessary for Lanzmann to have an eye witness for Belzec in his film: nobody knew Izbica nor understood then the complications of the ghettos, the work camps, the death centres and their relations. 4 Karski then believes that Krüger has been killed by the Polish underground, but he had only changed posting. He would commit suicide in 1945. 5 6 Lanzmann deposited the Shoah cuts at the USHMM where they can be seen, and there is a typescript. ‘In London I was not so to speak a human being, I was purely a camera, a recording machine’. He used all the time the words, camera, recording machine, tape recorder. Shoah Cuts typescript, p. 43. 7 Shoah Cuts typescript, p. 379. 8 Shoah Cuts typescript, p. 47. 9 Letter of Shimon Peres, then Israeli Foreign Office Minister, to Jan Karski, when he became an honorary citizen, 12 May 1994: ‘You, sir, proved by your very actions that you rank High in the all too brief list of such great and unique personalities who stood out in the darkest age of Jewish History. Had the Jewish People been blessed with more courageous individuals such as yourself, with more “Righteous among the Nations”, its decimation would certainly have been tempered yet further.’ Yad Vashem Archives. 10 Speech in Washington, 12 May 1994. Yad Vashem Archives. 11 Thanks to Jan Lambert who took me there and to so many other places and turned this article into real English.

References Becker, A. (2012) Devenir Karski, l’usage des interviews filmées. In A. Kleinberger and P. Mesnard (eds) La Shoah, théâtre et cinéma, aux limites de la représentation, pp. 263–91. Brussels: Kimé. Chamberlain, B., and Feldman, M. (eds) (1987) The Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps, 1945; Eye Witness Account of the Liberators. Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Council.

236  Annette Becker Creel, G. (1943) Revenge in Poland. Collier’s Magazine, 6 Nov.: 11. Gellhorn, M. (1944) Three Poles. Colliers Magazine, 18 Mar. Jewish Chronicle. (1942) Massacre. July. Karski, J. (1944) Story of a Secret State. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. —— (2012) Story of a Secret State. London: Penguin. Koestler, A. (1943) Arrival and Departure. London: Jonathan Cape. —— (1944) The Nightmare that is a Reality. New York Times Magazine, 9 Jan. Lemkin, R. (1944) Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Margalit, A. (2002) The Ethics of Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Niederland, W. (1961) The Problem of the Survivor. Journal of the Hillside Hospital, 10. Orwell, G. (1943) Looking Back on the Spanish War. New Road (June). London. Reprinted in The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. 13, All Propaganda is Lies 1941–1942, p. 503. London: Secker & Warburg, 2001. Pohl, D. (1993) Von der ‘Judenpolitik’ zum Judenmord: Der Distrikt Lublin des Generalgouvernements, 1939–1944. Frankfurt am Main: Lang. Shoah Cuts (n.d.) Unpublished typescript. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). Washington, DC. Wilson, E. (1944) The Polish Underground. The New-Yorker, 25 Nov. Zygielbojm, S. (1942) Stop them Now. German Mass Murder of Jews in Poland. London: Liberty Publications.

16 The sensory signature of being an airman in a Second World War Lancaster bomber aeroplane Melanie Winterton

As an example of wartime matériel, the Second World War Lancaster bomber possesses value as an archaeological object through its cultural associations. It was designed to fly higher than other aeroplanes of the day so that it could, in effect, escape flak in the sky and reach Germany to drop its bombs. Of course, our senses are all about being human and by focusing on the senses we are looking at other ways of being in the world. When aircrew work with such objects as the Lancaster bomber and its associated technology, it is inevitable that their senses became reconfigured and we can look beyond Aristotle’s five conventional senses,1 beyond passive experience. The realities of air combat are registered through the body’s senses, making the associated elements of senses a prominent feature of cultural analysis. There is more than one sense of touch, for we can be touched by our emotions. Aircrews’ wartime experiences provided the impetus for the public and veteran aircrew to express their feelings as the feats of members of Bomber Command remained unacknowledged until a memorial was erected in Green Park, London, in the summer of 2012. My research adopts the multi-disciplinary approach of modern conflict archaeology, a hybrid of archaeology and anthropology in a broad material culture sense (Miller 2002: 237–419; Saunders 2003). Since human experience is directly invested in such material culture, it is a personal and experiential archaeology that ‘excavates people’s lives’ (Saunders 2007: 2). By utilizing an anthropological archaeology we can embody the experience of being in a Lancaster bomber, seeking to make that which is absent present (Buchli and Lucas 2001: 3–18). I focus on aviators’ experiences from a sensorial perspective inasmuch as the ‘sentient pilot body’ has a ‘history and is as much a cultural phenomenon as it is a biological entity’ (Csordas 1994: 4). I demonstrate the potential for a sensory archaeology and acknowledge the increasing popularity of this nuanced focus on the materiality of human existence. To facilitate the excavation of the air-scape2 of Lancaster bomber aircrew, airmen’s letters, diaries, logbooks, memoirs, photographs and the books they wrote were excavated as primary evidence because they are close

238  Melanie Winterton to the moment of experience and representative of ‘sensory communication’ (Classen 1997: 401). Such texts and photographs in themselves may be regarded as material culture for they represent a dimension of human creativity in the social production of reality (Moreland 2001: 83). To add a dimension of authenticity to my research, I undertook an exercise of participatory anthropology enabling my approach to be ‘auto-ethnographical’ (Pink 2009: 64) in terms of experiencing the technology of another era to see how the people of that era might have related to the aviation technology available to them at that time. Participant observation is phenomenological and perception is promoted as a means of embodying and comprehending the sensory experience of being in a Lancaster bomber aeroplane. Such a stance contributes an element of authenticity and empathy to my research, for if one is going to write about being in an aeroplane, ‘there is no knowing or sensing a place except by being in that place and to be in a place is to be in a position to perceive it’ (Casey 2009: 321).

Lancaster bomber: a Second World War aeroplane Roy Chadwick designed the Lancaster bomber whilst working at A. V. Roe Ltd and he specifically designed it to fly higher than any other aeroplane of the time, up to 30,000 feet (Penrose 1985). At the end of 1941, the first three Lancaster bombers entered service with the Royal Air Force (Myers 1995: 59). Whilst the Lancaster bomber represents a rapid advance in aviation technology at the time that improved the performance and ability of combat aircraft, such advances exposed the crew to extreme flying conditions which caused them to feel the effects of G-force, hypoxia, and, in its extreme form, anoxia, hypothermia, and the effects of carbon monoxide, as well as the high probability of a death by physical means.

Lancaster bomber: tangible heritage Keeping trace of the Lancaster bomber, as tangible heritage, is important. Out of the 7,377 Lancasters that were built only two airworthy examples survive today, one in England (PA474) and one in Canada (FM213). One Lancaster is capable of movement under its own power (NX611), whilst a further fifteen examples survive in varying conditions worldwide. Lancaster bombers are exhibited in museums such as RAF Hendon in London and the Imperial War Museum, Duxford. Hendon’s Lancaster R5868 is exhibited in the Bomber Command Hall. It is an awesome-looking exhibit but also very impersonal because one can see but not touch the aeroplane, a rope cordon creating a boundary between visitors and plane. There are interpretation boards giving technological details of the aeroplane as well as information about Roy Chadwick, the designer of the Lancaster. But there is so much more we could add to the Lancaster’s story in terms of its value, significance and meaning of its relationships within the social world.

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Figure 16.1  A Lancaster B Mk 1 in flight, 1942 (© IWM HU 91969)

Lancaster R5868 is exhibited for visual appreciation only and is an example of the institutionalized collecting of rare aircraft, the museum providing a place to park a plane. Today the Lancaster bomber has iconic status; people recognize its profile and love to hear the sound of the four Merlin engines. The engines can be heard and recognized long before the Lancaster flies into view (Figure 16.1).

Sensory archaeology and archaeological theory: coming into being It was not until the mid-1990s that the possibility of a ‘sensory archaeology’ came to the fore as prehistorian archaeologists (e.g. Tilley 1994; Thomas 1996) adopted and adapted the existentialist phenomenology of Martin Heidegger ([1962] 2005) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty ([1958] 2002). The concept of being-in-the-world in terms of how we perceive the material world through human experience was applied to the landscape and the monuments within it. Whilst Tilley’s (1994) travels could be said to have alerted us to the possibilities of using phenomenology in new ways in order to materialize human experience, it was not without its critics (Brück 1998; Fleming 2006). In particular, Tilley’s (1994) phenomenology is totally vision driven and does not take into account the fact that ‘everyday experience is multi-sensorial’, and that ‘one or more senses may be dominant in a given situation’ (Rodaway 1994: 5).

240  Melanie Winterton Interest in the experiential nature of material culture encouraged archaeologists to focus on the embodied character of past materialities (Meskell 1996; Gilchrist 2000). Also, single modality studies came to the fore, for instance, studies on: taste (Classen 2005; Korsmeyer 2005); smell (Classen et al. 1994; Drobnick 2006); and auditory culture (Bull and Back 2003; Witmore 2006). In focusing on single modalities, we are merely investigating previously overlooked aspects of human experience to allow for a more nuanced interpretation (see Day 2013). Of course, we are multi-sensorial but it is perfectly acceptable to focus on single modalities to provide interesting and nuanced angles to research. Following on from this, it is evident that research by, for example, Houston and Taube (2000); Tarlow (2000); and Hamilakis et al. (2002) prepared the way for a sensory archaeology. David Howes’s observation of a ‘sensual turn’ (2004) is evident in contributions to Victor Buchli’s (2002) Material Culture Reader where, for example, Nicholas Saunders (2002: 181) refers to the heightened experience of warfare and the ability of ‘Trench Art’ to ‘act as a bridge between mental and physical worlds’. There have been calls for the replacement of our dominant visual culture by ‘an engagement with embodied culture . . . that recognises the unified nature of the human sensorium’ (Pinney 2002: 84–5). Multi-sensory archaeological studies include, for example, Skeates (2008) which, importantly, offers a socialscience research methodology for an archaeology of the senses and further suggests, when researching environments, that we build up a sensory inventory of that environment to include sensory signatures of different places. Sensory archaeology has also been applied to archaeologies of ritual and religion, for example, Insoll (2009) and Boivin (2009), as well as to the new anthropological-archaeological subdiscipline, ‘modern conflict archaeology’ (Saunders 2011), an example therein being the adoption of a ‘sense-scape’ approach to conflicted landscapes (e.g. Winterton 2012: 229–41).

Lancaster aircrew Bomber Command was a flying culture made up from volunteers gathered from all walks of life all over the world – the United Kingdom, British Commonwealth and Allied Nations. Common practice for crewing up at an Operational Training Unit involved all the airmen of an intake gathering together in a hangar to form themselves into crews, in effect, sensing who they could work with, for they had to rely on each other’s individual tasks for their collective survival on operations. They would become a sentient team.

Haptic world The centre of each aircrew’s air-scape is his designated workstation. An aircrew’s ‘haptic engagement is close range and hands on’ and the ‘engagement

The sensory signature of being an airman  241 of a mindful body at work’ (Ingold 2011: 133), his body filling his personal haptic space and due to the ‘reciprocal nature of touch [he belongs] to that space’ (Rodaway 1994: 55), a space where he is ‘literally in touch with [his] environment’ (Gibson 1966: 97) as he performs the duties relevant to his ‘taskcape’ of ‘related activities’ (Ingold 2000: 195).

Dressing for the task In their haptic space, Lancaster aircrew wore bulky heavy gear, such as a flying jacket, life vest and parachute harness, which made it difficult to move about ‘experienc[ing] their own body’ through the clothes they wore (Jackson 2004: 3), the constraints and confines of the heavy gear pressed on their bodies, restricting their body movement, and every time they moved they re-felt the touch of the weight of the heavy flying gear.

Operational senses Being in a Lancaster bomber is a multi-sensorial experience and each individual aircrew used different senses, coming together as one in order to complete the task in hand, working as a trusting sentient team. Once the airman settled into his position, he was in a world of concentration and the senses of ‘operational sight’ and ‘operational hearing’ were engaged, the senses required to focus specifically on the job in hand. Perception throughout the flight must be attentive and continuous and crew must discipline themselves to be so. Most Lancaster operations took place at night, requiring the crew to look at dimly lit instruments, which they monitored for technical information to help them keep the aircraft in the sky. They also listened out for information from their fellow crew which they received through headphones. They must react to such information within the parameters of their individual jobs, each airman depending on the other for his survival. The trained eyes and ears of the aircrew engage the senses, creating a sentient technology of the aircrew body. Equipment worn by the aircrew, such as headphones and microphones, and objects such as gun sights and bomb sights magnified their senses, subsequently remaking the live body of an airman, ‘making sentience itself an artefact’ (Scarry 1985: 255). Airmen’s vision is technologically facilitated. A gunner looks through the gun sight, the bomb aimer though the bomb sight. Aircrew cannot determine the buildings or the people they bomb in detail. They are guided to the site of target by a ‘Pathfinder Force’ that flies in front of the heavy bomber stream to drop red target flares on the actual aiming points to indicate the target. However, the aircrew see the fires as the buildings burn and they have to remain in the area long enough to photograph the damage caused in order to confirm that they have hit the target. Failure to do so will mean that the operation is not counted in their tour of thirty operations and will have to be repeated – an additional journey, another chance of dying.

242  Melanie Winterton The rear gunner and the mid-upper gunner were the eyes of the sentient team. They concentrated their eyesight for tell-tale signs such as fuel streams in the air, or a momentary light, so that the pilot could be warned over the intercom to take evasive action – for example, the corkscrew manoeuvre. This set up a chain of reaction of the senses, of sight, of hearing and haptic reaction of the pilot as he pushed the control column forward and closed the throttles in order to dive the Lancaster. Such evasive action had consequences for, without external visual reference, sudden aircraft manoeuvres may cause aircrew to feel or be sick or suffer from various forms of spatial disorientation – pilots, without reference to visual instruments, could not tell which way was up or down and could fly into the ground or the sea as a result. With regards the pilot’s sight, when flying high, or in the dark, there are no landmarks for reference so the pilot’s learned skills of visual reading and interpreting man-made instruments are paramount if he is to find his way accurately and safely. In such conditions, the pilot, however, does not physically see outside the aircraft, he ‘sees’ through his instruments which get him from A to B. Lancaster bomber pilot, Guy Gibson, tells us that the pilot’s eyes: constantly perform a non-stop circle from the repeater to the Airspeed Indicator, from the Airspeed Indicator to the horizon, from the horizon to the moon, from the moon to what he can see on the ground and then back to the repeating compass. (Gibson [1946] 2003: 19) Experienced pilots concentrated on flying the aeroplane and visually scanning the horizon simultaneously. The pickup of the information through head turning, James Gibson calls visual kinesthesis (Gibson 1986: 126). A pilot learns habits (Mauss [1935] 1979) regarding eye movements where he learns to scan his aerial environment and it is this habit that enables him to ‘see accurately a continuous visual world in which he himself moves with precision’ (Gibson 1986: 129). Thus in the air-scape of the pilot, vision is not an objectifying sense and vision should be understood in terms of its inter-relationship with other senses, in this case, touch, for to fly a plane both skilled vision and skilled touch are inter-related, the trained eyes and haptic responses together creating a sentient technology of the aircrew body as operational sight is engaged. So, we can see that subjective experience includes not just passive experience as that represented by the senses of sight or hearing, but it includes active experience which involves intentionality and movement, a pilot’s senses and movements providing ‘specific ways of entering into [a] relationship’ (Merleau-Ponty [1958] 2002: 159) with an aeroplane. The dimensions of air-scape shape the pilot’s senses, and such ‘sensory tuning is conditioned by culture, environment, technology . . . experience’ (Boivin 2008: 98) and accrued skill.

The sensory signature of being an airman  243 An airman must listen out for fellow aircrew giving instructions and warnings over the intercom, and be able to react to them decisively. Flight Engineer Powell describes his duties once in the air: [Y]ou would be surprised how busy you are. . . . Everybody is shouting at one another and if you can’t hear anybody you have to listen to them through your earphones. Only one person was supposed to speak at a time on the intercom. So in your headphones, you have this constant buzz of voices coming at you . . . (IWM 18410) The wireless operator listens to the radio transmitter and communicates with Command Control on the ground orally or by using Morse code. When using Morse code he listens to and interprets the coded signals, generating signal replies as appropriate giving an aura of tactility to speech as hands and fingers substitute for mouths and invisible signals are sent through the invisible air via the tactile pressure exerted by the fingertips. The use of such technology extended the reach of the wireless operator’s body giving ‘a sense of experiencing a world apart from the body’ (Rodaway 1994: 32) but also, in effect, of unifying both worlds. Whilst on the subject of communication, it is worth mentioning Squadron 101 which was assigned the task of countering the enemy on the airwaves by using Airborne Cigar (ABC) jamming apparatus, thus denying the sense of hearing to the enemy. An eighth airman joined the Lancaster bomber crew to man this device. His job was to listen out for German ground-to-air transmissions which were the ground controllers vectoring the German night fighters on the bomber stream. On listening out for and identifying a German transmission, the eighth airman would switch on one, two or three of his transmitters, tuned to the same frequency in order to jam the transmission. Whilst such blocking occurred, the eighth airman was oblivious to what was happening on his Lancaster and is not audially part of the sentient team until he switches the flight’s intercom back on. He is, however, visually part of the sentient team as he has a call light by his wireless set by which the pilot attracts his attention if required (Alexander 1979). The technology of such man-made equipment is not fool-proof. For example, flying at great heights of up to 35,000 feet in freezing cold temperatures, often in excess of –50°F has its consequences. Aircrew wore oxygen masks to enable them to breathe above 10,000 feet, without which they would fall into unconsciousness. Flight Lieutenant Howell recalls the start of the Battle of Berlin when he and his crew completed eight successful operations to the ‘Big City’. They were all long, cold, tough, tiring trips during which time they had to remain alert. During one of these operations, the temperature was –58oF and the rear gunner succumbed to facial frost bite, causing the microphone in his oxygen mask to freeze to his face rendering him unable to answer the crew’s attempts to contact him. Howell sent the wireless operator back to check what had gone wrong, but, his portable oxygen bottle

244  Melanie Winterton had not been refilled and he became semi-conscious and unable to report back to Howell. Howell then sent the flight engineer back to find out what the trouble was, giving him strict instructions to get onto mains oxygen and the intercom immediately he got to them. Then, with the mid-upper gunner’s help, he got them both back on to mains oxygen, the wireless operator defrosted the microphone and they returned to their respective positions (RAF Hendon B2456/1). Thus, for quite a long time, four of Howell’s crew were not in a position to see enemy fighters and, had they attacked, they would have been an easy target.

Realities of air combat There was full disclosure of casualties by Bomber Command and the aircrews of the Lancaster bombers were well aware of the high mortality rate and that the odds of completing a tour of thirty operations were extremely poor. Operational flying in bombers could claim to be the most dangerous task undertaken by any British servicemen, with over 55,000 of Bomber Command’s 125,000 aircrew being killed. Lancaster aircrew knew their chances of dying were high yet they faced danger night after night and it would be understandable if they were to succumb to fatigue, fear and exhaustion. Rear gunner, Sergeant Whitfield describes a daylight bombing raid to Brest: We got the ship we were after, but it cost us one aircraft, with seven of our pals in it. I saw it go down with a full bomb load aboard, until he hit the beach, after which there was a sudden flash (made me feel sickly). (RAF Hendon A1497) The effects of nerves were also experienced and G. W. Wills records in his diary a trip to Caen: ‘On the return trip the mid-upper gunner fired his guns by accident probably due to nervous reaction or carelessness’ (RAF Hendon MF1011/29). Lack of moral fibre Airmen whose bodies could not adapt to being technologically reconfigured or habituated displayed symptoms of stress and anxiety. Aircrew felt stressed, they felt exhausted, but they had to carry on if they were to survive. Such mental stresses wear people down and those airmen who refused to fly, or whose reliability became questionable, were labelled by the Royal Air Force as ‘lacking in moral fibre’ (LMF) (McCarthy 1984). They were immediately removed from duty, their flying brevet (wings) removed, and they were either discharged or demoted, possibly finding themselves cleaning toilets as punishment for the duration of the war (National Archives AIR 20/10727; also see Wells 1995). The policy took no account of an

The sensory signature of being an airman  245 airman’s pre-breakdown history. An airman who had flown a whole tour of duty and been decorated for bravery was treated the same as an airman who refused to fly during training. Veteran bomb aimer, Miles Tripp, in his book The Eighth Passenger (alluding to fear as being the eighth passenger) recalls that the humiliation and ignominy of going LMF was so great that some men continued to fly long after their nerves were in shreds (1969: 39). Indeed, Tripp himself remembers his legs shaking uncontrollably in an attack of nerves but knew that if he did not recover his nerve he would be grounded and stigmatized with the label LMF (1969: 50). Pilot Leonard Cheshire acknowledged that he was ruthless with moral fibre cases because one really frightened man could affect the lives of others around him (Messenger 1984: 206). Lucky mascots as coping mechanisms With regards touch, there is more than one sense of touch – cutaneous, kinaesthetic, vestibular, haptic and of course, tactile senses of touch (Paterson 2007). But also, in a more metaphorical sense, touch includes emotions, e.g. feelings of fear, anxiety, solidarity – in other words, how we make sense of our world. Material culture studies brings to the fore all sorts of relations and associations between people and things that go beyond the actual form and function of the object (Miller and Tilley 1996), including, for example, actions, sensations, memories, as well as with feelings and emotions. Emotions are a significant materiality of human experience and Lancaster aircrew were in touch with their world through their emotions. Emotions are cultural (Tarlow 2000: 728) and, as such, are predisposed to archaeological study for they are ‘historically specific and experientially embodied’ (ibid. 713) and, therefore, a significant means of enriching archaeological interpretation as we use our emotions to make sense of the world. I will focus on the emotional connotations of ‘touching’ in terms of feelings of fear and anxiety. It is interesting to note the relationship that the aircrew forged with their Lancaster in terms of taking lucky mascots on board to protect them and also in painting nose art on the Lancaster to visually identify the crew of a particular plane, thus advertising their confidence in each other’s ability to work as a team, having mastered the Lancaster’s technology. Flight Lieutenant Howell describes his crew’s conversion course to Lancasters and the fact that the instructors made an entry in their Conversion Flight Book that: ‘we were not expected to survive more than five ops, but it made us determined to prove them wrong’ (RAF Hendon B2456/1). However, the flight lieutenant and his crew encountered a dangerous situation on their second operation when they were hit by fire from a German aeroplane and: ‘they were all badly shaken up, and it made me wonder if the Con Flight Book was going to prove correct after all’ (RAF Hendon B2456/1). Fortunately, their next three trips occurred without incident, therefore beating the jinx. In reality, this was because they had

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Figure 16.2  Artwork for Lancaster DS734. The aeroplane was called ‘Y’ Yorker and the pilot, Howells, hence ‘Y’s ‘Owells’ ( Trustees of the Royal Air Force Museum, Hendon)

full confidence in each other’s ability and they had become aware and very appreciative of the efficiency of their ground crew team.3 They named their Lancaster and painted nose art on the fuselage as a means of identifying the crew (Figure 16.2). Thus, they have a new identity in the form of their relationship with the plane. Crew members often spoke about getting ‘the chop’, weighing up their chances of survival. In serious moments, one thought dominated their minds, would they be lucky enough to get through their tour of duty? Aware that death was random, it is apparent from the literature that aircrew grasped at every opportunity to increase their chances of survival – skill and discipline alone could not guarantee it as this was often down to luck and circumstance (e.g. Yates 1999). Thus, as a means of coping with the inevitable, lucky mascots were adopted by aircrew, as indeed they were during the First World War. A materiality of feelings of fear is the half-belief in lucky mascots, carried by airmen to counteract and challenge such feelings in an attempt to make sense of their sentient world (Winterton in prep.). One such mascot was a kangaroo (Figure 16.3), which came from Lancaster R5868 ‘S’ for Sugar, which completed 137 operations during the

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Figure 16.3  Lucky mascot from Lancaster R5868 ‘S’ for Sugar ( Trustees of the Royal Air Force Museum)

Second World War without the loss of one single member of crew (Dymond 1975). Another example is that of a pilot, who used one of his fiancée’s stockings as a good luck keepsake and he never flew anywhere without it, recalling: ‘that stocking must have become the best travelled stocking in existence but . . . by the few near misses and dodgy times . . . it served me very well: I was always very lucky’ (RAF Hendon X004-1500). Aircrew also participated in rituals as a means of encouraging good luck. Pilot Roy Gould remembers that, before boarding the aircraft, and in an attempt to keep up morale: ‘we would . . . ceremoniously gather round the tail wheel . . . A moment of quiet would descend over us whilst we all, I expect, said our own silent prayer for a safe return. Then we would all pee over that tail wheel and woe betide anyone who missed’ (RAF Hendon X004-1500). Whilst yielding no practical results, such good luck rituals are evidently invented by men when they feel anxiety in the hope that they will reduce such feelings (Homans 1941: 171).

Memory Even when the Second World War ended, the war is remembered, for the veteran body becomes a ‘central recording device’ in terms of bodily memory (Hamilakis 2002: 124). Memory is, as Nadia Seremetakis (1994: 9) writes: ‘the horizon of sensory experience’ for ‘memory as a

248  Melanie Winterton distinct meta-sense transports, bridges, and crosses all the other senses’. For example, P. W. N. Antwis, injured whilst bailing out of a Lancaster, recalls: ‘the tracer trails . . . raked up the side of my leg. I did not feel anything at the time, but the scar still pales even now in a summer tan’ (IWM 11651). Thus an old wartime injury acts as a visual reminder of a time and place. Despite suffering the highest casualty rate of any British branch of service in the Second World War, the contribution of Bomber Command was not, until recently, nationally recognized by any British Government. Bomber Command veterans, supported by the Bomber Command Association and the Daily Telegraph, orchestrated a national campaign to raise money for a memorial that was erected in Green Park, London, in 2012. The veterans never forgot what they experienced, what they saw, heard, smelt, touched or their emotions at that time in terms of feelings of fear, stress and anxiety. The veterans, now in their twilight years, provide a link with their dead comrades. They still see their faces and hear their voices and remember their willingness to go up night after night in Lancaster bombers and other aeroplanes knowing that, in all probability, they would not return and they want to ensure that they are not forgotten.

Bomber Command memorial The Green Park memorial is dedicated to the 55,573 airmen from the United Kingdom, British Commonwealth and Allied Nations who served in RAF Bomber Command and lost their lives over the course of the Second World War (Figure 16.4). Many people visit and leave flowers, wreaths and personal messages that tell the story of an airman. For example, somebody left a note attached to a wreath for his uncle, the navigator of a Lancaster bomber. It reads: ‘I wish I had a chance to know you and always dreamed that one day you would appear from some distant place where you had been lost. We will always remember.’ The whole crew were brought down in France in July 1944. The roof of the memorial is formed of a stainless steel diagrid and represents the ‘skeleton’ of the fuselage of a bomber aeroplane. The lining sheet of the roof is made from aluminium recovered from a crashed Handley Page Halifax III bomber (LW682 from No. 6 Group (Royal Canadian Air Force) 426 Squadron) which was smelted and rolled into sheets. This bomber was shot down at night over Belgium in May 1944, killing all eight crew (Rafbf n.d.). Objects of war are embodied with sensory experiences. The experiences of the aircrew with this aeroplane and their eventual fate and their aircraft are embodied into the fabric of the memorial – they touched that metal, they heard the engines, they smelt the fuel, they saw the crash, their senses felt heightened, they were frightened, they remembered their loved ones. Relationships with objects are continually forged as objects of conflict are recycled and recirculated but they remain textured with memory and remembrance, attributes which go far beyond an object’s form and function.

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Figure 16.4 Bomber Command memorial, Green Park, London ( http://orlok.org/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode)

Participatory anthropology: inside a Lancaster bomber Whilst I have not managed to fly in a Lancaster bomber – there are only two left that fly in the world – I have taxied along the runway in Lancaster NX611 Just Jane, owned by the Lincolnshire Aviation Heritage Centre at East Kirkby airfield. Such a reflexive and embodied approach has helped me to understand the sensorial world of a Lancaster bomber aircrew. The following is a culturally sentient account of my experience of being inside Lancaster NX611. From the outside, the Lancaster looks huge, but, in reality, the interior is very cramped to make room for bombs, machine guns, radios and navigation aids. The exterior of a Lancaster has a pronounced intensification of presence, it looks powerful – though it is human agency that attributes power to the Lancaster since it is the aircrew that enable it to fly and it is the bomb aimer who finally drops the bombs whilst directing the pilot over the target. Entrance to the aeroplane is by climbing a five-rung ladder to a small door at the rear starboard side. My head must be kept low to avoid banging it. It is quite awkward to manoeuvre my body through the door, and the Lancaster aircrew were further hampered by wearing bulky heavy gear, life vests and parachute harnesses. On entering the plane, there is an immediate awareness of the strong and all-invasive smell of fuel and oil, the personal smell of the aeroplane emanating from the chemical toilet and the musty

250  Melanie Winterton smell of stale sweat. On being in the Lancaster, in semi-darkness, I can almost feel the darkness before my eyes acclimatize and my body becomes spatially aware and immediately starts working out how to negotiate the available space. It is necessary to tense my muscles to be in sufficient control of my body to successfully negotiate the cramped space inside the Lancaster in order to avoid bumping into anything. In tensing my muscles it feels as though I am trying to make myself smaller. It is not possible to walk upright although my body wants to stand upright. A ground crew member on the starboard side and one on the port side enable switches in the wheel bays prior to the electrical starters being engaged from the cockpit, starting the engines one by one. As each engine starts, the noise of the Rolls Royce Merlin engines gradually builds to a crescendo. The noise vibrates right through the aircraft, enabling one to feel it as well as hear it. The roar of the engines is deafening, sparking a feeling of excitement and anticipation in the pit of one’s stomach, whilst the overpowering smell of the fuel simultaneously induces a feeling of nausea. The engines run for about six minutes before the plane moves. Then, one can feel the swaying motion and the vibration of the Lancaster as it lumbers and creaks forward and one cannot help but shudder at the thought that, during the Second World War, these aeroplanes would have been heavily laden with highly explosive bombs. After the taxi run, the aeroplane eventually trundles to a standstill and, as each engine is cut, the noise gradually diminishes until one suddenly ‘hears’ a very loud silence. The taxi ride itself feels very bumpy, visibly shaking the body, and, although lasting for fifteen minutes, it felt much longer. My experience was very synaesthetic in terms of multiple sensory sources, as the whole body sensed and moved. The noise of the four Merlin engines dramatized and heightened my sentient experience. One of the paying visitors was a Second World War veteran, aged 89 years, who had been a Lancaster pilot so the plane held particular personal significance for him. He experienced much difficulty in clambering over the main spar. He sat in the cockpit next to the pilot, and, in a way, authenticated my experience, linking his present with his past. After the taxi ride, when the roar of the engines had diminished, I managed to hone in on a conversation between the veteran pilot and the actual pilot. The veteran pilot experienced thirty tours and, because he was shot down only once, he (in his words) ‘had a good war’. Such was my sensorial encounter in this perceptual space; an event full of awe, emotion and an experience to be remembered.

Observations So, to conclude, as a modern conflict archaeologist, I am interested in objects and things and their relationships with people during and after times of conflict. The sensory signature of a Lancaster bomber airman promotes the kinaesthetic interplay of sonic, visual and tactile senses, with no single

The sensory signature of being an airman  251 sense being dominant as operational sight and operational hearing come into play in their haptic environment which is a capsule of concentration and communication. Subjective experience includes not just passive experience as that represented by the senses of sight or hearing, but includes active experience which involves intentionality and movement, a pilot’s senses and movements providing ‘specific ways of entering into [a] relationship’ (Merleau-Ponty [1958] 2002: 159) with an aeroplane. Operational, or reconfigured, senses, particularly of hearing and sight, are paramount as pilots had to learn skilled ways of seeing that have tactile dimensions and this is therefore not an objectifying sight. As aircrew used equipment, such as bomb sights and gun sights, to help them perform their jobs, their senses were magnified to the extent that sentience itself could be an ‘artefact in extremis’ (Winterton 2012). Also, wireless operators adopted an air of tactility to their speech as they communicated over distance through their fingers, extending the reach of their bodies. An airman’s sense of touch did not stop at tactility and movement but extended to the alternative emotional connotation of ‘touching’, for example feelings of fear and anxiety, or being touched by them. Their half-belief in the use of lucky mascots helped them make sense of their sensorial world as feelings of fear and anxiety emerged. Finally the veterans of Bomber Command never forgot what they saw, heard, smelt, touched or their emotions at that time, in terms of feelings of fear and anxiety which spurred them on to ensure the Bomber Command Memorial was erected. Of course, the meaning of the memorial will continually change as people visit, leave things behind, such as flowers and personal notes, extending the ‘biography’ (Kopytoff 1986) of the memorial. Sensory archaeology provides an innovative framework of inquiry that many archaeologists are adopting to bring a more detailed and nuanced angle to their research. Indeed, new subdisciplines, such as modern conflict archaeology, are integral in taking an anthropological archaeology of the senses to new heights in terms of formally theorizing the paradigm, particularly in terms of recognizing the realm of being in the air as an area of significant archaeological interest.

Acknowledgements This chapter is based on my Master’s dissertation (Winterton 2010). I would like to thank the following without whose help this chapter would not have been possible: Professor Nicholas Saunders, University of Bristol; Paul Cornish, Imperial War Museum; the staff at the RAF Hendon Museum, particularly Peter Devitt; Trustees of the RAF Museum, Hendon, for their kind permission to reproduce extracts from the museum’s photographs and archives; the archive staff at the Imperial War Museum; the Lincolnshire Aviation Heritage Centre, East Kirkby; and Philip H. Chalmers Winterton for funding this research.

252  Melanie Winterton

Notes 1 Aristotle set out a hierarchy of five separate senses (1986: 168–186): (1) sight; (2) hearing; (3) smell; (4) taste; and (5) touch. He ranked the sense of sight as the most developed sense. The first three senses, sight, hearing and touch he described as human senses. Whilst taste and touch he described as animal senses. Greek tradition separated mind and body. The Greeks thought that the mind was superior to the body. They recognised the senses but really felt that it was animals that had senses whilst humans had the ability to reason, they had intellect. 2 Landscape is not just the physical surface of the world, for there is a ‘below’ (Edholm 1993: 139–164) and, therefore, an above which I shall term ‘air-scape’. As landscapes are cultural processes (Hirsch 1995: 23), the term air-scape represents a subjective means of perceiving the aerial world through the airmen’s ‘embodied experience’ (Merleau-Ponty [1958] 2002; Csordas 1990) through the senses in a cultural context (Howes 2005: 143–145). 3 It took 39 members of Bomber Command ground crew to look after one Lancaster bomber.

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The sensory signature of being an airman  253 Classen, C., Howes, D., and A. Synott (1994) Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell. London and New York: Routledge. Csordas, J. (1990) Embodiment as a Paradigm of Anthropology. Ethos, 18(1): 5–47. —— (1994) Introduction. In J. Csordas, Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self, pp. 1–24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Day, J. (ed.) (2013) Making Senses of the Past: Toward a Sensory Archaeology. Carbondale, IL: Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University. Drobnick, J. (ed.) (2006) The Smell Culture Reader. Oxford and New York: Berg. Dymond, F. E. (1975) A Very Special Lancaster: A History of Lancaster MkI R5868. London: Pitkin Pictorials Ltd. Edholm, F. (1993) The View from Below: Paris in the 1880s. In B. Bender (ed.), Landscape, Politics and Perspectives, pp. 139–68. Oxford: Berg. Fleming, A. (2006) Post-Processual Landscape Archaeology: A Critique. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 16: 267–80. Gibson, Guy (2003) [1946] Enemy Coast Ahead. Manchester: Crécy Publishing Ltd. Gibson, James (1966) The Senses Considered as a Perceptual System. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Co. —— (1986) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Publishers. Gilchrist, R. (2000) Archaeological Biographies: Realizing Human Lifecycles, Courses and Histories. World Archaeology, 31(3): 325–8. Hamilakis, Y., Pluciennik, M., and Tarlow, S. (eds) (2002) Thinking through the Body: Archaeologies of Corporeality. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers. Hamilakis, Y. (2002) The Past as Oral History: Towards an Archaeology of the Senses. In Y. Hamilakis, M. Pluciennik and S. Tarlow (eds), Thinking through the Body: Archaeologies of Corporeality, pp. 121–36. New York: Kluwer Academic/ Plenum Publishers. Heidegger, M. (2005) [1962] Being and Time, tr. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Hirsch, E., and O’Hanlon, M. (eds) (1995) The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Homans, G. C. (1941) Anxiety and Ritual: The Theories of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown. American Anthropologist, ns 43(2/1): 164–72. Houston, S., and Taube, K. (2000) An Archaeology of the Senses: Perception and Cultural Expression in Ancient Mesoamerica. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 10(2): 261–94. Howes, D. (2004) Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. —— (2005) Sensation in Cultural Context. In D. Howes (ed.), Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, pp. 143–5. Oxford: Berg. Imperial War Museum Accession Number 11651 (1944) Private papers of P. W. N. Antwis, written in 1944 of his enlistment and training in the RAF, September 1942–March 1944. Imperial War Museum Accession Number 18410. (1995) Recording of Jamaican Officer, E. K. Powell, served as flight engineer with No. 47 Squadron. Ingold, T. (2000) The Perception of the Environment. London: Routledge.

254  Melanie Winterton —— (2011) Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Abingdon: Routledge. Insoll, T. (2009) Materiality, Belief, Ritual – Archaeology and Material Religion: An Introduction. Material Religion, 5: 250–64. Jackson, P. (2004) Inside Clubbing: Sensual Experiments in the Art of Being Human. Oxford and New York: Berg. Kopytoff, I. (1986) The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process. In A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, pp. 64–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Korsmeyer, C. (ed.) (2005) The Taste Culture Reader: Experiencing Food and Drink. Oxford and New York: Berg. McCarthy, J. (1984) Aircrew and Lack of Moral Fibre in the Second World War. War and Society (Sept.): 87–101. Mauss, Marcel (1979) [1935]Body Techniques. In Sociology and Psychology: Essays by Marcel Mauss, tr. B. Brewster, pp. 95–123. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (2002) [1958] Phenomenology of Perception, tr. C. Smith. Oxford: Routledge. Meskell, L. (1996) The Somatization of Archaeology: Institutions, Discourses and Corporeality. Norwegian Archaeological Review, 29(1): 1–16. Messenger, C. (1984) Bomber Harris and the Strategic Bombing Offensive 1939–1945. London: Arms and Armour Press. Miller, D. (2002) Artefacts and the Meaning of Things. In T. Ingold (ed.), Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology, pp. 396–419. London: Routledge. Miller, D., and Tilley, C. (1996) Editorial. Journal of Material Culture, 1: 5–14. Moreland, J. (2001) Archaeology of Text. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd. Myers, G. (1995) Mother Worked at AVRO: The Story of AVRO (Yeadon) and Its Contribution to Britain’s War Effort. Warrington: Compaid Graphics. National Archives AIR 20/10727. RAF correspondence relating to flying stress, 1941–1946. Paterson, M. (2007) The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies. Oxford and New York: Berg. Penrose, H. (1985) Architect of Wings. A Biography of Roy Chadwick – Designer of the Lancaster Bomber. Shrewsbury: Airlife Publishing Ltd. Pink, S. (2009) Doing Sensory Ethnography. London: Sage Publications. Pinney, C. (2002) Visual Culture. In V. Buchli (ed.), The Material Culture Reader, pp. 81–6. Oxford and New York: Berg. RAF Hendon Museum Accession Number B2456/1. Papers of A. H. Howell. Description of Flight Lieutenant Howell and his crew’s tour on Lancasters with No. 115 Squadron. RAF Hendon Museum Accession Number X004-1500. Roy Gould (2000) Memories of my time in the Air Force. Written in May 2000, some 65 years after the events, with the aid of his two flying log books. RAF Hendon Museum Accession Number A1497. Unofficial diary of Sergeant J. Whitfield, rear gunner on Lancasters, No. 9 Squadron, 24 June 1944–25 April 1945. RAF Hendon Museum Accession Number MF1011/29. (1944) Diary of operational flying of G. W. Wills 1944. Rafbf (n.d.) Accessed Aug. 2015.

The sensory signature of being an airman  255 Rodaway, P. (1994) Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense and Place. Oxford and New York: Routledge. Saunders, N. J. (2002) Bodies of Metal, Shells of Memory: ‘Trench Art’ and the Great War Re-cycled. In V. Buchli (ed.), The Material Culture Reader, pp. 181–206. Oxford: Berg. —— (2003) Trench Art, Materialities and Memories of War. Oxford and New York: Berg. —— (2007) Killing Time: Archaeology of the First World War. Stroud: Sutton Publishing Ltd. —— (2011) First World War Archaeology: Between Theory and Practice. In Archeologia della Grande Guerra: Atti del Conveguo Internazionale 23/24 June 2006, pp. 37–53. Trento: Stampalith. —— (ed.) (2012) Beyond the Dead Horizon. Oxford and Oakville: Oxbow. Scarry, E. (1985) The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Seremetakis, C. N. (1994) The Memory of the Senses, Part I: Marks of the Transitory. In C. N. Seremetakis (ed.), The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity, pp. 1–18. Boulder, CO: Westview. Skeates, R. (2008) Making Sense of the Maltese Temple Period: An Archaeology of Sensory Experience. Time and Mind, 1(2): 207–38. Tarlow, S. (2000) Emotion in Archaeology. Current Anthropology, 41(5): 713–46. Thomas, J. (1996) Time, Culture and Identity: An Interpretative Archaeology. Oxford: Routledge. Tilley, C. (1994) A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments. Oxford: Berg. Tripp, M. (1969) The Eighth Passenger. London: William Heinemann Ltd. Wells, M. K. (1995) Courage and Air Warfare. The Allied Aircrew Experience in the Second World War. London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd. Winterton, M. R. (2012) Sign, Signals and Senses: The Soldier Body in the Trenches. In N. J. Saunders (ed.), Beyond the Dead Horizon, pp. 229–41. Oxford and Oakville: Oxbow. —— (in prep.) Depths and Dimensions of a First World War Aviator’s Air-Scape: An Anthropological-Archaeological Perspective 1914–2014. PhD, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol. —— (2010) Experiencing the Lancaster Bomber: An Anthropological Archaeological Perspective, 1942–2010. Unpublished Master’s Dissertation, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol. Witmore, C. L. (2006) Vision, Media, Noise and the Percolation of Time: Symmetrical Approaches to the Mediation of the Material World. Journal of Material Culture, 11(3): 267–92. Yates, H. (1999) Luck and a Lancaster: Chance and Survival in World War II. Marlborough: Airlife Publishing.

17 Sounds of horror Sensorial experiences of a Gestapo prison, Begunje (Slovenia) Uroš Košir

On 25 March 1941, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia signed the Tripartite Pact with the Axis Powers and only two days later the government was overthrown. Despite the new leadership the pact was surprisingly still valid, but Hitler was outraged by attempts to dissolve it, and Germany, Italy and Hungary launched an attack on Yugoslavia on 6 April 1941 (Čepič et al. 2005: 24–7). Shortly after the occupation population transfers and a process of ‘Germanization’ commenced in response to Hitler’s exhortation ‘make me this land German again’.1 Soon the partisan movement, mass deportations and imprisonments of civil population also took place. During the entire war in Slovenia, more than 65,000 people were imprisoned, only 10 per cent due to the criminal activity (Čepič et al. 2005: 236). In this chapter, I will discuss the sensorial experiences of imprisonment in the Gestapo prison in Begunje, which was one of several prisons in Slovenia. I argue that imprisonment affected all the prisoners’ senses, from their arrival until their release or execution. The historical-ethnographic evidence presented here is an exploration of the extremes of sensory experiences and deprivation whose analysis engages with the literature on the anthropology of the senses in terms of sight, sound, touch, smell and taste. As David Howes points out, we have witnessed a remarkable florescence of theoretically engaged work on the senses in different disciplines in recent decades (Howes 2006: p. xii) and some of the key roles in this development were played by Paul Stoller (1989), David Howes (1991) and Nadia Seremetakis (1994) (van Ede 2009: 61). Jo Day wrote that all senses together represent the bodily experience of being human (Day 2013: 1–2). Here, I will represent the aspects of being human in the time of conflict, more exactly of being human without freedom in the aforementioned prison. It is this ‘realm of the body and the senses’ (Howes 2005: 1) that represents the horrors of imprisonment. The sensorial experiences of conflicts have already been discussed: for example, Melanie Winterton explored not only cultural but also experiential and sensorial aspects of being a soldier or other participant in the Great War (Winterton 2012). In the same way as ‘the soldier body experienced the trench world through its senses, its emotions, its movements, gestures, and bodily signs and signals’ (Winterton

Sounds of horror  257 2012: 230), so the prisoners experienced the world of captivity. The aspects of internment were widely discussed in the work of Adrian Myers and Gabriel Moshenska (2011) where different authors contributed to the Archaeologies of Internment. The useful (and highly subjective) definition of internment they used are all forms of unjust imprisonment that ‘are not the result of a fair and equitable legal process. These forced movements serve social, political, economic and military ends and are often organized round conceptions of racial, ethnic, political and social otherness’ (Moshenska and Myers 2011: 3). If we embrace this definition, we can argue that, at Begunje, we can talk more of internment than classic imprisonment, but we must acknowledge that some criminals were also present there. Howes states that after the First World War there was a decline in interest in exploring the sensorium in anthropology (Howes 2006: 6), which is striking as the Great War was also a war of the senses, where one could not see the enemy, but could hear, smell and touch the danger, enemies and the dead (Winterton 2012). After the Second World War, sight and hearing were the most investigated, on the assumption that they were the least subjective of the senses (Howes 2006: 6): sight remains the most discussed of all the senses in academic research even today (Howes 2006: p. xii). The ‘anthropology of the senses’ is a field that came into its own during the 1990s (Howes 2006: 10; 2011: 441–2), and ‘sensory archaeology’ is even more recent (Day 2013). Descriptions of imprisonment in this chapter are largely based on the work of Stane Šinkovec (1995) and Janez Gerčar (1975) concerning Begunje. I also include the testimonies of prisoners from archive sources and a variety of wall graffiti from the ‘bunker cells’. They reflect prisoners’ thoughts and experiences, similar to the graffiti from Second World War air raid shelters in Winchester (UK) that encapsulate a unique insight into civilian experiences of that conflict (Glass 2012: 133). As it is believed that soldiers wrote their ‘truths’ about their experiences (Winterton 2012: 229; Winter 2006: 113), we can presume that the prisoners’ experiences are also ‘truth’.

The Gestapo prison in Begunje Begunje is a typical Upper Carniola (Slov. Gorenjska) village in northwestern Slovenia about 8 km east of Bled. The village is known not only for the Elan sporting goods company and Avsenik music, but also for the Katzenstein mansion where during the Second World War, the Gestapo prison was located (Figure 17.1). The mansion, which originates from the fourteenth century, was converted into a women’s prison at the end of the nineteenth century. At that time, the Katzenstein was in the lease of Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul (Gerčar 1975: 20; Šinkovec 1995: 83). On 1 May 1941, the prison or Strafanstalt Vigaun,2 was handed over to the KdS3 Veldes4 IVth department, known as the Gestapo (Gerčar 1975:

258  Uroš Košir

Figure 17.1  Katzenstein mansion in Begunje ( Author)

24–5; Šinkovec 1995: 49, 83). At the time, half of the nuns were dismissed, the rest were present until 3 October 1942 when they had to leave the premises (Gerčar 1975: 24–5; Šinkovec 1995: 84). The mansion became the central prison for political prisoners from Upper Carniola and, until 1942, also from Slovenian Carinthia (Slov. Koroška) (Šinkovec 1995: 83). The first twenty-six inmates were registered on 20 May 1941 and, at the beginning, many of the inmates were criminals, counterfeiters and gypsies. The ratio soon changed; for example, between 25 July and 25 August, of 526 prisoners only 80 (15.2 per cent) of those who were imprisoned were nonpolitical inmates (Šinkovec 1995: 85–91). During the war, 11,477 people were imprisoned, some of them several times, so the prison records contain a total of 12,363 prisoners (Šinkovec 1995: 127). According to Šinkovec, who analysed the prison records, there were 10,894 Slovenians, 104 gypsies, 83 Italians, 70 Russians, 62 Croats, 52 Polish, 34 Serbians, 22 Germans, 21 Austrians, 20 French, 13 English, 8 Czechs, 3 Hungarians, 3 Spaniards, 2 New Zealanders, 1 each from Lithuania, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Romania, Macedonia, and a further 81 for whom there is no data of nationality (Šinkovec 1995: 127–8). The majority of prisoners were from the working class, followed by those working on farms. There were also some teachers, artists, priests, students, musicians and many with other professions (Šinkovec 1995: 130–1). The

Sounds of horror  259 majority of prisoners were aged 20–30 (30 per cent), and 30–40 (30 per cent) and the rest were 20 or younger (18.94 per cent), 40–50 (14.25 per cent), 50–60 (5.07 per cent), 60–70 (1.52 per cent) and over 70 years old (0.32 per cent). The youngest was a little over two months and the oldest 82 years old (Šinkovec 1995: 129). It is clear that many different nationalities, ages and backgrounds were imprisoned in Begunje until it was liberated by the partisans on 4 May 1945 (Šinkovec 1995: 295–9).

Arrival, accommodation and life in prison The vast majority of inmates were brought from different Gestapo stations, mostly from Kamnik, Jesenice and Kranj. Many of them had already undergone torture at many Gestapo centres and other prisons (Šinkovec 1995: 132). The prisoners were brought into the mansion courtyard by cars or trucks. Anica Zorec remembers that the prisoners were usually not handcuffed, but if they were, it almost always meant that they were partisans (Gerčar 1975: 43), who were also the most tortured ones. In principle, the prisoners were first sent to the bathroom to wash while their clothes were being disinfected. Šinkovec points out that the procedure was not always in that order (Šinkovec 1995: 269). One former inmate recalls that they arrived in Begunje at around 8 in the morning: Immediately we were put in the bunker where we stayed until 4 o’clock in the afternoon. Around 4 o’clock in the afternoon, we had to give away all the clothes in the laundry for steaming, and we had to take a bath. They shaved us entirely, even around the private parts. (Anon. n.d.) Jože Homan remembers: On the arrival in Begunje the police and the Gestapo, who accepted us into their ‘protection,’ took away everything from us what was worth anything, such as watches, wallets and other things, which of course, we never saw again. In doing so, we were catalogued in their book Verzeichnis der Gefangenen. (Homan 1960) So, in addition to their freedom, their dignity was also taken from them. They became just numbers in a prison book. Unlike those who were in concentration camps across Europe and had numbers stitched on their prison uniforms or even tattooed on their body, the prisoners in Begunje did not carry any visible markings, only numbers in their prison records. Prisoners were then bundled into often overcrowded cells, for which several large rooms were used, known among prisoners as Belegschaft (Gerčar 1975: 45) or belegš (Šinkovec 1995: 269). For example, on one occasion room no. 16, where in normal conditions twenty people could

260  Uroš Košir sleep, there were around 100 women (Gerčar 1975: 124). The witness remembers that room no. 19 had only twenty-six beds and more than eighty prisoners, once even 127 (Gerčar 1975: 127; Šinkovec 1995: 269). We can imagine that smell and touch played a significant role in those cells. The prisoners had to get used to the smell of a crowded cell on a hot summer day and to the warmth of a human body in cold winter nights. Prisoners were allowed to use the toilets three times a day (in the morning, noon and in the evening) for one hour, and for the rest of the time each room had a special latrine bucket. The windows were not allowed to be opened and even looking through them was forbidden (Šinkovec 1995: 270). The rooms were often also very cold and, as one prisoner recalled: ‘Most of the detainees had to lie on the bare ground; later, they put blankets and paper on the ground. Fleas were so many that the seams of our clothes were black; they stayed in the seams in lumps. Head and body lice also spread’ (Gerčar 1975: 127). In addition to cold and heat, prisoners had to endure the intense itching due to these lice and fleas. So they were not punished and tortured only by the Gestapo and guards, but also by nature itself. As Alfredo GonzálezRuibal points out (2011: 66), open rooms with no furniture (as most in Begunje were), further dissolved the concept of individuality, and, I would argue, of humanity too, as they resembled animal stalls rather than human spaces. Despite the difficult conditions, the inmates wanted to maintain a relaxed atmosphere in which they could forget their troubles, even for a brief time. One prisoner recalls: ‘I spent the last night in a bunker with other women. Fleas were crawling over me; all the wounds were hurting, and I was telling funny stories as if the next day we would be going to a happy trip and not to the death camp’ (Gerčar 1975: 112–13).5 On the ground floor of the mansion in a special building extension, socalled bunker cells were located, where the most dangerous and important political inmates and those sentenced to death were held (Figure 17.2). In total, there were ten small rooms of which Ivan Dobovšek recalls: ‘The cell was small, around seven steps. The window was barricaded with a dense mesh and covered with a wooden lid, so it was impossible to look at the gymnastics’ arena. In this distress, we were also tortured by the mosquitoes, fleas and lice’ (Gerčar 1975: 62). Usually, there was only one prisoner in the cell and some prisoners were even shackled with a chain to the wall so other prisoners could hear the rattling of the chain when they moved (Gerčar 1975: 55). According to the witnesses, some of them were chained on a very short chain so it was impossible to stand straight, they could just crouch or lie on the ground, although lying was strictly forbidden during the day (Šinkovec 1995: 152). We can imagine that barricaded windows caused a different order of sensory perceptions for the inmates (Howes 2006: 51–5). They had to rely more on their hearing than on their sight, despite being from a Western society, where sight is regarded as the sense that allows control, distance

Sounds of horror  261

Figure 17.2  Today’s view of the hallway with ‘bunker cells’ ( Author)

and objective knowledge (Bagarić 2011: 86). What you heard was more important than what you (couldn’t) see. Prisoners had very limited time for walks in the walled courtyard and even that was used by the guards and the Gestapo to torture and abuse them by rough physical exercise (Figure 17.3). Many prisoners collapsed through fatigue and exhaustion (Gerčar 1975: 47). The prisoners Zdenko Lavrička and Vladimir Lakovič recalled that they had to get up at half-past five in the morning and then clean up the cells, eat breakfast and wash themselves. After that the interrogations started for some of the prisoners. In the afternoon, the interrogations carried on in the sports field and punishment exercises were also carried out. These were conducted in a manner described by the inmates: the punishment lap was about 50 ms long, and they had to run around it about twenty times, then two or three with hands held in the air and spinning around while looking at the sun. Those who fell to the ground were beaten by the guards until they stood up. This was followed by frog jumps, which sometimes lasted for three laps, then crawling on the sharp sandy ground with bare elbows and knees. Slow squats and sit-ups followed with many other exercises. At the end, they had to run back to the cells, while being beaten by the guards (Gerčar 1975: 58–60). The entire exercise was not only physical, but also psychological torture with which they wanted to break the prisoners.

262  Uroš Košir

Figure 17.3  Prisoners during exercise ( Museum of Gorenjska, Photo Archive)

Smell and taste also played a part in a prisoner’s story. This came to the fore in nutrition and sanitary conditions in the prison. In his testimony, Jože Homan stated that food was: not so bad . . . and if there was enough of it, it could make a man full. The problem was that you couldn’t eat it all because everything had to be done in a few minutes, and if you had the misfortune to have been in the last group to which the boiling food was served, you couldn’t eat it so quickly. When the others had already finished, we still struggled with our boiling food, and if I did not want to spoil my stomach and get burned, I had to leave it all. (Homan 1960) Similarly, another witness recalls that they had to stand next to the tables in the dining room until the guard’s signal, and then quickly eat a miserable dish because the command to get up came fast (Gerčar 1975: 127). The prisoners in the bunker cells often suffered from hunger. One of the prisoners remembers that he spent a week in a bunker cell, of which three days were without food (Gerčar 1975: 55). He also described the feeling of hunger: ‘The first few days without food you feel great hunger; the days and nights are endless and to listen to the rattling dishes and spoons is especially painful’ (Gerčar 1975: 71). Clearly, certain sounds made the feeling of hunger even worse. On the walls of the cells, some inmates had scratched

Sounds of horror  263 the food menus and descriptions of what they had for lunch. One example says: ‘Today is St Nicholas’s day, for lunch we had cabbage, and I hope that in the future it will be something else.’ Writings such as ‘I didn’t eat for 24 hours’ and ‘I hadn’t eaten for 4 days’ reflect the ongoing hunger and deprivation suffered by some prisoners.

Interrogations, tortures and executions Political prisoners and partisans were often interrogated and tortured. This entailed serious physical suffering for the tormented inmates and the shouts, cries and sounds of beatings also caused mental agony for other prisoners. Franc Leskovec recalls: ‘I ​​often heard during the day, but also at night, how the prisoners in the bunkers were screaming and moaning when they were brutally tortured by the Gestapo’ (Gerčar 1975: 47). Prisoner Justin Ažman described how for ‘most of the interrogation the prisoners were mercilessly beaten by the Gestapo and many of them lost consciousness. During my interrogation, one Gestapo man beat me with a stick, the other with a club and the third was kicking me brutally’ (Gerčar 1975: 55). A number of other prisoners also heard beatings and screams of prisoners, which echoed through the corridors. Ana Sernež recalls that ‘Above my hospital room the Gestapo interrogation room was located from which, mostly in the evening, high-pitched screams and beatings were heard’ (Gerčar 1975: 112). Rezka Prešeren remembered how they tortured Marija Kokalj: ‘her hands were untied and put on the table, and then they burned the fingers of the left hand with cigarettes. Lighted matches were put under the right hand fingernails, and under her palms and wrists a burning cloth was placed’ (Gerčar 1975: 101). The Gestapo used other interrogation and torture techniques too, and some detainees died during those interrogations. Franc Globočnik stated that, while he was waiting in the hallway, a man was carried out from the interrogation room in a blanket, probably dead (Šinkovec 1995: 153). We can imagine how horrific it was for the prisoners to hear screams echoing through the corridors, mixing with the sounds of the radio that was sometimes used to camouflage the screaming (Šinkovec 1995: 153). As France Hiti recalls, the prison terror grew worse from day to day, and soon death sentences began (Gerčar 1975: 40–1). At the beginning, the so-called hostages were shot mostly in the Draga Valley, not far from Begunje (Figure 17.4). Because of the partisan movement, executions were carried out also in the garden of the mansion from 1942 onwards (Šinkovec 1995: 84). In the majority of cases, the hostages were tied to the wooden posts and blindfolded before they were shot. The blindfold worked as a sensory and psychological barrier between the shooters and the hostages. It concealed the victim’s most vitally human characteristic – eyes that were human, and not those of the ‘bestial’ partisan stereotype conjured up by Nazi propaganda. Looking into the eyes of the victims before they were

264  Uroš Košir being executed could create serious emotional and psychological stress for the executioners. Simultaneously, the goal of the blindfold was to suppress the sense of sight, which has a strong relationship with knowledge (Zarankin and Salerno 2011: 2019). According to Andrés Zarankin and Melisa Salerno (2011) if ‘knowledge is power, then the gaze is part of its dynamic. Those who play the role of watching have the opportunity to exercise control over things (Thomas 2001)’. And control over things was definitely in the hand of the Gestapo, police and prison guards. Many prisoners were taken from Begunje and shot in locations of partisan sabotage actions – thereby creating a tragic emotional relationship between social action and conflict landscape. Prisoners were usually shot, sometimes hanged and the majority of the killings were either in retaliation for partisan activities, or as punishment for being a partisan or working for them. The prisoner Anton Bizjak recalls that prisoners knew for a couple of days beforehand when the executions would start. A Gestapo car this purpose came from Bled (Gerčar 1975: 53). As the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea are familiar with specific bird sounds (Howes 2006: 36–7; see further Feld 1982: 62, 144–50) and the soldiers in modern conflicts recognize a different calibre of artillery and mortar shells by their sounds, so did the prisoners recognize the Gestapo car by its distinctive horn and other identifying sounds.

Figure 17.4  Page from a prisoner’s book – Gefangenen-Buch. Gantar Paul (Pavel) was one of two of the author’s relatives executed in Begunje. In the last column it says Hingerichtet – executed ( Museum of Gorenjska, Photo Archive)

Sounds of horror  265 Prisoner-victims were called from the common rooms the night before the executions, but sometimes they were picked out in the hall that morning when they went to the washroom – then held in bunker cells (Gerčar 1975: 41). Prisoners sentenced to death had to spend the last night in fear and wait for morning and their death. One recalls that they often sang in the cells the night before they were shot (Gerčar 1975: 45; Šinkovec 1995: 221). Slavka Dolgan also recalls that singing was strictly forbidden and as punishment, some of the women had to march around the yard for two hours in the middle of the night (Gerčar 1975: 108). For the Temiar people of the Malaysia, music and medicine are closely connected and the dominant form of medical practice is ‘singing to heal’ (Howes 2006: 39; see further Roseman 1991). Singing in the prison cells before the shooting also had ‘healing’ effects on their feelings and as one prisoner wrote on the wall: ‘If you are sad, sing a song, as it is a medicine for sadness.’ However, prisoners sentenced to death were not the only ones to suffer, and some prisoners had to attend the executions. One of them recalls: ‘prisoners that were employed in so-called working squads, had to dig graves for their fellow-sufferers, and bury them, but they had to even undress them and bury their naked bodies’ (Gerčar 1975: 47). A witness remembers: ‘early in the morning on 7th July, I was taken with a group of 20 hostages near Begunje where I had to watch the martyrdom death of 20 comrades’. He said that he would never forget the horrors of shootings (Gerčar 1975: 113). However, apart from seeing the shootings, hearing them was also a mental suffering. A female prisoner said that: ‘The worst thing was to hear and bear the moaning and suffering of people during interrogations or to hear guns’ firing when they were executing hostages’ (Šinkovec 1995: 276). Dr Leo Matajc remembers that, during the shooting in Draga, they were taken into the yard, where they had to run around, hop, clap with their hands on their knees and sing happy songs (Gerčar 1975: 121). In the end, a total of 849 prisoners from Begunje were shot or hanged, five committed suicide, twelve died from torture or other wounds and causes, and four prisoners were already dead when they were brought to the prison (Šinkovec 1995: 238–9). Next to the high number of prisoners and their terrible experiences, this is a reason why Begunje occupies a special place in the collective memory of the people of Upper Carniola.

Graffiti – the mirror of suffering In the special building extension, where ten prison or ‘bunker’ cells were located and can be visited today as a museum, we can see numerable wartime graffiti made by the inmates (Figure 17.5). As Janez Gerčar wrote in his book on Begunje (1975), the cell walls represented the mirror of prisoners’ worst moments as they were covered with different graffiti. Most inscriptions and images are preserved on wooden parts of the cells, mostly on doors and doorframes, as the walls were repainted several times by the

266  Uroš Košir

Figure 17.5  Prisoners’ graffiti on the cell door. Amongst them are the inscriptions made by an Englishman D. M. Watt. ( Author)

Germans (Gerčar 1975: 69–70). The prisoners literally put themselves in the graffiti as they were, like Gerčar mentions, made by fingernails (Gerčar 1975: 70), which is an extreme example of human beings inscribing themselves into material culture. This created an intimate relationship between graffiti, cell and prisoner. The cells also represented a medium for a transfer of thoughts, feelings, messages and memories and the graffiti are not just scratches on the wall but had very special meanings for the authors and other prisoners. In this sense they parallel Navajo Indian sandpainting, which involves essential elements of touch and movement (Howes 2006: 8; see also Classen and Howes 1996: 89). Graffiti representing pictures and symbols were just one way of communicating through the body without the use of words (Howes 2006: 33; see further Jackson 1983: 337). They can be also seen as forms of dialogue, and as Emily Glass argues they ‘possess the potential for alternative narratives to be teased out and interpreted alongside more orthodox resources’ (2012: 133). These inscriptions and pictures are also a way of preserving the memory of their authors, as Chantel Summerfield argues regarding the tree graffiti or ‘arborglyphs’ on Salisbury Plain (2012: 159). The bunker cells with their graffiti represent a symbolic landscape of remembrance that embodies memories, experiences and thoughts of prisoners (Summerfield 2012: 169; see also Saunders 2001: 46).

Sounds of horror  267 Among the graffiti various signatures of the prisoners predominate, which is probably the most common type of conflict-related graffiti around the world (for further examples see Glass 2012: 135; Summerfield 2012: 164). González-Ruibal points out that Ballesta and Rodríguez Gallardo interpret the graffiti (words) from the Spanish Civil War concentration camp of Camposancos as an impulse of the self that forces the prisoner to leave a trace of his presence. This was felt as an especially pressing need in Camposancos given the high rates of execution and death by disease that marked the carceral experience: ‘To leave the name as a trace was regarded by the inmates as a denunciation of a confinement dominated by infrahuman conditions’ (Ballesta and Rodríguez Gallardo 2008: 205). Writing the name was also a way of reasserting the self in the circumstances of dehumanization and de-individualization. (González-Ruibal 2011: 69) We can see the signatures of the inmates in Begunje in the same way as those from Camposancos. As previously mentioned, according to the prison books, many foreigners were also imprisoned in Begunje. Some of them left material traces on the walls in a shape of different inscriptions, such as those left by Miša Lepehov, who was a Russian partisan, or the signatures of an English parachutist. Some of the graffiti express the everyday life of prisoners, and one can find various calendars, etc. We can imagine that the prisoners spent much of their time thinking of home, and homesickness is reflected in many of the graffiti: It is not hard to die; it is hard to leave behind the loved ones Oh that’s terrible. Today, I asked if I could write home, but I was declined, how that hurts I’m sick. I have fever; my head hurts and cold shakes me and there is no one to be here for me. Oh my dear mother, where are you, oh where? Come and get me my dear mother. The graffiti of Franc Kregar expresses homesickness and uncertainty for the future: Kregar Franc awaits interrogation but I do not know why. Today is day 12 and it looks like there will be no solution. I have a wife and two babies, Franci and Marinka. I wish to see them, even more to live with them. (Šinkovec 1995: supplement, 324–325; author’s translation) An Englishman, D. M. Watt, also had homesickness. He wrote: ‘Far from the old folks at home – god bless us all’ (ibid.). Homesickness was not expressed just with words but also with images and drawings. It is reflected

268  Uroš Košir in a number of depictions of hearts, flowers as well as houses, which could represent a home in the same way as the images of English houses and countryside on many artworks, made by internees from Channel Islands, express their homesickness (Carr 2011: 134–7). Some graffiti refer to physical suffering, others to psychological pressures, which are reflected in a fear of an unknown destiny and desire for freedom. Such inscriptions mention the torture of Tomaž Godec: ‘Tomaž Godec was a partisan, whipped, shot, martyred, tortured in 1942.’ A witness recalls that it was terrible to look at him as he was all covered in dried blood (Šinkovec 1995: 152). One of the graffiti mentions the suffering in the bunker cells: ‘There is no mercy for the one who comes into this bunker’ (Šinkovec 1995: supplement, 324–5; author’s translation). Desire for freedom and the suffering is symbolically shown in the drawing of a window with iron bars. The uncertain future is also reflected in the writings such as ‘came from Ljubljana to an unknown fate’ and ‘we are about to go somewhere; we do not know anything’ (ibid.). The suffering of the prisoners was expressed with their anger, and someone wrote: ‘Only the Slovenians are capable of various atrocities against their own people’ (ibid.). We must realize that some Slovenians were working with the Germans, even within the Gestapo. Among the graffiti, there are also many which were created by the prisoners who were sentenced to death. Examples include: ‘Hodnik Franc, Hours of waiting are heavy’ and ‘Here I am waiting to die’ (ibid.). Ivanka Kokalj wrote: ‘I have been sentenced to death, where is my sweet home, my dear mother. Pardoned. 12th June 1944’ (ibid.). In addition, there are other graffiti that reflect the suffering of waiting for execution. One prisoner wrote: ‘I am waiting in this tomb and thinking about my fate as I was sentenced to death’ (ibid.). The convicted prisoners’ thoughts often escaped to the safe shelter of their homes and their loved ones to whom they wanted to say goodbye: ‘I’m suffering and waiting for death for 33 days [. . .] the last greeting and kisses to Tone, Jože, Ivo. Your Dad’ and ‘Farewell beloved wife and children, see you above the sky’ (ibid.). Julij Ocepek, who was later executed, wanted to make sure that his parting words arrived at his home: I am waiting here to die, without harming anybody. I want to thank to all my friends for shown [. . .] and I’m sorry if I was unjust to anybody because [. . .] and brothers there is no solution. I am so alone. Difficult days. Sad days. Where are you freedom my dear? My mother, sisters, don’t forget about my little children. I am so sad that I could go crazy [. . .] Even you my dear Marica I have maybe done [. . .] bad, but you must embrace the circumstances as they are. [. . .] is guilty for my death. So you will know that he tried really hard to destroy me [. . .] (Ibid.) At the end of his farewell words he wrote: ‘Dear friend who comes to this hole after me. If you will have more luck than me, and you will leave this

Sounds of horror  269 place alive, I beg you to rewrite these lines and send them to this address’ (ibid.). Prisoners often had to deal with death, and some of them saw salvation in it. Alojz Klander drew a skull with bones and wrote underneath: ‘This will be my saviour, just visit us soon’ (ibid.). Suffering and salvation in death is also reflected in graffiti such as: ‘There is no life for me, only death pleases me’ or ‘Mother, rather death than such life; it is better to die than to suffer like this’ (ibid.). Inscriptions such as ‘room of death; there is no escape from here; Memento mori; you don’t know where death awaits’ express the extreme desperation and fatalism. The suffering, despair and anguish made prisoners turn to God. Many inscriptions carry a religious content. Some are as simple ‘trust in God; Ave Maria’ or drawings of crosses. Prayers are also expressed in words as ‘Help us Virgin Mary; God save me; Christ have mercy on us; O Mary, save us innocent children from this prison’ (ibid.). Ivanka Kokalj wrote: ‘Virgin Mary will help me and save me from this misery and suffering – help me Virgin Mary’ (ibid.). We can imagine that pardoning of Ivanka Kokalj further deepened her faith in God. Some of the other prisoners also saw a solution only in the faith. They wrote: ‘Search for help in God not in people’ and ‘Pray for Peace, those who did not pray earlier must be praying now and beyond’ (ibid.). In conclusion, we can see that aural aspects of imprisonment were undoubtedly very strong, but above all, it was really a multi-sensorial world of captivity, mistreatment, torture and death, which is embodied in the experiences of Begunje’s prisoners. During their time in the prison, the inmates formed a small, closed society with different sensory perceptions than the free outsiders. This brief overview of just one prison reveals the assault on the senses which such experiences represented, and opens the door to a new archaeological-anthropological engagement with the sufferings of so many individuals during the Second World War and beyond.

Notes 1 Machen Sie mir dieses Land wieder deutsch! 2 Germ. Vigaun = Slov. Begunje. 3 Kommandeur der Sicherheitspolizei und des Sicherheitsdienstes. 4 Germ. Veldes = Slov. Bled. 5 A great number of prisoners were send from Begunje to different concentration camps accross Europe. Data according to Šinkovec (1995: 198): Mauthausen (892), Dachau (433), Ravensbrück (208), unknown (158), Ljubelj (Mauthausen sub-camp – 55), Auschwitz (8), Flossenbürg (3), Buchenwald (1).

References Anon. (n.d.) R.F. Testimony. In Memories of Internees – KZ Ljubelj, AŠ 27. Archive of National Museum of Contemporary History, Ljubljana. Bagaric, P. (2011) Razum i osjetila: fenomenološke tendencije antropologije osjetila. Narodna umjetnost, 48(2): 83–94.

270  Uroš Košir Ballesta, J. A. Rodríguez Gallardo (2008) Camposancos: Una ‘Imprenta’ de los Presos del Franquismo. Complutum, 19(2): 197–211. Carr, G. (2011) Engraving and Embroidering Emotions upon the Material Culture of Internment. In A. Myers and G. Moshenska (eds) Archaeologies of Internment, pp. 129–45. One World Archaeology. New York: Springer. Čepič, Z., Guštin, D., and Ivanič, M. (2005) Podobe iz življenja Slovencev v drugi svetovni vojni. Ljubljana: Založba Mladinska knjiga. Classen, C., and Howes, D. (1996) Making Sense of Culture: Anthropology as a Sensual Experience. Etnofoor, 9(2): 86–96. Day, J. (2013) Introduction: Making Sense of the Past. In J. Day (ed.), Making Sense of the Past: Toward a Sensory Archaeology, pp. 1–32. Carbondale, IL: Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Feld, S. (1982) Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics and Song in Kaluli Expression. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Gerčar, J. (1975) Begunje. Ljubljana: Založba borec. Glass, E. (2012) ‘Hitler Loves Musso’, and Other Civilian Wartime Sentiments: The Archaeology of Second World War Air-Raid Shelters and their Graffiti. In N. J. Saunders (ed.), Beyond the Dead Horizon: Studies in Modern Conflict Archaeology, pp. 130–45. Oxford: Oxbow Books. González-Ruibal, A. (2011) The Archaeology of Internment in Francoist Spain (1936–1952). In A. Myers and G. Moshenska (eds), Archaeologies of Internment, pp. 53–73. One World Archaeology. New York: Springer. Homan, J. (1960) Testimony from 4.5.1960. In Memories of Internees – KZ Ljubelj, AŠ 27. Archive of National Museum of Contemporary History, Ljubljana. Howes, D. (ed.) (1991) Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. —— (2005) Introduction. Empires of the Senses. In D. Howes (ed.), Empire of the Senses: the Sensual Culture Reader, pp. 1–17. Oxford and New York: Berg. —— (2006) Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. —— (2011) The Senses: Polysensoriality. In F. E. Mascia-Lees (ed.), A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment, pp. 435–50. Blackwell Companions to Anthropology, 13. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Jackson, M. (1983) Knowledge of the Body. Man, ns 18: 327–45. Moshenska, G., and Myers, A. (2011) An Introduction to Archaeologies of Internment. In A. Myers and G. Moshenska (eds), Archaeologies of Internment, pp. 1–19. One World Archaeology. New York: Springer. Myers, A., and Moshenska, G. (eds) (2011) Archaeologies of Internment. One World Archaeology. New York: Springer. Roseman, M. (1991) Healing Sounds from the Malaysian Rainforest. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Saunders, N. J. (2001) Matter and Memory in the Landscapes of Conflict: The Western Front 1914–1919. In B. Bender and M. Winer (eds), Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place, pp. 37–54. Oxford: Berg. Seremetakis, N.C. (1994) The Memory of the Senses, Part I: Marks of the Transitory. In N. C. Seremetakis, The Senses Still: Memory and Perception as Material Culture in Modernity, pp. 1–18. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Šinkovec, S. (1995) Begunje: nemška okupacija 1941–1945. Kranj: Pokrajinski odbor Osvobodilne fronte za Gorenjsko.

Sounds of horror  271 Stoller, P. (1989) The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Summerfield, C. (2012) Trees as a Living Museum: Arborglyphs and Conflict on Salisbury Plain. In N. J. Saunders (ed.), Beyond the Dead Horizon: Studies in Modern Conflict Archaeology, pp. 130–45. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Thomas, J. (2001) Archaeologies of Place and Landscape. In I. Hodder (ed.), Archaeological Theory Today, pp. 165–86. Cambridge: Polity Press. Van Ede, Y. (2009) Sensuous Anthropology: Sense and Sensibility and the Rehabilitation of Skill. Anthropological Notebooks, 15(2): 61–75. Winter, J. (2006) Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press. Winterton, M. (2012) Signs, Signals and Senses: The Soldier Body in the Trenches. In N. J. Saunders (ed.), Beyond the Dead Horizon: Studies in Modern Conflict Archaeology, pp. 229–41. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Zarankin, A., and Salerno, M. (2011) The Engineering of Genocide: An Archaeology of Dictatorship in Argentina. In A. Myers and G. Moshenska (eds), Archaeologies of Internment, pp. 207–27. One World Archaeology. New York: Springer.

18 The uninvited guests who outstayed their welcome The ghosts of war in the Channel Islands Gilly Carr A few years ago, while on fieldwork in Guernsey, I visited the German Underground Hospital. Dug by forced and slave labourers during the German Occupation, this labyrinthine tunnel structure was constructed for the purpose of looking after German soldiers injured in the event of an Allied invasion, and was used as such after the D-Day landings in France. The Underground Hospital was opened to the public in the early 1950s by the family who own it now and it has never been restored. Today the tunnels are filled with strange echoes. They are chilly, dimly lit, dripping with damp, and contain remnants of rusty equipment left here and there. There are even footprints of German guards and labourers in the concrete alongside the tracks of wagons once used in tunnelling (Figure 18.1). Near the exit, but standing out of reach and in the shadows of unfinished tunnels, are a few mannequins of labourers, obligatory in all German tunnels open to the public in the Channel Islands. The sensory experience of the place is one that provokes expectation of more than can be experienced through the five senses alone. Indeed, the place is reputed to be haunted by ghosts of German soldiers and slave workers, and the damp atmosphere of the place almost guarantees that any photograph using a flash will capture spots of moisture in the air, popularly interpreted as ‘orbs’ in local parlance, or evidence of spirit presence. As the only visitor to the tunnels that day, I soon succumbed to the uncomfortable atmosphere and had the intense feeling that I was being watched. Aware of the reputation of the place, I turned on my dictaphone and invited anyone present to speak. I heard nothing and left soon after, my echoing footsteps sounding like the marching of German soldiers. I played the dictaphone recording to a number of Channel Island friends who agreed that they could hear a voice whisper ‘help us’. After downloading the dictaphone file, I heard what I thought was a quiet but rather strange-sounding voice. My friends informed me that a side tunnel in the site, just where I had been standing when making the recording, had collapsed in 1943 killing six slave workers whose bodies have never been recovered, and that they were clearly asking for my help. My experience then prompted their tales of supernatural experiences in other German bunkers and tunnels.

The ghosts of war in the Channel Islands   273

Figure 18.1  German Underground Hospital, Guernsey ( Author)

After enquiries in four different Channel Islands, including among members of the Channel Islands Occupation Society (CIOS) and other similar groups who restore bunkers, I soon realized that an acceptance of the continued spiritual presence of German soldiers and, sometimes, slave and forced labourers, was a relatively widespread phenomenon, experienced equally in Guernsey, Jersey, Sark and even Alderney (whose experience and legacy of Occupation was quite different to the other islands). These ghosts of war were seen, heard, smelt or felt by ordinary people, heritage amateurs and even a number of heritage professionals. It seems that Channel Islanders are still haunted, in a very real sense, by the Occupation of seventy years ago. But why, and what does this reveal about the legacy and memory of conflict in these islands? How does this complement the more tangible physical heritage that covers the islands, if indeed it does? In recent years, ethnographies have emerged within the field of anthropology which discuss the phenomenon of ghosts of twentieth-century war and trauma. While ghosts, both of American GIs and Vietnamese soldiers, still abound in Vietnam (Kwon 2008), in multicultural Indonesia ghosts

274  Gilly Carr of Japanese soldiers are seen alongside multiple other species of spiritual beings (Long 2010). Stories of ghosts occupying Japanese soldiers also still flourish in Singapore (Faucher 2004). In the Siberian reindeer herder village of Topolinoye, built on the site of one of Stalin’s gulags, Ulturgasheva (2012: 138–40) vividly describes the spirits of former prisoners regularly witnessed by villagers. In each case, broadly speaking, sightings seem to represent ways of expressing alternative narratives, and dealing with the legacy, of war and trauma. They also function as a vehicle of transmission of knowledge about the locality and its past, and thus such sightings enable the demonstration of an intimate familiarity with that past and its continuing importance in and to the local society. This is important in the Channel Islands where a third of the population evacuated to the UK during the war, and where many incomers from the UK live today. As in Singapore, ghost stories can also be seen as part of collective memory, with ghosts as agents of remembrance (Faucher 2004: 196). And yet, when one moves into the field of archaeology or heritage studies, there is a detectable reluctance to mention or admit to the phenomenon of ghosts. Where the ghosts of war and conflict are mentioned, it is either in the non-academic literature (e.g. Ogley 2001), as an interesting anecdotal postscript (Schofield 2009: 197–201), the stuff of dreams (Brown 2007), or else is substituted for the concept of haunting meant, ultimately, in a metaphorical sense (e.g. Ladd 1997; Till 2005). Till, for example, does not speak of ‘physical’, ‘real’ or ‘actual’ ghosts in the sense that I discuss them here. Her Berlin ‘spectres’ were made manifest by ‘selectively remembering particular understandings of the past through place’ – places that are ‘haunted by past structures of material meaning and material presences from other times and lives . . . [and which] contain and house disturbing absences and ruptures, tales of violence’ (Till 2005: 9). For Till, places are eye witnesses to the past and, by visiting these places, people can work through their ‘contradictory emotions associated with feeling haunted by the past’ (ibid.). While Till’s concept of place is not entirely at odds with what I have observed in the Channel Islands, I believe that metaphorical haunting is qualitatively and ontologically different to the phenomenon I describe here, although the two types of haunting are not entirely unrelated. In this chapter, I seek to bring the phenomenon of haunting and ghosts into the field of conflict archaeology and heritage studies as a serious and legitimate focus of study. My aim is not to ask whether such ghosts ‘really exist’, for they are certainly very real to those who encounter them. Rather, I seek to understand why they are seen, why they manifest themselves in certain locations, and why they take the forms that they do. Importantly, I ask what they can contribute to our understanding of the legacy of conflict. I will argue here that ghosts can be a lens through which to understand the legacy of conflict and its impact upon successive generations. I position them here as an aspect of the intangible heritage of war although, unexpectedly and even ironically, these ghosts of dead

The ghosts of war in the Channel Islands   275 soldiers are often sought out by the second and third generations as a living, tangible experience of the Occupation, an event that they missed, as will be examined below.

The heritage of the German Occupation Their closeness to the coast of Normandy means that indigenous Channel Islanders are culturally and historically Norman first and British second. It also means that they were occupied as an extension of the occupation of France and were the only part of the British Isles to be occupied. They were also among the last places in Europe to be liberated, on 9 May 1945. There are many parallels to be drawn between their experience of occupation and that of other Western European countries, such as the deportation of Jews and political prisoners to concentration camps; the importation of forced and slave labourers from across Europe to build the Atlantic Wall and their placement in labour camps; and the increased hunger and starvation towards the end of the Occupation. While the heritage of the German Occupation might be expected to dwell upon this experience of suffering, victimhood and martyrdom, like the traditional war and heritage narratives of continental Europe (e.g. Lagrou 2000), instead the Channel Islands are deeply influenced by the Churchillian paradigm (Sanders 2012). This narrative, like that of mainland Britain, emphasizes an experience of unwavering steadfastness in the face of adversity and stoic endurance until victory. It does not dwell upon suffering. While for mainland Britain this meant a focus upon the endurance of bombing and rationing, in the Channel Islands the heritage focus is on the endurance of hunger and military occupation. This is why Occupation museums in the islands, of which there are many, focus seemingly upon the German experience at the expense of victims of Nazi persecution (as misinterpreted by Bunting 1995; Vitaliev 1999; Lennon and Foley 2000). There is a detectable traditional narrative formula in Occupation museums: it centres upon the display of the trophies of war (i.e. German militaria including helmets, swastikas and uniforms) and the defeated Goliath, expressed through the ubiquitous mannequin-soldier in uniform (Figure 18.2). Around the edges are displayed jars of ersatz food, repeatedly darned and resoled socks and shoes, and sometimes the odd radio hidden in a biscuit tin. This is only the only hint at defiance which, in fact, ran very much deeper and broader than just the illicit listening to the BBC (Carr et al. 2014). The mannequins in German uniform and swastika flags are seen both in Occupation museums and in restored bunkers all over Guernsey and Jersey. Islanders today are wholly familiar with and untroubled by this sight, and would see the removal of either as the ‘denial of history’. It is only since the fiftieth anniversary of liberation that the islands have begun to acknowledge narratives of the ‘other’ – those who suffered in concentration camps, prison, labour camps and civilian internment camps. Since that date, memorials

276  Gilly Carr

Figure 18.2  German Occupation Museum, Guernsey ( Author)

have been erected to these groups, but these are often small and in marginal places, unlike the monuments to liberation which take centre stage (Carr 2012: 185). The memorials, monuments, museums, restored bunkers, and Occupation-related dates in the annual calendar have resulted in a physical memory landscape that is saturated with reminders and traces of the Occupation. As it was the most important event ever to take place in the Channel Islands and plays a large part in identity perception and formation today (Carr 2014), the observation that Channel Islanders are metaphorically still haunted by the Occupation is beyond doubt.

Powerful bunkers Concrete German fortifications can be seen as the focal point of activity for German soldiers, both during the Occupation and today, in mannequin form. Bunkers which have been turned into Occupation museums or which have been restored to how they would have looked when operational are both common in the Channel Islands and have been a growing phenomenon since the post-war period, and especially since they first began to be restored in the late 1970s by what Suleiman (2006: 179) refers to as the ‘1.5 generation’ (i.e. those who were children during the Occupation), helped and now

The ghosts of war in the Channel Islands   277 taken over by the second generation (see Carr 2010; Carr 2014: 99ff.). The role of the generations is, I suggest, instructive in helping us to understand this phenomenon. For while bunker excavation and restoration was a key way in which the second generation began to learn about the Occupation in the face of first-generation silence, it was also, revealingly, the place where the ghosts manifested themselves. It is worth noting here that these ghosts were not confined to bunkers. In fact, the earliest reports of sightings (de Garis 1975: 198, 218) were located in streets and in the home – places where the soldiers marched and were billeted. We can also locate the process of post-memorial inheritance by the second generation within bunkers. Although Marianne Hirsch’s postmemory or second-generation memory is a phenomenon more commonly associated with the children of Holocaust survivors, it can also be seen among the children of those who experienced occupation in the Channel Islands. Here, the second generation grew up ‘dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, [and] whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation’ (Hirsch 1996: 659). These stories are, like those of Holocaust survivors, ‘so powerful, so monumental, as to constitute memories in their own right’ (Hirsch 1999: 8). While family photographs are central to Hirsch as the ‘building blocks’ or ‘medium connecting first- and second-generation remembrance, memory and postmemory’ (1997: 2–3), in the Channel Islands the key medium of memory has become Alfred Gell’s ‘distributed personhood’ or ‘exuviae’ of the German soldier (Gell 1998: 103–4). This primarily takes the form of militaria or uniforms of soldiers, so eagerly sought by the 1.5 and second generation in bunkers, but it also takes the form of the spirits or ghosts of soldiers, and even the bunkers themselves where they dwelt and seemingly dwell still. The 1.5 and second generation were responsible for restoring bunkers as a way of vicariously experiencing what their parents went through but would rarely talk about, and in an attempt to understand and recreate for themselves the experience of Occupation: the identity-defining experience that they missed. And as they searched for the metaphorical ghosts that still haunted their parents, they found ‘real’ ones in the dark corners of German bunkers. In fact, it would be true to say that while the discovery and encounter with these ghosts by the second generation was unexpected, the third generation, who are also involved with bunker restoration today, actively go searching for ghosts. The further they travel in time from the German Occupation, and the further removed they become from the original ‘authentic encounter’, it seems the stronger their desire to experience it. By ‘authentic encounter’, I am touching upon a very particular system of value that I have observed in the Channel Islands. It manifests itself variously, such as through ownership of German militaria which has not already passed through the hands of multiple collectors (which acts to decrease its value), or through links of family or friendship with those who were there. And as the number of

278  Gilly Carr people who lived through the Occupation invariably decreases with time, and the items of German militaria are placed beyond reach (behind glass in museums or into private collections), so the third generation feels a need to locate its own alternative authentic experience. Thus, we can see that the transmission of postmemory changes subtly between the second and third generation, and the search can often be one that requires harder work and which has to thrive, of necessity, on less tangible or alternative authentic encounters because of the increased scarcity of that which was readily available to the second generation. For the third generation, an encounter with ‘authentic’ ghosts of German soldiers is a way of vicariously experiencing the Occupation in a very ‘real’ way. It is worth focusing on the important role of restored bunkers here. They are often restored with time-capsule realism by committed volunteer groups. It is not unknown for some members of this group to consult clairvoyants to improve the accuracy of their restorations. Above all, the aim is to make visitors feel that the Germans have left the room briefly and that they might return any second. In this sense, these bunkers can also be said to function as ‘time machines’ just as much as time capsules. They are ‘platforms where memories of the Second World War may be experienced’ outside official spheres of commemoration, as Faucher (2004: 192) put it. This is also the implicit aim of those who restore them, and is another example of the authentic encounter. These people ardently desire to feel ‘closer to the Occupation’ – the same system of value and motivation referred to above and a guiding principle observed among both collectors of militaria and bunker restorers in the Channel Islands (Carr 2014: 55ff.). These types of bunkers are repainted in their original colours, with the electricity restored and bunker equipment refitted, even if this has meant dragging gun barrels up from the bottom of cliffs or the sea floor, where they were dumped in the immediate post-war period. The soldier-mannequins are provided with clothes, beds, tables and chairs, plastic food, bottles of wine, games of chess, radios, weapons – in fact, all they might need for their continued existence (Figure 18.3). Paul Virilio (1994: 11) was not very far off the mark when he likened French bunkers to temples, crypts or tombs. A number of bunkers were covered in earth after the Occupation in order to remove them from sight, making them resemble Bronze Age barrows or grass-covered Neolithic chambered tombs, quite a number of which exist in the Channel Islands. In fact some bunkers were even built into the side of barrows, such as at Le Creux Faïe in Guernsey (Figure 18.4). It is worth pausing for a moment to draw a parallel between an aspect of folklore and German bunkers. According to Guernsey folklorist Marie de Garis, such barrows and tombs were guarded by ‘foreign’ spirits dressed in green. These barrows were repositories of treasure, but anyone who entered them had to beware in case they were transported to the land of the fairies (de Garis 1975: 154). The parallels are immediately apparent here between militariafilled time-capsule bunkers guarded by mannequins in green uniforms (and

Figure 18.3  Inside the command bunker at Noirmont Point, Jersey ( Author)

Figure 18.4  Bunker built into the side of Le Creux Faïe in Guernsey; person on left is standing on top of the underground bunker ( Author)

280  Gilly Carr ghosts of German soldiers), and prehistoric tombs, capable of transporting the unwary, guarded by spirits. It is possible that local readiness to accept the presence of these ghosts is because it taps into pre-existing folk beliefs and cosmologies, and this is not to be dismissed. Before we can leave the notion of bunker as time capsule/time machine, it is instructive to pause to examine the unrestored bunkers and the role that they play in this scenario, because it is in these kinds of structures where most of the ghosts are reported and sought. This is not to suggest that ghosts are not reported in restored bunkers – indeed, a number of islanders involved in bunker restoration have reported seeing ‘pillars of mist’ or have heard ‘German voices’ or had experiences of doors or airlocks inexplicably slamming shut while engaged in repainting during the winter season while the bunkers are closed to the public. We might observe that ‘spiritual activity’ is rarely reported on a busy day when the bunkers are full of tourists. However, unrestored bunkers carry a different sort of authenticity. Untouched since the Occupation they carry a different kind of ‘authentic encounter’ or ‘closeness to the event’. It is to these structures that islanders are drawn in their search for Occupation ghosts, and several have a reputation for supernatural activity, including the Mirus Battery and Underground Hospital in Guernsey and, in Jersey, Hohlgangsanlagen 2 (or the ‘Ho2 tunnel’ as it is known for short) and the Underground Hospital (now restored as the Jersey War Tunnels).

Occupation ghosts The phenomenon of Occupation ghosts is an interesting one, and takes many forms. It is true to say that the vast majority of ‘experiences’ in German fortifications are interpreted as ‘Occupation ghosts’ (usually soldiers), who are popularly perceived to be telling islanders to ‘get out of their bunkers’, as the islanders are invariably trespassing in locations that were denied to their parents or grandparents during the Occupation. The soldiers are perceived to be highly territorial and still carrying out their wartime duty. The Mirus Battery today is unrestored, but is used by a war-gaming group as a regular place for their activities. ‘Fritz’, as he is known, is the acknowledged guardian ghost of the battery, and many have encountered him. He is reputed to be a tall man who wears a long black leather coat, and is seen out of the corner of sight as he strides away. Pete and Steve1 are two men who have, in the past, coordinated the activities of the war-gaming group, and both have seen Fritz. Both independently reported the flickering or fusing of electric lights when Fritz is present. Steve has also heard voices from a ‘German radio station’. Recently, Pete told me that Fritz actually joined in a shooting match with BB guns (guns which shoot soft white ball bearings). While firing into a room in the dark, one individual was scared to find ball bearings being fired back at him although he was alone. In retrospect, Pete did not consider it so surprising that Fritz would want to join in or would respond to this kind of military activity.

The ghosts of war in the Channel Islands   281 I returned to the Mirus Battery at a later date with a non-indigenous local fieldwork informant, Sharon, who told me that, since childhood, she has been able to see and communicate with ghosts. After calling out in German while in the main entrance of the battery, the atmosphere became noticeably different even to me, and Sharon said that she could see a soldier who was ‘extremely agitated’ that we, as women, were in his bunker. She staggered a few times after feeling this soldier push her in the back. We were later joined by two other spirits: one who was a caretaker and looked after the place, and another who was a senior officer and was ‘extremely proud’ of his bunker and ‘ran it as a tight ship’. On another occasion I visited the Mirus Battery with Betty, an older woman who had ‘sixth sense’. She was quite unfazed to tell me that she could see German soldiers ‘everywhere’, and was being ‘proudly shown’ it by the senior officer previously noted by Sharon. Two particular questions occupied me: why and how were the ghosts still present? The answer, for Channel Islanders, was not difficult. They were there because the Occupation was perceived to be ‘the happiest’ and ‘most important’ period of their lives; this was the answer given by a number of those interviewed. The parallel here with Channel Islanders’ attitudes to the Occupation, as the most ‘exciting’ and ‘important period’ of their lives (or of their parents’ or grandparents’ lives) is striking. While many islanders were often not clear or necessarily in agreement on this, it transpired that there were two kinds of ghosts: those who died in the bunkers and thus ‘haunted’ it, and those who had died elsewhere, even of old age in Germany, and who chose to come back as their preferred place to ‘live’. These ghosts were not perceived to be ‘haunting’ as such, but were just simply there. There was yet another explanation for their presence, and this seemed to be favoured among the bunker restorers. It seemed that the bunkers themselves were able to function as a ‘recording device’; the very concrete of the walls was perceived to be able to ‘absorb the electric current’ of the soldiers when alive, and were able to ‘play back’ the recording in ‘suitable conditions’. Thus we might observe that bunkers act as important agents or devices in this phenomenon: they can function as ‘time capsules’, ‘time machines’ and ‘recording devices’. It is clear, therefore, why they act as magnets for members of the third generation who wish to have an ‘authentic’ and ‘tangible’ experience of the Occupation. They are also loci of a different sort of authentic encounter for the second generation, who restored the bunkers and collected militaria to recreate the Occupation for similar reasons, but whose encounters with ghosts were unexpected and not sought after. There is one last ability to be outlined in the special properties of concrete before we can explore the importance of the second and more recent kind of Occupation ghost, and that involves the myth of the ‘bodies in the concrete’. One of the most persistent stories of atrocity which circulates in the Channel Islands as a kind of ‘rural myth’ is that dead bodies of slave workers were deliberately ‘thrown into the concrete’ during bunker

282  Gilly Carr construction (see Knowles Smith 2007: 225–6). While there are many who point out that the mesh of steel reinforcement within the concrete would prevent this, this does nothing to quash the myth being repeated down the generations. It will be noted that this ‘bodies in the concrete’ story is echoed by my own experience at the start of this chapter, which recorded the presence of unrecovered bodies trapped by rock falls or collapsed tunnels during construction; such tales are also found in other islands. This belief was further compounded by a letter I received from Jersey, showing a photo of a concrete tunnel, in which the shape of the ‘face of Hitler’ and others were observed within the patterning of concrete, just as one might see shapes in clouds. The very fabric of bunkers – concrete – is a troubling medium for islanders who are more comfortable with the equally durable and ubiquitous granite, the bedrock of their islands. Concrete is powerful, immovable and omnipresent in the landscape; it is symbolic of oppression and the Occupation. It is seen to have acted as witness both to atrocities and to daily life during the Occupation, and is able to transport islanders in a very real sense back to the most formative period in their recent history.

The recent phenomenon of ‘slave worker’ ghosts A few years ago, Ann went on an organized ghost hunt to the Mirus Battery in Guernsey. While there she heard a ‘loud panicky scream’ in her ear – a ‘get me out of here scream’, as she put it, which she interpreted as being from a ‘slave worker’ as the accent she heard was ‘Russian’. In Jersey, a photographer who has been visiting the island for many years and who specializes in photographing German fortifications, also had an encounter in the gun battery in the north-west of the island. In an empty room, he suddenly saw a bright image of a ‘Russian slave worker’, dressed in rags and in a piteous state. He was extremely frightened and grabbed his camera and ran. I mentioned earlier in this chapter that there are two kinds of Occupation ghost: the German soldier and the ‘slave worker’. Although all foreign labourers who were brought to the Channel Islands are collectively and popularly referred to today as ‘Russian slave workers’, this actually masks the variety of categories of voluntary, forced and slave labourers, paid and unpaid, from Eastern and Western Europe. While many islanders did their best to feed, clothe or shelter these unfortunate people despite the severe penalties involved (e.g. Willmot 2014), the majority of islanders encountered the foreign workers only at a distance, where they formed an anonymous mass of unknown people, many of whom were badly ill-treated by their overseers or who died through negligence, industrial accidents, starvation or disease. I mentioned earlier that it has been only since the fiftieth anniversary of liberation that islanders have been ready to acknowledge the suffering of victims of Nazism. It has taken this long for the Churchillian paradigm to weaken and leave room for other narratives. We might pause here to

The ghosts of war in the Channel Islands   283 consider the consecutive phases of memory through which the islands have gone through, as it is instructive in helping us understand the presence and type of ghosts seen at different times. Analysis of all kinds of Occupation heritage from 1945 to the present day (Carr 2014) has shown that the first phase of memory was that of victory, patriotism and commemoration of the war dead. This lasted until around 1950. This was followed by a period of silence and elective ‘amnesia’ about the war years, broken only in the late 1970s by the second generation, as mentioned earlier. This third phase, which reached its heyday in the 1980s and is still, to a certain extent, ongoing, was a period of ‘Occupation nostalgia’, which looked back with fondness upon the excitement of the Occupation and especially upon the day of liberation. This phase espoused the myth of ‘correct relations’ between soldiers and islanders, where there was no resistance and no collaboration. Heritage in this phase never showed soldiers in the act of persecution or enforcing deportation; rather, it showed them listening to the radio or playing chess or carrying out other harmless activities. The fourth and final phase, detectable most clearly in Jersey, is that which speaks of the experience of victims of Nazism, and has been increasingly present on the margins since 1995. Memorials to Jews, political prisoners, deportees and foreign labourers, for the most part (but with exceptions), were erected only on or after this date. Bearing this in mind, we might observe that ghosts of ‘Russian slave workers’ (but never of any other category of ‘victim’ of the Occupation) have been sighted only in recent years. They are not the traditional kind of Occupation ghost and they are perceived as frightening. They are not sought out in ghost hunts and people do not expect to see them. But the point I wish to stress is that people have reported seeing them only since a change in islanders’ consciousness about the existence and suffering of these shadowy figures. It is only in recent years that these ghosts have joined the pantheon of spirits of German soldiers who have held court since the post-war period. It is interesting that my own experience in the German Underground Hospital was perceived to be spirit voices of slave workers, given my own interest in victims of Nazism in the Channel Islands, and this reputation may well have influenced my friends’ reading of my recording.

Letting go of the ghosts of place? I returned to the Underground Hospital in Guernsey with my fieldwork informant Sharon, curious to see what she would make of the source of my dictaphone recording. In fact, in several places throughout the structure, Sharon was distressed to see German soldiers standing guard over pathetic groups of ‘slave workers’, who were sitting around in rags, starving and exhausted. I asked her why they were still there. Didn’t they know the war was over? Sharon explained that they were still carrying out their duty and they had got stuck in these roles. I took her to the place where I had made

284  Gilly Carr the recording and she told me that there was an extremely angry spirit there who was furious that nobody had come back to uncover his body after it had got buried in the concrete. Sharon was convinced that we needed to do something to free the spirits trapped in the tunnel complex because there were too many there for her to do it single-handedly. The retired Dean of Guernsey was approached and, although he was sceptical and uncomfortable with the idea, he agreed to help; he was not unaware of the local stories of ghosts of German soldiers in the island and had heard tales himself. When I was next in the island, we held what Sharon referred to as a ‘cleansing ceremony’ and what the former Dean called a ‘blessing’. It was brief – around five minutes – which was a reflection of his discomfort with the situation. It comprised prayers, Bible readings, a Holocaust poem and the sprinkling of holy water to the four cardinal points of the compass (Figure 18.5). As soon as the otherwise-uneventful ceremony was over, he left and did not want to discuss it with me, then or afterwards. Instead I spoke to Sharon, and her perceptions of what took place were revealing. Sharon said that the ceremony had frightened the spirits of the place who did not understand what was happening as they did not know that they were dead. When it was over, they came forward. One had his suitcase in his hand and said he was ready to leave. Others were suspicious about whether Sharon was really able to show them the way out. What was most instructive was that, even though she thought that she was eventually able to lead 30–40 spirits out of the tunnels, some remained. One spirit of a German

Figure 18.5  Cleansing ceremony in the German Underground Hospital, Guernsey ( Jonathan Bartlett)

The ghosts of war in the Channel Islands   285 soldier said that he had injured his leg and couldn’t walk well enough to leave. Another was deeply depressed and said that his family was dead and his town had been bombed and he had nothing to go back to. In essence, despite Sharon and the Dean’s best attempts, the Underground Hospital remained, to all intents and purposes, still haunted. If we are not to take this episode at face value and to shrug our shoulders and walk away from this ‘failed attempt’, how should we seek to understand it? I argue that the failed ‘cleansing ceremony’ suggests that Channel Islanders do not actually want to be rid of these ghosts. They need them and want them. They feel a need for ghosts of the Occupation to still be present in their society. This begs the question: what is the role of these ghosts today, seventy years after the end of the Occupation? Why do people still seek them out? Why do they want to find them? While I was careful not to publicize the cleansing ceremony in any way, or to give any impression that the place has been denuded of most of its ghostly inhabitants in my conversations with local people, I have been interested to gauge the continued reports of ghostly phenomena or photographs of orbs or unexplained swirls of mist at the site discussed in a social media group dedicated to Guernsey’s ghosts. This confirms to me the desire to encounter – and the necessity of – these ghosts of war. I suggest that we should view the role of these ghosts of German soldiers in the same way as the real soldiers themselves were perceived, i.e. as uninvited guests who outstayed their welcome. These uninvited guests, who stayed for five years, became such a fixture in the landscape for islanders during a momentous and traumatic period in their history that, even when the real soldiers left, the population still felt psychologically occupied. One simple piece of evidence for this ‘occupied psyche’ lies in newspaper cartoons in the Channel Islands, in which the German soldiers are still present in the everyday life of islanders. The first example can be seen in the work of cartoonist Alan Guppy, who died in the early 1980s, and who had a weekly strip cartoon in the Guernsey Evening Press throughout the 1970s. The cartoon character for which Guppy was best known was Stone de Croze, ‘the original Guernseyman’. Stone de Croze was a Stone Age character who was accompanied in his weekly adventures by characters from other Channel Islands. Every now and again, threatening Stone Age Germans (complete with politically incorrect square heads, duel-scarred cheeks and strong accents) would arrive by coracle, threatening to occupy the island. In 1980, Guppy published a cartoon showing German soldiers, complete with white beards and stooped by age, coming out of a bunker and waving a white flag. Two local policemen look on, and the caption reads ‘Now we know who has been raiding the beach kiosk all these years’. Guppy’s work does not stand alone. To it we might add a cartoon which appeared in the Jersey Evening Post in 1998 at a time when Jersey’s tourist board got into trouble locally with the controversial advertising slogan, ‘Jersey: where there’s something to keep everyone occupied’. In the cartoon, a bunch of German

286  Gilly Carr soldiers stand outside the tourist information office, offering their services to help with the campaign. More recently, two other cartoons have been spotted in Guernsey press. One reflects on the recent theft of a German helmet from the German Occupation Museum. The cartoon shows an old German soldier wearing it with his German colleague remarking ‘Himmel! I don’t care if it’s yours – you should put it back!’ In a later cartoon from 2013, following a report that some heritage structures were to be sold off by local government, two old Germans stand by their former bunker and ask a clipboard-wielding official whether it is on the list. The subtext to all of these cartoons is clear: the Germans are still hovering nearby. They haven’t left. They may have aged, but they are still present, waiting in the margins to be summoned or to appear at will, and are still a lens through which people encounter their wartime heritage. They have not been allowed to leave; they are still invoked regularly by local people. They are an important cultural referent for islanders today. While for the first generation the Germans outstayed their welcome, for the second and third generation that welcome has been renewed. Rather than uninvited guests, the invitation is made clear. The bed has been made, the plastic food has been put on the table, and the bunkers have once again been made habitable.

Conclusion Patrice Ladwig commented that anthropological accounts of ghosts are often conceptualized as ‘representations and symptoms of something else . . . they stand for something that cannot be expressed otherwise’ (Ladwig 2013: 428). Perhaps this is true for the Channel Islands; we can see that occupying German soldiers still form an important part of social relations, much as it might dismay the older generation to hear this. The uninvited guests have stayed for seventy years and show no signs of leaving yet. But are they representations or symptoms of (or even metaphors for) something else? Or can we take them at face value, ‘as they present themselves, rather than immediately assuming that they signify, represent or stand for something else’, a methodology that Henare et al. suggest (2007: 2)? Can we treat these ghosts as a ‘real’ phenomenon – a tangible yet intangible part of Occupation heritage standing alongside bunkers, museums and militaria? By seeing Occupation heritage such as militaria, bunkers and ghosts as part of the ‘distributed personhood’ of the German soldier, aspects which are all part of the medium of transmission of postmemory to the second and third generations, and all of which are part of the ‘authentic encounter’ that is possible in bunkers, we can begin to take ghosts seriously as intangible heritage. With the passage of time and the transition of generations, different narratives of the Occupation have come to the fore. This in turn has affected peoples’ awareness of different aspects of the Occupation, which has made them aware of other kinds of ghosts.

The ghosts of war in the Channel Islands   287 It is questionable whether the trauma of Occupation ever left the psyche of the first generation; it was with them so long and was such an important memory that its dominant position was passed on to the next generation, not just as a referent to a defining period in local history, but also as an integral part of identity. It became, for the second generation, an aspect of postmemory. So strong was the figure of the German soldier that the second generation felt its absence to the extent that they recreated it in mannequin form and created the conditions necessary to house it through their bunker restoration. From here, it was but a short step to see it, albeit out of the corner of their eyes, on the cusp of their hearing, and in tell-tale but ambiguous images on the camera lens. This speaks of a need to reach out to get a tangible grasp, through whatever senses possible, of what is, ironically, intangible. These ghosts are encountered because German soldiers still play an important role in the social relations of Channel Island society – they are seen because people need to see them. Seeking and seeing ghosts is a way of vicariously (re)experiencing and keeping ‘alive’ the most important event ever to happen in the Channel Islands, and which the second and third generation missed. The Germans have never really left the islands because they have never been allowed to leave – they are far too important for identity definition and maintenance for that.

Note 1 Some names have been changed at the request of those interviewed.

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288  Gilly Carr Gell, A. (1998) Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Henare, A., Holbraad, M., and Wastell, S. (eds) (2007) Thinking through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. London and New York: Routledge. Ogley, B. (2001) Ghosts of Biggin Hill. Westerham: Froglets Publications. Hirsch, M. (1996) Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile. Poetics Today, 17: 659–86. —— (1997) Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. —— (1999) Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy. In M. Bal, J. Crewe and L. Spitzer (eds), Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, pp. 2–14. Hanover and London: University Press of New England. Knowles Smith, H. (2007) The Changing Face of the Channel Islands Occupation: Record, Memory and Myth. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kwon, H. (2008) Ghosts of War in Vietnam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ladd, B. (1997) The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape. London: University of Chicago Press. Ladwig, P. (2013) Ontology, Materiality and Spectral Traces: Methodological Thoughts on Studying Lao Buddhist Festivals for Ghosts and Ancestral Spirits. Anthropological Theory, 12(4): 427–47. Lagrou, P. (2000) The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945–1965. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lennon, J., and Foley, M. (2000) Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster. New York: Continuum. Long, N. (2010) Haunting Malayness: The Multicultural Uncanny in a New Indonesian Province. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 16: 874–91. Sanders, P. (2012) Narratives of Britishness: UK War Memory and Channel Islands Occupation Memory. In J. Matthews and D. Travers (eds), Islands and Britishness: A Global Perspective, pp. 24–39. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Schofield, J. (2009) Aftermath: Readings in the Archaeology of Recent Conflict. New York: Springer. Suleiman, S. (2006) Crises of Memory and the Second World War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Till, K. (2005) The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place. Minneapolis, MN, and London: University of Minnesota Press. Ulturgasheva, O. (2012) Narrating the Future in Siberia: Childhood, Adolescence and Autobiography among the Eveny. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Virilio, P. (1994) Bunker Archaeology. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Vitaliev, V. (1999) Showing off the Sites of Shame. Guardian, 3 Jan.: 4. Willmot, L. (2014) Humanitarian Resistance: Help to Jews and OT Workers. In G. Carr, P. Sanders and L. Willmot, Protest, Defiance and Resistance in the Channel Islands: German Occupation, 1940–1945, pp. 97–126. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

19 Sensory deprivation during the Irish Civil War (1922–1923) Female political prisoners at Kilmainhan Gaol, Dublin Laura McAtackney The Irish Civil War (1922–3) was a short-lived conflict fought between recent comrades over the acceptability of the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921) with Britain. While this Treaty hoped to end brutal and damaging years of guerrilla warfare, waged against what was perceived as the occupying British forces, it was acknowledged by both sides that its acceptance was not without compromise. Ratifying the Treaty would result in an incomplete independence, short of the aims of the Republic of the 1916 Proclamation, and a partitioned island. In January 1922 the Treaty was marginally accepted by the de facto Irish parliament, the Dáil. However, pre-empting the vote of predominantly male politicians the women’s group Cumann na mBan became the first organisation to officially reject it (although not without disagreement) thereby taking a strong anti-Treaty stance (Matthews, 2010: 313). Over the following months the newly formed Free State spiralled towards what appeared to be an inevitable civil war, which officially started with the bombardment of the anti-Treaty forces in the Dublin Four Courts by the Free State forces in June 1922. The civil war continued for nearly eleven months until May 1923 when a ceasefire was accepted by the diminished anti-Treaty forces. However, the mass interment of antiTreaty activists and sympathizers – a significant tactic used to break the combatants’ resolve and capabilities – continued into early 1924. This need to retain imprisonment long after the ceasefire reveals its importance during and after the civil war in holding the peace and highlights experiences of those prisoners as worthy of further study. As with many civil conflicts, the brevity of the Irish Civil War was more than counterbalanced by its bitterness. In some ways it was a unique conflict for an island known for rebellions, insurrections, uprisings and political violence, due to the protagonists essentially being from the same side, and the heightened significance of gender. The Irish Civil War was the first time in Irish history that women were subject to mass imprisonment for political reasons (Matthews 2010), hence revealing a tacit acceptance by the Free State of the importance of their roles immediately before and during the conflict. Margaret Ward has stated that, even in the immediately preceding Easter Rising (1916) and War of Independence (1919–21), when the British

290  Laura McAtackney imprisoned c.50 women as political internees, there was no public acceptance that women were actively involved en masse. It took the nearly tenfold jump to at least 400 women (Ward’s estimations in 1983) held during the civil war to reveal the Free State’s estimations of their contribution to guerrilla warfare (Ward 1995: 190). Recent access to the Irish Military Archives has allowed Ann Matthews to update these imprisonment figures to show that the number of women held during the Civil War was significantly larger than previous estimations. Through collating various official records Matthews estimates over 600 women were held during this period (Matthews 2012); a significant increase on previous conflicts that requires an exploration of gendered experiences and sensory perceptions of imprisonment. Matthews interprets this increase in numbers of interned women as indicative of more significant societal changes in the treatment of women during times of war in Ireland. She argues that the more public roles of women that coincided with this period – with many of the most active female nationalists previously involved in suffragette and trade union politics and associated social justice protests in the earlier years of the century – resulted in a significant backlash in the arena of guerrilla warfare. In what she describes as a ‘war on women’ she dates deliberate attacks on women to the period after the executions of the Easter Rising leaders in 1916. She convincingly claims that women were actively targeted for verbal, physical and sexual attack by both the British and Irish sides (2010: 266–83). While this treatment of women could be conceded as a repercussion of the increased militarism of the period, or a reaction to the increasing move of women into the public domain, it is clear that women were viewed as acting as proxies for the men who they were related or married to and even as agents of the conflict in their own right (McCoole 1997). Effectively, non-elite women on either side were being singled out for punishment for their acts and the acts of male associates as an extraordinary and innovative act of war during this period. The role of women is still under-represented in the public memory of this time and this lacuna is particularly noticeable in relation to their more public roles and punishments during the Civil War. It was only during this latter internecine conflict that women were publicly acknowledged for their roles as essential cogs in the anti-Treaty guerrilla networks and were punished through mass imprisonment.

Gendered experiences of political imprisonment The mass imprisonment of women during the Civil War should be viewed within the context of the movement – and targeting – of women in the arena of guerilla warfare. One of the most interesting differentials of imprisonment during this period is locating and comparing the gendered treatment of men and women. Ward (1995) contends that c.12,000 men were held during the period of revolutionary Ireland, substantially more than the women, and the majority were held en masse in specially, if temporarily, constructed

Sensory deprivation during the Irish Civil War   291 internment camps. Special treatment was reserved for the leaders, who were often isolated in more traditional gaols in Ireland and also in the UK prior to independence. Indeed, William Murphy has argued in his volume on political imprisonment and the Irish, that the strain that mass imprisonment put on the prison system in Ireland during this period ensured the removed of many prisoners to the UK to ensure that effective control of prison populations could be maintained (2014) – a solution that was not available to the Free State who now also had significant numbers of women to contain. Women were not held in internment camps during this period but many began their carceral experiences held in isolation in de facto cells in either police stations, barracks or local prisons in the areas where they were captured. They were usually released within days, if not hours, or were moved onto regional gaols, with many eventually transferred to a small number of holding centres in Dublin for communal and more long-term periods of imprisonment. Even after they arrived in Dublin their experiences of imprisonment were not stable, with frequent moves between holding centres due to changes in prison policy, a desire to break the communal spirit of the women or isolate a small number of leaders. The unsettling nature of such frequent, and usually unheralded, moves ensured the women frequently protested, with infamous incidents occurring in which many women were injured whilst being forcibly removed from Kilmainham Gaol to the North Dublin Union (NDU) during the middle of the night in late April 1923. Clearly, there was an intention of giving especially unpleasant treatment to women and this is particularly evident when one notes the locations where women were interned as political prisoners. Of the three main holding centres for women – the women’s wing at Mountjoy Gaol, Kilmainham Gaol and the NDU – only the first prison was associated with female political imprisonment before the Civil War. Kilmainham Gaol and North Dublin Union were extraordinary holding centres that were not only previously associated with holding men but also with degrading, inhumane and dangerously out of date conditions. Kilmainham Gaol had closed as a convict prison in 1910, considered too outdated to hold even the lowliest criminal class, and had been used as a barracks and holding centre for soldiers intermittently since. North Dublin Union, as the name suggests, had been a workhouse (with all its unsavoury connotations) that had latterly been used as a barracks for irregular British soldiers, including the much-hated Black and Tans.1 The women interpreted these conditions as indicative of the feelings of the newly formed Irish state to them. Margaret Buckley described her introduction to the NDU as a transferee from Mountjoy: ‘The place was filthy. It had been occupied by British emergency troops during the Black-and-Tan war, and was now as they had left it’ (1938: 53). However, it is clear that she had been even more disgusted with her initial introduction to the older, B (West) Wing of Kilmainham Gaol, where she acted as OC (Commanding Officer): ‘Such a foul hole! The British would not put men prisoners into it, but it was good enough for Irish Republican

292  Laura McAtackney women’ (1938: 79). Clearly the ‘war on women’ was to extend beyond their treatment in the public arena to their conditions of internment in some of the most overcrowded, poorly equipped and archaic conditions in the Free State. It is on the dark and dismal corridors of B (West) Wing Kilmainham Gaol that this chapter shall concentrate.

A short history of Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin Kilmainham Gaol was opened in 1796 across two wings with a plan based on the reforming ideals of John Howard, who had visited Dublin gaols – and was critical of their conditions – in the years immediately before its construction. At the time it was considered a modern, progressive institution, located on a hill to allow circulation of air through the prison’s (initially unglazed) windows (Cooke 1998). Howard’s emphasis on a move away from uncategorized, communal holding cells to more controllable, segregated, cellular occupation was also implemented, at least in theory. In practice, the cells always held a number of inhabitants. The dark, cold corridors of the limestone prison were narrow and prevented an overview of prisoner activities. They were very difficult to patrol by prison guards at times of emergency and the unglazed windows made the cells extremely cold during inclement weather (which was frequent in Dublin’s temperate climate). By the mid-nineteenth century the recognition of the importance of the wider material environment in creating the conditions to enable reform were recognized and the original East Wing was demolished and replaced by a Bentham-inspired panoptical design. With the single cells organized on balconies around a large central zone that allowed the guards to have unhindered visual access to (almost) all points on the wing it was a very different carceral environment. The glass roof further highlighted this difference by creating a light, communalized area. The new East Wing was designated as the ‘A’ Wing, and the old West Wing was the inferior ‘B’ Wing. Effectively from this time onwards two prisons operated on the same site until its final closure in the aftermath of the civil war in 1924 and with these different conditions so the sensory experiences of place varied considerably. Due to the very different plans of the two wings at Kilmainham Gaol the prisoners were aware that to be held in ‘A’ Wing was a very different experience than being held in ‘B’ Wing. Margaret Buckley in her later memoir evocatively talks about her time in ‘B’ Wing, often in sensory terms relating to the darkness, coldness and smell of the dilapidated conditions (1938). She notes that the conditions were so different to the ‘large and airy’ ‘A’ Wing that ‘we [the women] were, it seemed, marked out for special punishment’ (1938: 79). However, the very different physical forms of the wings have resulted in unexpectedly differential treatment – and survivals – by later groups interested in interpreting both the building and the prisoners who were held within. Counter-intuitively, the degradation of ‘B’ Wing has been beneficial in its more intact survival, in that it was not a focus for the

Sensory deprivation during the Irish Civil War   293 efforts of the initial restoration efforts. Although the building was made sound and the roof repaired there was little attempt to tamper with the surviving walls, which has inadvertently ensured archaeologists can now at least attempt to reconstruct experiences of imprisonment in its last phase of holding political prisoners. This is very different to the fate of the ‘A’ Wing. When Kilmainham Gaol closed in 1924 it was the subject of many proposals for its future usage, none of which came to fruition until the years immediately preceding the fiftieth anniversary the Easter Rising (see O’Dwyer, 2010). In the late 1950s the then derelict prison became a subject of heightened interest amongst a small number of previous political prisoners who had been involved in revolutionary Ireland. Many of the men and women who led the Kilmainham Gaol Restoration Society (KGJS) had been prisoners at the site during the War of Independence and Civil War and the majority had been anti-Treaty republicans – the rejection of the Free State compromises were politics many of them still held. As a result of their meetings with the government Kilmainham Gaol was eventually leased to the voluntary organization in 1960 (O’Dwyer, 2010). It was their vision that saw the implementation of a restoration programme that focused on the more visually recognizable classical Victorian prison design of the ‘A’ Wing (O’Dwyer, 2010: 41–2). Once the inevitable task of clearing the decades of accumulated debris and infiltration of nature from all parts of the prison had been complete, and the buildings were made physically sound, restoration took the form of interventions with the material environment with the aim to revert the state of the gaol to the time of the Rising. Due to a reticence about discussing the still divisive civil war a decision was made not only to exclude mention of that final conflict from the interpretation of the site but to actively conceal it. This included the thorough whitewashing of walls in the communal ‘circle’ area of the ‘A’ Wing, which had retained a substantial proportion of the political cartoons, murals and text from the last inhabitants of the prison despite the decades of dereliction. Inside the cells of the ‘A’ Wing plaster was chipped off the walls with an efficiency and thoroughness that is almost admirable. Of the 111 rooms (mainly cells) on the wing all but seventeen were thoroughly deplastered in this period, with the remnants of the walls often remaining as rubble, piled into the centre of the cell floor. With the graffiti in the ‘B’ Wing largely untouched – indeed it had only been added to by visitors in the intervening years – this assemblage is the focus of attempts to use the building of Kilmainham to retrieve the sensory experiences of the women held within it during those final months of operation.

Locating sensory experiences of place: autograph books and graffiti Although there are difficulties in retrieving documentary and oral information on civil war prisoners due to poor survival of official records and

294  Laura McAtackney later reticence at reopening contentious wounds there are also more prosaic issues that impact on accessing even the most basic details. The difficulties in keeping detailed, accurate and retrievable records in the early months of a fledgling state, while engaged in a civil war, clearly resulted in partial and at times haphazard recordkeeping. The Military Archives at Cathal Brugha Barracks in Dublin hold a number of files and ledgers that can be crossreferenced to provide the barest facts of the internment of prisoners during this period. However, the records clearly reveal that the authorities had but a tenuous hold. Prison ledgers hold marginalia voicing doubts regarding the identity and even whereabouts of some internees, prisoners were openly falsifying names, addresses and some appear to have been released without ever officially being registered as being interned. With such partial official sources, constructing accurate lists of prisoner numbers, never mind gaining insights into life as a political prisoner, is extremely difficult. In such a circumstance the materials made by and associated with the prisoners are one of the most effective ways of tracing not only their experiences but also their prison records. Two of the most rewarding sources to enable such aims are atypical for political or military historians and instead would be more readily associated with social historians and historical archaeologists: autograph books and prison graffiti. Autograph books were relatively inexpensive, mass-produced books of blank paper that were popularly circulated in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. They were usually passed between acquaintances, colleagues and friends to mark major transitions and changes in young lives through the written exchange of a short message, verse, poem or image (Shapira and Herzog 1984). They appear to have been a popular means of marking imprisonment by the women and they often trace the women’s arrest and imprisonment records in more detail and with greater certainty than the official records. Poignantly, entries clearly state that women were falsifying their official records, with Peg Walsh proclaiming in the autograph book of Nan Hogan ‘Now that I’m expecting release I claim my own name’ (KGLM 2015. 0087). Autograph books survive in number – nearly thirty – in the contemporary archive of Kilmainham Gaol. Although an often overlooked source they are important because of, rather than despite, their essentially ubiquitous and trivial nature. Hanna Herzog and Rina Shapira have conducted one of the few detailed studies of autograph books, in 1980s Israel, and convincingly argue for their study. They claim that autograph books are particularly useful texts in conducting social histories as they can gauge the opinions of the users due to being ‘authentic material not created for the purpose of study’. The entries, while largely mundane, are meaningful in allowing researchers to trace social networks between the writer and the owner (Herzog and Shapira 1986: 109). Likewise the graffiti remnants of the final months of the Civil War are still partially retrievable from the walls of the ‘B’ (West) Wing of Kilmainham Gaol. Despite sporadic whitewashing, dereliction and later graffiti intrusions affecting the wider assemblage, what remains still provides a fascinating

Sensory deprivation during the Irish Civil War   295 insight into the lives of the last forced inhabitants of the structure. Graffiti studies are growing in importance in archaeologies of the recent past, not just as a means of retrieving and interpreting text and images but in reconstructing spatial and temporal realities that are inherently engaged with the materiality of the graffiti site. Detailed and systematic recording of graffiti at Kilmainham Gaol has revealed spatial patterns that link not only to issues of access and light but also reveal power relations and communal relationships. For instance, the prisoners’ ability to create large, detailed and publicly viewable graffiti seemingly without deterrent in the final years of the functional prison life clearly indicates access to paints, chalk and pencils alongside a lack of control and censoring of their activities. There are numerous examples of graffiti appearing in corridors and stairwells – often defiant, accusatory and even threatening of the Free State forces – with caricatures of prison personnel included at the entrance to the top of three floors in the wing (Figure 19.1). In contrast to the careful controlling, and even punishment, of graffiti creation during the decades of the criminal prison (a small number of prisoners were charged with creating graffiti), political prisoners had officially sanctioned access to pencils and paints (as noted in parcel ledgers from the period, see CW/P/05/02) and the resultant graffiti included large slogans on well-lit walls, over doorways and in corridors, as well as

Figure 19.1  Graffiti image created with pencil over whitewash depicting a nurse working for the Free State in Kilmainham Gaol c.1922–3 ( author)

296  Laura McAtackney the typical small-scale graffiti secreted in hidden corners. In such a context graffiti transcends its typical interpretation as secretive and even criminal activity; rather it can be viewed as intrinsic to the arsenal of resistance of the political prisoner (McAtackney 2014) and can be interpreted as an object of biography (Clarke and Frederick 2012; Merrill and Hack 2013). Such a contention is confirmed by one of the most common graffiti forms being prisoners writing their personal details such as name, address and prison record on the wall of the gaol – creating what Eleanor Casella calls ‘testimonies’ (2009: 174–5). Far from imprisonment being a circumstance of shame, graffiti clearly played a significant role in publicly performing political status and notifying presence. Its analysis is also central to allowing us to better understand the prisoners’ sensory experiences of place.

Sensory experiences of Kilmainham Gaol during the Irish Civil War Bringing together the range of sources available on Kilmainham Gaol during the Irish Civil War reveals an intriguing picture of the sensory experiences inside this most feared institution, a picture that is not without contradictions. The predominant experiences that emerge from memoirs and newspapers reports written at the time and soon afterwards dispel McCoole’s claims that ‘[the women] appear to have eluded the historical record’ (1997: 10). Clearly the women were keen to use the degrading conditions of their imprisonment to shame the authorities as publicly and frequently as possible. There are numerous contemporary newspaper articles that present Kilmainham Gaol as an inhospitable place, with an emphasis on the aggressive and inappropriate treatment of the women by the Free State guards and female accomplices. This includes a letter from Mary McDermott, smuggled from the NDU after she was transferred from Kilmainham Gaol: I was assaulted . . . by four women employed by the Free State. My dress was taken off, because I resisted . . . The prison adjutant, a man at least six feet of heavy build, knelt on me while the women assaulted me, beating me about the face and body with my own shoes . . . I fainted . . . On my recovering consciousness I found myself outside in the passage among drunken soldiers lying in a semi nude state, my clothing saturated with water. (Daily Herald, 7 May 1923) Likewise, Dorothy Macardle complained of being, ‘manhandled, trampled, carried and “flung down” in surgery to be searched’ (quoted in McCoole 1997: 56), at the same time as Mary McDermott, and around seventy other women, were forcibly moved from Kilmainham Gaol in the middle of the night in late April 1923. The forced searching of women was a multifaceted and decidedly sinister act that facilitated the prison officers in locating and confiscating whatever they decided was contraband, but

Sensory deprivation during the Irish Civil War   297 following Aretxaga (1997) such intrusions also allowed the ‘colonialization’ of the female body. Evidently, such reports and texts were self-consciously collated for public consumption and they had a tendency to highlight the extremely poor physical environment and unpleasant treatment they received. However, it is clear that these interactions did occur and often shaped the sensory experiences of the women, instilling fear of threats of violence, unwanted physical interactions, and actual assaults that were particularly associated with the unruliness of night-time. The numerous records of ill-disciplined soldiers using the cover of darkness to rampage around the wings of the various holding centres of women, even letting off sporadic gunfire (Coyle papers, P61 4a), were read as a real threat to the physical body of the female prisoner. It impacted on the ever-changing relationship the women had with the prison environment, with their freedom of movement during the day contrasting with the possibility of unwanted incursion by guards at night. The women condemned the activities of the soldiers as the inappropriate acts of cowardly men (see MacSwiney in the foreword to Buckley 1938); one can only assume as much for the grave breach of the social conventions of the time as for the actuality of violence. This was particularly the case for many otherwise

Figure 19.2  Substantial graffiti slogan created using paints by the women. Located above an archway leading into the so-called ‘1916 Corridor’ featuring a quotation from Padraig Pearse: ‘Beware the risen people that have harried and held ye who have bullied and bribed’. ( Author)

298  Laura McAtackney middle and upper class women who were experiencing their first (and often only) period of imprisonment (McCoole 1997). The sinister, dark corridors of the B (West) Wing of Kilmainham Gaol were already well known to the wider public as the holding centre for countless Irishmen (and a small number of notable Irish women) who had been forcibly removed, held for extended periods and even executed from the late eighteenth century onwards at this particular site. Acting as a de facto place of political imprisonment in Ireland from at least the mid-nineteenth century onwards (Cooke 1998) Kilmainham Gaol as a structure resonated strongly with the women. Its very materiality allowed them to perform the ‘political’ nature of their imprisonment by using the building as a touchstone for previous nationalist leaders, revolts and rebellions. The women during the Civil War emphasized their connection to those enduring, popular narratives with frequent references to their immediate predecessors, especially executed leaders of the Easter Rising such as Padraig Pearse and James Connolly, whose names and works appear in number in autograph books and in extant graffiti (Figure 19.2). This extends back to early nationalist predecessors, including Robert Emmett, the executed leader of an Irish Rebellion in 1803, who is mentioned in autograph books and may be the subject of a portrait on a cell wall on the top floor of the B Wing (Figure 19.3).

Figure 19.3  Faint graffiti image in pencil over whitewash of a historically dressed male and female figure in profile looking towards each other. Possibly the figure of Robert Emmett, executed after being held in Kilmainham Gaol in 1803. ( Author)

Sensory deprivation during the Irish Civil War   299 Probably the most prominent dead Irish nationalist referenced by the women, appearing in a number of autograph books and in at least two major slogans on the top and middle floors of the B Wing (in the cells we know held Sighle Humphries and Bridie O’Mullane during the Civil War: Figure 19.4) is Thomas MacSwiney. MacSwiney had been the Mayor of Cork when he was imprisoned during the War of Independence (1919–21) and transferred to Brixton Prison, where he died on hunger strike in October 1920. While a well-known figure at the time, and one the women used to highlight the steadfastness of those who died for their cause and principles in contrast to the Free State men imprisoning them, he also had a stronger connection that speaks to gendered differences of experience. Thomas MacSwiney was the brother of a high-profile female prisoner during the Civil War, Mary, a fiercely intelligent woman who was the first female prisoner to endure a high-profile and long-term hunger strike in the early months of the Civil War. She continued throughout this period, and until her death in 1942, to mobilize the women, defy the Free State authorities and enter into fierce public debates with anyone who doubted the moral right of the anti-Treaty women. The women chose to articulate their resolve and intransigence by using quotations taken from works written by Thomas MacSwiney as a means of connecting to both his, and her, respective hunger strikes. Thomas MacSwiney was prominent in a

Figure 19.4  Substantial graffiti slogan created using paints by Bridie O’Mullane during her imprisonment in 1922–3. Quoting Thomas MacSwiney ‘A few men faithful and a deathless dream’. ( Author)

300  Laura McAtackney republican pantheon of figures who inspired the women and are located throughout the graffiti assemblages of the B (West) Wing. The scale, size and frequency of appearance of such political rhetoric in graffiti indicates the walls, cells and corridors of Kilmainham Gaol were not simply part of a repressive place of incarceration but were consciously being reconfigured by the women to create a space of active resistance. The importance of the material structures of Kilmainham Gaol as a connection to previous nationalist heroes for the women is most clearly articulated in the annual commemorations of the Easter Rising in 1923. Dolan (2006) has shown how the anti-Treaty forces quickly, and almost without contest, claimed the ideals and aspirations of the Easter Rising as their own in the early days of the Civil War. Presenting themselves as the legitimate descendants of the leaders of the Easter Rising the women prisoners held the official anti-Treaty commemoration of the Rising in Kilmainham Gaol in 1923. Although there are no graffiti traces of this day of commemoration there are a number of ornately designed programmes inserted into autograph books that detail the procession, activities and speakers (Figure 19.5). They reveal not only how important the building of Kilmainham Gaol was in claiming the leaders of the Easter Rising as their predecessors but also the hierarchies

Figure 19.5  Programme created by pencil and painted in the autograph book of Nellie Fennell. ( Author)

Sensory deprivation during the Irish Civil War   301 of remembrance the women constructed and the lack of interference from the Free State forces in executing their day. The programmes clearly show that the women were able to experience the buildings without hindrance, performing their commemorations in ‘the place of execution’, including a wreath being deposited and a rosary recited in Irish. They then proceeded to ‘the Prison Compound’ where an Irish Tricolour that they had made in the prison was unfurled, hymns were sung and speeches and prayers were recited (Fennell, KMGLM 2010.0196). Three aspects of this commemoration are of note: first, all the women named as participants were related by marriage or birth to an executed leader. Second, they did not commemorate any women or indeed their role in the Easter Rising; preferring to defer to the men executed in Kilmainham and as a consequence undermining their own roles in the insurrection (McAtackney 2015). Third, they had been able to procure the material culture needed to create a wreath and flag and then proceed without impediment throughout the gaol complex to complete this commemorative act – surely an indicator that the power differentials within the prison were, at times, much more balanced than the letters and memoirs of the women lead us to believe. Parcel ledgers retained by the Irish Military Archive reinforce an interpretation of a rather freer material condition of imprisonment than most criminal prisoners would expect to encounter (CW/P/05/02). The parcel ledgers detail the contents of parcels sent to the women, and note if any of the contents were withheld from the prison (an infrequent occurrence). They reveal that the contents of these parcels contained an extraordinary array of food types, many of which would have been expensive and considered luxuries at the time. A typical parcel includes one passed to Miss C. Moloney that held ‘rashers, chocolates, oranges, cake, cigs, eggs’. Extravagances such as bananas, chocolate, sweets, cakes and cigarettes were frequent inclusions. Furthermore, clothing – including ‘Skirt / 2 golf coats / Silk jumper / silk blouse / 2 camisoles / 1 pr knickers / 3 handkerchiefs / 3 pr stockings’ for a Miss D Barry – and handicrafts items – including a ‘costume’ for Miss Donovan – were frequent inclusions and were almost always passed to the women. We can even account for the origins of much of the extensive, colourful graffiti that remains on the walls of the B Wing due to detailing of the ‘paints . . . . Pencils, pens’ being sent to the famous cartoonist Grace Gifford Plunkett and ‘4 boxes of crayons, box of ? pencils / Box of 50 cigarettes & matches / ½ day notebooks / German and Irish / box of colour chalks’ being sent to Miss O’Mullane in the parcels ledger. Evidently these supplies, and probably others, were being used to complete the extensive graffiti that remains in almost all the cells in the B (West) Wing. While the graffiti interactions of Bridie O’Mullane and Grace Gifford Plunkett could not eradicate the cold, grey dark walls completely they did go some way to subverting the space. By covering the surfaces with colourful images,

302  Laura McAtackney slogans that maintained the resolve of the women, and quotations to taunt and shame the lack of resolve of their imprisoners, the graffiti can be viewed as an attempt to direct their sensory experiences of place.

Conclusion Kilmainham Gaol has been called ‘the Bastille of Ireland’ due to the symbolic role it held in the formation of the state that directly references its functional role in punishing nationalist leaders and the fear it instilled as to experiences within its formidable, grey exterior (O’Dwyer 2010). Clearly, its outdated design and poor living conditions were perceived as an extra punishment by some of its last inhabitants – female political prisoners from the Irish Civil War – who discussed the cold, dark and grey cells and corridors in detail. However, time spent within the building also presented an opportunity for the women to advertise this perceived slight, articulate the ‘political’ nature of their imprisonment and to utilize its material remains in a multitude of ways. Kilmainham Gaol was an inhospitable environment, which transitioned from being unpleasant to being truly sinister when night followed day and unruly, armed guards and soldiers were able to access the wings and cells of unprotected females. Undoubtedly assaults and inappropriate interactions were the outcome of some of these incursions, particularly when the authorities decided to try to move the women without notice in the dead of night, such as in late April 1923. However, it should be remembered the that surviving material culture of the B Wing of Kilmainham Gaol – especially the autograph books and graffiti – reveals other sensory experiences of the prison. The autograph books detail how the buildings were meaningfully interacted with to commemorate the dead leaders of the Easter Rising, who were not only executed in the prison confines but were also close relatives of many of the women held in the gaol during the Civil War. The graffiti reveals that women were creating large slogans to advertise their steadfastness whilst simultaneously condemning the disloyalty of the Free State forces to the ideals of their immediate predecessors. The official parcel ledgers not only reveal a material world within the prison that would be unmatched outside the most affluent households of the time but also delineates how the implements needed to create the graffiti and fill the autograph books – the pencils, pens and paints – were passed into the prison: through official parcels. This chapter ultimately reveals that sensory experiences of Kilmainham Gaol cannot be determined solely through the editorializing of the women, the vast array of extant graffiti or the autograph books, but must include a variety of sources that reveal that the poor conditions did impact on the women’s sensory experiences but they were not passively suffered. The women used their collective and individual agency to use their surroundings to resist and even reaffirm their place in the Republican pantheon of repressed heroes.

Sensory deprivation during the Irish Civil War   303

Acknowledgements With many thanks to Niall Bergin, Assistant Director of Kilmainham Gaol, and to the Office of Public Works, who have facilitated access to Kilmainham Gaol and its archives since 2011. Furthermore, thanks to the Irish Military Archives at Cathal Brugha Barracks, Dublin, who allowed access to archives at short notice and facilitated reproductions.

Primary Sources Coyle, Eithne. (Unpublished) Personal Papers. UCD Archive. P61 4a. (Autobiographical and Biographical Material, 1914–1923), 1945–1975. CW/P/05/02 Parcel Book, Kilmainham (Relates to Female Prisoners Only). Dated 21 Feb.–18 Mar. 1923. Held in Irish Military Archive, Cathal Brugha Barracks, Dublin. Daily Herald (Dublin). Letters. 7 May 1923. Fennell, Nellie. Autograph book c.1922–c.1923. Held in Kilmainham Gaol Archive. KMGLM 2010.0196. Hogan, Nan. Autograph book c.1922–c.1923. Held in Kilmainham Gaol Archive. KGLM 2015. 0087.

Note 1 The Black and Tans, officially Royal Irish Constabulary Reserve Force, were a force of temporary recruits employed to assist the Royal Irish Constabulary during the War of Independence in Ireland. They were recruited in the UK to include many veterans of the First World War. Their unofficial name came from the colours of their improvised uniforms. They were much hated due to high-profile and brutal attacks on civilians and civilian property during the period.

References Aretxaga, Begoña (1997) Shattering Silence: Women, Nationalism and Political Subjectivity in Northern Ireland. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Buckley, Margaret (1938) The Jangle of the Key. Dublin: J. Duffy & Co. Casella, Eleanor Conlin (2009) Written on the Walls: Inmate Graffiti within Places of Confinement. In A. M. Beisaw and J. G. Gibb (eds) The Archaeology of Institutional Life. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press. Clarke, Anne, and Frederick, Ursula (2012) ‘Rebecca will you marry me? Tim’: Inscriptions as Objects of Biography at the North Head Quarantine Station, Manly, New South Wales. Archaeologia Oceania, 47: 84–90. Cooke, Patrick (1998) A History of Kilmainham Gaol, 1796–1924. Dublin: Office of Public Works. Dolan, Anne (2006) Commemorating the Irish Civil War: History and Memory 1923–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herzog, Hanna, and Shapira, Rina (1986) Will you Sign my Autograph Book? Using Autograph Books for a Sociohistorical Study of Youth and Social Frameworks. Quanlitative Sociology, 9(2): 109–25.

304  Laura McAtackney McAtackney, Laura (2014) An Archaeology of the Troubles: The Dark Heritage of Long Kesh/Maze Prison. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— (2015) Women’s Autograph Books: Remembering the Easter Rising through the Experiences of the Irish Civil War. In Joanna Brück and Lisa Gosdon (eds) Making 1916: The Material Culture of the Easter Rising. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. —— (forthcoming) Gender, Incarceration and Power Relations during the Irish Civil War. In Victoria Stanford, Katerina Stefatos and Cecilia Salvi (eds) The State and Gender Violence: International Perspectives. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. McCoole, Sinead (1997) Guns and Chiffon: Women Revolutionaries and Kilmainham Gaol, 1916–1923. Dublin: Stationery Office Books. Matthews, Ann (2010) Renegades: Irish Republican Women, 1900–1922. Dublin: Mercier Press. —— (2012) Dissidents: Irish Republican Women, 1923–1941. Dublin: Mercier Press. Merrill, Sam, and Hack, Hans (2013) Exploring Hidden Narratives: Conscript Graffiti at the Former Military Base of Kummersdorf. Journal of Social Archaeology, 13: 101–21. Murphy, William (2014) Political Imprisonment and the Irish, 1910–1921. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Dwyer, Rory (2010) The Bastille of Ireland. Kilmainham Gaol: From Ruin to Restoration. Dublin: History Press Ireland. Shapira, Rina, and Herzog, Hanna (1984) Understanding Youth Culture through Autograph Books: The Israeli Case. Journal of American Folklore, 97(386): 442. Ward, Margaret (1995) Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism. Dublin: Pluto Press.

Part III

Sensorial objects

20 Sensing the sepoy Objects, letters and songs of Indian soldiers, 1914–1918 Santanu Das

A tremulous yet incantatory voice – interrupted by awkward silences and sharp intakes of breath – crackles from an old phonograph record as the needle scratches against the disc. The speaker refers to himself in the third person, as he narrates his life-story in Punjabi, with the voice rising and pausing and rising again till it reaches, and almost spits out, the final word at the end of each line: There was a man who would have butter back in India He would also have two sers of milk. He served for the British. He joined the European War. He was captured by the Germans. He wants to go back to India. If he goes back to India then he will get that same food. Three years have already passed. There’s no news as to when there will be peace. Only if he goes back to India will he get that food. If he stays here for two more years then he will die. By God’s grace, if they declare peace then we’ll go back. (Singh n.d.) This is the story of Mall Singh, an Indian prisoner of war in the ‘Halfmoon Camp’ at Wünsdorf outside Berlin. The recording was made on 11 December 1916. He was forced to stand in front of a phonograph machine held before him by his German captors and instructed to speak. More than the ‘warm scribe my hand’ (Keats 1970: 657–8) – lurking behind the manuscript, souvenir or artefact – this bleak voice-recording touches us on that fragile spot where categories collapse. A voice calls out from the phonograph, strains itself in the act of recording: the trepidation, the timbre, the laboured enunciation, the slight breathlessness seem to bridge the gap between technological reproduction and lived experience. Listening to it now, the body and emotion of the speaker seem insurgent, filling in, flowing out, authenticating an encounter with a disembodied voice from a hundred years ago.1

308  Santanu Das The effect is powerful and uncanny: we are in the presence of the ‘real’, in whatever way we may define the term. What is the relation between the sensory (here the sonorous), the testimonial and the ‘authentic’? Or, to put the question another way, what is it to listen or to view or even to touch rather than to read in the act of recovering past lives and bodies? ‘To listen is tender l’oreille – literally, to stretch the ear – an expression that evokes a singular mobility, among the sensory apparatuses, of the pinna of the ear – it is an intensification, a curiosity or an anxiety’ notes Jean-Luc Nancy (2007: 5). Exploring the relationship ‘between a sense (that one listens to) and a truth (that one understands)’, Nancy comments on the age-old hierarchy of the senses, with the visual privileged over the aural, in their relation to the ‘conceptual’; and yet, the hierarchies shift as we consider questions of contact, trace and affect. Sound and touch, clinging more to the body than vision, pertain to the domain of the intimate; ‘visual presence’, Nancy notes, can pale before ‘acoustic penetration’ (2007: 2–3). But the question that surely must also be asked, in our context, is whether Mall Singh’s voice penetrates us because of the way it sounds, or because of the poignant story it tells, or because, in some undefinable way, Mall Singh is present in it. The borders are porous; ‘sense’ and ‘truth’ (to use Nancy’s terms) are fused and often confused in the affect of ‘hearing’, as it joins ‘listening’ and ‘understanding’ (and hence the importance of ‘translation’, inter-sensorial and linguistic). What is being said can disturb the pinna as much as the voice. Mall Singh’s was among the 2,677 audio recordings made by the Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission between 29 December 1915 and 19 December 1918, using the First World War Prisoners of War held in Germany.2 They included a large number of colonial prisoners, including Singh. I shall come back to these men and the recordings later, but for the moment, let us examine the voice-testimony at hand. Desolate, homesick and hungry, Mall Singh distils all the pain and longing into the images of ghee (butter) and the two sers (a form of measurement) of milk. Home is remembered as taste; but the image conjures into being, beyond memory and desire, the socio-economic conditions of the society he comes from: the agricultural-martial world of colonial Punjab (today divided between India and Pakistan). Mall Singh’s voice is not just a fresh and tantalizing source but opens us to new ways of ‘reading’ – and writing – life in times of war: it confronts us with the role of the sensuous, the material and the intimate; it forces us to weave together a narrative of fugitive fragments, the flotsam, jetsam and lagan of life wrecked by war; it points to the importance of relicts as zones of contact between warm life and historical violence, sacral sites where testimony is born. The wavering of the voice, the blood and bulletholes on trench artefacts, the creases and crinkliness of trench-letters are in many ways the hand-prints and face-prints of war in the act of writing its own violent life – its peculiar mode of communication – as it slices through human lives and reduces them to piece-meal narratives. What I am arguing

Sensing the sepoy  309 for is a mode of reading that goes merely beyond ‘reading’ – a more active engagement with the material, the aural and the haptic; to sense life, as it were, while being alert to the traces of violence; to how, in a fragmentary, tentative, hesitant way, a narrative is built up; to be alive to the role of affect in the relicts and the ‘reader’. Forms and genres are informed by their own histories and hierarchies. Are the different kinds of source material, belonging to different media, to be given equal value? Does materiality invest testimony with the aura of authenticity and if so, what is the relation between affect and the politics of ‘combat gnosticism’ (Campbell 1999: 203–15)? Here I shall examine some of these issues with relation to a specific community – the Indian soldiers who served on the Western Front between 1914 and 1915. While I have written elsewhere about the small but powerful body of Indian war literature – poems, memoirs and the war novel Across the Black Waters by Mulk Raj Anand (2008 [1939]) – here my focus is on fugitive fragments which impinge on our senses and thought.3 If life-writing involves, as Hermione Lee notes, both ‘making up’ and ‘making over’ a ‘quasi-fictional story-like shape’, with the ‘need for accuracy’ pulling against it (Lee 2005: 28), a project like this one is even more precarious and ramshackle, tipping over to the world of ‘make-do’ with its assemblage of half-known sonic, textual and material fragments. In the colonial context, they take on, as I shall argue, even more vital intensities of meaning. I shall first provide a brief background about them and then go on to examine different kinds of testimonies: objects, letters and songs.

Indian soldiers on the Western Front The nineteenth century had seen the extensive militarization of the agricultural and dairy farming communities of the Punjab through the construction of the idea of ‘martial races’ and the system of rewards of fertile ‘canal colonies’ for military service. In the post-Mutiny years, the British colonial army had decided that certain ethnic groups – such as Sikhs, Punjabi Mussalmans, Pathans, Gurkhas, Dogras, Jats – were ‘naturally’ more war-like than others and thereby restricted the recruiting pool of India’s vast military to a narrow strip of land along the northern and north-western part of the country, particularly the Punjab. In return, these men – traditionally farmers and dairy-producers – were given agricultural lands. Locking land-grants to military service was the perverse genius of the British colonial administration that propelled hundreds of thousands of young men, such as Mall Singh, to join the British Army and venture into the wide unknown. The production of ghee and milk back home depended – literally – on their service abroad.4 The military-agricultural nexus shaped the texture of everyday life and its narratives; army cantonments sprang up in the heart of rural Punjab. For this community, soldiering was a profession; their life stories became war stories as they grew up in the army and travelled, like their fathers and forefathers, to places such as Cyprus, Egypt, Somalia and China for various

310  Santanu Das ‘small’ wars – though few knew for whom or what they were fighting, except for those 11 rupees at the end of the month. In 1914, undivided India (comprising today’s India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma) had the largest volunteer army in the world. And of all the colonies in the British, French and German empires, it contributed the highest number of men to the war. Between August 1914 and December 1919, it sent overseas over a million men, including 622,224 soldiers and 474,789 non-combatants, who sailed to France, East Africa, Mesopotamia, Salonika, Palestine, Suez, Gallipoli, Aden and the Persian Gulf (Anon. 1920: 777). They were the twin conscripts of colonialism and modernity for it was the conjunction of cheap labour-markets and modern modes of transportation that facilitated their mobilization. Of them, some 140,000 were sent to France and Flanders where they served between October 1914 and December 1915, when the Indian infantry was withdrawn and sent to Mesopotamia. The Indians were among the almost four million colonial troops (French, German and British) who served in the war.5 Yet, these men were also the most ‘silent’ of communities – their experiences have remained largely ‘incommunicable’ not just because of their traumatic nature but, more immediately, because they did not know how to read or write. The erasure of four million lives from the annals of the ‘Great War and modern memory’ because of their non-literacy – the absence of written testimonies – also exposes the crippling inadequacy of terms such as ‘war-writing’ and ‘life-writing’, with their textual elitist bias. Indeed, to focus narrowly on the scripted and the literary would leave out the experiences of the majority of soldiers across the world even today and indeed through history (Britain had its first literate army only in the Boer War) and reduce their life stories to the ventriloquism of a select literate cognoscenti. In a context where the colonial soldiers did not leave us with an abundance of diaries, journals, poems and memoirs, it is necessary to go beyond the textual to other forms of evidence – the material, the visual and the aural – and establish a dialogue between them. Mall Singh’s voicerecording is not just a fresh source but puts pressure on the very scope and definition of ‘war-writing’ and ‘life-writing’ and underlines the absolute need to ‘expand the frame’ – both in terms of source-material and methodology.

Touching things In the centre of Kolkata, the former capital of British India, stands the Cenotaph-like memorial to the soldiers killed in the First World War (Figure 20.1). Surrounded by statues of the leaders of the Indian nationalist movement, the memorial – with its Latin dates and the statues of the English Tommies marked by their Saxon features and Western military uniform – is for the local people a relic of the Great European War. It is also symptomatic of the cultural amnesia that marks Indian metropolitan middle-class memory (except in the Punjab) about the country’s own participation in the conflict.

Sensing the sepoy  311

Figure 20.1  Calcutta’s First World War Memorial ( Author)

Yet memories exist silently, stubbornly, privately. The Flemish countryside continues to throw up traces of its Indian past. In 2013, a body was exhumed and identified as that of a Gurkha sepoy when a new road was being built near the Irish cemetery outside Ypres; just last year, I visited a barn in the small village of Ouderdam which was used as a casualty-clearing station for the Indian sepoys.6 Artefacts of the Indian sepoys can be found around the world. In Ypres, I came across lotas – brass water-mugs – with the names of sepoys inscribed on them (Figure 20.2), and on one of them, an etching of a peacock; in the recruiting village of Bondsi in present-day Haryana (part of colonial Punjab), a man turned up during an interview with the Princess Mary Gift Box his great-grandfather had received in

312  Santanu Das France for Christmas 1914; in the Australian War Memorial, I happened upon the diary of an Australian private where an Indian sepoy had signed his name in Gurmukhi, Hindi and English.7 A search through my own extended family in Kolkata revealed the war mementoes of Colonel Dr Manindranath Das: his uniform, whistle, razor, brandy bottle, tiffin-box and album, as well as the Military Cross he was awarded for tending to his men under perilous circumstances. Alongside it was also a German shell-case (Figure 20.3) he had found and which had been locked up in the family wardrobe for nearly a century – almost a metaphor for the subterranean way the memory of the First World War functions in India. Das was one among several distinguished doctors from the Indian Medical Services who served in Mesopotamia. But most moving of all the artefacts I have come across were those belonging to Jogen Nath Sen in a small archive in the former French colony of Chandernagore in West Bengal: a dog-tag (to identify the injured), a photograph of a young European woman, a ‘Book of Friendship’ possibly given by this lady (signed as ‘Cis’), a small leather wallet and finally a pair of broken glasses, placed next to a photograph of Sen wearing them. The label said: ‘Broken and bloodstained glasses belonging to J. N. Sen, Private, West Yorkshire Regiment . . . he was the first Bengalee, a citizen of Chandernagore, to be killed in 1914–1918 War’ (Figure 20.4).8 Why do these objects touch and move us? Like the crackling voice of Mall Singh, these artefacts have a precious, living quality for they are the archives of touch and intimacy. The inscribed lota, the rusty cigarette box, the diary, the tunic, the tiffin-box, the whistle, the brandy-bottle, or the broken glasses evoke the body of the user or possessor, hand-prints and face-prints – quiescent

Figure 20.2  Lota (brass drinking vessel) ( Author and Dominique Faivre)

Sensing the sepoy  313

Figure 20.3  German shell-case found by Dr Manindranath Das in Mesopotamia ( Author)

Figure 20.4  The glasses of Jogen Sen ( Author)

but palpable. They not only congeal time but also conceal processes of care. Like its more famous European cousin, the pocket-watch on Edward Thomas’s wrist, its hands perpetually fixed at 7.36 am as they recorded the time of their master’s death, the broken and bloodied glasses of Sen had borne testimony to the final moments of his life. The fragility of the glasses

314  Santanu Das intensifies their Ozymandias-like persistence, particularly when seen next to the photograph of Sen wearing them: the effect, like the voice of Mall Singh, is uncanny. The poignant materiality of the objects results from a constant frisson between presence and loss: a constant reminder both of the sensuousness of the life they had known and of its absence. In his celebrated essay on museum culture, ‘Resonance and Wonder’, Stephen Greenblatt points out the ‘resonance’ that certain material objects of the past hold for us – the threadbare fabric of an old chair or a vase broken by Marcel Proust – not because of their aesthetic value but because ‘of use, the imprint of the human body on the artefact’ (Greenblatt 1990: 172). More recently, he has suggested that historical anecdotes and vignettes provide for him the ‘touch of the real’, giving insights into ‘the contact zone’, the ‘charmed space where the genius literarius could be conjured into existence’ (Greenblatt 1997: 29). Similarly, Susan Stewart has noted how, in glass-cases in museums, ‘the contagious magic of touch is replaced by the sympathetic magic of visual representation’ and notes ‘the constant play among deixis, tact, proximity and negation’ (Stewart 2002: 174–5). Indeed, war-objects and life-objects are sensory palimpsests where multiple bodies, experiences and time-scales touch and rub against each other in a series of fantasized encounters. And yet, the most visceral of encounters are dependent on the surrounding information, on the power of narrative and language. Consider for example the glasses of Jogen Sen. Our responses are largely determined by the information in the label: ‘broken and bloodstained’. But that single label led me to a research-trail and the gradual unravelling of a remarkable life. Jogen Sen, son of a widowed mother, had come to the University of Leeds in 1910; by 1913, he had taken a degree in engineering and was singing in the choir of the Mill Hill Unitarian Chapel; he volunteered in the opening months of the conflict in the Leeds Pals Battalion and was the only non-white member of the West Yorkshire regiment; he was gunned down on the night of 22 May 1916, and his death as reported in The Times on 4 September 1916 as ‘A Bengali Soldier’s Death’. During an interview in 1988, Arthur Dalby, a Leeds Pals veteran, remembered his Indian comrade: ‘We had a Hindu in our hut, called Jon Sen. He was the best educated man in the battalion and he spoke about seven languages but he was never allowed to be even a lance corporal because in those days they would never let a coloured fellow be over a white man, not in England, but he was the best educated.’ More revelations followed in 2001, when a wartime letter surfaced, written by another Leeds Pals comrade. Private Burniston, just before his own death on 1 July 1916, wrote: ‘I heard poor Jon Sen had been brought in killed. He was hit in the leg and neck by shrapnel and died almost immediately’.9 In 2004, almost by accident, I had discovered the glasses of an unknown young man tucked away in a small, dark, dusty glass-cabinet in the Chandernagore archive; exactly ten years later, in 2014, I revisited

Sensing the sepoy  315 the archive, armed with the story of his life and a film crew. This time, the glasses were no longer in the cabinet but had been taken out for us. They looked different from what I remembered, transformed undoubtedly by all that I knew now. I lifted with my naked hands Jogen Sen’s glasses which looked uncannily like my own – the standard gold-rimmed glasses worn by the Bengali bhadralok (‘gentlemen’) over generations; the process was intimate and unsettling.

Letters Two photographs from the Imperial War Museum archives accost each other with particular poignancy. The first image is a close-up of hands: a white hand – uniformed, confident and bureaucratic – grasps and guides the fingers of the ‘coloured’ hand to get a thumb-impression. The caption says: ‘An Indian, unable to write, is putting his thumb impression on the pay-book’ (Figure 20.5). Insurgent under this touch is not just the body of the participants but the weight of colonial history. This brisk, bureaucratic touch is answered in the second photograph by a more lingering, tender moment. Here, a wounded (and semi-literate) sepoy dictates to a scribe or a fellow-sepoy a letter (Figure 20.6). The violent traces of war are all too evident in his wheelchair-bound body; but the clunky mechanism is offset as the sepoy leans across to touch the scribe or fellow-sepoy. As opposed to the impersonal rub of fingers in the first photograph, this is a gesture of

Figure 20.5  An Indian, unable to write, is putting his thumb on the pay-book (© IWM Q 12500)

316  Santanu Das

Figure 20.6  A wounded sepoy dictates a letter to a scribe or fellow sepoy (© IWM Q 53887)

gratitude, trust and intimacy: thank you for writing, the hand says, as the body fills in the gap left by language. It also provides insights into the collaborative and oral processes through which the letters – our main sources of information – were composed. The most substantial yet tantalizing sources remain the censored versions of these letters by the Indian troops. Between March and April 1915, the Indian soldiers from France were writing around 10,000 letters a week. What have survived are substantial extracts from the letters, as selected and translated by the colonial censors at the time to assess the ‘morale’ of the Indian troops. Their heavily mediated nature thus undermines their testimonial value but, as David Omissi notes in the introduction to his anthology Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914–1918, ‘The crucial issue is, surely, less what we cannot learn from these letters, than what we can learn from them’ (Omissi 1991: 9). However, given their multiple sites of textuality – mouth to hand, hand to print, Hindi, Gurmukhi, or Urdu to English, whole to part – these letters put pressure on the very concept of ‘authenticity’. Are these letters private or public? How far can one generalize about Indian war experience on the basis of textual fragments? It is tempting to read these letters – incomplete, fragmentary, tantalizing – as the sign of the necessarily partial knowledge

Sensing the sepoy  317 we have of trench-life, the material trace of the impossibility of ever fully understanding trench experience. By early 1915, the soldiers realized that their letters were being read and censored, and they drew on elaborate codes to avoid censorship, as in the following letter written in April 1915, after the Battle of Neuve Chapelle, advising against further recruitment: ‘The black pepper which has come from India has all been finished, so now the red pepper is being used. But the red pepper is little used and the black more’ (Ram 1915). The ‘black pepper’ refers to the Indian troops while the ‘red pepper’ refers to the English. These letters are best read not as transparent envelopes of sepoy experience but as palimpsests where, underneath accretions by different agencies, one can hear the echoes of the sepoy heart. Neither the transcript of trench experience nor just scribal embellishment, these letters are the earliest examples we have of South Asian subaltern ‘writing’, recording the earliest encounters between textual form and plebeian testimony. Life-writing here begins as war-writing; at the same time, these missives from France and Flanders bear testimony to a subaltern history of feeling. One can imagine the range of emotions – thrill, wonder, excitement, fear, terror, horror, homesickness, grief, envy, religious doubts – that the sepoy must have experienced as he encountered new lands, people, cultures. For centuries, he had been travelling as an imperial sentinel – in Somalia, China, Malta, Egypt – but during the First World War, he wrote for the first time and the processes of colonial censorship paradoxically ensured that his letters survived. Sepoy letters thus have the distinction of being South Asia’s first examples of lifewriting from the non-elite. These letters open up a whole new world in First World War history and culture, and cover an extraordinary range of topics and emotions, from an initial sense of wonder at the modernity of France (‘The country is very fine, well-watered and fertile . . . Each house is a sample of Paradise’), to comments on the people, their clothes and manners, or the occasional thrilling account of romance and sexual braggadocio (‘The ladies are very nice and bestow their favours upon us freely’), to observations on issues such as gender, education and class distinctions. The letters are haunted by the images of the heart: ‘My heart wishes to unburden itself’, ‘My heart was day and night fixed on home’, ‘My heart is sadly failing’; ‘My heart is not at ease, for I can see no way of saving my life’. Perhaps because of the censors, or internal pressures of masculinity, honour and patriarchy, feelings are often not voiced directly; instead, they lead to a thickening of language as emotions such as horror, resignation or homesickness express themselves in images, metaphors and similes: The condition of affairs in the war is like leaves falling off a tree, and no empty space remains on the ground. . . . When we attacked the German trenches we used bayonet and the kukri, and the bullets flew about more thickly than drops of rain. (Rawat 1915)

318  Santanu Das For God’s sake don’t come, don’t come, don’t come to this war in Europe. . . . Cannons, machine guns, rifles and bombs are going day and night, just like the rains in the month of Sawan. Those who have escaped so far are like the few grains left uncooked in a pot. (Rahman 1915) As tired bullocks and bull buffaloes lie down in the month of Bhadon so lies the weary world. Our hearts are breaking, for a year has passed while we have stood to arms without a rest. . . . Germany fights the world with ghastly might, harder to crush than well-soaked grain in the mill. For even wetted grain can be ground in time. . . . We have bound ourselves under the flag and we must give our bodies. (Singh 1915) The images of ‘dry forest in hot wind’ or ‘tired bullocks’ or ‘well-soaked grain’ are not just communicative gestures or literary embellishments but repositories of feeling: although they have been transported thousands of miles, images from the agrarian world of the Punjab are used as the men try to make sense of themselves, the world and the war; their traditional cognitive and narrative processes are at once drawn upon and pushed to their limits. Realism is eschewed for the metaphoric, the fantastic, the mythical as they bear testimony to life as felt. Whether occurring at the level of experience or representation, these letters, freighted with images, similes and allusions, can be read as Indian literature of the trenches: these men may have been non-literate but being non-literate does not mean being non-literary. The letters are often treated as linguistic bubbles on the dark sea of South Asian plebeian history but they are rooted in the extraordinarily vibrant oral culture of the Punjab. In The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab, Farina Mir excavates the remarkably polyglot nature of ‘literary formation’ of the Punjab through its various sites of oral circulation: the recitation of qissas (stories), poetry competitions, the singing of shabads (devotional songs) or plays in village fairs and religious festivals (Mir 2010: 17). Between 1884 and 1901, when the British army officer Richard Temple decided to collect folktales – the basis of his three-volume Legends of the Punjab (1988 [1885]) – he hired ‘bards’ to perform these texts, showing the deep connections between orality and memory. What we see in the letters is the remarkable transition from a vibrant and robust oral culture to a textual culture of letter-writing: a whole generation of men who had grown up listening to stories now begin to draw on those structures as they start to narrate their own lives. This possibly explains why Mall Singh refers to himself in the third person, or begins the way he does: ‘There was a man’.

Songs However, of all the sources, the most haunting are the voice-recordings made in the German POW camps. Mall Singh’s soulful lament, with which we began, was one of the over 300 South Asian recordings in this

Sensing the sepoy  319 2,677-strong archive of audio recordings produced by the Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission between 29 December 1915 and 19 December 1918 (Mahrenholz 2008; Lange 2008, 2011). Masterminded by the philologist Wilhelm Doegen, the Commission comprised thirty academics who toured thirty-one prison camps in Germany and made recordings in approximately 250 languages and dialects. A photograph from a contemporary publication tells us about the conditions under which these voice-recordings were made. The person whose reading is being recorded is flanked on either side by a German official: a hand on the speaker’s shoulders holds him firmly in place so that the voice is projected onto the phonograph funnel while the other hand of the officer holds a sheet of paper from which he is made to read out (Figure 20.7). A popular text the soldiers were often given to read was the ‘Parable of the Prodigal Son’. If Friday had his tongue cut out in Coetzee’s Foe (2010), these prisoners seem to have been muted in the very act of speaking, forced to read out from a text given to them by their captors. But Mall Singh, managing to bypass authoritarian control and communicating to us his plaintive message, seems to defy such formulation: can the subaltern then speak? In her celebrated essay on subaltern speech (first published in 1988 and revised subsequently), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak moves from her critique of the models of Western subjectivity to a note of ‘passionate lament’, as she tells us the story of Bhubaneswari Bhaduri, with its combination of nationalism, suicide and the tragic failure of communication, and makes

Figure 20.7  An audio-recording taking place at the Wünsdorf camp (Photograph reproduced from Otto Stiehl, Unsere Feinde, Stuttgart, 1916)

320  Santanu Das the controversial claim: ‘The subaltern cannot speak’ (Spivak 1996). In this frisson – the overarticulate poignancy of the story brushing against the claim made in the concluding statement – lay the power of the essay, and its seemingly paradoxical nature. Has not Bhubaneswari Bhaduri spoken most powerfully through her dead, menstruating, bleeding body? Of the various responses this essay has spawned, Rajeshwari Sunderajan provides one of the most acute and corrective expositions: [Bhubaneswari] serves as the figural example of the subaltern who cannot – but in fact, does speak. ‘Cannot’ in this context signifies not speech’s absence but its failure. . . . In other words and more generally, the locution ‘Can the Subaltern speak’ is an invitation to rethink the relation between the figural and the literal. (Sunderajan 2010: 112) The plangent materiality of the German POW sound-recordings seems to push this differential relation between the literal and the figural to a crisispoint. Here at long last, or so it seems, is the unmediated subaltern voice: archival recovery, the shellac recording, peasant consciousness and wartime captivity touch and blend, speaking to us powerfully across a century. Who was Mall Singh addressing, as he spoke into the funnel of the recording machine? ‘By speaking’, writes Spivak, ‘I was obviously talking about a transaction between the speaker and the listener’ (Spivak 1996: 293). Forced to address a recording machine rather than a responsive individual and locked at the site of failed communication – ‘not speech’s absence but its failure’ – Mall Singh’s voice has echoed through the corridors of First World War history for almost a century in its desperate attempt to find a listener. Mall Singh could not speak, even though he spoke so urgently; or, to push Spivak’s formulation further, he seems to speak to us so urgently today precisely because he could not speak then. Spivak’s troubling question – ‘With what voice-consciousness can the subaltern speak?’ – becomes freshly resonant in the context of these extraordinary recordings (Spivak 1996: 225). Of the 2,677 sound-recordings in the Archive, around 135 recordings seem to be of South Asian prisoners. The languages used are Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Marathi, Nepalese, Khas, Gurkhali, Bengali and English. They range from minimal linguistic exercises such as the 1.09 minute recording of Karamar Ali reading out the letters of the Bengali alphabet to Bela Sigh describing his arrival in Marseilles to the 3.20 minute-long speech of Mohammed Hossin (Hussain) narrating the story of his capture by a German ship and of his life in the POW camp (Hussain n.d.). Can they be examined alongside the letters to understand more fully the intimate and affective history of these men? To uncover a subaltern history of emotions from so aggressive an ethnological and propagandist an archive is to stretch the practice of reading the colonial archive against the grain to its limit. Any reading has to be necessarily tentative

Sensing the sepoy  321 and incomplete. But one wonders why any particular story was selected above others by these narrators? Of course it depended on what the sepoys remembered or wrote down but often these men chose parables and tales that echoed their own predicament. Thus, the story narrated by a sepoy of ‘a parrot who died shivering with cold’ gathers special poignancy when we realize that it was recorded in December 1916 in the Wünsdorf camp which had a mortality rate as high as 18 per cent. Or consider the following audio-recording: Swan and Heron became friends. Swan lived in his own homeland but Heron was staying in Swan’s homeland away from his own homeland. Heron used to feel nostalgic about his own homeland. Swan asked him the reason for his unhappiness. Swan said to Heron: ‘why are you unhappy and why don’t you eat anything?’ Heron replied that he has received news about his homeland and was therefore nostalgic. Swan thought that perhaps Heron’s home was far better than Swan’s homeland and that was why he was missing it. Swan concluded by saying that one’s nation (vatan) is very dear to one, it may not be very good, but even then, one is desirous to return to one’s own land. (Story of Swan n.d.) Is it, like the coded letter about red and black pepper, at once an ingenuous plea to the outside world and a desperate form of life-narrative to articulate its own predicament?

Figure 20.8  Professor Heinrich Lüders from Berlin University with a group of Gurkha prisoners at Wünsdorf Prisoner of War camp (Photograph reproduced from Unsere Feinde, Stuttgart, 1916)

322  Santanu Das An important clue is provided by the German scholar and linguist Heinrich Lüders who closely studied the Indian troops at Wünsdorf (Figure 20.8). Lüders observed: Certainly, the majority did not have the confidence to tell a coherent story. Instead they preferred to sing a song, either alone or accompanied by others. . . . Old verses are constantly altered, extended and copied until something utterly new emerges. The singer is at the same time always to a greater or lesser degree the poet, and people know that too; ‘if I want to sing a song, I make one up’, one of them admitted. (Lüders 1925: 135; translation as in Lange 2011: 157) Indeed, one such song was recorded on 6 June 1916 – one of the most heart-breaking of testimonies in the whole pantheon of First World War life-stories. All that is known about it is that it was sung by ‘Jasbahadur Rai’, a 23-year-old Gurkha sepoy from Sikkim/Darjeeling, and that it was a ‘Gurkha song, own words’. Jasbahadur must have died shortly afterwards for his grave can be found outside the Zossen camp. In the final part of this article, it is to him that I would like to turn. The song is recoded in two instalments. The first instalment is shown in Table 20.1. Like Mall Singh’s, the song is interrupted by awkward pauses and sharp intakes of breath. Yet there is a passionate intensity to the singing, a compulsive need to tell: the voice rises and falls, high-pitched, desolate, undeterred. Traumatized by his experience and perhaps haunted by the knowledge of Table 20.1  Jasbahadur Rai, Gurkha song, own words Line

Nepali Transcription

English Translation

 1

Sisai kholā badhi jyān āyo bagāyo bulbule . . . Hai suna suna, sun lāune kānchhī, bujhāũchhau katin din Dui paisa bache tabalmar sigret salkāula mārchisle Hindustān pāri, ke rāmro pahād, gh a saiko khaliyo Baseko pirtī, chutāunam bhayo, man ba dha baliyo

With the rising of the Sisai river, I came, carried in its bubbling flow . . . Listen, oh listen, gold-wearing little one, how many days will it take to console yourself? If I save two cents, I’ll light a Tabalmar cigarette with matches Across Hindustan, what beautiful hills, storage places for fodder The love we’ve had, we now have to break apart, bind your heart and be strong Listen, oh listen, gold-wearing birdie, bind your heart and be strong

 9 10 11 12 13

Hai suna suna, sun lāune chari man ba dha baliyo

Source: Rai 1916. I am very grateful to Anne Stirr for the translation.

Sensing the sepoy  323 his approaching death, Jasbahadur turns an ethnographical experiment into one of the most haunting examples of life-narrative. In both metre and melody, Jasbahadur draws on a subgenre of Nepali song called jheyru, which was traditionally a feminine lament. The refrain Hai suna suna (‘Listen, oh listen’, lines 3, 7, 13), Ancient Mariner-like, draws the listener into the song through an intricate sonic structure, combining alliteration (suna suna sun laune) with a pattern of repetition with variation centring round the addressee – didi (elder sister), kanchi (little girl), chari (birdie). In the centre of this masculinist universe is its silent interlocutor – a little girl – anxious, weeping, disconsolate; the pain of separation is built into the very structure of narration. Water (pani) courses through the song, first entering as memory (Sisai, a river in Nepal, and then the sea journey) but soon seeps into its every pore as bodily fluid (‘cries, sobbing’) before being translated back to water for purification of the dying body (‘will you wash my body’): memory, metaphor and mourning are knitted together through onomatopoeia and rhyme (paniko bulbul, ei monko chulbul: the bubbling of the water, the restlessness of the heart) as sound becomes the sense. Cigarettes and matchsticks rub against mountains and flowers, Belgium and Germany are brought together, the year of the war’s eruption is remembered through sense perception. Jasbahadur is the First World War poet par excellence for he records history not as grand narrative or even cultural memory but as what Raymond Williams calls ‘a structure of feeling’, as in the poems of European soldier-poets. Blurring the boundaries between song, reportage, lament, j’accuse, prison-narrative and compulsive testimony, it is also the birth of life-writing as war-writing while a local Nepali genre – the jheyru – is called upon to bear lyric testimony to historical trauma. In her inspired study Body Parts: Essays on Life-Writing, Hermione Lee notes that the challenge for the biographer lies in the art of evocation rather than narration, in being able to touch life at several points rather than try to capture its complete arc. What life-writing does is to rescue from oblivion not the entire narrative but certain vital moments: ‘bodily sensations and memories’, ‘moments of physical shock’ or the ‘left-over parts of a life’ (Lee 2010: 4). The method that Lee suggests is more like the art of the short story than that of the bildungsroman – an aesthetics of fugitive fragments. As signalled in her very title, there is an insistent harping on the body, the material, the senses. ‘What makes biography so curious and endlessly absorbing is that through all the documents and the letters, the context and the witnesses, the conflicting opinions and the evidence of the work, we keep catching sight of a real body, a physical life’: the young Dickens, bright-eyed and sprightly in a crimson velvet waistcoat, Rimbaud dust-covered and scrawny or Joyce with a black felt hat, thick glasses and a cigar (ibid. 3). If Lee’s wonderful vignettes are still largely from the realm of written – diaries, letters, novels – what these semi-literate sepoys force us to do is to go beyond the textual.

324  Santanu Das What the lota, the blood-stained glasses, the cigarette-box, the scrawl on the diary, the mutilated letters, the hesitant, faltering voice of Mall Singh or the compulsive singing of Jasbahadur Rai evoke – when assembled, matched and made to bear pressure on each other – is not the completeness of one life, one story; instead, they help us to sense the life of a whole war-ravaged community whose ‘body parts’ – like scattered limbs of the Egyptian god Osiris or the Hindu goddess Kali – lie strewn all across the globe.

Acknowledgements The chapter was first published as ‘Reframing Life/War “Writing”: Objects, Letters and Songs of Indian Soldiers, 1914–1918’, Textual Practice, Special Issue edited by Kate Mcloughlin, Lara Feigel and Nancy Martin, 29(7) (December 2015): 1265–87, and is printed here with the kind permission of the editors and Peter Boxall. Some of the archival findings mentioned here are showcased in the short YouTube video on my bigger project, of which this chapter is a part: From Bombay to the Western Front (https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=6stybO5v7SY).

Notes 1 See Gillian Beer’s wonderful reading of Keats’s hand in ‘Four Bodies on the Beagle’ (Beer 1999: 14), which has influenced my understanding of Mall Singh’s voice. 2 These archival sound recordings are still largely unknown. For a full record of the Indian POWs in Wunsdorf, see Ahuja et al. (2011), particularly Britta Lange (2011). 3 For a different approach, where I do draw upon published memoirs and literary texts, see Das (2015). 4 For military histories of India and the First World War, see Omissi (1994), Corrigan (1999), Morton Jack (2014). For socio-cultural history, see Das (2014a), chapters on the First World War in Visram (2002), and Singh (2014). 5 For figures and context, see Das (2011). 6 Interview with Paul Jacob for the documentary From Bombay to the Western Front: Indian Soldiers in the Great War (https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=6stybO5v7SY). 7 Interview with collector Domique Faivre, France and villagers in Haryana for Radio 4 programme on ‘Recruitment and Resistance’, 15 Oct. 2014 (http://www. bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04l0zq5). 8 These archival finds (Sen n.d.) as well as freshly discovered documents at Leeds have now inspired a BBC documentary on J. N. Sen (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ uk-england-leeds-31761904). 9 All this information can be found on the webpage dedicated to him under the Leeds Pals Battalion website at http://www.leeds-pals.com/soldiers/jogendra-sen. In a happy and rare coincidence, I was speaking about Jon Sen and showing pictures of the glasses in a talk at Leeds when I was interrupted mid-sentence by a gentleman in the audience who told me that the subject of enquiry was mentioned just outside the lecture-hall in the Leeds Memorial! This in turn led BBC Yorkshire to shoot a short documentary on Jogen Sen. See http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ article-2981911/Revealed-Indian-student-died-fighting-alongside-pals-LeedsWW1-Hero-believed-Bengal-die-trenches.html

Sensing the sepoy  325

References Ahuja, R., Liebau, H., and Roy, F. (eds) (2011) ‘When the War Began, We Heard of Several Kings’: South Asian Prisoners in World War I Germany. Delhi: Social Sciences Press. Anand, M. R. (2008) [1939] Across the Black Waters. South Asia Books. Anon. (1920) Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire during the Great War, 1914–1920, p. 777. London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office. Reproduced in India’s Contribution to the Great War, p. 79. Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1923. Beer, G. (1999) Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Campbell, J. (1999) Combat Gnosticism: The Ideology of First World War Criticism. New Literary History, 30: 203–15. Coetzee, J. M. (2010) Foe. London: Penguin. Corrigan, G. (1999) Sepoys in the Trenches: The Indian Corps on the Western Front 1914–1918. Staplehurst: Spellmount. Das, S. (2011) Race, Empire and First World War Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (2014a) Indians on the Western Front 1914–1918. Paris: Gallimard. —— (2014b) Recruitment and Resistance: Soldiers of Empire. BBC Radio 4 (Oct.).

—— (2015) Touching Semi-Literate Lives. In M. Dibattista and E. Whitman (eds), Modernism and Autobiography, pp. 127–42. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dendooven, D., and Chielens, P. (eds) (2008) World War One: Five Continents in Flanders. Tielt: Lanoo. Greenblatt, S. (1990) Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture. New York: Routledge. —— (1997) Touch of the Real. Representations, 59: 14–29. Hussain, M. (n.d.) Mohammed Hossin (Hussain), Story from the Gull. Humboldt University Lautarchiv, PK1151. Translation from Bengali by Santanu Das. Keats, J. (1970) The Fall of Hyperion. In M. Allot (ed.), The Poems of John Keats, pp. 657–8. London: Longman. Lange, B. (2008) Academic Research on (Coloured) Prisoners of War. In D. Dendooven and P. Chielens (eds), World War One: Five Continents in Flanders, pp. 153–65. Tielt: Lanoo. —— (2011) South Asian Soldiers and German Academics. In R. Ahuja, H. Liebau and F. Roy (eds), ‘When the War Began, We Heard of Several Kings’: South Asian Prisoners in World War I Germany, pp. 149–86. Delhi: Social Sciences Press. Lee, H. (2005) Body Parts: Essays on Life-Writing. London: Chatto. Lüders, H. (1925) Die Gurkhas. In W. Doegen (ed.) Unter Fremden Volkern, pp. 126–39. Berlin: Eine Neue Volkerkunde. Stollberg. Mahrenholz, J. (2008) Ethnographic audio recordings. In D. Dendooven and P. Chielens (eds), World War One: Five Continents in Flanders, pp. 161–5. Tielt: Lannoo. Mir, F. (2010) The Social Space of Language. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Morris, R. (ed.) (2010) Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea. New York: Columbia University Press.

326  Santanu Das Morton Jack, G. (2014) The Indian Army on the Western Front: Indian Expeditionary Force to France and Belgium in the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nancy, J.-L. (2007) Listening. New York: Fordham University Press. Nelson, C., and Grossberg, L. (eds) (1988) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Omissi, D. (1991) Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914–1918. London: Macmillan. —— (1994) The Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army, 1860–1940. London: Macmillan. Rahman, H. (1915) Havildar Abdul Rahman (Punjabi Muslim) from France to Naik Rajwali Khan in Baluchistan, 20 May 1915. Reports of the Censor of Indian Mails in France, vol. 1, Apr. 1915–May 1915, British Library, IOR/L/ MIL/5/825/3, 394. Rai, J. (1916) Jasbahadur Rai, recorded on 6 June 1916, Humboldt University Lautarchiv PK 307. Translation from Nepali by Anna Stirr. Ram, M. (1915) Mausa Ram from Kitchener’s Indian Hospital to Naik Dabi Shahai, Apr. 1915. Reports of the Censor of Indian Mails in France, vol. 1, Mar. 1915–Apr. 1915, British Library. IOR/L/MIL/5/825/2, 208. Rawat, A. (1915) Amar Singh Rawat (Garhwal Rifles) from Kitchener’s Indian Hospital to Dayaram Jhapaliyal in Garhwal, 1 April, 1915. Reports of the Censor of Indian Mails in France: Vol 1, Apr 1915–May 1915, British Library, IOR/L/ MIL/5/825/2, 245. Sen, J. N. (n.d.) J. N. Sen Artefacts. Dupleix Museum, Chandernagore, West Bengal. Singh, G. (2014) The Testimonies of the Indian Soldiers and the Two World Wars: Between Self and Sepoy. London: Bloomsbury. Spivak, G. C. (1996) Subaltern Talk. In D. Laudry and G. Maclean (eds), The Spivak Reader, p. 293. New York and London: Routledge. —— (2010) Can the Subaltern Speak? In R. Morris (ed.), Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea, pp. 156–76. New York: Columbia University Press. Singh, Mall (n.d.) Humboldt University Lautarchiv, PK619. Translation from Punjabi by Arshdeep Brar. Singh, S. (1915) From Santa Singh, hospital in Brighton, to his uncle in India, 18 Aug. 1915. Reports of the Censor of Indian Mails in France, vol. 1, Aug. 1915–Sept. 1915, British Library, IOR/L/MIL/5/825/5, 758. Stewart, S. (2002) Poetry and the Fate of the Senses. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Stinson, C. (n.d.) Diary of Charles Stinson. Australian War Memorial, PR84/066. Story of Swan (n.d.) Humboldt University Lautarchiv, PK828. Translation from Punjabi by Barleen Kaur. Sunderajan, R. (2010) Speaking of (Not) Hearing: Death and the Subaltern. In R. Morris (ed.), Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea, p. 112. New York: Columbia University Press. Temple, R. C. (1988) [1885] Legends of the Punjab. 3 vols. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers. Visram, R. (2002) Asians in Britain: 400 Years. London: Pluto Press.

21 War with flowers The paintings of Albert Heim and the German sensory experience of the Somme, 1914–1916 Alastair H. Fraser This chapter examines sensorial aspects of the German Army on the Somme in the period 1914–16 through the medium of a series of sixty-two paintings by Albert Heim (1890–1960) which recently came to light in Spain. These were commissioned by General-Leutnant Theodor von Wundt, a professional soldier who served on the Somme from September 1914 to October 1916. I shall look in detail at five paintings for what we can deduce of the battlefield and its rear areas. They reveal a world of vivid colour, conviviality and comradeship, ample food, alcohol and tobacco and warm sun, all elements of the not especially arduous life of a German infantry brigade staff in the first two years of the war. In other words, a recognizable sensorium, and one not yet totally reconfigured by the war. I will supplement this with reference to other sources relating to the 26 Reserve Division in which von Wundt served. This is a relatively well documented formation and has attracted considerable interest amongst English-speaking military historians for its successful defence of Beaumont Hamel in July 1916. Its records survived the destruction of much of the German Army’s archives in the Second World War and still exist in Stuttgart. After the war most of the infantry and artillery regiments in the division published unit histories, many lavishly illustrated, and these provide further evidence for living conditions; German troops often owned cameras and used them frequently; the division also had a photographer who took group and individual photographs for a modest fee (Vischer 1921: 27). Thus there are abundant German photographic sources for this period but they are all monochrome images whilst Heim’s paintings give a very rare view of the Somme in colour. Together I hope that this study will point the way for a broader analysis of the German sensory experience of the First World War. Where I have contrasted German with British experience I have used memoirs by British soldiers who fought against 26 Reserve Division or were in the line in the sector that they had previously occupied, a position that stretched from south of Serre to the Albert-Bapaume road. Whilst quieter than many sectors of the Western Front the Somme was not without episodes of violence; the initial fighting of September 1914 was rekindled by French attacks in December 1914 and June 1915 and there

328  Alastair H. Fraser was a constant background of patrol warfare, artillery bombardments and mining. The Somme in Heim’s paintings is a flower-covered, overgrown agricultural landscape that is utterly unfamiliar to most of us. Heim’s depictions of eating, drinking and smoking in his earlier paintings are a striking contrast to one of the final ones in the series which shows dead British soldiers in a German trench (Figure 21.5). Theodor Karl Wilhelm von Wundt was born in 1858 and entered the army of the Kingdom of Württemberg as a Fahnenjunker in 1875. He attended the Kriegsakademie in Berlin and served successively in company, battalion and regimental commands. On 2 August 1914 he became commanding officer of the newly raised 51 Reserve Infanterie Brigade of 26 Reserve Division (HStAS M 743/2 Bü589). He was promoted to command of 18 Reserve Division but was dismissed after their poor performance during the Battle of Arras in 1917 and was not re-employed (Moser 1927: 142). Physically he was a striking figure, at least a head taller than most of his contemporaries and was very far from the stereotype of a German army officer; urbane and cosmopolitan, a friend of the playwright Max Halbe and a well-known author of mountaineering books, he was married to an Englishwoman, Maude Walters, and spoke fluent English. He continued to write whilst on the Somme and produced his best known book Ich und die Burge (Me and the Mountains) in 1917. This was illustrated by a Stuttgart artist called Albert Heim about whom little is known. Heim appears to have served in 180 Infanterie Regiment (180 IR) and been seconded to the staff of 51 Reserve Infanterie Brigade, probably at von Wundt’s orders (HStAS M57/Bü5). The paintings form a very personal account of von Wundt’s war rather than that of the men of his brigade. The motive for the production of these paintings is not entirely clear. There are clearly some ‘in jokes’, such as the toilet roll incident described below, the significance of which is now lost. Some have censorship stamps on them and it is possible that they were intended to accompany a publication that was never written. In most cases Heim’s paintings can be checked against photographs of the locations and are accurate. Individuals, including von Wundt, are often depicted in an irreverent cartoonish style but a few are identifiable from his personal photograph album which still exists.

Life at the Front The first painting (Figure 21.1. Heim 10) is titled ‘Anmarsch des Esstrupps. G. Unterstand’ or ‘Advance of the Commissariat. General’s Dugout’ and depicts Baul, one of von Wundt’s servants, cigarette in mouth, walking down a flower-covered trench with a rolled napkin tucked under his arm, carrying a tray with a chicken, a steaming tureen, bread rolls, and a glass of wine, all of which presumably were intended for the general’s dinner. Another smiling orderly behind carries two bottles of wine. Life in the

War with flowers  329

Figure 21.1  (Heim 10) ‘Anmarsch des Esstrupps’ or ‘March of the Commissariat. General’s Dugout’ dated 1916, showing Baul carrying a meal for the General down a flower covered trench. ( Abbott & Holder Ltd.)

trenches was clearly a relatively comfortable affair for a senior officer during quiet periods and many of the paintings show alcohol and cigarettes being consumed. One of the most noticeable contrasts between the Somme as seen by Heim and that of the popular imagination is the mass of flowers in his paintings. A British soldier, George Ashurst, described in his memoirs how in 1916 as he walked down a communication trench near Auchonvillers, ‘the thick herbage and wild flowers hung over the sides of the trench and brushed our faces, splashing us with fresh raindrops’ (Ashurst 1987: 87). There is also a striking parallel to this painting amongst the colour photographs of Albert Samama-Chikli (1872–1934) of the Section Photographique de l’Armée française; this was taken on 8 July 1916 and shows French soldiers leading a donkey down a trench covered in red flowers (Walter 2014: 314).

330  Alastair H. Fraser Out of the line, officers’ living conditions were quite comfortable and even luxurious. Many well-appointed houses were requisitioned from their French owners for regimental and brigade staffs. Leutnant Armin Stäbler was an officer in 26 Reserve Feld Artillery Regiment and was allotted quarters in the village of Miraumont. A postcard sent to his wife is annotated with the location of his combined office and dining room in the Cafe de la Gare at the head of Rue de la Gare, somewhat insensitively rechristened Kaiser-Wilhelm Strasse by the Germans. He also had a comfortably furnished bedroom next door at no. 5 whilst his men ate in the billiard room in the cafe and the officers had a mess at no. 2 on the opposite side of the street. In addition the officers had a timber summer house constructed in the garden of no. 2 in which they held dinners. A surviving dinner menu for the regimental staff on 8 September 1915 advertises beef tea, Hindenburg pastries, partridge with cabbage and soufflé (Riedel 2006: 28, 34). Food supply was a major source of concern for the Central Powers from the beginning of the war, partly but not entirely because of the British blockade. Fairly early on the German Army in occupied France took responsibility for food production; supplies were requisitioned from the civilian population and the army began its own cereal, dairy, pig and cattle production. Markets were set up to which local farmers could bring produce. The central provision depot for XIV Reserve Korps was in Bapaume, a town with a rail link to Cambrai and beyond. Here a field bakery, a butchery and a sausage factory were set up. Water was not easily obtainable on the Somme (see also Duffet, and Breithoff, both this volume) and a mineral water bottling plant was constructed in Bapaume (Haldenwang 1925: 50–2). Existing village wells were supplemented by new ones and where possible pipelines were laid to deliver water to the trenches. The general standard of food for the other ranks on the Somme appears to have been adequate during the period under discussion, although the army’s meat ration had dropped from 375 grams per day in peace time to 350 grams in December 1915; it fell further to 250 grams by October 1916 (General Staff 2002: 227; 1973: 95). Meals were initially supplied from wheeled field kitchens but over the winter of 1914–15 elaborate underground kitchens were constructed in the front line, bringing a strong sensory dimension of domesticity to the subterranean landscape of conflict (see Leonard, this volume). Heim 7 shows a French civilian cooking range which had been removed from ground level and re-erected in a cellar. Meals were distributed from company kitchens down to squad level by ration parties using tins to transport soup and coffee and baskets for bread and other articles. In quiet sectors three hot meals a day could be provided, a luxury not always sufficiently appreciated at the time as one author remarked. Complaints about food seem to have been evident only when distribution broke down in poor weather or during heavy shelling. The French and British would often shell known routes at dawn and dusk specifically to catch food-carrying parties; when the trenches were very muddy men would risk travelling over open

War with flowers  331 country sometimes with fatal consequences (Whitehead 2009: 192). By the autumn of 1916 getting food to the front line was routinely an exhausting and dangerous task (Gerster 1920: 36). Regiments also attempted to procure additional food and facilities; in November 1914 the baggage train of 180 IR was moved to Ligny-Thilloy south of Bapaume and Paymaster Würz set up a rest home known as Tübinger-Hof (Tübingen Hotel). In December 1914 one of 180 IR’s battalions was able to provide a Christmas meal of sauerkraut, smoked meat, cheese, potato salad, pastries and mulled wine. The general good health of the troops over the winter was put down to the distribution of woollen underclothes, regular provision of tea and occasionally mulled wine as well as good and plentiful food (Vischer 1921: 24–5). The quartermaster of III/180 IR listed a month’s issue of supplies in his diary for 31 July 1915; these comprised 16,775 loaves of bread, rusks, smoked, tinned and fresh meat, butter and lard, eggs, noodles, sausages, cheese, fresh and dried vegetables, dried fruit, rice and barley, potatoes, and pickled gherkins (compare with Duffett, this volume). Coffee and cocoa were considerably more popular than tea and 78,400 cigars were issued. In contrast to British soldiers German other ranks seem to have smoked cigars and pipes rather than cigarettes (Breuninger 2014: 94). Recesses were sometimes dug in the trench walls and small stoves constructed, fuelled by wood shavings to reduce the smoke. These were used for heating food or frying potatoes (Vischer 1921: 19). All this suggests, at least in a quiet sector, a more pleasant olfactory experience than many studies indicate (compare with Dendooven, this volume). Rations were often supplemented by parcels from home before shortages made this impossible; Karl Losch of 119 Reserve Infanterie Regiment (119 RIR) received ‘cigars, some pastries, old rum, balaclava (I have never had it on), braces and . . . stationery’ in one parcel (Whitehead 2009: 179). Heim 37 shows one of von Wundt’s staff officers, identified only as Basil, opening a number of parcels from home, all of which contain toilet rolls. Basil, a gentleman of ample physique, can be seen in several photographs in von Wundt’s album. The boxes are labelled ‘For our heroes. Best German manufacture’. Basil is shown in Heim 39 with a fearful expression on his face presenting the biggest toilet roll to von Wundt who looks none too amused, possibly a commentary on the inappropriate contents of parcels. Regimental canteens were set up to provide everyday articles to the troops. Items for sale included beer, wine, schnapps, cheese, sausages and oranges. In addition, knives, mirrors, combs and stationery could be purchased; Jakob Hönes, a soldier of 121 Reserve Infanterie Regiment (121 RIR), whose remains were excavated at Serre in 2004, had a mirror, a comb and manicure set, perhaps purchased from one of these canteens, suggesting a desire to keep as clean and tidy as possible under difficult conditions (Fraser and Brown 2008: 162) Some semblance of civilized life was maintained on the Somme although Mosse sees the record of these events in postcards and newspapers as a

332  Alastair H. Fraser trivialization of the war rather than an accurate reflection of reality (Mosse 1990: 131). However, as Heim’s paintings attest, trench warfare was not an existence of unremitting toil and danger; Miraumont was the rest centre for troops out of the line in this sector and had a reading room, baths and a cinema – which was destroyed by a British shell almost immediately after it opened in June 1916. Grandcourt had a German pub called ‘Das lustige Frontschwein’ or ‘the happy front pig’ (Haldenwang 1925: 50). Music was a feature of life both in and out of the trenches. Fiddles, flutes, concertinas and mouth organs all featured, whilst regimental bands performed every fortnight in Miraumont church. In February 1915 a concert was held there to celebrate the birthday of King Wilhem II of Württemberg. This involved the band of 180 IR, a string orchestra, and an organ medley of the songs of Württemberg by a soldier called Nowowiejski, a professional pianist in civilian life (Riedel 2006: 41). From a sensorial perspective, patriotic sounds of the most civilized kind shared the sonic world with the potentially lethal and discordant noise of industrialized war (Bull and Back 2003; Feld 2005). On 27 July 1915 180 IR held a battalion festival which involved food and beer, several choirs, a carousel improvised from a wagon wheel and an inter-company football competition (Breuninger 2014: 149–50). There were even some opportunities to create gardens and the dead were buried in numerous well-kept cemeteries with elaborate memorials. This domesticity vanished with the destruction wrought by the British guns in the preparations for the Somme offensive. A Bavarian officer remarked on the contrast: During this time we worked in the vicinity of Beaucourt. I had looked at the sad remains of this village, the soldiers’ graveyard that lay upon the heights, with the beautiful monuments, also the remains of little St. Pierre Divion, as well as the dugouts positioned on the steep hillside by the Württembergers, where canteens and shops were accommodated, such that everything looked like a charming garden suburb. (Whitehead 2010: 466)

Under attack A more conventional depiction of action is seen in the second painting (Figure 21.2, Heim 55) titled ‘Kampf um Thiepval’ (Fighting for Thiepval). This is dated 1916 and shows the front-line positions between Thiepval and St. Pierre Divion under bombardment. Von Wundt watches through binoculars from a trench, probably part of the Alt-Württemburg Stellung, a position known to the British as Beaucourt Redoubt. In the foreground are clumps of white and yellow flowers amongst the brown vegetation and the barbed wire entanglements. A panorama taken from the Beaucourt to Beaumont Hamel road, probably in the summer of 1915, shows the right half of the same view but with no indication of the splashes of colour in the landscape (Klaus 1929: 60–3). Bombardments could be colourful affairs

War with flowers  333

Figure 21.2  (Heim 55) ‘Kampf um Thiepval’ or ‘The Fight for Thiepval’. The work is dated 1916 and depicts von Wundt watching a bombardment of the German front line at Thiepval from the south side of the Ancre Valley. ( Abbott & Holder Ltd.)

when viewed from afar; Siegfried Sassoon described British artillery fire on Fricourt as ‘clouds of drifting smoke, blue, pinkish and grey. Shrapnel bursting in small blue-white puffs with tiny flashes’ (Sassoon 1930: 65). Pink smoke would have been generated by hits on brick buildings. Heim’s rendering of such a dynamic and fast-moving event shows the impact of shells in grey and black with sprays of greyish blue smoke and white clouds, presumably British shrapnel bursting. Heim 51 shows a bombardment seen from a distance, possibly falling in the Gommecourt area; a similar range of colours are apparent although there are splashes of red-orange, perhaps representing fires. Heim also painted a bombardment in the Ancre valley (Heim 57) with the same red-orange seemingly representing a building on fire in St. Pierre Divion; the smoke, tinged with yellow in some areas, is more like a mist. Footage in the film The Battle of the Somme (38.54–40.42) shows a bombardment between La Boiselle and Pozieres, probably filmed on 4 July 1916, which is very similar to that in Figure 21.2. The moving image adds a powerful impression of violence but in common with Heim can never represent the sound and concussion associated with bombardment (Fraser and Brown 2008: 144–7). Watching a distant bombardment could evoke a

334  Alastair H. Fraser strange feeling of detachment, as described by an officer of 110 RIR near Fricourt in 1915: The sight of Hill 110 under drumfire was marvellous. The summit was shrouded in dense dark and bright drifts of smoke from the deepest black dazzled with white . . . Strange! Only the hill and communication trench were under fire, silence prevailed everywhere else around so the support company . . . could look at the drama in all ‘comfort’. It would have been a pleasure had one not been anxious about the fate of their comrades under the hail of fire. (Whitehead 2009: 283) As already mentioned, much of the German front-line infrastructure went underground. The Germans had several complex tunnel systems around Beaumont Hamel and St. Pierre Divion. Dugouts became deeper as the war went on and even in the front line were often six or more metres deep. Although not entirely safe they were generally impervious to anything but the heaviest artillery. Some systems accommodated 1,200 men and were equipped with electric generators, medical posts and kitchen facilities, whilst in Miraumont there was an underground hospital (Riedel 2007: 100–17; Sheldon 2006b: 144). The dugout is a feature of the Great War that provoked a range of sensations and emotions, often contradictory – at once a protection against high explosive and a potential death trap, likely to entomb those inside. In British memoirs German dugouts are usually described as foul-smelling places of horror, almost always encountered after violent combat. Clearance involved throwing grenades and mortar, petrol or phosphorus bombs down the entrances, frequently leaving any remaining occupants in an unwholesome condition. Exploration often meant encounters with German corpses or at least their smell. Norman Gladden remembered ‘a hideous stench of Germans already disintegrating’ (1974: 118) and Wilfred Owen in his poem ‘The Sentry’ records ‘the smell of men who had lived there years’ when his platoon sheltered in an old German dugout south of Serre (Owen 1918: 193). Even undamaged German dugouts had a peculiar smell, a feature remarked upon by British veterans of both wars. After a visit to Thiepval Edmund Blunden stated that ‘the smell of the German dugouts was peculiar to them, heavy and clothy’ (Blunden 1936: 134). A Second World War veteran described it as ‘a sickly, scented, pungent smell, very distinctive’ (WW2talk). An anonymous Guards officer in Italy in 1944 described ‘the sour smell of captured German trenches, the same as in Tunisia and the Desert’ (Trevelyan 1983: 309). This would seem to be a case of sensorial ‘othering’ which Day describes as ‘defining those who smell differently’ but it is interesting to note that no German memoir known to the author contains any mention of Allied troops generating an odd smell (Day 2012: 23; and see De Nardi this volume). Whilst the Germans captured French and British soldiers in reasonable numbers in this area, the tactical situation meant that they only got into the

War with flowers  335 enemy’s trenches or dugouts during raids and may simply not have had the opportunity to notice a different smell. Nevertheless, the idea that the significance of smell is culturally constituted (Classen et al. 1994) rather than a natural given is highlighted by this apparent divergence between protagonists occupying the same geographical spaces. In a more general sense ‘what did appal the Germans was the French habit of making no effort to bury the dead or even to evacuate the bodies of quite senior officers who were killed in forward positions. This ran contrary to all their traditions and cultural inclinations and they were generally shocked by the callous indifference of it’ (Sheldon, pers. comm.). The British were also critical of French attitudes to hygiene and the war diary of 2nd Monmouthshire Regiment records the state of the village of Auchonvillers after the French left in July 1915: ‘cesspits had only a small covering of earth, cellars full of straw under which were dead rats and dirt.’ (WO95/1506) (and see Dendooven, this volume).

Figure 21.3  (Heim 3) ‘Drunten im Unterstand. Do ists halt schön’ or ‘It is Cosy Down in the Dugout’. Von Wundt and his staff enjoy a glass of wine and a cigarette in a fairly cramped but well appointed dugout. ( Abbott & Holder Ltd.)

336  Alastair H. Fraser Figure 21.3 (Heim 3) has the title ‘Drunten im Unterstand. Do ists halt schön’ which roughly translates as ‘It is cosy down in the dugout.’ This shows von Wundt and five members of his staff sitting in a panelled dugout drinking wine with a plate of biscuits on the table. There is an orderly visible through a door behind them. Stabs Arzt Alber and Hauptmann Richard Ruoff are both smoking cigars and von Wundt has a cigarette in his mouth. The furniture is utilitarian but quite comfortable. The only light comes from a candle in a wine bottle rather than electricity. In Heim’s narrative the dugout is a place of domesticity and shelter from the elements as well as a protection against shelling. Norman Collins explored the German positions around Y-Ravine a day or two after Beaumont Hamel was captured by 51st Highland Division in November 1916. ‘The dugouts themselves were very deep and had flights of stairs down to the bottom and wire beds’ (Collins 2012: 102). Heim 5 depicts bunks in a dugout, probably not a very deep one from the light streaming down the stairs, and another, Heim 4, has a group of three soldiers in relaxed attitudes sitting on the stairs of a well-constructed headquarters dugout. Two men calmly smoke in the sunlight. Heim 8 also portrays the interior of a particularly luxurious dugout with a range of items clearly salvaged from French houses. There is a double bed with sheets and a chamber pot underneath, all in a close-boarded alcove. A substantial wooden support is incorporated into a table with a table cloth, upon which sits an elaborate civilian oil lamp, a set of candlesticks and some books and bottles. Shelves above contain a tea cup and a glass. Images of similarly luxurious captured dugouts appear in Sir Douglas Haig’s Great Push, the tie-in book for the film The Battle of the Somme (Anon. 1917: 180–3, 321). The literature of 26 Reserve Division however tends towards the more familiar account of life underground, particularly prior to the British assault of 1 July 1916, an ordeal that could be said to stretch every one of the senses (see Leonard, this volume). The British bombardment began on the morning of 24 June. Initially most of the shells were shrapnel and did little damage but over the morning heavier guns joined in and it was clear that this was the beginning of the offensive (Gerster 1920: 49). It became impossible to get supplies up by wagon or trench railway and carrying parties suffered serious losses. In most cases enough was brought forward to top up stocks already in the front line. Positions had five to eight days of food, mostly bread and jam, and two or three bottles of mineral water per man as well as matches, candles, spirits, cigars and wine (Haldenwang 1925: 51). I/121 RIR filled every available container with water as soon as possible and made sure each man had a canteen of cold coffee on him. In the sector occupied by 99 RIR all the wells were blown in by shell fire and water ran short. The tinned meat was very salty and produced a terrible thirst. Many men smoked heavily which also induced thirst and must have contributed to the thick atmosphere, already foul with fumes from candles, explosions and acetylene lamps. Overpressure from explosions sometimes blew out the lights, leaving the occupants in total darkness and in one case in a medical

War with flowers  337 dugout a lamp exploded (HStAS M107/Bü42). It became too dangerous to venture outside to repair wire and trenches; whilst many dugouts were impervious to shelling, the entrances frequently collapsed, prompting herculean efforts to unblock them before the occupants suffocated. Matthias Gerster described the scene in his history of 52 Reserve Infanterie Brigade. Death-dealing geysers could be seen springing up everywhere. Plumes of smoke were thrown up – as high as houses, as high as towers. The earth trembled, the dugouts rocked. Clods of earth fell down the stairs and falling walls filled the trenches, blocking the entrances to the dugouts. Clouds of poisonous smoke and gas seeped down into the underground shelters, stinging the eyes and making breathing laborious. ‘Toffee Apple’ trench mortar rounds on their long heavy iron stakes wobbled through the air, shredding the obstacles and destroying the frontline trenches. Powerful tornadoes of fire hit individual sections of trench, turning the positions into crater fields. (HStAS M410/Bü260) Heavy artillery was especially feared; ‘every sense strained, every nerve stretched to the limit, the men sat in their dugouts listening for the devilish shriek of the falling mortar rounds which bored into the earth with a dull thud and exploded with an appalling din. The dim tallow lights and acetylene lamps were extinguished and the walls swayed as though they were in a boat’ (HStAS M410/Bü260). A report from 121 RIR’s war diary recounted how the nerves suffered badly as ‘in the next blink of an eye the roof above you could come crashing down’ (HStAS M109/Bü44). Morale seems to have held up remarkably well despite the almost unbearable strain. 180 IR reported that ‘one heard from all the companies that the mood was magnificent’ (Vischer 1921: 34). 119 RIR’s history states that ‘the men’s spirits were unbroken. Still the seven days of drumfire had not left their nerves unaffected.’ It is significant that the word ‘Trommelfeuer’ or drumfire is frequently used in German sources, a highly suggestive word that describes the noise and vibration of bombardment as being near or even inside a drum. Some men apparently stood up to the experience better than others. Stefan Westmann was a medic with 119 RIR in the Beaumont Hamel area and recorded his experiences in the 1960s. He remembered a nightmare of crushed bodies and suffocated soldiers, panic-stricken rats fleeing into the dugouts and being killed by frantic soldiers and men becoming hysterical with fear and having to be knocked unconscious by their mates (Westmann 1968: 94). The terrifying ordeal, lasting seven days and nights, generated an intense desire for revenge on their tormentors; Gerster remembered ‘all were seized by a deep bitterness at the inhuman machine of destruction which hammered endlessly. A searing rage against the enemy burned in their minds’ (Sheldon 2005: 134). The captured diary of Unteroffizier Hinkel of

338  Alastair H. Fraser 99 RIR expressed his feelings: ‘the torment and the fatigue, not to mention the strain on the nerves were indescribable. There was just one single heartfelt prayer on our lips “Oh God, free us from this ordeal: give us release through battle, grant us victory: Lord God! Just let them come!” And this determination increased with the fall of every shell.’ (Whitehead 2009: 473).

The enemy Figure 21.4 (Heim 48) is titled ‘Wie ich meinen Irelander fing’ or ‘How I caught my Irishman’. The painting shows a comfortable, brightly lit room with von Wundt and three of his staff officers sitting at a table. Von Wundt and two of the officers are smoking cigarettes and on the table are a bowl of punch and four bottles as well as a supply of cigars. In complete contrast are two dirty but smiling German infantrymen, one a senior NCO, and a rather sheepish British prisoner with a cigarette. As the attention of the officers is directed to their visitors Moritz the dog is standing on the table and eating a plate of biscuits. Two utterly different experiences of the war briefly coincide in this painting; the dangerous and exhausting world of crawling about No Man’s Land in the darkness with the prospect of sudden death or wounding by knife, club, grenade or gunshot meets the office-based existence of the well-fed staff officer, clean and tidy in his tailored uniform,

Figure 21.4  (Heim 48) ‘Wie ich meinen Irelander fing’ or ‘How I Caught my Irishman’. A comfortable, brightly lit cottage sitting room forms a striking contrast to the muddy German infantrymen and their prisoner. ( Abbott & Holder Ltd.)

War with flowers  339 enjoying a glass of punch after a hard day’s work on his neat maps and intelligence reports. Von Wundt and his staff did visit the front line; he is depicted in two paintings (Heim 55 and 56) observing bombardments and another (Heim 17) shows a smartly dressed Hussar officer splashing about in a muddy trench whilst von Wundt appears behind him. Von Wundt’s photograph album shows him visiting the trenches and there is no reason to suppose he was not a conscientious commander but this evidence emphasizes his status as a clean, well turned out visitor and certainly not a permanent inhabitant of the world of the Frontschwein. Both German soldiers wear mud-smeared greatcoats with rifles slung over their shoulders and one has a muddy handprint on the skirt, two grenades are hooked onto his belt. The prisoner is wearing a khaki greatcoat with a rip in the front. There was considerable rivalry amongst the regiments of 26 Reserve Division over the capture of prisoners and the Germans proved to be vastly more proficient at raiding and patrolling than the British. In the year before the Battle of the Somme 119 RIR alone captured eleven British officers. The British during the same period captured one live German soldier (Gerster 1920: 43). It is just possible that the British soldier is Corporal Stevenson of 1st Royal Dublin Fusiliers who was captured by a patrol from 119 RIR on Redan Ridge to the west of Beaumont Hamel on 13 August 1915. Stevenson caused enough interest to be photographed, probably the next morning, and there is some facial resemblance although the hair is fuller in the painting (26 RD 1920: 61). Against this is the fact that 119 RIR were not part of von Wundt’s brigade and it is unlikely that a prisoner captured by them would be exhibited to von Wundt. No record of the capture of an Irish soldier by 121 RIR or 180 IR has come to light. The final painting for discussion is the only one known to have been copied from a photograph (Figure 21.5, Heim 59). This was taken on the evening of 3 September in the aftermath of a failed attack by 39th Division on the German lines south of Beaumont Hamel. It shows dead British soldiers, probably of 11 Royal Sussex Regiment or 14 Hampshire Regiment, in a German trench (26 RD 1920: 108; Official History (1938), 280). Heim’s rendering has a hint of fading rosy light reflecting off the chalk which covers the entire area. There is a splash of blood in front of the German sentry but otherwise very little colour, in complete contrast to the flowers depicted in the height of summer 1915. The bodies are a single jumbled line of dull khaki broken only by the pale flesh of the dead men. This is a much more recognizable image of war on the Somme and it is tempting to see a change in attitude. From this period the war became a ceaseless struggle against superior British artillery; with the approaching winter trenches collapsed and filled with mud, dugouts flooded and stairs fell in; spells of front-line duty were much longer, it became difficult to get supplies up, food was always cold, the frequent rain brought bronchitis and colds and equipment and uniforms rotted in the damp. The exhausted and

340  Alastair H. Fraser

Figure 21.5  (Heim 59) ‘Schützengraben im Beaumont nach dem 3 Sept 1916’ or ‘Front Line Trench in Beaumont on 3 September 1916’. The only painting known to have been copied from a photograph. The caption in the photographic history of the division states that it was taken on the evening of 3 September, a fact that Heim acknowledges with the faint glow of a sunset in an otherwise monochrome depiction. ( Abbott & Holder Ltd.)

grievously depleted division was relieved by 12 Division in October 1916 and von Wundt was promoted to command 18 Reserve Division. Beaumont Hamel, the village that 26 Reserve had so bravely defended in July, was finally lost to the British by 12 Division in November. The good times were well and truly over, but the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the men of the division, whilst not as well provided for as von Wundt and his staff, experienced a more varied range of sensations than might be supposed. Music, reading, palatable food, alcohol, tobacco, sport and relaxation were not entirely absent from their lives.

Acknowledgements Thanks to the following: Jack Sheldon and Ralph Whitehead for their assistance and for permission to quote from their works; Philip Athill of Abbott & Holder for permission to use their images of Heim’s paintings;

War with flowers  341 Alexander Brunotte, Volker Hartmann, Ann-Marie Einhaus and Francis Jones for German translation; my wife, Minnie Fraser, and Paul Blackett for reading drafts.

Primary Sources Hauptstaatarchiv, Stuttgart HStAS M 57/Bü 5. Service record of Albert Heim. HStAS M109/Bü 44. War diary of II/121 RIR. HStAS M410/Bü 260. M. Gerster: History of 52 Reserve Infantrie Brigade. HStAS M 743/2 Bü 589. Obituary of Theodor von Wundt.

The National Archives, London WO95/1443. War diary of 1st Royal Dublin Fusiliers. WO95/1506. War diary of 2nd Monmouthshire Regiment.

Websites Accessed Dec. 2014. Accessed Feb. 2015. Contains images of all the paintings in the series.

Film The Battle of the Somme. Imperial War Museum.

References Anon. (1917) Sir Douglas Haig’s Great Push: The Battle of the Somme. London: Hutchinson & Co. Ashurst, G. (1987) My Bit: A Lancashire Fusilier at War 1914–18. Ramsbury: Crowood Press. Blunden, E. (1936) Undertones of War. London: Penguin. Breuninger, C. (2014) Cornelius Breuninger Kriegstagbuch 1914–1918. LeinfeldenEchterdingen: Numea Verlag. Bull, M., and Back, L. (eds) (2003) The Auditory Culture Reader. Oxford and New York: Berg. Classen, C., Howes, D., and Synott, A. (1994) Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell. London and New York: Routledge. Collins, N. (2012) Last Man Standing: The Memoirs, Letters and Photographs of a Teenage Officer. Barnsley: Pen & Sword. Committee of Imperial Defence, Historical Section (1938) Military Operations France and Belgium 1916: 2nd July to the End of the Battles of the Somme. London: HMSO.

342  Alastair H. Fraser Day, J. (2012) Introduction: Making Senses of the Past. In J. Day (ed.) Making Senses of the Past: Toward a Sensory Archaeology, pp. 1–52. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Feld, S. (2005) Places Sensed, Senses Placed: Toward a Sensuous Epistemology of Environments. In D. Howes (ed.) Empire of the Senses, pp. 179–91. New York: Berg. Fraser, A. H., and Brown, M. (2008) Mud, Blood and Missing Men: Excavations at Serre, Somme, France. In A. Pollard and I. Banks (eds) Scorched Earth: Studies in the Archaeology of Conflict, pp. 147–71. Leiden: Brill. —— Robertshaw, A., and Roberts, S. (2009) Ghosts on the Somme: Filming the Battle, June–July 1916. Barnsley: Pen & Sword. General Staff, British Army (1928) Vocabulary of German Military Terms and Abbreviations (revised edn). London: HMSO. —— (1973) Handbook of the German Army in War. January 1917. Wakefield: EP Publishing. —— (2002) Handbook of the German Army (Home and Colonial) 1914 (4th edn). London: Imperial War Museum. German Army, XIV Reserve Korps (1916) Zwischen Arras und Peronne herausgegeben von einem deutschen Reservekorps. Bapaume: Korps-Verlagsbuchhandlung. German Army, 26 Reserve Division (1920) Die 26 Reserve-Division im Weltkrieg 1914/18. Stuttgart: Stähle & Friedel. Gerster, M. (1920) Das Württemburgische Reserve-Infanterie-Regiment Nr. 119 im Weltkrieg 1914–1918. Stuttgart: Chr. Belsersche Verlagsbuchhandlung. Gladden, N. (1974) The Somme 1916: A Personal Account. London: William Kimber. Haldenwang, A. von (1925) Feldverwaltung, Ettape und Ersatzformationen im Weltkrieg 1914–18. Stuttgart: Bergers Literarisches Büro. Holtz, G. von (1922) Das Württemburgische Reserve-Infanterie-Regiment Nr. 121 im Weltkrieg 1914–1918. Stuttgart: Chr. Belsersche Verlagsbuchhandlung. Klaus, M. (1929) Das Württemburgische Reserve-Feldartillerie-Regiment Nr. 26 im Weltkrieg 1914–1918. Stuttgart: Chr. Belsersche Verlagsbuchhandlung. Moser, O. von (1927) Die Württemberger im Weltkriege. Stuttgart: Chr. Belsersche Verlagsbuchhandlung. Mosse, G. L. (1990) Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Owen, W. (1918) The Sentry. In J. Silkin (ed.) The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry. London: Penguin. Prussia, Kriegsministerium (1912) Rangeliste der königlich Preussischen Armee und des XIII. (königlich Württembergischen) Armeekorps für 1912. Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler & Sohn. Riedel, F. (ed.) (2006) Das Gesicht des Krieges: Kriegsfototagbuch des Leutnants Armin Stäbler. Leinfelden-Echterdingen: Numea Verlag. —— (2007) Zwischen Kriegsgericht und Heldentod: der Grabenkrieg an der Somme 1914–1916. Leinfelden-Echterdingen: Numea Verlag. Sassoon, S. (1930) Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. London: Faber & Faber. Sheldon, J. (2005) The German Army on the Somme 1914–1916. Barnsley: Pen & Sword.

War with flowers  343 —— (2006a) The Germans at Beaumont Hamel. Barnsley: Pen & Sword. —— (2006b) The Germans at Thiepval. Barnsley: Pen & Sword. Trevelyan, R. (1983) Rome ’44: The Battle for the Eternal City. London: Coronet. Vischer, A. (1921) Das Württemberg Infantrie-Regiment Nr. 180 im Weltkrieg 1914–1918. Stuttgart: Chr. Belsersche Verlagsbuchhandlung. Walter, P. (2014) The First World War in Colour. Cologne: Taschen. Westmann, S. (1968) Surgeon with the Kaiser’s Army. London: William Kimber. Whitehead, R. (2009) The Other Side of the Wire: With the German XIV Reserve Corps on the Somme. September 1914–June 1916. Solihull: Helion & Co. —— (2013) The Other Side of the Wire: With the German XIV Reserve Corps on the Somme. 1st July 1916. Solihull: Helion & Co.

22 The senses Battlefield exploration, drawing and sculpture Steve Hurst

Children collect things. Some display them, some hoard them, some make miniature museums. This was never more common than during the period of the Second World War when the children of any and every school used a clandestine market to swap, barter or simply admire pieces of crashed aircraft, bomb fragments (rare), splinters of anti-aircraft shell (these were very common, erroneously called ‘shrapnel’), ammunition and regimental buttons and badges (see Moshenska 2008). By the end of the war the south of England appeared to be covered in war material, abandoned, or left in dumps as the soldiers and airmen who once guarded munitions and stores were demobilized. A sizeable quantity of weapons, ammunition, equipment, vehicle parts and even tinned food was thrown into quarries or old mine-shafts. Some were placed in pits on land owned by the War Department or Air Ministry. It is this that brings us up to the present day and a story covered in most of the national newspapers. Three men living in different towns; one from St Albans, one Newport Pagnell and one from Bicester near Oxford, were arrested and charged with theft. This was not ordinary theft but the use of metal detectors to locate and unearth objects buried on land owned by English Heritage.1 The men belonged to a group called Extreme Relic Hunters who were a worry to the police and fire service. The charge of theft gave the police an excuse to raid the men’s houses. The Oxfordshire man complained that several objects from his collection were blown up in a controlled explosion on the field behind his house and that the police took away the rest, ‘including a child’s toy telephone and two pairs of Wellington boots’ (reported in the Daily Telegraph, 18 September 2014). Where does one draw the line between battlefield archaeology and stealing – a practice which, at its most extreme, turns to grave robbing?2 The short history of The Diggers is insightful in this respect. The Diggers was a group of amateur archaeologists from West Flanders who started well and did some useful work in Westhoek (better known to the British as the Ypres Salient). Recently the group dissolved as the more responsible members resigned.3 Because The Diggers fell into the hands of clandestine traders in souvenirs the Flemish police proscribed them. Flanders and Northern

Battlefield exploration, drawing and sculpture  345 France are the areas most disturbed by war souvenir hunters. The Western Front is without equal for the quantity of early twentieth-century metal artefacts lying just below the surface of the earth. Taking soil samples in West Flanders, Belgian Government chemists discovered that the copper content was way above the normal level because of the great quantity of fuse-caps, driving bands and cartridge cases still buried in agricultural land (Van Meirvenne et al. 2008). As the soil moves so they are eased gently to the surface. Piet Chielens, the Director of the In Flanders Fields Museum (IFFM) in Ypres (or Ieper), remarked that the potato-lifting season is the most dangerous because a muddy potato is difficult to distinguish from a muddy grenade. A few days later, passing a small farm, I saw a large pile of potatoes waiting to be cleaned and packed, and there, in the middle of the concrete yard, lay a rusted Mills grenade. Imperial War Museum curator Rose Coombs wrote the first modern guide to the Western Front (Coombs 1976). That wise woman warns against picking up anything that you cannot readily identify as harmless. Following her route, the areas with the greatest quantity of war-debris are the Ypres Salient, the Somme, sections of Champagne and, perhaps greatest of all, Verdun. Sections of the landscape around the forts that once protected the city of Verdun are so strewn with unexploded ordnance that the French army wire them off and put these areas permanently out of bounds to civilians. Last time I visited this area of Northern France the War Ministry had just given permission for archaeologists to excavate the large overgrown, mine-pitted ridge where once stood the village of Vauquois. Most of the diggers were young, clearly students, with a few older men and women in charge. Part of the trench line had been cleared up to a point where it disappeared at the lip of a huge mine-crater. The students disinterred a metal water-bottle shaped like a wine-skin, an entrenching tool, the shattered and heavily rusted ghost of a French infantryman’s Adrian helmet, and then the barrel and breach of a rifle, probably a Lebel, though the rust and mud made it hard to identify. All these finds were laid carefully on large sheets of paper together with remnants of the village before the war overtook it; part of an agricultural machine, a broken crock with a brown salt-glaze, a strip of blackened leather too small to be an army boot, possibly a woman’s shoe. Nothing had been touched here for more than eighty years. Watching this young international group at work was a strange and moving experience. This moment of discovery is, by its nature, ephemeral and delicate both physically and emotionally. Today the Vauquois site has been tidied up and commercialized and made acceptable and accessible for the coach parties. There will likely be a café and souvenir shop below the ridge to cater for the tourists who arrive, take pictures of each other and depart. This is the site of a most terrible and inhuman struggle where men burrowed like moles under the ground, either to protect themselves from the rain of missiles, or else to dig deeper, under the enemy line to blow their opponents into small bloody pieces, and yet now it

346  Steve Hurst has no atmosphere, no more sense of reality than a TV reconstruction. That is the price that the archaeologist pays for his study; to be transmuted into superficial entertainment (see Saunders 2010: 19–20). What is true for Verdun and Vauquois holds for Ypres too. In exploring the old Salient, it is the area between the world of the professional archaeologist and the battlefield scavenger that interests me. The fascination lies in the landscape, the ground, and also in the more recent past: the transformation of a destroyed and polluted city and landscape into a commercial enterprise. I am not an archaeologist, which brings me to the question, what am I doing in a place like this? A question I asked Nick Saunders in 2009 as a group of us ate sandwiches opposite the cemetery at Hooge, outside Ypres. What draws us to places of such tragic, evil memory? Nick replied that all human beings are interested in death and the rituals of death and one could not find a place more dedicated to the cult of death than this. A second question: how does exploring a battlefield, familiarization with the terrain, making topographical drawings, experiencing the weather, the weight of the soil, the presence of wild life in the overgrown areas, how does that experience translate into the making process of forming sculpture? Sculpture is made initially in wax, or plaster or wood, and transformed into bronze or iron or aluminium in a foundry. This is an area that is hard to define, the region of the senses. All of the senses are engaged in solitary walking along the old front line and those same senses are used in the making of sculpture. The answer is complicated and comes in several parts. First, the periods of research were not concerned with the Western Front as a whole, still less the grand strategy or the plans made by the General Staffs. In each case my self-imposed research programme took me to one very small area and, in the first case, one group of men, a single battalion. The first period of research took place soon after the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of the Somme. The second, in Ypres, started five years before the centenary of the Great War. The connection between the two periods is drawing. John Ruskin wrote ‘Drawing is a means of seeing’. There is a collection of Ruskin’s drawings in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. They are extraordinary and timeless. While agreeing with Ruskin’s remark one can go further; anyone drawing with such intensity over a long period of time is aware of the senses: sight, touch, smell, the heat (or cold) of the day. The combination of senses becomes yet more acute sitting in the position of a former trench or observation post on the site of the front line. This is not immediately apparent in the drawing viewed sometime afterwards, but it is an experience that lodges itself in the memory and emerges later, often in unexpected ways. This chapter concerns an intermediate area that is harder to define, the point where the senses, stimulated in one place, dominate the making of an art form in another. In terms of hours spent in the field I spent far more

Battlefield exploration, drawing and sculpture  347 time exploring the Ypres Salient (Westhoek) than I did the Ancre Heights (the Somme). I visited Ypres in all seasons and many different weather conditions so had contact with both the fine penetrating rain and the mud of Flanders. I followed the path of the line of the longest period of British occupation (between the Second and the Third Battles of Ypres), from a point south of Wieltje to Hooge and Sanctuary Wood to the Zillebeke and the Comines canal at the Palingbeek. I settled on a relatively small area, partly by luck and partly deliberate choice. This was the Bellewarde Ridge, crossing the Menin Road at Hooge to Sanctuary Wood. The nature of the research was bound to be different, not only because of the terrain and the differences between Flanders and Picardy, but the time difference. In the aftermath of the fiftieth anniversary, through the 1970s, I visited the Ancre Heights each summer with my cycle and interviewed survivors of the disaster at Beaumont Hamel through the rest of the year (Hurst 2007). There were no survivors left to interview during my second battlefield explorations (Figures 22.1, 22.2, 22.3). The sensory experience during the second period was different from the first, though one could claim that the first influenced the second. The second (Ypres) period of research was more methodical and disciplined than the first. This was partly because I was working in collaboration with that superb and constantly changing museum in the Cloth Hall, In Flanders Fields, and partly as a measure of self-protection. For reasons I will explain later I wanted to avoid any chance of a recurrence of the mental disturbance I experienced near Beaumont Hamel. I kept the drawing periods much shorter and did not stay too long in one place (the Flanders rain made sure

Figure 22.1  ‘Beaumont’, 1971. The colours are symbolic of the German defenders and the Allied attackers at Beaumont Hamel. Aluminium, painted wood and canvas 122cm high. ( and courtesy of Pangolin London Gallery and Steve Russell Photographic Studios)

348  Steve Hurst

Figure 22.2  ‘Y Ravine’ (Beaumont Hamel), 1978. The sculpture symbolizes an infantry weapon and also describes a kneeling corpse. Aluminium, steel and mahogany on a painted wooden base 85cm high. ( and courtesy of Pangolin London Gallery and Steve Russell Photographic Studios)

Figure 22.3  ‘Jacob’s Ladder’, 2012–13. Inspired by a notorious British section of the line at Beaumont Hamel, this symbolizes both the official pomp and glorification of the war and the reality of death, madness and mutilation. Steel, cast iron and bronze 300cm high. ( and courtesy of Pangolin London Gallery and Steve Russell Photographic Studios)

of that). Equally important, as the months passed into years, I became less interested in the war and more and more interested in the extraordinary way that the Salient and the city recovered from the devastation of the war and the pollution of the landscape. I was (and am) overwhelmed by the

Battlefield exploration, drawing and sculpture  349 way the dispossessed inhabitants of Westhoek survived, adapted to their changed circumstances and finally turned the disaster of total war to their advantage. Thus today the ‘material culture’ of Flanders not only comes at the visitor from the ground but is to be found in the extraordinary jumble of horror and comedy and kitsch found in the café-museums, in the monthly markets of war-souvenirs and in the mini-museums in bars, cafés and hotels in the city and its neighbouring villages. War means tourists and tourists mean prosperity. A local politician told me that the prosperity of Ypres was started by the British trade but, in time, this was equalled by local business, not just Flemish but Walloon French and Dutch.

Chalk and clay The sculptor resembles the archaeologist in his interest in the soil beneath his feet; one could say the mud on his boots. On the Somme the density of the chalk preserves metal objects, tunnels and trenches, but retains them below ground. The archaeologist has to dig. The fertile agricultural land around Ypres had to be drained, diked and constantly worked to prevent it returning to its natural swampy conditions. The British bombardment before the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917 ensured that it returned to its original state. Everyone knew about the mud of Flanders and the intricate drainage system of beeks that fed rainwater into the river Yser, except it seems, the British Commander and Chief and his Chief of Intelligence Brigadier Charteris. In soil-mechanics terms the soil of West Flanders is fluid. For this reason, missiles, weapons, vehicles and men swallowed up in the mud are gradually pushed up to the surface. The material objects found on or just under the surface include quantities of human remains, sometimes bones or shattered skulls, sometimes complete skeletons, German, British, Belgian or French, and sometimes these remains can be identified. The least welcome arrivals on the surface of the fields are poison-gas containers. The great majority of these are shaped like and the size of a large vegetable marrow, fired in huge quantities from British ‘Livens’ projectors. The steel case is relatively thin, no more than 4 or 5 mm. After close on a century the steel is heavily corroded and the compressed gas is beginning to leak out into the soil. When contained, the war-gases do not change their nature and so today they are as lethal as in 1917 when they were projected at the German line.4 The Ypres Salient is a fascinating mixture of conflicting and paradoxical qualities. The visitor will pull out of it an enlarged, and probably distorted, image of what he projects into it. Whatever he seeks he will find it there; scholarship, strident nationalism, opportunism, horror, sentimentality and gross commercialism all rub shoulders in a surreal circus of war. Max Beckmann served as a medical orderly on Hill 60, doing his best to save the lives of shattered men while continuously under threat from high-explosive, shrapnel and gas shells above him and mines underneath. I doubt that Beckmann ever visited Ypres after he escaped, alive, from

350  Steve Hurst Flanders, and yet his paintings are brilliantly coloured parables, not only of Germany through the 1920s and 1930s, but a forecast of Ypres today, a Flemish carnival with the reminders of death always overlooking the feasting and drinking. Beckmann is one of those uncanny artists whose paintings are decorative, wonderfully crafted and at the same time scream a warning of a nightmare future – the rise of the Nazis and the Second World War. Today, with hindsight, we can see what the paintings predict; his contemporaries could not. Spending hours, or days, sketching in a particular landscape the artist observes many unexpected things. Being in one place for a long time he notices distortions in the tree-trunks, strangely coloured grasses, discoloured patches of soil and objects protruding from the ground that, at first, he assumes to be natural but then, slowly recognizes as alien. At a longer range the trained eye detects ridges, depressions or folds in the ground that are not the work of nature or agriculture. Touch usually refers to the sensation on the skin, particularly on hands or face. In the context of Flanders one may legitimately use it to describe the sensation when the rain penetrates your waterproof and you feel the icy water trickling down your neck. You can also use it to describe the sensation of several pounds of sticky mud clinging to your boots and impeding your gait. The weight of mud one gains crossing a ploughed field on one of the ridges dominating Ypres has to be experienced to be believed. The London sculptor Jim Turner asked his father what life in the trenches was like. Mr Turner senior was a bad-tempered old man who lost a foot from frost-bite in the winter of 1917. He thought for a while and then said Tell you what son, if you really wants to know, dig two ’oles in the garden, go down about seven feet. Then get the garden ’ose and ’alf fill ’em with water. Put a dead ’orse in one and leave ’im there for a couple of weeks, till ’e’s ripe. When you done that, son, you get in the other one and tell the neighbours to throw bricks and lumps of metal at yer. And stay like that for ten days. That will give you some idea of what it was like at Wipers in ‘seventeen’. (Pers. comm.)5 The passing tourist in his comfortable car comments on the flatness of the countryside. So it appears to him, as the automatic gearbox barely changes note. But walking, especially cross-country, is a very different matter. Walk along any path radiating outwards from Ypres and, in less than an hour, your path will start to rise. If it is winter and you have a heavy raincoat, encumbered by a rucksack and with several kilos of mud on your boots, you will find the rising ground far from negligible. This is the Salient, a shallow arc of low hills dominating the city. Describing the Somme battlefield, almost a year after the disaster of 1 July 1916, John Masefield wrote:

Battlefield exploration, drawing and sculpture  351 All the advantages of position and observation were in the enemy’s hands, not in ours. They took up their lines when they were strong and our side weak, and in no place in all the old Somme position is our line better sited than theirs, though in one or two places the sites are nearly equal. Almost in every part of this old front line our men had to go up-hill to attack. (Masefield [1917] 1972: 77) Though the Flanders ups and downs are less dramatic, Masefield’s remark was true as much for the Ypres Salient as the Somme. Time and time again, German professionalism and skill at designing and building defensive positions could only be overcome by a gigantic artillery bombardment followed by prodigious expenditure of British lives. This loss of such numbers of the fittest and most idealistic young men would impoverish Britain and the Empire for half a century. Through the insane Third Battle of Ypres, mud and the slope of the ground were enemies as formidable as barbed wire, machine guns, mortars and shrapnel shells. Clearly, reaction to heat and cold, discomfort and pain are sub-sections of the sense ‘Touch’ (see Classen 2005). Equally, wounds on the battlefield from bullets, shrapnel balls or shell splinters belong here too, so does the scourge of barbed wire. Close to a century after the commencement of trench warfare in Europe, finding a recognizable length of barbed wire is a rare event. Even the extra-thick German wire has corroded away. A few lumps of iron-oxide betray what was once a tangled hank of wire but it crumbles immediately if you attempt to clean off the surface. Sometimes a farmer unearths a reel of wire on its wooden frame preserved by its sheer bulk.6 This is very different from any one of the major battlefields during and after the fiftieth anniversary in 1964 when quantities of wire remained and were a hazard and a curse to farmers and explorers alike. Dense masses of surplus wire were pressed down into trenches and craters. Farmers still used miles of it to fence off their fields where today only the trench furniture remains in use as fence-posts. Wooded areas were still uncleared at this time. The neglected and overgrown Aveluy Wood, Trones Wood and the forested areas around Fricourt were still treacherous with wire and holes in the ground (Figure 22.4). In one of his long, choleric and fascinating letters, Alf Damon wrote at length about wiring duty using American-made wire which he thought feeble stuff. He contrasted this with patrols in No Man’s Land where he had to attempt to cut the German wire: Some of it as thick as your finger . . . War Office issue wire-cutters were no use against that stuff. Some thoughtful Company Commanders went to Harrods or the Army and Navy Stores in Victoria and bought superior civilian cutters and paid for them out of their own pockets. (Pers. comm.)7

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Figure 22.4  ‘Tambour’, 2000. The remnants of battle at the German fortification of the Tambour near Fricourt on the Somme emphasized the shared humanity and suffering of soldiers. Bronze 40cm wide. ( and courtesy of Pangolin London Gallery and Steve Russell Photographic Studios)

Apart from a line of factories and storehouses north of Ypres, alongside the Yser Canal, the Salient is today an agricultural landscape, as it was for hundreds of years before 1914. The Germans never captured Ypres. Apart from the hum and hiss of traffic on the A19 heading eastward to Kortrijk, or towards Poperinge and the coast to the west, the sounds are rural: birds sing, cockerels crow and the wind blows through the grassland where the heavy-legged, grey Belgian cattle graze. There is another sense associated with hearing. That is silence. When the traveller sits in the stone porch of one of many, many war cemeteries, alone and still, in time he becomes aware of an extraordinary silence. The visitor is forced to contemplate the mystery of death; the death of all these men cut off in the prime of life and his or her own death. At first consideration smell, like sound, is remarked by its absence (Classen et al. 1994). The smells appear to be the normal smells that one might expect in a rural area: silage, cow-manure, diesel from tractors, perhaps a heavy tobacco smell from the roll-your-own cigarette of the tractor driver. I cannot claim to have experienced a taint of the battlefield. Rose Coombs did. Rose joined the staff of the Imperial War Museum in 1946, when she was demobilized from the RAF. As Special Collections Officer she became an expert on the Great War and made more than a hundred tours of the Western Front as a guide, at a time when guides to the area were rare. I saw her at the IWM during the 1970s several times, but was too timid to approach her. She was a formidable, practical and no-nonsense woman, so it is the more remarkable that she had a strange and what must have been a terrifying experience on the Somme battlefield, above Beaumont Hamel. She was in a half-filled trench, sheltering under a bush during a squall of

Battlefield exploration, drawing and sculpture  353 rain when she smelt the foul stink of the battlefield. She gave no explanation for this sensation (Coombs 1976: 75). Rose Coombs is not the only person to have experienced this phenomenon. A sceptic would remark that the site of a twentieth-century battlefield is full of all sorts of alien chemicals contained in steel or iron cases that are slowly corroding. Gas shells are leaking. Alternatively that nauseating smell might originate in a farm nearby.8 The wartime smell of the front line and No Man’s Land was compounded of ordure, human and animal, organic remains, human and animal, chloride of lime, petrol, cordite, and spent gas. Of the survivors of the Somme that I interviewed on a continuous basis throughout the 1970s, only one, Noel Peters, referred to the disgusting miasma, the vile smell that hung over the trench lines between 1915 and 1918. We carried clean drinking water up to the line in old petrol tins. The taste of petrol and paraffin got into everything. Then there was chloride of lime that they tipped onto the corpses and the Lysol, used as a disinfectant. In the background was that smell, that dreadful stink – all the time. I don’t have to tell you, you can imagine it for yourself. A horrible, sweet smell. I suppose after a time you cease to notice it. You lost your sense of smell and your sense of taste. (Hurst 2007: 101) Generally speaking, men of the age group that served in the Great War would talk about death with none of the inhibitions that we feel today because death was so familiar. So many of their friends ‘went west’ or ‘popped their clogs’ or ‘kicked the bucket’ as they put it. Antibiotics did not come into use for treating the wounded until the Second World War, so infections had to take their course. At the other extreme, sexual or scatological remarks that, today, are not considered shocking at a middle-class dinner table were taboo to the older generation. My parents’ generation did not talk about either sex or excrement, so talk about the stink of No Man’s Land would come within this taboo. For this reason, I was surprised when another survivor of the first day on the Somme told me that the War Office ‘in its wisdom’ designed a latrine on a circular pattern, remarkably similar to the dugout for a trench mortar. That early morning visit to the latrine might be your last. ‘Some of the chaps used to defecate into a bully beef tin and then chuck it over the parapet into no-mans-land.’9 (And see Dendooven, this volume.) The disgusting nature of the battlefield was noted by Ernst Jünger, all of whose senses were heightened by the war. Describing the ruins of Combles during the Somme battle in August 1916, he wrote Over the ruins, as over all the most dangerous parts of the terrain, lay a heavy smell of death, because the fire was so intense that no one could bother with the corpses. You really did have to run for your life

354  Steve Hurst in these places, and when I caught the smell of it as I ran, I was hardly surprised – it belonged to there. Moreover, this heavy sweetish atmosphere was not merely disgusting; it also, in association with the piercing fogs of gunpowder, brought about an almost visionary excitement. (Jünger 2003: 93) Taste and smell are closely related. Noel Peters mentioned the frequent complaint of the men in the line that he tried to supply with hot food: ‘It all tastes the same.’ I was lucky to meet Noel, a man of steadfast character and wide experience. Noel was an apprentice cook before the war and he faked his age to volunteer to join the 16th Middlesex Regiment. He was a cook up until the Battle of the Somme and an infantry soldier from 1917 onwards. Noel talked about cooking immediately behind the line and the problems of moving food up to the men in the line while attempting to keep it hot. You’d make a dixie of tea. Or you’d take a lot of trouble to make a composition stew taste better. Maybe you’d scrounge some vegetables, real vegetables not the tinned kind, steal some onions and potatoes. Or sometimes you could get hold of some real steak. Now and then I’d scrounge some curry powder off the Indians up the line at Festubert. Or there might be a few herbs that had survived the shelling in one of the little neglected gardens behind the miner’s cottages. Anything to give it a taste. You’d get the grub up to the line somehow, dodging between shells and diving into dugouts when the whistles blew. At last, with a bit of luck, you would reach the line. Some stout fellow would have a brazier going nicely and you’d put the dixie on to warm. And finally you’d serve it out in their mess-tins. And then, after all that, you’d hear some of the fellers say ‘It all tastes the same’. (Hurst 2007: 101) We use the expression ‘I sensed something was wrong’ or ‘I sensed someone was in the room’. This describes none of the actual senses – sight, sound, smell, touch – any one of which can be measured. There are other senses which are much harder to define. Some group them under the term ‘extrasensory perception’ while others refuse to accept that they exist, or assert that they are merely the figment of a neurotic imagination or hallucinations accompanying a psychotic episode. The artist spends many years being trained and in training himself in perceiving and sensitizing his reactions to the stimuli around him. But in walking the battlefield more than observation comes into play. Perception involves all the senses – sight, touch, hearing, smell. There are other emotions too, tension mixed with exaltation, a sense of awe, of horror at what happened here. A couple of decades ago a schoolgirl accompanied her grandfather to the Ancre Heights. Suddenly, in the middle of an empty field, she broke down and wept. ‘This was our holocaust’ she said.10

Battlefield exploration, drawing and sculpture  355 My explorations, first above the Somme in the 1970s, more recently on the Ypres Salient, were always solitary. The senses that stimulate the making of sculpture are not present in company. Whatever this force is, other people distract, even destroy it. The first exploration was the more powerful and shocking than the periodic visits to Ypres which were spread over more than four years. This was partly because it was my first intensive contact with the battlefields of the Western Front but equally because of the atmosphere prevailing in Northern France compared to Flanders. At that time the French actively discouraged visitors to the Somme and that was true equally of the local council (dominated then by the French Communist Party) and the locals, whether wealthy landowners or small farmers. This must seem odd to those who have experienced only the rush to attract tourists, but fifty years ago the Picards made their dislike of English visitors clear. This increased the sense of trespassing in a forbidden world. Exploring, map in hand, is one thing, drawing is another. Drawing is not for the gregarious type who cannot bear his own company. Drawing in a place that carries immense historical, mythical and emotional force increases the sense of isolation. The reader may think of drawing as a technical matter, ‘the coordination of hand and eye’. So it appears. In practice it is accompanied by unexpected and often unwanted emotions. At this point the reader may ask: what has this got to do with sculpture? Does a series of drawings along the site of the old front line lead to sculpture? To begin the explanation I have to refer to two other conflicts which have impinged on my life: the Second World War and the Northern Irish Troubles. My Father could not conceive of life without a workshop so, at the end of the Second World War, when he came back on leave from Egypt, he bought an army-surplus Nissen hut and we reconstructed it at the end of the garden (a 65-year-old man and two 13-year-old boys). In it he installed both his armourer’s chests of hand-tools and a variety of machine tools. When he returned to Egypt he gave me the use of his workshop and made me its guardian (an act of generosity that today, as an adult, I find remarkable). He allowed me to use anything I needed on one condition; that every tool was put back in the state that he left it so that he could pick it up and use it when he returned. It was in that workshop that I began to make sculpture. Later, as a student of painting, I did not consider the painted objects that I made in wood and metal to be ‘Art’. Painting was Art, these were toys. But, in old age, I become more interested in the things that I made as a child in the immediate aftermath of the war. Children have a quality that we lose as adults and can only relearn with great labour and dedication. Each of us holds an immense reservoir, or library, of childhood images that we can return to and use. This is of immense importance to the artist. Like every other child I was surrounded, enveloped, by the war. There was a cliché, a form of abuse, hurled at a child if he demanded too much of an official or teacher. ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’ Yes we knew

356  Steve Hurst about the war. We could not ignore it. To alleviate their own sense of guilt our pastors and masters attempted constantly to make us feel guilty that we were too young to fight in the war. War provided a number of strange new and exotic images. As D-Day approached, village streets, parks and fields filled with vast numbers of tanks guns and military vehicles. Every evening the sky above us roared with bombers forming up to fly away and demolish German cities. Bombs for those raids and shells for the approaching invasion were stored in woods all over southern England. Move forward to another, very different form of war, termed by the British Army ‘Low intensity operations’ – Northern Ireland. Once again, the war is all-enveloping. Civilians try to forget it and carry on as normal. ‘Normal’ is what is happening in the streets around them. The Art and Design Centre, unlike the rest of Ulster Polytechnic, occupied an undistinguished modernist building on York Street in the centre of Belfast. The prevailing ethos amongst the teaching staff was of denial, a refusal to acknowledge the reality of what was happening around them. A common gibe by staff members of the denial mentality was ‘Oxfam Art’ or ‘This is the art that the English come here to see’. In this stubborn insistence that ‘Art is above politics’ and ‘The Troubles has nothing to do with Art’ they were at odds with the majority of their students. At the same time, canny students knew that they would not get a good degree if they made art about the Troubles. Many of the students had experienced the horror at first hand through the murder, maiming or intimidation of friends or family. The experience of some students was so recent and so raw that discussing it demanded great tact and consideration. Staff who based their art on the Troubles tended to be young, often of LiverpoolIrish or London-Irish descent and on one term’s temporary contract. A small group of us used to meet informally to talk about art and – inevitably – how the artist approached the subject of war. In our discussions we came to the conclusion that the artist must find a ‘medium’ or a means of translating his feelings. We compared the visual arts to the plays of Sean O’Casey, the war poetry of W. B. Yeats, and modern writers like John Arden and Brian Friel. (In his ‘Translations’, for example, Friel discusses the Irish language and Irishness not in the present time but in the early nineteenth century against the background of the mapping of the island by the British Army). We talked of Brecht, Beckmann and Picasso and worked out some guidelines – to avoid the obvious, the illustrative and above all to shun propaganda and cant. We talked of parody, metaphor, or of historical references that had their echo in current events. Some of those I talked to I knew well, like the printmaker from Andersontown, Brian McCallion, others were students from other departments who I did not know and had to approach warily and with circumspection. Some of the subjects we discussed, often under stress, served me well when I worked in Ypres. And so, by a circuitous route, I come back to walking the battlefields and to the city of Ypres. I spent four and a half years preoccupied with the destroyed and rebuilt city, one of the principal medieval cities of Flanders.

Battlefield exploration, drawing and sculpture  357 The Salient and the old front line never lost their fascination, but I was surprised to find that I ceased to notice the British War Cemeteries even though it was the line upon line of stone slabs that first haunted me. I realized that I was acclimatizing, like the Flemish citizens around me. I spent as much time as I could drawing in or around Ypres. Making sculpture on the spot was not practical so I did that part of the project back in my studio in Oxfordshire. The distance, and the sensation of going over, or under, water, was beneficial because it allowed me to distance myself and digest my subject.

War clichés Looking through the work of Irish students applying to enter the Art and Design Centre I came on repeated clichés – helicopters, the type of armoured lorries called ‘Pigs’, feral dogs as a metaphor for gunmen, and all the regalia of the tribal orders on both sides of the divide. The two most common Ypres clichés are the poppy and the strand of barbed wire. Next comes the soupplate helmet. In the chocolatiers you can buy boxes of chocolates shaped like British helmets and, more recently, red-chocolate poppies as well. War-art resembles sex-novels in that it is easy to do badly. There are two ways of dealing with this; either the artist approaches the subject obliquely. He sneaks up on it like a cat stalking a mouse. The alternative is to take the battery of clichés head on and use them. This was the technique used by the London Pop-Art movement throughout the 1960s. The sculptor George Fullard (a survivor of severe wounds sustained during the Second World War) spoke of ‘playing with paradox’. Paradox and contradiction are a part of the character of most artists, indeed one might say that contradiction is one of the fuels that drives art. Paradox, contradiction and memory. Like survivors of the earlier war, George’s imagination and memory were filled with images of the battle that maimed him but the images that he used came from other sources, not least childhood and his father’s stories of the First World War. Writing of occupied France in the Guardian on Saturday 15 November 2014, Caroline Moorehead described the limitations of memory.11 How much more unstable, then, must memory be when dealing with events that took place more than seventy years ago and with matters of survival, fear and heroism? . . . It is about ownership of the past, . . . the sole true version of events, to be guarded with ferocity.

The café-museums Looking through my sketchbooks, the Historian at the IFFM, Dominiek Dendooven, laughed when he reached pages of sketches and cartoons made in the café-museums. ‘You love these places don’t you?’ he said.

358  Steve Hurst The café-museums in and around Ypres are an acquired taste (see Saunders 2010: 189–95). Many visitors are shocked, particularly by the most gross and vulgar of them, Hill 62 at Sanctuary Wood (see Miles, this volume). This was my initial reaction to the place but very rapidly I recognized this revulsion held the clue to my approach to Ypres. Over a period of four and a half years I became more and more interested in the city, and Westhoek, as a phenomenon, a unique place. The more I visited, the more I stayed in Ypres, the more extraordinary I found it – and the key to this mystery lies in commerce. The epitome of this vulgar, vital spirit lies in the three surviving cafémuseums that form a triangle on or close to the Menin Road. Closest to the town, beyond the busy roundabout that was once Hell-fire Corner, lies the Menin Road Cafe (known locally as ‘The Canadiaan’). Further out, still on the Menin Road but on the Bellwarde Ridge, is The Hooge Museum. An easy – if muddy – walk past Hooge Cemetery and across fields to the right of the main road leads to the third café-museum, Hill 62. This is the surviving remnant of one of the first of such small enterprises dating back to 1919, the museum at Hill 60. By a series of family feuds, rivalries and expropriations Hill 60 closed and Hill 62 emerged triumphant. I visited Hill 60 in the early 1960s. It looked like a junk heap of rusting metal with some remnants of trenches (flooded when my brother Andy and I visited Flanders) and a crude café in a former army hut, and yet it had a strange, other-world atmosphere. There was neither art nor artifice, this was the detritus of war, take it or leave it, and mine host and his daughter made no concessions to visitors. Hill 62 has attempted to enter the modern world of coach tours and battlefield guides, of Brits and Canadians with euros to jingle in their pockets, some of which tumble into the purse of the obese man in the kiosk at the entrance to the museum. Once again the trenches (said to be original but plainly reconstructed) and the store sheds contain a mass of ungraded and unlabelled war-junk – much of it loot from the original Hill 60 café. I paid and entered the museum two or three times and then I lost interest in it. It was the café that held my interest: its fat owner who appears joined to and grown into the kiosk, the women behind the bar, the image of ageing ladies of the town, ‘Gay Paree’, circa 1918, its innumerable cats and its surreal, mad juxtaposition of objects fascinated me – and still does. Fluffy nylon animals beside polished shell cases, bright plastic Dutch dolls and windmills between rifle-grenades and coal-scuttle helmets. In the forecourt of the café fading plaster gnomes nuzzle up to hideous rusting pieces of war equipment (a Minenwerfer beside a pair of them, an aerial bomb beside another). Here is Charlie Chaplin (once again made of plaster with the paint peeling off) next to a piece of trench art made of shell cases soldered together. Laurel and Hardy (Stan Laurel has an arm missing). In a raised flowerbed an enormous rusted shell stands erect festooned with plastic flowers, like Mellors adorned with daisies by the amorous Lady Chatterley.

Battlefield exploration, drawing and sculpture  359 The artist has to be wary of clichés and he has to find a way in. He has the emotion – sometimes too much of it – he has the technique, or a whole battery of techniques. What he needs is the code-word to unlock the puzzle, a key to open the door. It was Hill 62’s juxtaposition of horrific killing machinery with fair-ground kitsch that gave me the key that I needed. Young historians, on each side of the militarist/anti-militarist divide, can manipulate statistics as they please, there is no one left alive to contradict them. The view from the café-museum is parable, or perhaps symbol. Realism is gone and the artist moves into the world of legend. For most, if not all, political artists the direct representation of a subject or a situation does not work. This is true when the artist is stuck in the middle of a war (Northern Ireland for example). It is even more important when the artist is removed from his subject by many decades. Illustration at second hand is as remote from reality as re-enactment groups dressed up as soldiers. Art has to be translated, or transmuted or transformed. In contrast, exploring the city of Ypres, walking the Salient or even sitting in one of the café-museums is real experience. The battlefield, the cemeteries, the monuments rarely fail to surprise and shock the artist, the poet or the writer. This emotional experience becomes his raw material.

Notes 1 The site near St Albans included a POW camp and a field where the army buried weapons during the immediate post-war period 1945–7. 2 There is a significant difference between traditional battlefield archaeology (which has often been prey to unscrupulous battlefield looters), and the more recent interdisciplinary endeavour known as modern conflict archaeology – see Saunders (2010: 11) for a recent account of this issue. [Editors’ Note] 3 See Saunders (2010: 12–15) for a brief contextualized account of The Diggers’ activities. 4 Personal communication from Patrik Indevuyst, The Shell Hole Bookshop, Ieper. 5 Jim Turner was a colleague of the author on the staff of Wimbledon School of Art at the time of the fiftieth Anniversary of the Battle of the Somme in 1966. The author never met Jim’s father whom he describes as a cantankerous, fierce old man. This story is one of many anecdotes the author was told by Jim about his father. 6 Rolls of barbed wire are more commonly found today underground than on the surface, particularly in archaeological excavations. [Editors’ Note] 7 This information was given by Alf Damon to the author as part of a long correspondence between the two between 1971 and 1979, while Damon was living in Tasmania. 8 At certain times of the agricultural year, the pungent smell of the fields on the approach to Ypres can be overwhelming even when travelling by car with the windows shut. 9 Personal communication from James Crosbee at Birmingham School of Art during the early 1970s. As a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Warwicks, Crosbee was wounded during the attack on Serre on 1 July 1916, and most of his platoon were killed. He ended the war with the rank of Captain. A gentle, humorous man for

360  Steve Hurst whom the war was such a bitter and tragic memory that I felt ashamed of questioning him about it. 10 The author saw this event on a television news broadcast at some point during the last thirty years. Interestingly, while unable to provide an attribution of date, time, or name, the young girl’s sudden and unexpected emotional breakdown made a deep emotional impact on him and he has always remembered it. 11 Moorehead was writing about the background to her recently published book Village of Secrets (Moorehead 2014).

References Classen, C. (ed.) (2005) The Book of Touch. Oxford: Berg. —— Howes, D., and Synott, A. (1994) Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell. London and New York: Routledge. Coombs, R. (1976) Before Endeavours Fade. London: Battle of Britain Prints International. Dendooven, D. (2009) Private Collections and the Origins of the In Flanders Fields Museum. Paper delivered at the conference Collecting war: trench art and souvenirs – manufacture and representation. In Flanders Fields Museum, Ieper, 18 Apr. Hurst, S. (2007) The Public Schools Battalion in the Great War. Barnsley: Pen and Sword. Jünger, E (2003) In Stahlgewittern (Storm of Steel). London: Allen Lane. Masefield, J. (1972) [1917] The Old Front Line. Bourne End: Spur Books. Moorehead, C. (2014) Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France. London: Chatto & Windus. Moshenska, G. (2008) A Hard Rain: Children’s Shrapnel Collections in the Second World War. Journal of Material Culture, 13(1): 107–25. Saunders, N. J. (2010) Killing Time: Archaeology and the First World War (2nd edn). Stroud: History Press. Van Meirvenne, M., Meklit, T., Verstraete, S., De Boever, M., and Tack, F. (2008) Could Shelling in the First World War have Increased Copper Concentrations in the Soil around Ypres? European Journal of Soil Science, 1–8.

23 War, memory and the senses in the Imperial War Museum London, 1920–2014 Alys Cundy

The role of the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in London since its foundation in 1917 has been to represent the war efforts and experiences of Britain, her Empire, and Commonwealth, to a diverse audience. This representation is based on extensive collections of the physical remains of war, ranging from heavy weaponry to letters and diaries, works of visual art to sound recordings. The diversity of these collections puts at the curators’ disposal a great degree of sensory display potential. At the same time, the museum’s aim to represent all aspects of all wars in which British and Imperial/Commonwealth forces have been involved since 1914 bestows a responsibility to capture and communicate a vast array of historic sense experiences. The IWM thus stands at the intersection of a number of areas of interest for scholars of the senses and conflict. The IWM can shed light particularly on the relationship between war, the senses and memory. Museums are institutions in which material culture is mobilized to represent the past. Thus, what differentiates museums from other forms of history-making and learning is the sensory experiences that they provide. Unlike textbooks, the raw material of museum narratives is objects, and objects are accessible in potential, if not always in practice, to all of the senses. In line with this trend scholars of museum studies have begun to engage with this aspect of the museum’s nature and function (Howes 2014). This multi-sensory nature of the museum experience can be a powerful stimulus for personal memories. Gaynor Kavanagh explains this potential in her exploration of what she terms the ‘dream space’ of the museum: ‘The shape or shadow of something, its texture or colour, the operation of space and the people moving through it can be triggers to an endless range of personal associations [therefore] we have to accept more fully the imagination, emotions, senses and memories as vital components of the experience of museums’ (Kavanagh 2000: 3). She continues by noting that the ‘multi-sensory experience of museums, together with the social nature of the visit, puts many visitors in a situation where recall is natural, even spontaneous’ (ibid. 4). Museums are also sites in which the connection between the senses and collective memories can be observed. Paul Connerton has argued for the significance of the senses and embodied experience to the transmission

362  Alys Cundy of collective social memory. It is ‘recollection and bodies’, he writes, that ‘are key to conveying social memory’ as commemorative rituals are unavoidably performative and thus enacted through the sensing body (Connerton 1989: 4). The museum visit does not necessarily conform to Connerton’s conception of a commemorative ritual, but it nevertheless is an important vehicle through which the past is transmitted to and preserved in the present. As with personal recollections, it is the sensory potential of the material culture within the museum that is key to its impact on collective memory. Gregory and Witcomb (2007: 267) cite Marius Kwint on the special capacity of objects within museums to ‘arouse dominant memories’, arguing that they do so through their ‘record-like [. . .] capacity to hold cultural memory that speaks beyond individual experience’. ‘This collective memory’, they assert, ‘is transmitted to us through the senses’. The IWM has further relevance as the close relationship between sensory experience and memory, both personal and collective, is also beginning to be interrogated by scholars of conflict and the senses. Santanu Das made an important intervention in this field with his 2005 work Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature. There he argued for the significance of ‘tactile experiences’ for those who lived through and wrote about their experience of that conflict (Das 2005: 5). Significantly, he also explored the way in which these tactile sensations could be transmitted once the conflict had ended. Touch, he acknowledged has a particular relationship to time and representation. The visual appearance of a person can be preserved through photography; recorded voices may speak from beyond the grave; smell and taste, more difficult to re-create, have been successfully simulated in recent years. But touch dies with the person, impervious to technology and preservation, as if the soul lodged in the skin. (Ibid. 27) Nevertheless, Das argued that there are ways in which past experiences of touch can be perceived by future audiences and these will be discussed below. Winterton also considered memory in her investigation of the sensescapes of the First World War (Winterton 2012; and this volume).1 Drawing on Yannis Hamilakis, she argued that the human body is a site onto which sensations are imprinted. These sensations can then be recalled through the body long after the ephemeral moment of the original experience has passed. Thus, following the First World War, the soldier’s body was a central vehicle through which the past was recalled as ‘the war-induced multi-sensory experiences did not cease with the armistice and the stillness of the battlefields’ (Winterton 2012: 238). In light of the above, this chapter seeks to bring together these fields of interest to explore how sensory memories of twentieth-century conflict have been experienced in the IWM in London. The analysis covers the

War, memory and the senses  363 displays at the institution’s three London ‘headquarters’ and spans from the first semi-permanent public display in 1920 up to the present incarnation, opened to coincide with the First World War centenary in summer 2014.2 It reveals a number of ways in which war memories have related to sensory experience at the museum. One of the earliest incarnations of this relationship involved those with personal experiences of war. For these people the war museum, with its extensive displays of the material culture of the conflict through which they had lived, served to prompt sensory recollections of their war experiences. For those observing the new museum the sight of the artefacts and their physical proximity was understood to conjure for former soldiers the sense-scapes of the battlefields and their own place within them. This sense experience was most prevalent in the inter-war years, when the First World War was a close memory and when all those visiting the museum had personal experience of it. However, the power of the IWM’s displays to recall wartime sensory experience for old soldiers was observed even decades after. The second major category of sense experience encompasses those with no personal experience of conflict. For these visitors cultural memory takes the place of personal recollection as the bridge between the sense-scapes of past and present. These cultural memories have been stimulated by different forms of sensory experience at the IWM. Some have been a response to the sight and the feel of war’s objects within the museum’s spaces and the imaginative responses these create. Others have been consciously manufactured by the museum’s curators. These generated experiences have become more prevalent in the museum since the 1960s as technology has developed and as the relationship between the museum’s visitors and the wars of the twentieth century have changed. They have proved controversial. This controversy, however, stems from an unhelpful assumed polarity between artifice and authenticity in heritage representations of conflict (Hewison 1987). This polarity needs to be challenged in order to better understand how museums can and should represent the sensory experiences of wars to audiences now far removed in time from the original embodied sensations.3

Personal sensory memories On the opening of its first major public display on 9 June 1920 the IWM and its collections were immediately understood to provide a site for sensory recollection. The prohibition of touch common within history and art museums at the time was applied to the IWM, meaning that the museum’s objects were primarily accessed through sight alone. However, a number of reviews of the museum in its early decades suggested that sight was only the entry point to a more expansive sensory affect. The day after the museum’s opening a reviewer in the Daily Express described the Crystal Palace as ‘a hall of vital memories’, in which ‘surgical instruments [. . .] carry back memories to the days of suffering, canteen buffets [. . .] summon up

364  Alys Cundy rollicking scenes of the days of real comradeship, and shattered German ‘planes [. . .] give the airman renewed thrills of victory’ (Anon. 1920). The references here to bodily suffering, to recollections of comradeship based on food consumption and on the ‘thrill’ of success all denote reminiscences in which remembered sense experiences play a part. In 1927 a reviewer wrote in the Evening News of the crowds of visitors that ‘gazed at the bristling arrays of lethal weapons in those crowded halls’ (Anon. 1927). This visual ‘gaze’ triggered a process that summoned the other senses of the lived past. The visitors, the reviewer noted, were mostly veterans. As these former soldiers ‘stared at the shining steel of the guns the last nine years seemed to slip away, and they were, in memory, once more in khaki’ (ibid.). This assertion contains the implied return of the soldiers’ wartime sensory world; they could once again feel the khaki. An article from The Mercury in 1970 suggests that the sensory stimulus offered to former soldiers by the IWM’s objects was lasting. When First World War veteran Laurence Cauldecourt was taken around the IWM his sensory experiences of the objects there were identified as powerful triggers to memory. Touch now, as well as sight, was employed to bridge the gulf between past and present, but the result was the same as it had been in the 1920s: Laurence, now a spritely 75-year-old, saw and touched some of the guns, tanks and other relics . . . it was a moving and nostalgic experience . . . He fingered the gun and, for a while, he wasn’t in the brightlylit War Museum. He was back on those battlefields. (Paper 1970) Museum, object, memory and the senses thus remained a potent combination. For others, observing the debris of war sparked an imaginative process that resulted in a poignant multi-sensory experience. Just before the opening at Crystal Palace, Ian Hay, writing in the Daily Mail, reported: The Crystal Palace is a roomy edifice, capable of harbouring many things besides unconvincing statuary and Handel Festivals [. . .] To-night the Palace harbours something new – voices, whispering voices, and the noiseless tread of feet that not so long ago were stamping manfully in ammunition boots over steel decks, or Belgian cobbles, or French mud, or Macedonian grit, or desert sand. They fill the air, softly and eager in recognition, or criticism, or speculation. For Hay, senses real and imagined operated in tandem within the IWM, the massed artefacts conjuring sounds from the past. He was not alone in such spectral sensations. C. W. Ingham reported experiencing similar sounds on visiting the museum twenty years later. The first thing he noticed on arriving at the museum was the sound of chattering children. However, he was ‘glad when the children went away’ as their ‘voices awoke echoes in both

War, memory and the senses  365 sound and memory. And while children chatter in the War Museum, you cannot hear properly the continuous whispering noise that fills the whole place’ (Ingham 1940) The noise, Ingham explained, was ‘a peculiar sound – like millions of tired feet scraping on for ever over a worn stone floor’. Significantly, this imagined sound responded to the exhibitions on display, suggesting the capacity of the IWM’s displays to evoke memories so powerfully that their sensory experiences bled into the present. Thus, Ingham heard the sound ‘first while I was looking at Jaggers [sic] sculptures’, where the ‘whispering now began to take form – Gordon Highlanders, 56th London Division, Canadians, Lancashire lads who went straight from their looms to the Near East, the Rifle Brigade, the Royal Fusiliers’. Furthermore, he noted, the ‘whispering seemed to grow louder as I looked at the exhibits’ (ibid.).

Cultural sensory memories The sight and touch of the museum’s objects was then undoubtedly evocative for the veteran. So too can it be for the visitor with no personal war experience. This relationship, however, is more problematic as it brings the museum and its audience up against the difficulty, recognized by Das (2005), of transmitting ephemeral embodied sensations to later generations. The extremes of the sensory experiences of war and the representational difficulties they entail were noted by writers and commentators during and in the immediate aftermath of the twentieth-century conflicts. Samuel Hynes, for example, has noted the representational struggle that many writers experienced when faced with the First World War. ‘They saw’, he argued, that ‘war was not an adventure or a crusade, but a valueless, formless experience that could not be rendered in the language, the images, and the conventions that existed’ (Hynes 1992: 2281–91). The problems associated with transforming the brutal bodily experiences of conflict into meaningful communicable form have continued since 1918, with the Holocaust as the most significant example. Of this trend of war in the twentieth century Coker has noted, ‘Beginning with the First World War and culminating in Auschwitz had not reality itself become so extreme as to outpace the capacity of language to represent it’ (Coker 1994: 192). If such experiences were inaccessible to contemporaries that had not experienced them then they must be so to an even greater degree to audiences removed by time. Jay Winter recognized this essential difficulty at the heart of war museums. Working on the development of the Historial de la Grande Guerre at Peronne, Winter observed ‘one fundamental conclusion’ common to all involved with these institutions is that all war museums fail to represent ‘the war’, because there was then and is now no consensus as to what constituted the war, wie es eigentlich gewesen war – as it actually was. In this sense, war museums are like cloud chambers in particle physics; they represent the traces and

366  Alys Cundy trajectories of collisions that happened a long time ago. They never describe war; they only tell us about its footprints on the map of our lives. (Winter 2012: 152) This is particularly the case when attempting to represent sense-scapes, so intimate and personal are they in their original affect. Faced with these representational difficulties war museums can mobilize cultural memory as a means of depicting sensations of the past.4 Visitors with no personal memories of conflict do undoubtedly possess ideas about and images of past wars, received through history teaching, film and television, literature, art and other media. These visions of the past are in turn accentuated, revised or enlarged through a visit to the war museum. These cultural memories are evoked by the sensory experiences of the IWM and include within them perceptions of the sense-scapes of past conflict. As noted above, these sensory experiences have been of different types and they have produced different forms of cultural memory. Two principal categories of such memories can be discerned: spontaneous and generated. Spontaneous cultural sensory memories have been a response to the massed material of war that the IWM holds and puts on display. The term spontaneous conveys the fact that these experiences consist of an immediate, personal and often emotive, relationship between the visitor and the tangible objects within the museum. They are a product of the IWM’s essential purpose as a showcase for war’s material culture, rather than a ‘ready-made’ set of sights, sounds and smells manufactured by the museum’s curators. The basis for these spontaneous sensory memories is imagination. Imaginative processes have been understood as an important feature in many visitors’ experience within museums (Mortensen and Madsen 2015: 254–5).5 Their potential value in displays of war material has been recognized by Das. He has written of the ways in which imagination can operate to fill the gap between the sensations of the present-day museum visit and that of the soldier of the First World War. He described this process in terms of his own response to the IWM’s 2002–3 exhibition ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’. This exhibition brought together varied artefacts and manuscript material belonging to twelve soldier poets of the First World War. Das found such objects affective due to both the sensory experiences that they provided and those that they were perceived to represent. These objects not only congeal time but also conceal processes of touch. The British Library reading room ticket of Brooke, the tunic worn by Blunden, the pocket watch of Thomas, the spectacles of Ledwidge or the hairbrushes of Wilfred Owen evoke the body of the user, traces of hands, quiescent but palpable [. . .] these objects have a precious, living quality for they are the archives of touch and intimacy – they have once held, protected or brushed against the bodies of their possessors in their

War, memory and the senses  367 youths or in the trenches and the hospitals, and through this intimate caress, these mute insensate objects seem to have been touched by life, bequeathed with the very pulse of their owners’ being. (Das 2005: 236) Although the majority of visitors to this exhibition had not lived through the events with which the objects were associated, Das suggested that they would be able to access a version of their sense-scapes through the combination of physical objects and cultural legacies that the original soldiers left behind. The original material objects on display in this exhibition evoked a chain of sense experiences: from sight to perception of tangibility, to an imagined sensing of past lives. This imaginative projection was made possible through the impressions of past wars provided by literature and art. Thus, ‘The pressed flowers of Thomas touch us all the more because of our acquaintance with his pastoral verse; a nondescript cap gains immediate significance when we realize that it is the German cap found by Blunden and mentioned in Undertones of War’ (ibid. 237). Nor is it only artefacts that can initiate this process. Winterton cites Colin Renfrew who interprets the same series of transmissions of sensation occurring for visitors viewing John Singer Sargent’s painting Gassed, on display at the IWM since 1920. In creating the work, Winterton explains, Sargent had transformed his own experiences into lasting physical form, thereby ensuring that ‘his multisensorial past mingles with our visual present so that we might understand and know his past’ (Winterton 2012: 233). Generated cultural sensory memories are of a very different type. These consist of displays created by curators in order to augment the visitors’ imagination with external sensory depictions. Such displays came to have a presence in the IWM from the 1960s onwards and were the product of changing museum and cultural memory contexts. At the same time as the two world wars were receding into history the techniques and ambition of the museums sector were becoming increasingly sophisticated.6 In response the IWM’s Director, Noble Frankland, and his curators set out to bring visitors closer to past war experiences by offering a simulacrum of the embodied sensations of conflict. These displays were directly multi-sensory and thus did not rely on the personal imagination of the visitor to transform sight into a perception of the other senses through empathetic projection. They were also, particularly in the case of the generated sense displays of the 1980s and 1990s, the product of the museum’s ambition to entertain its audience and to compete with, or not fall behind, other museum and heritage representations. The adoption of generated sense experiences by the IWM began during Frankland’s directorship as a means of adjusting for the departure of living memory by generating sensory experiences. A report on the reorganization of the museum galleries in 1967 laid out plans for these early experiments in multi-sensory stimulation. It was necessary, the report instructed, that ‘all

368  Alys Cundy possible means should be employed to create the idea of the atmosphere and movement of war’ (Simkins 1967). This was to include ‘Life-size dioramas, the animation of display figures and the use of back projection films’ (ibid.). Building on these early techniques, the generated sensory displays reached their peak in the ‘Experiences’ that formed a part of the ‘new’ Imperial War Museum under Dr Alan Borg. Opened in 1989 the ‘Blitz Experience’ offered visitors the opportunity to enter a recreated bomb shelter, listen to a recorded script and feel the shaking of a simulated air raid. The ‘Trench Experience’ followed in 1990, providing visitors with a walk-through of a trench complete with sound and smell effects (IWM 1996: 11). With such elaborate generated sense ‘Experiences’ the IWM curators intended to communicate to the visitor the embodied experience of life on the battlefields and home front of the two world wars. In a brief for the two displays, Penny Ritchie Calder, head of Permanent Exhibitions, explained their purpose. They were to ‘bring to life important aspects of warfare in our century of which increasingly fewer visitors will have had direct experience’. In doing so they were to ‘recreate the intensity and drama of these aspects’ in a way that enabled the visitor to ‘experience physically and emotionally what it was like “to be there”’ in a way not possible with ‘conventional static showcase displays’ (Ritchie Calder 1988). Furthermore, the sensory experience was perceived as a route to cognitive processes. A report by the exhibition designers, Jasper Jacobs Associates, noted that the ‘Experiences’ were considered essential to visitors gaining a ‘direct understanding of what it was like’ to have lived through these situations (Jasper Jacobs 1988). To provide this understanding the designers sought to play on the visitors’ ‘sense of space or enclosure’ and thus to provide ‘the appropriate texture and sensation’ that would conjure the sense-scapes of the two World Wars (ibid.). The use of simulated sense-scapes in order to bring the visitor closer to the past has continued in the most recent of the IWM’s displays. The large new First World War galleries that were opened in summer 2014 include sound and light effects, film and animation. Roger Mann, one of the designers from the firm behind the new galleries, explained the intention of these sensory prompts. ‘The challenge’ when creating the First World War galleries, he explained, was ‘to create a “felt” experience that would engage the attention of younger, increasingly distanced and in some cases de-sensitised generations’ (Mann 2014). One example of the efforts to achieve this comes in the section of the exhibition which addresses causes of the slaughter of one million men during just five months of fighting in 1914. Here an original French field gun is incorporated within a larger audio-visual scene, which attempts to convey the ‘Shock’ of weaponry developments during the conflict. Mann described the ambition for this scene. It was intended to demonstrate to visitors ‘the lethal ferocity and legacy’ of this piece of artillery, for which ‘no authentic visual record exists’ (Mann 2014). To work around this lack of visual evidence the designers ‘chose to create a dramatic animated film that is projected onto a

War, memory and the senses  369 life-size set of cut-out running figures in range of the weapon’ (ibid.). The film, which plays on a loop is accompanied by the ‘sound of splintering casing and the whistle of the shrapnel’. Mann justified the creation of this multi-sensory animation by appealing to the need to ‘help objects now lost in time engage modern audiences with their stories of human conflict and courage’ (ibid.). The assertion that original objects require the ‘help’ of modern multi-sensory display techniques in order to engage audiences demonstrates the difference of this position from one based on the sensory potential of material culture as prompts for spontaneous imaginative processes, as celebrated by Das. The new First World War galleries also include a ‘trench’ area. While not a direct replacement for the former ‘Trench Experience’, this employs sound, light and visual effects to promote engagement in visitors now a century distant from the original event (see Cornish, this volume). Generated experiences at the IWM have proved controversial. The ‘Experiences’ attracted particular criticism for their perceived inauthenticity; including their failure to faithfully represent wartime sense-scapes. A reviewer for The Times wrote of these exhibits in 1989: There is no way, of course, that this ‘Experience’ mini-theatre can reveal what fragment of memory it will stir up for many who saw such days . . . Nor . . . will it ever replicate the dead limbs, the live rats – or what passed in the minds of young men . . . (James 1989) Noble Frankland was of a similar opinion of the displays introduced by his successor. He wrote in his autobiography that these ‘so-called “virtual reality” experience exhibitions’ were ‘the stuff of theme parks rather than historical museums’, so inadequate were they in capturing the true sensory detail of the battlefields. ‘An honest attempt at realism’, he concluded, could only be achieved ‘by concealing a machine gun in the sales stall [. . .] and advertising the fact that this would open fire at random times on random days’ (Frankland 1998: 175). With this sensation of bodily fear lacking, the ‘Experiences’ were nothing more than entertainment. These criticisms were made against the backdrop of wider debates about authenticity and artifice within museum and heritage representations. Within these debates there has been established a polarity between the ‘authentic’ material object, the original preserve of museums and heritage sites, and ‘artificial’ reconstruction and simulation.7 Some within the sector valorize the former whilst protesting against the latter. Sharon Macdonald, in her recent work Memorylands, identified an ‘anxiety’ amongst those working in and observing heritage that Europe is turning into a ‘heritage theme park’ in which the past is marketed in ever-more artificial terms. ‘The axis of this opposition’, she notes, ‘is authenticity. Put over crudely, the market is typically considered inauthentic – as concerned only with profit; and heritage is valued for its promise to provide “something more”, “something real” – the

370  Alys Cundy authentic. So when the two come together, this is oxymoronic and unsettling’ (Macdonald 2013: 109–10). For those holding this opinion, whilst the spontaneous engagement in past sensory worlds prompted by the physical object is a valid concern of museums, the generated sensory simulation is better left to more commercial ventures. The curators and exhibition designers responsible for the IWM’s simulations had an alternative judgement of the heritage value and veracity of their displays. Throughout the planning process for the ‘Trench’ and the ‘Blitz’ authenticity was a repeated ambition. A brief by Jasper Jacobs noted that it was ‘of the utmost importance that in every respect these embody the qualities of authenticity and sensation which will convey to the public the significance of the aspects of the two conflicts which are being presented in a manner sensitive as well as exciting’ (Jacobs 1988). The historian Richard Espley has defended ‘The Trench Experience’ on different terms. The value of the exhibit, he argued, lies less in its absolute accuracy and more in its general impact. ‘While the gallery’, he admitted, does not provide the whole truth of trench warfare it does provide an accessible impression of certain aspects of this elusive historical situation. Its light, sound and smell effects, and its multiplicity of human stories told in fragments across the jumbled progress of a few minutes mimic in some important ways a truth of the confusion of the disorientation of the battlefield. (Espley 2008: 343) This support for experiential displays echoes that of Alison Landsberg in her development of the concept of prosthetic memory. As part of her argument she presented a justification of the methods used at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) to simulate sensations associated with that dark history. ‘The museum’, she argues, ‘is designed to be an experience for the visitor. This is not to say that visitors somehow experience the Holocaust. Rather, they have an experience that positions their bodies to be better able to understand an otherwise unthinkable event’ (Landsberg 2004: 131). Thus Landsberg, like the curators of the IWM ‘Experiences’, believes that manufactured physical prompts can serve cognitive understanding. These ‘inauthentic’ memories, she asserts, can thus be as affecting as ‘authentic’ ones (ibid. 117–18). Both Landsberg and Espley offer a way of thinking about the IWM’s generated sensory displays that breaks away from the authenticity/artifice polarity that tends to obstruct more than it illuminates. As Espley notes, the primary mistake in discussing these representations is ‘to continue to rely upon the vocabulary of the “realistic” and the “authentic”’ as it is ‘obvious that such a stable, univocal narrative was and is unavailable’ (Espley 2008: 345). Furthermore, moving away from the existing terms of the debate makes it possible to judge sensory techniques by the extent to which they

War, memory and the senses  371 promote imaginative and empathetic engagement with past conflict. In this alternative formulation the spontaneous sensory experiences prompted by the material culture of the IWM’s collections are to be valued for the way in which they encourage the visitor to construct around the sight of the objects a creative perception of the sense experiences of their original users. However, the generated sensory experiences can also be understood to operate in this way. For those, the very young, those with no prior knowledge of the period or events depicted, or visitors from a range of backgrounds who may not have access to the cultural memories necessary for an imaginative spontaneous response to physical objects, simulations can provide the necessary prompts to begin an imaginative engagement with the past. Providing that curators do not feign an authenticity that is not possible, those experiencing these simulations will recognize that they do not fully replicate past sense experience. On reaching the limits of the displays’ authenticity visitors will be encouraged to fill in the gaps with their own projections, while at the same time appreciating the difficulty of representing faithfully the experience of war. And bringing visitors to such a recognition is surely an essential purpose of a war museum such as the IWM.

Conclusion The lively academic interest in the senses over the past decade has been vital in unlocking neglected areas of understanding about historic conflicts. Central to the growing number of investigations in this area has been a desire to get closer to and grasp more fundamentally the lived, embodied human experience of war in the past. It is the task of museums that take historic wars as their subject to convey the insights into this sensory past to a wide audience. These institutions are particularly well suited to doing so. The centre of their function and appeal is material culture, the three-dimensional tangibility of which links it inextricably to all five senses, even though it is commonly sight that is privileged in displays where visitors may look but not touch. The history of the IWM shows that the material culture in the museum has been provided immediate sensory experiences to visitors that have acted as a prompt to or entrance point for memories of sensations in the past. For those visiting the museum in its first decades these sensory memories were their own; as the sight and potential tangibility of the physical remains of conflict summoned their own wartime pasts, temporarily transporting them back into khaki (Anon. 1927). For later visitors the sense experiences at the museum prompted an engagement with cultural memories of past conflict, in which the sensations of living through and participating in war were addressed across the distance of time and circumstance. Some of these sensory cultural memories were spontaneous; imaginative personal responses to material culture that built on a cultural awareness of the context of the objects and an empathetic projection into the sense-scapes of those who first used them. Others were generated; constructed by curators

372  Alys Cundy conscious of the need to interest visitors in the experiences of the past in ways that were familiar and entertaining. These experiences provided a simulation of the sensory world of the past, and in doing so attempted to reconnect visitors with war as lived. The generated nature of these sensory depictions has drawn criticism for their perceived inauthenticity. However, such an assumed polarity of authenticity and artifice is an obstruction to understanding the way in which such simulations engage audiences. Allowing visitors without the background knowledge necessary to experience spontaneous sensory cultural memories, the generated displays enable empathetic and imaginative processes that are of value to the function of the war museum. The history of the IWM demonstrates the varied and complex ways in which visitors engage with past sensory experiences of war within museums. Through this exploration of one institution this chapter hopes to demonstrate the rich potential of these institutions for the study of conflict and the senses. Literature on the theoretical aspects of the senses has been sensitive to the relationship between the sensory world studied, the senses of those studying it and the sensory experiences of those to which the research is conveyed. War museums are a valuable institution in which this nexus of sensory experience can be explored. Further research within war museums; both in terms of the intentions of curators and the perceptions of the visitors would be valuable in assessing how creators and audiences understand the relation between the museum sense-scape and those of conflicts in the past. Such research would make an important contribution to our understanding of the ways in which the sensory worlds of war can be and are remembered; a process at the heart of our understanding of conflict as not just historic event but as human experience.

Notes 1 Winterton coins the term ‘sense-scape’ to convey ‘experiences of the soldier body in the trench world of the Western Front’ that ‘were multi-sensorial, as men were constantly assaulted by the sounds, sights, and smells of war’ (2012: 231). 2 The IWM was first housed in the Crystal Palace, before moving to South Kensington in 1924 and to its current principal site at Lambeth Road in 1936. The IWM also now includes IWM Duxford, HMS Belfast, the Churchill War Rooms and IWM North. However, these branches are not considered here. 3 Some have begun to challenge the assumed correlation of authenticity/positive vs artifice/negative. See Landsberg (2004) and Espley (2008). 4 Cultural memory is used here as defined by Marita Sturken, as ‘a field of cultural negotiation through which different stories vie for a place in history’ (1997: 1). Such memory is produced ‘through objects, images and representations’ such as those which form the displays at the IWM (ibid. 3). Andreas Huyssen’s description of cultural memory as expressed in institution’s, public discussions, theory, art, literature and the media is also relevant here (1995). 5 Keightley and Pickering have coined the term ‘mnemonic imagination’ to capture the closely bound interrelationship between remembering and creative imaginative practices (cited in Mortensen and Madsen 2015: 255).

War, memory and the senses  373 6 From the 1960s onwards ambitious experiments in display began occurring across the country. The Museums Journal records diverse examples, including an Edinburgh Shakespeare exhibition in which, ‘translucent structures glowed in the shadows, lights flashed, jewellery glittered, objects moved and the scent of musk and the music of madrigals was present everywhere’ (Law 1965: 45) and a display of Diaghilev’s dance costumes in which the designer, ‘Through an ingenious use of light and sound [. . .] managed to create, in his own words, “the illusion of a “magic box”’ – the figures appeared to move and the enchantment of the theatre was recreated’ (Glaister and Wyman 1980: 20). Large-scale reconstructed scenes made several high-profile appearances including in the Castle Museum in York (Glover and Richards 1977: 161–2) and in the redesigned Museum of London (Simmons 1977: 15–18). 7 It was the increasing use of reconstruction in the crop of ‘heritage centres’ that emerged in the 1980s that led Robert Hewison to write The Heritage Industry, in which he protested against what he saw as the commercialization and sanitization of the past using market-driven methods (1987).

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Afterword War on the senses Joanna Bourke

War is hell on the senses. It assaults sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch. It activates nociception. Combatants and their victims feel abnormally hot or cold; they are physically unbalanced and often disorientated, failing in their attempts to ‘make sense’ of what they are feeling. This was what journalist Fritz August Voigt discovered, when he struggled to describe working as a medic in a Casualty Clearing Station during the First World War. The stench of gas gangrene was ‘almost unendurable’, he stammered. He was profoundly disturbed when a soldier who was having his wounds dressed ‘threw back his head, bared his teeth, and uttered shrill, piercing cries in sudden blasts’. He was shocked when he noticed that a soldier who was having his shattered, gangrenous knee amputated had woken up halfway through the operation. Voigt was tormented by the sight of this patient’s face: it was ‘ashen pale and the sweat ran down it in big drops’. The man was ‘too weak to struggle, but his eyes were staring in a way that was terrible to see’. While Voigt held the patient’s foot, he heard the surgeon’s blunt saw ‘grated harshly as it cut through the bone’. He heard the man moaning ‘in piteous drawling tones: “Jesus Christ have mercy on me, God Almighty have mercy upon me, and forgive me all my sins”’ (F.A.V. 1920: 56–7). Nothing prepares sentient creatures for war’s devastation. Within less than an hour into battle, thousands of normally robust men would lose their limbs. In the days, weeks, and years to come, perhaps a phantom one would take its place, itching or burning like fire. Many of the senses-at-war have no counterpart in the civilian world. The sound of a grenade detonating and the stench of high explosives are unique to war. Horses and dogs trembled uncontrollably; some birds learnt to imitate rifle fire. The metallic smell of blood was shared by all those in the trenches, as was the sight of human bone, muscle, tissue, skin, hair and fat strewn around. Such assaults on the senses are not incidental to the warring enterprise. Mobilizing human and animal sensibilities are intrinsic components of militarization. From the moment war is declared, the sensual worlds of all protagonists are marshalled to the cause. In training camps, bodies are redesigned. Muscles materialize. Scars appear; fat disappears. The mess hall plays havoc with smell receptors and taste buds. During drills, recruits

376  Joanna Bourke become accustomed to matching in rhythm, being yelled at and staggering fatigue. Weapon drills are repeated over and over until the metallic ‘arm’ becomes indistinguishable from the sensing body. Airmen are trained to hear subtle changes in the roar of their engines. Naval personnel learn to ignore the taste of salt on their lips. In ‘realism training’, soldiers gradually become inured to the acrid smell of sulphur, charcoal and saltpetre. This initial mobilization of bodily functions is followed by uncompromising, calculated violence. This could excite the senses. As a state of exception, war can enliven people, making them exquisitely attentive to their environment. Artists might portray war as a heroic adventure; the sun felt warmer; flowers, more colourful; a lover’s kiss, sweeter. For others, war was – literally – shit. It could be overwhelming. The sight of so much death caused people to shake, vomit, even faint. Pain, anxiety and terror could also eradicate the sense of self, as in the muselmänner of the Nazi concentration camps or the catatonic, thousand-yard stare of the shell-shocked. In the end, the senses are hushed and then razed in death. Precisely because war purposefully mobilizes, assaults and then destroys sentient life, it provides a unique context within which to study the senses. Wartime experiences are extreme, highlighting the complexity of human and animal feeling-states. Whether we adopt an Aristotelian classification of the five senses or more recent neuroscientific ones, it is important not to take for granted that we know what the senses are. Most cultural theorists, anthropologists and historians reject universalist, physiological claims of a straightforward association between sensory cell types that respond to specific physical phenomena and then send signals to regions within the brain for interpretation. This is not to doubt that physiological processes are necessary for sensual experiences: to see an object, two distinct types of receptors (one for colour and one for brightness) have to be present; to taste, a person needs hundreds of taste receptor cells; and so on. Rather, it is to suggest that there is no such thing as raw sensation; sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch exist in acts of evaluation. It is simply not the case that a person ‘feels’ something, after which affective, cognitive, and motivational processes ‘kick-in’ – responding and interpreting the ‘feeling’. The mind and the body are integrated. Furthermore, the body is itself social. Although senses are experienced by the individual – they have what the French phenomenological philosopher Paul Ricoeur calls a ‘mine-ness’ (Ricoeur 1992: 132) – they emerge from, are recognized by, and belong to the collective. The senses materialize in negotiation with social worlds. From the moment of birth, infants are initiated into cultures of sensuality. They are taught and they learn about their body and its relationship with the world in culturally variant ways, all of which affect the way they see, smell, taste, touch and hear. Another way of expressing this is to note that the physiological body is not a culture-free object. At every point, the facts of physiology are given cultural meanings and these meanings are not something that exist in a pre-social universe,

Afterword  377 but are an integral part of the very organization of that physiology. In other words, it is not simply the case that culture ‘inscribes’ something on a ‘natural’, pre-social physiology, but that physiological processes cannot be separated from the various and varying cultural meanings given to those senses. As such, the senses are historically constituted and reconstituted in relation to language, social and environmental interactions, and bodily comportment (Bourke 2014). There are many advantages to this approach. I have already mentioned the first one: it historicizes the senses, enabling us to analyse changes within and between different historical communities. Because people learn how to frame their descriptions of senses and because these conventions change over time, attention must always be paid to genre, audience and context. For example, I began this afterword by discussing the way Fritz August Voigt described the painful assault on his senses while working in a Casualty Clearing Station. It is essential to note that his memoir was written at the end of a disillusioning war and published by a pacifist press. A very different sensual account of gas gangrene and amputation emerges in a memoir written by a surgeon who worked in a field hospital during the American Civil War. Unlike Voigt, he recalled that ‘I do not think I heard a groan or a cry’ throughout his time at the hospital. He even conjured up a picture of one ‘poor fellow . . . walking up and down holding the freshly amputated stump of his forearm in the remaining arm’. The soldier’s jaw was ‘firmly set, and his face wore the hard, fixed expression of pain, yet he made no complaint’ (Wyeth 1914: 256). Not only was this later sense-memoir published to stimulate patriotic pride, but it also arose in the context of a civil war in which suffering itself was assumed to be redemptive. The second advantage of understanding the senses as historically constituted is that it acknowledges that they are collective entities. The way an individual sees, smells, hears, tastes and touches affects the way other individuals see, smell, hear, taste and touch. The senses are not internal to themselves but move outward, affecting witnesses. Bodies communicate with other bodies. Sensations are contagious. They can even be transmitted between generations, surviving either as ghostly spectres or somatic remnants in the minds and bodies of people who weren’t even present during the initial event. The final advantage is that it draws attention to the ways in which the senses are deeply enmeshed in political relations. There is no such thing as individual senses because ways of being-in-the-world are always already embedded in inequitable social and economic relations. Individuals are born into worlds not of their own making; they accommodate and acquiesce, struggle and submit, to the environmental and social contexts within which they find themselves, but always from a starting point that is not of their own choosing. Most soldiers did not choose the visual, auditory, and tactile horrors of trenches. Being a woman in Berlin as the rapacious Red Army advanced was not a choice. The poor, minority groups and those

378  Joanna Bourke working in the most hazardous military positions are more likely to have their sensual worlds assaulted. The senses are indelibly entangled in human and environmental interactions, and can never be abstracted from wider, political relations. This volume contributes to the multiple ways in which the senses are filtered through emotion, cognition and environment. It emphasizes the importance of culture in collaborating in the creation of physiological bodies. Perception of the senses always occurs in social worlds, filtered through the prism of the entirety of a person’s lived experiences, including their sensual physiologies, emotional states, cognitive beliefs and relational standing in various communities.

References Bourke, J. (2014) The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ‘F.A.V.’ [Voigt, Fritz August] (1920) Combed Out. London: Swarthmore Press. Ricoeur, P. (1992) Oneself as Another. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Wyeth, J. (1914) With Sabre and Scalpel: The Autobiography of a Soldier and Surgeon. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Index

absence see presence/absence acoustics and war, 93–105 acoustic mirrors, 35; shadowing, 35 Across the Black Waters (Mulk Raj), 309 A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Empire, 1800–1920, ix aerial landscape (and senses), 3 aerial photographs, 34 aero engines (sounds of), 113–15, 123–4 air-scape, 239–41; and see sense-scape aircraft, and sensory experience, 237–55; nose art of, 246 (Figure 16.2); and sounds of, see aero engines (sounds of) affect, 143–4 Aguateros (in Chaco War), see water carriers air raid shelter, 107, 112 air raid siren, 110–13 (Figure 7.1), 114 Alderney, 273, and see Channel Islands Alpenvorland (Nazi sector or northern Italy), 146 Alps/Alpine warfare (First World War), see, Italian Front, and Punta Linke Alÿs, Francis (artist), 99–103 American Civil War, 6–7 American Library Association (Library War Service of), 203 amputation, 377 An Officer’s Manual of the Western Front 174 Ancre valley (Somme, France), 333 Anderson shelter, 112 Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921), 289 animals, as ‘tunnellers friends’, 55; use of metaphors, 164 Anthem for Doomed Youth (exhibition, Imperial War Museum), 366

anti-aircraft gun, 117 (Figure 7.2) anti-Fascism/anti-Nazi Resistance in Italy, 142–54 anticipation, see bukimi anxiety caused by combat, 177, 244–5 appetite, loss of/intensification of in battle, 180 Apocalypse Now! (Hollywood film), 5 arborglyphs, 266, and see graffiti archives, Military (Dublin), 294, 301 Archaeologies of Internment, 2011, 257 archaeologists and sculptors, 349 archaeology and the senses, xxi, 57, 67–9, 237–40, 251, 257 Aristotle, 77 Aritsuka, Dr Ryoji, 123, Armistice Day (First World War), 94, 200, 363 armistices, 95, 146, 151 Arras, Battle of, 328 Arrival and Departure 1943 (Arthur Koestler), 231–2 art, aircraft nose, 246 (Figure 16.2) Artaxerxes (in David Jones poem), 3 art, and the senses in battlefield exploration, 344–60 artists, sensitization to stimuli, 354–5 artillery bombardments, descriptions and sounds of, 93–4, 337–8 artillery shell cases (as gas gongs), 4 artillery shell cases (as trench art), 6 Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 346 Athenaeum Club, London, 34 Auchonvillers (Somme, France), 329, 335 Audoin-Rouzeau, Stéphane, 32 Auntie Mabel’s War (Marian Wenzel and John Cornish), 38 Auschwitz, 2, 365

380 Index Australian War Memorial (Canberra), 312 Austrian-Hungarian soldiers, 62 Austro-Hungarian position at Punta Linke, 36, 62–71 authenticity (issues of), 22–4; museum representation and, 24–5, 369–70 auto-ethnographical approach. 238 autograph books (Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin), 293–6, 300 (Figure 19.5) avalanches, 4, 31, 69, 218 Aveluy Wood, (Somme, France), 351 ‘Baby Blitz’, The, 108 Bairnsfather, Bruce (First World War cartoon by), 172 Bapaume (Somme, France), 330 Barad, Karen, 143–4 barbed wire, 64, 332, 351, 357, 359 Barbusse, Henri, 33 ’Bastille of Ireland, the’ (Kilmainham Gaol), 302 Battle of Arras (1917), 328 Battle of Neuve Chapelle, 317 Battle of Okinawa, xxi, 123, 126 Battle of the Somme, 20, 24, 93, 339, 346, 354 Battle of the Somme (film), 21–2, 24, 333, 336 Battle of Okinawa, 123 battlefield tourism, 76–92 Beachy Head, 94 Beaucourt (Somme, France), 332 Beckmann, Max, 349–50 Begunje Gestapo prison (Slovenia), 5, 256–71 Belegschaft (Gestapo prison cells), 259–60 Bérillon, Doctor Edgar, 191 ‘Beaumont’ 1971 (sculpture by Steve Hurst), 347 (Figure 22.1) Beaumont Hamel (Somme, France), 327, 332, 334, 347; ‘Front Line Trench in Beaumont on 3 September 1916’ (painting by Albert Heim), 340 Bellewarde Ridge (Ypres, Belgium), 347 Belzec, extermination camp, 229–30 Bernède, Allain, 36 ‘Big Bertha’ (German 420mm mortar), 25 biscuits (First World War), 172, 179, 336, 338; and see food and drink Blitz (London), 108, 112, 129; ‘myth of’, 119

‘Blitz Experience’ (Imperial War Museum), 368 blood/bloodstains, 25 Blunden, Edmund, 33, 334, 367 body, the soldier, 100–3, 362; female, 297; involuntary reactions to experiencing the Holocaust, 231 Body Parts: Essays on Life-Writing (Hermione Lee) 323 Bolivia, see Chaco War, The bombardments see artillery bombardments Bomber Command, RAF, 248–9 (Figure 16.4) bombilla (metal straw for drinking mate), 224; and see mate Bombproof (hospital magazine), 200–1, 203–4 bombs (aerial), 115–17; and see ‘social suffering’, 128 Borg, Alan, 368 Borneo, 159 Braley, Berton, 201–2 brass polish (smell of), 6, 38 bread, 64, 172, 179–80, 191–2 (Figure 12.6), 328, 330–1, 336; and see war bread Bronze Age, 68, 278 bucket, see latrine bucket bukimi (fearful anticipation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), 129 bully beef (boiled beef ration of First World War), 173–4, and see food and drink ‘bumf’ (British soldier slang) see ‘bum fodder’ ‘bum fodder’ (British soldier slang for toilet paper, often reduced to ‘bumf’), 193 bunkers, on Channel Islands, 276–80 (Figures 18.3, 18.4); disguised as prehistoric monuments, 278; folklore associations of, 278 Buzz bombs, see VI (German pilotless rocket-plane), and ‘Doodlebugs’ caca (French slang for faeces), 191 Cadolten (Italian village), 145 (Figure 9.1) café-museums, 83–5, 89, 349, 357–9 Calcutta, see Kolkata calories, 171, and see food and drink Calvino, Italo, 70

Index  381 camouflage, 162, 263 canteen, 219 Caramayola, see canteen Carinthia, Slovenia, 258 Carnolia, Upper, 258 Carso, 2–3 cartoons, 172, 178, 196, 204, 285–6, 293, 328, 358 carvings, trench art, 50–1 (Figure 3.2); and see arborglyphs; graffiti Adrian (French steel helmet), 345 Casson-Mann (exhibition design company), 17 Cat Island, 157 Cauldecourt, Laurence, objects as triggers to memory, 364 caves, xxi, 36, 43, 49–50, 112, 124, 128, 130–3 (Figure 8.2), 135–6, 146, 148, 163, 286; and see The Cave Mouth and the Giant Voice (artwork/film) Cenotaph, London, xxii, 94–5, 310; Kenotaphion (CD of Cenotaph silences), 94–5 Centenary (First World War), 15, 30, 76, 93, 346, 363 Chaco, The, 213–14 Chaco War, The, 213–28 Chadwick, Roy, 238 Chaffers, Colonel N.B., 37 chalk, 47–8, 50–4 (Figure 3.4), 295, 301, 349 chamber-pot, 183–4 (Figure 12.1) Channel Islands, 5, 272–88 Channel Islands Occupation Society (CIOS), 273 Cheshire, Leonard, 245 Chielens, Piet, 345 children, and art, 355–6; and Second World War, 106–22; voices in museum, 364–5 Chislehurst Caves, Kent, 112 Christmas Truce 1914, 79 (Figure 5.1), 176 cigarettes, see smoking cigars, see smoking cigarette cards, 109, 114 cigarette lighters (trench art) 84 Civil War, American, 6–7 civil wars, 129, 142, 146–8, 152, 267; and see Irish Civil War Classen, Constance, ix–xx claustrophobia, 3, 14, 22, 43, 51–2, 54, 147, 151

Clouting, Cavalryman Ben, 172 climate change/melting glaciers, 62 coca leaf/chewing, in Chaco War, 224–5 collecting (war objects), 17, 21, 84, 107, 239, 344–5 Collier’s (magazine), 230 commemoration, of war 86–7; of Easter Rising, 300–2 concentration camp, 229–30, 234, 259, 267, 275, 376 ‘conflict culture’, 44 confinement, 6 Connerton, Paul, 361–2 Connor, Steve, 129 consumption, of food, 177 Conversion Flight Book (for Lancaster bombers), 246 cooking, smell of in trenches, 331 Coombs, Rose, 345, 352–3 Cope, Harold (bloodstained jacket), 25 Corbin, Alain, 183 corned beef, 82 Courmont, Juliette, 191 crap, see defecation Crimea, 171 ‘Crucifix Corner’, (trench name), 34 Crystal Palace, London, 363–4, 372 D-Day, 356 Dad’s Army, BBC television series, 106 Daily Express, 363 Daily Mail, 364 Daily Telegraph, 248 Dambusters (film), 115 Darke, Diana (author, My House in Damascus), 36 Das, Colonel Dr Manindranath, (war mementoes of), 312–13 (Figure 20.3) Das, Santanu, xx, 216, 362 Davis, Katie (filmmaker and installation artist), 95–9 Dayak (indigenous people of Borneo), 159 de Cupere, Peter, 8 de Garis, Marie, 278 defecation, xx, 3, 173–4, 183–95 (Figure 12.3); death while engaged in, 188; and health 189–93 (Figure 12.7) dehumanization, of Japanese by Americans, 161, 164; of Jews by Nazis, 231 dehydration, 213, 217, 219

382 Index Dendooven, Dominiek, 357 dentists, see teeth diarrhoea, 175–7, 218 Diana, Princess (funeral of), 95 digestion, 171–180 Diggers, The (group), 344 dinner gongs, 4 disorientation (Italian adjective for), see spaesato Dixmuide (Ijzer Tower) Belgium, 82 Do It (film artwork), 100 Doegen, Wilhelm, 319 dogs, use of to smell Japanese soldiers, 160–1 ‘Doodlebugs’ (German V1 pilotless rocket-planes), 108, 118–19; and see V1 doughnuts, and recuperation, 204–7 (Figures 13.2–4) Draga Valley, 263 drawings (and war), 21, 57, 96, 104, 207, 267–9, 346–7, 355, 357 Dresden Military History Museum, 69 drink, see food and drink drinking water, see water drumfire (‘Trommelfeur’), effects of, 337–8 Dublin, 94; Kilmainham Gaol (Dublin), 289–304 dugouts, German, 335–6 (Figure 21.3); smell of, 334 Dunn, Captain J.C. (First World War diary of), 172 dysentery, 175 dystopia, 143, 151 Eachus, Private S.T. (First World War diary of), 171–2 Easter Rising (1916), 289–90; programmes commemorating, 300–1 (Figure 19.5) eating, see consumption of food, and see also food and drink El Salvador, civil war (mental and physical effects of), 129 ethnicity and the senses, 157–170 Evening News, 364 excretion/excreta, xx, 1, 3, 174, 184–5, 193, 376; and see defecation execution (of prisoners), 263–5 extermination camps (Nazi), 229–36 Extreme Relic Hunters (group), 344

facsimiles, 18, 21, 24 faeces, 3, 51, 188–9, 218; and propaganda, 190–93; French slang term for 191; and see defecation; excreta fat, intake by First World War soldiers, 175; and see food and drink Faust, Drew Gilpin, 7 female body, 297 Field Service Pocket Book 1914, 174–5, 179 First World War and the senses, 68 fleas, 260 flowers, paintings and sensorial aspects of, 327–43 flu, see, influenza, and The Flu (poem) food and drink, 2, 46, 82, 88–9, 171–82, 328–9 (Figure 21.1), 335–6 (Figure 21.3), 354; German at Christmas 1914, 331; in Gestapo prison, 262–263; and recuperation, 204–7 (Figures 13.2–4) food poisoning, 176 folklore, of Guernsey landscape and parallels with bunkers, 278–80 Ford Cuatro, water carrier in the Chaco War, 221 (Figure 14.2) Forni glacier (Alps), 64, 69 Fort Belvedere (Lavarone, Trentino), 69 Fortines (military outposts in the Chaco War), 215 Frankland, Noble, 367 Fricourt (Somme, France), 333–4, 351–2 Froidmont souterraine (Chemin des Dames), 51 (Figure 3.2) ‘Front Line Trench in Beaumont on 3 September 1916’ (painting by Albert Heim), 340 frost bite, 243, 350 Fullard, George (sculptor), 357 Fussell, Paul, 183 Gallipoli (Turkey), 2, 20, 31, 310 gama (limestone caves, Okinawa), 131, 133, 136; and see caves ‘Gangrene Alley’ (trench name), 34 gas-alarms, 4, 23, 106 gas attacks, 8, 14, 33, 45, 49, 55, 161, 197, 337, 349, 353, 375; in museum displays, 18, 81–2 (Figure 5.3) gas, and extermination of Jews, 230, 234

Index  383 gas curtain, 54 (Figure 3.4) gas, in hospital, 377 gas/gas masks, 4, 25, 49, 82 (Figure 5.3), 107–9 Gassed, painting (John Singer Sargent), 367 gastroenteritis, 175 gastronomic issues, see food and drink ‘gaze’ (Western, and Tourist), 77 Gellhorn, Martha, 230 gender, issues and war, 125, 289–92, 299, 317 geophones, 52, 58 German Hygiene Museum, 186 German Underground Hospital (Guernsey), 272–3 (Figure 18.1) Gestapo, prison, see Begunje Gestapo prison ghee (butter), 308–9 ghosts, of soldiers, and occupation, 280–2; and social relations, 286; in Vietnam, 273; in Singapore, 274; in Channel Islands, 272–88; of prisoners in Siberia, 274; of slave workers, 282–3 glaciers, 31, 47, 62, 64, 69–70 glasses (spectacles), 313 (Figure 20.4), 314–15 Gloster Meteor (jet fighter), 119 Goss family, see Heraldic Porcelain graffiti, 257, 265–9 (Figure 17.5), 293–6 (Figure 19.1), 297–300 (Figures 19.2, 19.3, 19.4), 302 Gran Chaco, see Chaco grave stones, see headstones ‘Great Stink’ (London 1858), 183 Great War, British image of 14; 19–22 Greenblatt, Stephen, 314 grenades, and potatoes, 345 Guadalcanal, 165 Guaraní (indigenous people), 215 Guards (film artwork), 100–3 Guards, regiment, see Guards (film artwork) Guernsey, see Channel Islands Guernsey Evening Press, 286 gulags, 274 Guppy, Alan (cartoonist), 285–6 Gurkhas, 309, 311, 321 (Figure 20.8), 322

habitus, 163 Haig, Douglas, 177, 336 ‘Halfmoon Camp’ (prisoner of war, Wunsdorf, Germany), 307 haptic, 23, 25, 43, 45, 48, 52, 57, 97, 101, 103, 240–2, 245, 251, 309 Hardtack, 172; and see food and drink haunting, see ghosts Hawker Tempest, 119 Hay, Ian, 364 headstones, 87 Heidegger, Martin, 239 Heim, Albert, (paintings of), 327–343 Henzan, Hiroko (Second World War Japanese survivor), 125–6 heraldic porcelain, 38 heritage, 275–6; and ghosts as intangible, 274–6; and senses, 78–83 Hill 60 (Ypres, Belgium), 349, 358 Hill 62 (Sanctuary Wood, Ypres, Belgium), 358 Hill 110 (Somme, France), 334 Hiroshima (Japan), 129 Hiramatsu, Kozo (acoustic scientist), 124 Historial de la Grande Guerre (Péronne, Somme, France), 80–81 (Figure 5.3), 365 Hitler, Adolf, 146, 159, 234, 256, 282 Holocaust, 5, 229–36, 277, 284, 354, 365, 370 Homan, Jože, 259, 262 Home Front, 34–8 Home Guard, 109 homesickness, 152, 222, 267–8, 308, 317 Hönes, Jakob, 331 Hooge Crater café-museum, 83, 358 Hooper-Greenhill, 79 Hospital, German Underground, German (Guernsey), 272–3 (Figure 18.1) Howes, David, 240, 256–7 Howitzer, British 9.2-inch, 20 human body as agent and material object, 164, 166 human body/senses (effect of war on), see senses; weaponization of, 30 hygiene, trench (French, German, British and Belgian practices), 6, 175–6, 183–6, 335; in Vietnam War, 158, 162, 163

384 Index Hynes, Samuel, 29, 365 hypnosis (as treatment for war trauma), 127 identity, 89, 97, 103, 157–8, 160, 162, 165, 224, 246, 276–7, 287, 294; and herbal tea, 224 If This is a Man (Primo Levi), 2 Ijzer Tower, Dixmuide, 82 imagination, and (war) senses, xxi–xxii, 128, 329, 354, 357; and museums, 361, 366–7 Imperial War Museum, 4, 13–28, 361–74; redesigns of, xxi, 14–15; Duxford, 238 Indian soldiers, see sepoy indigenous peoples/inhabitants, 3, 165, 214–15, 218–19, 221, 224–5, 275 inferiority (of Japanese), 164 influenza, 197–200 Ingold, Tim, 88 In Flanders Fields Museum (Ypres, Belgium), 79–80, 183, 345, 347 International Hygiene Exhibition 1911, 186 internment/internment camps, 165, 257, 275, 291–2, 294 interrogation (of prisoners), 261, 263–5 interview process and memory, 144–5 intestinal afflictions and excreta, 189 Iraq, 30, 96 Irish Civil War (1922–3), 289–92 Irish Military Archive, 301 Isbister, James, 107 ISIS, see Islamic State Islamic State, 30 Isonzo Front (Italy), see Soča/Isonzo Front Izbica (transit camp), 5 Italian Front, 2–4, 31, 47; and see Soča/Isonzo Front Italy in Second World War, 143–54 Izbica-Lubelska transit camp, 229 ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ 2012–13, (sculpture by Steve Hurst), 348 (Figure 22.3) Japanese soldiers and the senses, 157–70; smell of according to American soldiers, 161–2 ‘Jap stink’, 162 Jasper Jacobs Associates, 368 jazz, 200, 202 ‘jerries’ (English slang for German steel helmets used as piss-pots), 190

Jersey, see Channel Islands Jersey Evening Post, 285 Jersey War Tunnels, 280 Jesenice (Gestapo centre), 259 Jewish Chronicle, 231 Jewish Welfare Board, 196; jazz band playing at, 202 (Figure 13.1) Jones, David, 3 Jünger, Ernst, 353–4 Just Jane (Lancaster bomber), 249–50 Kadena (United States Air Force base, Okinawa), 124–5, 135; and pollution, 131–2 (Figure 8.1) Kamikaze (Japanese suicide pilots), 124–5 Kamnik (Gestapo centre), 259 Kangaroo (RAF mascot), 246–7 (Figure 16.3) Kantian Sublime, 22 Keegan, John, 33 Karski, Jan, 5, 229–36 Katzenstein mansion (Gestapo prison building), 257–8 (Figure 17.1) Kavanagh, Gaynor, 361 Kenotaphion (CD of Cenotaph silences), 94–5 khaki, 196, 219, 339, 364, 371 Kilmainham Gaol (Dublin), 289–304 Kilmainham Gaol Restoration Society (KGJS), 293 Kingdom of Yugoslavia, 256 Kitchener, Lord, 193 Knife, French Nettoyeurs des Tranchées, 25 Koestler, Arthur, 231–232 Kokali, Ivanka, 269 Kolkata (Calcutta), war memorial, 310–12 (Figure 20.1) Korea, Demilitarised Zone, 96 Kranj (Gestapo centre), 259 Kregar, Franc, 267 ‘Kriegsgefangenenlager Kleinmünchen’ Prisoner of War camp, Linz, Austria, 64 La Boiselle (Old Blighty Tea Room), Somme, France, 83 La Folie tunnel system (Vimy Ridge), 53 (Figure 3.3) Lancaster bomber, 238–9 (Figure 16.1); sensorial experiences of, 238–55 Lancet, The, 177 Lake Pitiantuta/Chuquisaca (Chaco), 215

Index  385 landscape (sensory issues and), 4, 33, 68–70, 76–92, 314; and Second World War Italian Resistance, 147–9; palimpsest nature of, 32, 33, 47, 56; art and, 33; maps and, 33–4; home/domestic, 35–8; sonic, 93–105, 123–41; theories/classifications of, 46–58; and memory, 88 Laos (carpet-bombing of), 2 Last Post Ceremony, Menin Gate, Ypres, Belgium, 87 latrine bucket, 190 (Figure 12.5) latrines, digging and use of, 185–6 (Figure 12.1), 189–90 (Figure 12.5), and see defecation ‘Lavender Walk’, (trench name), 34 Lee, Hermione (Body Parts: Essays on Life-Writing), 323 Leeds Pals Battalion, 314 Le Creux Faïe, German bunker and prehistoric barrow (Guernsey), 278 Le Tommy Café, Pozières, Somme, France, 83 letters/letter writing, 315–18 (Figures 20.5, 20.6) Levi, Primo (If This Is a Man), 2 Lewis, Aubrey (Director Maudsley Hospital, London), 128 Library War Service, see American Library Association lice (head and body), 260 Liège, surrender of and smell of defecation, 186 lieux de mémoire, 3, 131 light/lighting, 45 Lima (Peru), 100 limestone caves, see gama liminality and the senses, 96, 99, 158–9, 162–3, 166; and see subliminal ‘Livens’ projectors, 349 Lloyd George, David (British Prime Minister), 35, 94 L’odeur de l’ennemi (‘The Smell of the Foe’), Juliette Courmont, 191 London Blitz, see Blitz lotas (Indian brass water mugs), 311–12 (Figure 20.2) lucky mascots, see mascots Lüdders, Heinrich, 322 Macardle, Dorothy, 296 Machine gun, German MG 08, 20

Macdonald, Sharon, 369–70 Madurese (indigenous people of Borneo), 159 magazines and recuperation, 196–212 Maison Blanche (souterraine), 44 (Figure 3.1) Mann, Roger, 368–9 manuals (military), 161, 173–4, 184, 185 (Figure 12.2) Manual of Elementary Military Hygiene 1912, 185 maps (Western Front), 33–4, 339, 355, 366 mascots, of RAF pilots, 245–7 (Figure 16.3), 251 Masefield, John, 351 Mauclair, Camille, 29 mate (herbal tea in the Chaco War), 221–4 McDermott, Mary, 297 mementoes, war, 37, 143, 152, 172, 269, 311–15 (Figures, 20.2, 20.3, 20.4); and see souvenirs; trench art memorabilia, 25, 85; and see mementoes Memorial to First World War Indian dead (Calcutta/Kolkata), 310–11 (Figure 20.1) Memorial to RAF Bomber Command, 248–9 (Figure 16.4) Memorial Museum Passchendaele 1917, Zonnebeke, Belgium, 81–2 (Figure 5.3), 85–6 (Figure 5.5) Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, Thiepval, Somme, France, 86 memorialization, xxi, 31, 95 memorials see War Memorials memory, 107–22, 123–41, 132; and interview process, 144; and photographs, 232, 234, 277–8; and sound, 128–9; and smell, 70–1; and landscape, 88, 143; and museums, 363–5; and RAF pilots, 247–28; of Second World War in Italy, 143–54; objects as triggers of, 364 ‘memory bridge’, 35, 64, 240 Memorylands (Sharon Macdonald), 369–70 Menin Gate (Ypres), 86–7 Menin Ro cafe (‘The Canadian’, Ypres, Belgium), 358 Mennonites, 215 Mercury, The, 364

386 Index merde (French slang for shit), 191 (Figure 12.7) Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 239 Messines (Battle of), 35, 94 Mess-Kit, The, hospital magazine, 196, 203 (Figure 13.1), 206–7 (Figures 13.2–4) Mesopotamia, 179, 310, 312–13 (Figure 20.3) metaphor, 6, 30, 32, 36,72, 76, 135–16, 165, 190, 245, 274, 276–7, 286, 312, 317–18, 323, 356–7 Military Archives (Dublin), 294 Mill Hill Unitarian Chapel, 314 mirage, 217 Miraumont (Somme, France), 330, 332 Mirus Battery, Guernsey, 280 ‘Missing, The’, 37–8, 86 ‘Moaning Minnie’, see air raid siren modernity, 57, 216, 225, 310, 317; gone wrong in the Chaco War, 226 Modern Conflict Archaeology and the senses, 68–9 ‘Morrison’ shelter, 107 mosquitoes, 214, 218, 260 Mott, Frederick (neurologist), 127 mud, 14, 16–17, 43–4, 47–8, 51–2, 88, 176, 188, 193, 214, 217, 220, 330, 339, 345, 347, 349–51, 358, 364 munitions factories (Britain), 35–6, 48 murals, 293 Museo Boquerón, 221 (Figure 14.2), 223 (Figure 14.3) museology, xxi, 78, 83, 89 Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MART), Rovereto, Trentino, 71–2 ‘museum voice’ of Imperial War Museum, 19–20 museums, see war museums music, 21–3, 94, 100–2, 332; and recuperation, 200–2 (Figure 13.1) Mussolini, Benito, 5, 72, 146, 151 mustard gas (Yperite), 82 Myers, Charles (First World War Cambridge psychiatrist), 126–7 My House in Damascus (Diana Darke), 36 Nagasaki (Japan), 129 napalm, smell of, 5 National Archives, Kew, London, 232 Nash, Paul (artist), 33 Nazi/Nazism, 38, 142, 144, 148, 159, 230–3, 264, 275, 283, 376

nervios, 129 Neuve Chapelle, see Battle of Neuve Chapelle Nevinson, Christopher, 33 newspapers, 64 New Yorker, 232 New York Times, 232 Nightwatch (film artwork), 100 Nisei (second generation Japanese American soldiers) 157, 159–65 North Dublin Union (NDU), and women internees, 291, 296 North, Major E.B. (and First World War rum consumption), 173 nostalgia, 2, 6, 151, 283 nutrition, see food and drink objects, war, 143; and Indian soldiers of First World War, 307–26; as triggers to memory, 364; in museums, 82–3; in Imperial War Museum, 24–5, 366–7; as metaphors, 72; as palimpsests (of meanings), 314, 317; see also souvenirs; trench art objectification, 37, 50 Ocepek, Julij, 268–9 occupation, and heritage, 275–6, 283; of Channel Islands, 272–88 Occupation museums (Channel Islands), 275–279 (Figures 18.2, 18.3) odour, see smell Okinawa, Battle of, 123 Okinawa Peace Museum, 132 ‘Old Bill’ (Bruce Bairnsfather cartoon character), 172 Old Blighty Tea Room Café-museum (La Boiselle, Somme, France) 83–4 (Figure 5.4) olfaction/olfactory and ethnicity, 158–9; and see smell Operation Reinhard, 230 Orpen, William, 21 Ortles Mountains (Italian Front), 62 otherness/othering, 162, 221, 257, 334 Ouderdam, village and casualty clearing station (Belgium), 312 Over Here, (hospital magazine), 202–4 Owen, Wilfred, 33, 70, 334 ‘Oxfam Art’ (Northern Ireland), 356 ‘Oxford Street’ (trench name), 34 Pacific, War of the (1879–83), 214 paintings, of the Somme, 328–43 palimpsest, see landscape

Index  387 Pals Battalion, Leeds, 314, 301, 324 Paraguay, see Chaco War, The parcels, sent to trenches, 177, 295, 301–2, 331 Partisans (Second World War Italy), 143, 145, 147–51 Passchendaele, Battle of, 20, 34; Memorial Museum 1917 (Zonnebeke), 81–2 (Figure 5.3), 85, 88 Passchendaele Beer, 89 ‘Peio 1914–1918, the War at the Door’ project, 62 perfume, 68, 158, 162 personal effects, as souvenirs from dead soldiers, 37 People’s War, BBC Project, 107, 109–10 phenomenology, 35–6, 71, 158, 238–39, 376 Philippine-American War of 1899–1902, 166 phonograph, 307–8, 319 photographs, and memory, 277–8, 312, 314–15, 319, 327–9, 331, 339–40 (Figure 21.5), 362 ‘Piccadilly’, (trench name), 34 pilots, equipment and the senses 241–4; memories of, 247–8 Pipers of the Trenches (BBC documentary), 93 piss-pot, 190, and see chamber-pot; used for cooking 190 place, sense of, 4, 129–30, 143, 152; and see landscape ‘Platoon Experience’ (Memorial Museum Passchendaele 1917, Zonnebeke, Belgium), 85, 89 Plattsburg Reflex, The (hospital magazine), 203 Poppy (Remembrance), symbolism, 89, 357; bracelet, 80; chocolates, 89 pollution, (associated with military activity), 124, 159, 166, 349 postcards, 83, 186, 191–2 (Figures 12.6, 12.7), 331 potatoes, and grenades, 345 Pozières (Somme), 333; Le Tommy Café, 83 pozos indios (indigenous wells), 219 prehistoric monuments, German bunkers disguised as, 278 presence/absence, and senses, xxii, 24, 26, 50, 54, 62, 71–2, 83, 85, 99, 127, 135, 152, 157, 166,

191, 207–9, 249, 267, 272–24, 280, 282–3, 308, 314, 367 Princess Mary Gift Box, 311–12 prisoners of war (camps), Kilmainham Gaol (Dublin), 289–304; Kriegsgefangenenlager Kleinmünchen, Linz, Austria, 64; and see Begunje Gestapo prison Psychosomatic Internal Medicine Department, Kyoko Hospital, Okinawa (Japan), 123 propaganda, 164–5; and faeces/ defecation, 183, 190–3, 231–2, 263, 356 Proust, Marcel, 73, 314 Punjab/Punjabi, 2, 193, 307–11, 318 PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), 123, 126, 128–9, 132, 137, 139 Punch (magazine), 178 Punta Linke (cableway transit station site), 2, 5, 61–75; preservation at, 63 (Figures 4.1 and 4.2), 64 Punta San Matteo, Battle of, 69 racism (related to smell), 6, 157–70, 191; and warlike Indian ethnic groups, 309 RAF Museum, Hendon, 238 Rai, Jasbahadur, 322–3 Railings (video artwork), 100 Raj, Mulk (Across the Black Waters), 309 Rancière, Jacques, 99 rations, soldiers, 172, 328–32; and see food and drink rats, 335, 337, 369 realism, see authenticity recordings (of Indian prisoners of war), 307–8, 319–24 (Figures 20.7, 20.8) recreation, and recuperation, 196–197, 200–204 recycling war material, 46, 56, 134, 248 recuperation, and magazines, 196–212; and recreation, 196–7; and music, 200–2 (Figure 13.1); and food, 204–7 Red Cross, 198, 205 Redipuglia war cemetery, Italy, 72 rehabilitation, see recuperation religious feelings/imagery/ritual, 87, 166, 215, 269, 317–18 remembrance, xxii, 31, 88, 93–104, 131, 143, 248, 266, 274, 277, 301 Remembrance Sunday, 94–5

388 Index repatriation ceremonies, see Wootton Bassett Republic of Salò, 146 Resistance in Second World War Italy, 142–54 rest and recovery, 197–200 Ricoeur, Paul, 377 Ritchie Calder, Penny, 368 Rivers, W.H. (First World War Cambridge psychiatrist), 127 Rovereto, Trentino, 71–72 Royal Naval Division, 174 Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission, 319 rum ration, 173, and see food and drink Ruskin, John, 346 Russian slave workers, see slave workers rye straw overshoes (Punta Linke), 64, 65 (Figure 4.4.), 66 (Figure 4.5) Saint-Amour, Paul K, 129 Salò, see Republic of Salò Salvation Army, 196 Sanctuary Wood café-museum (Ypres, Belgium), 83, 358 sanitation, see defecation, and hygiene Sargent, John Singer, 367 Sark, see Channel Islands ‘Satan’ bomb, 115 sauerkraut, found at Punta Linke 2, 65 (Figure 4.3) Saunders, Nick, 346 Sassoon, Siegfried, 33 school children, 15, 87, 109, 112, 344, 354 sculptors and archaeologists, 349 scurvy, 179 Scutari (Crimean War hospital), 171 Semper, Jonty, 94–5 Serre, Somme (excavations at), 331 shit, see excretion/excreta Shoa (film), 239, 231, 233 shoes, 64, 65 (Figure 4.4.), 66 (Figure 4.5), 72 Shute, General Sir Cameron, 174 Sen, Jogen (Sepoy), 313 (Figure 20.4), 314–15 senses, and art, 344–60; presence/ absence, 209–10; and recuperation, 196–212; and pilots’ experiences 241–4; and imprisonment, 256–71;

and sounds, 307–8; and see sense-scapes; and prompts in museums, 368 sense-scapes, 22–4,78, 150–1; and heritage, 78–83; and museums, xxi, 68; high-altitude, 61–75, 238–55; and battlefield tourism, 76–92; simulated, 368–9; subterranean, 44–58; of the Chaco, 216–17 sensory archaeology, 239–40 sepoy (Indian soldiers), 307–26 shells (artillery), see artillery bombardment shell shock, 46, 126–7, 197, 376; and see trauma (caused by war) shit, see defecation shrapnel, 22–3, 31, 48, 84, 107, 109, 116, 119, 314, 333, 336, 344, 349, 351, 369 silence, 87, 94, 103, 352; Kenotaphion (CD of Cenotaph silences), 94–5 simulated, sense-scapes, 8, 82, 368, 370 Singapore, 274 Singh, Mall (Indian prisoner of war, voice of), 307–10, 318–24 singing, see songs/singing Sir Douglas Haig’s Great Push 1917, 336 sketching, xxi, xxii, 189, 350, 357 skin, 3, 53, 72, 88, 158, 164, 218, 350, 362, 375 ‘skin knowledge’, 216 slave workers, ghosts of, 5, 7, 272–283 ‘slimescapes’, xx, 43, 217 smell, xx, 1, 5–6, 38, 46–7, 67–8,78, 82; of battlefields, 353–4; of trenches, 51; and Americans and Japanese, 157–70; and memory, 2, 6; excavation of, 5, 70–1; and propaganda, 191–3; and racism, 191, 334; of dead in trenches/dugouts, xx, 334; of gas, 49 Smell of the Foe, The (‘L’odeur de l’ennemi’, Juliette Courmont), 191 Smell of War, The (exhibition, Poperinghe, Belgium), 8 smoking, 205, 263, 301, 312, 323, 328–9, 331, 335 (Figure 21.3), 336, 338, 352 Sobibor extermination camp, 230 Soča/Isonzo Front (Italy/Slovenia), 2, 5, 72 social being, 30

Index  389 ‘social suffering’ (as component of PTSD), 128 Somme, 2; landscape, 21, 328; battle, see Battle of the Somme; film, see, The Battle of the Somme; paintings of, 328–43 songs/singing, 119, 171, 193, 265, 270, 307, 318–24, 332 sonic landscapes, 333; and see acoustics and war Sopwith Camel, 17 ,23 souvenirs, 4, 6, 21, 37–8, 83, 188 (Figure 12.4), 307, 344–5, 349 ‘souveneering’ (looting), 37, 84 sound, soldiers’ experiences of, 4, 31, 43, 45–6, 48; of artillery bombardment, 93–4; civilians’ experiences of in Britain, 34–5; prisoner experiences of, 256–71 soundfields, 109 Sound of the Wind (film), 132 soundscape, 22–3, 48, 109–10 sound survey (of noise from American air base on Okinawa), 125–6 souterraines, 49–52, 57–8 space, (conceptions/perceptions of), 16–18, 31–2, 34, 39 spaesato (Italian adjective for disorientation/placelessness), 146, 148 Spanish Civil War, 267 spectacles, see glasses spirits, see ghosts Spirit Recalling (film), 132 Spivak, Gayatri, 319–20 ‘Square Mile’ London, 101 St. Pierre Divion (Somme, France), 333–4 Star Shell, The (hospital magazine), 205 steel helmet (German), 190–1; (pierced by bullet), 18 Stevenson, Corporal (captured by Germans), 338–9 (Figure 21.4) Stewart, Susan, 314 stomach disorders, 176–7, and see digestion Stop Them Now: German Mass Murder of Jews in Poland 1942 (Szmul Zygielbojm), 232 Story of a Secret State, 1944,(Jan Karski), 229, 233 straw, see rye straw overshoes stress, see anxiety

subliminal, 1, 22–3, 71 subterranean landscapes (and senses), 3, 36, 43–60, 134, 312, 330 suffering and salvation, 269 Sunabe, community (coastal Okinawa), 124–125, 130–131 Sykes-Picot Agreement, 30 synaesthesia, 19, 46, 52, 157, 250 ‘Tambour’ 2000 (sculpture by Steve Hurst), 352 (Figure 22.4) Tank, British Mark V, 17, 23 taste (sense of), xx, 2, 15, 33, 46, 50–1, 69, 71, 73, 77–8, 88–9, 106, 172, 199–200, 204–5, 207, 216, 240, 262, 308, 353–4, 362, 375–6 teeth, xx, 172, 177–9 The Battle of the Somme (film), 21–2, 24, 333, 336 tereré, (herbal tea) as symbol of Paraguayan identity, 224; and see mate ‘The Diggers’ (Belgian amateur archaeologists), 344 thirst, xx, 2, 175, 179, 213–28, 336; and see drinking water time (perceptions of), 30, 37–8 The Cave Mouth and the Giant Voice (artwork, film), 133–7 The Eighth Passenger 1969 (Miles Tripp), 245 The Come-Back (hospital magazine), 207–8 The Face of Battle (John Keegan), 33 The Flu (poem), 197–8 The Foul and the Fragrant (Alain Corbin), 183 The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century (television series), 183 The Jap Soldier (American military manual 1943), 161 The Lying Communications of our Foes – Best German Toilet Paper, 193 The Smell of the Foe, The (‘L’odeur de l’ennemi’, Juliette Courmont), 191 The Tourist Gaze (John Urry), 77–8 The Trembling Hour (film), 127 The Separation Line (artwork), 96–8 ‘Thiepval, The Fight for’ (Albert Heim painting), 332–3 (Figure 21.2) Thiepval, see Memorial to the Missing of the Somme

390 Index thirst, 2, 175, 213–28; and see drinking water Tilley, Chris, 239 time capsules/time machines, bunkers as, 278 tobacco, 51, 53, 84, 327, 340, 352 Todman, Dan, 14 toilet paper, 191–193 Tolaas, Sissel (artist and chemist), 81 ‘Tommy Tucker lunch’, see ‘Platoon Experience’ torture (of prisoners), 261–5 touch (sense of), 45, 53, 83, 85, 245, 310–15, 350, 362 Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Santanu Das), xx, 362 tourism, see Battlefield Tourism trauma (caused by war), xxi, 72, 107, 120, 123, 126–9, 132, 273–4, 285, 287, 310, 322–3 Treblinka extermination camp, 230 trees, 3, 8, 130, 213, 220, 222, 266, 317, 350 trench art, xxi, 4, 6, 37–8, 84, 172, 240, 358; subterranean carvings as, 51; in Chaco War, 219–20 (Figure 14.1) ‘Trench Experience’, at Imperial War Museum, 15, 24 trench mortar, 18, 43, 264, 334, 337, 351, 353 trench names, 34 trenches (First World War), and hygiene 183–5; smell of 51 Tripp, Miles, 245 Triple Alliance, War of the, 215 Trones Wood (Somme, France), 351 trophy/trophies, 21, 37, 275 tunnels, xxi, 3, 14, 33, 36, 43–4, 46, 49, 51–8, 64, 69, 93, 148–9, 163, 272, 282, 284, 334, 349; and see subterranean sites ‘tunnellers friends’, animals as, 55 Toyama, Ms Fujiko, 123 Turner, Jim (sculptor), 350 Tyne Cot Cemetery (Belgium), 85, 87, 90 Under Fire (Henri Barbusse), 33 underground war, 43–60; and see subterranean landscapes (and senses) Underground Hospital, German (Guernsey), 272–3 (Figure 18.1), 280, 283–5 (Figure 18.5)

Undertones of War (Edmund Blunden), 33, 367 uniforms, 53, 73, 81, 83, 85, 100–3, 152, 193 (song), 217, 219, 259, 275, 277–8, 303, 310, 312, 315, 338 ‘Unknown Soldier’ (Westminster Abbey), 37 United States Army Chemical Corps, 5 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), 370 Urry, John, 77–8 US Army General Hospital Number 3, 202–3 US Army General Hospital Number 30 (jazz orchestra of), 200 US General Hospital Number 18, 203 Van Walleghem, Father, (diary of) 184 Vauquois, 345 Venice, 100 Veneto (region, Italy), 143, 145–7 Vietnam war, 5 Vimy Ridge, 53 (Figure 3.3.), 86 Virilio, Paul, 278 voices, recorded sounds of (Indian prisoner of war), 307–8 Voigt, Fritz August, 375 vomiting, 5, 176–7, 218, 231, 376 von Wundt, General-Leutnant Theodor, 327–8 V1 (German pilotless rocket-plane), 117–119 (Figure 7.3); and see ‘Doodlebugs’ V2 (German ballistic missile), 108 walking (sensory aspects of), 88 Walter Reed Army General Hospital, 207–8 (Figure 13.5) war-art, 357 war bread, German (KK Brot), 191–12 (Figure 12.6) war memorials, 86–7 war museums, 4, 85; and imagination, 366; and the senses, 68, 81–3; as smellscapes, 71–2; and see Imperial War Museum; In Flanders Fields Museum; Memorial Museum Passchendaele 1917 (Zonnebeke); RAF Museum, Hendon, 238; Museo Boquerón (Paraguay) 221 (Figure 14.2), 223 (Figure 14.3); and see café-museums; and see Occupation museums; and authenticity, 24–5, 369–70

Index  391 War of the Pacific (1879–83), 214 War of The Triple Alliance (1864–70), 215 war-writing, 310 Warsaw Ghetto, 233 water, xx, 2, 5, 132, 175–6, 179, 213–26, 284, 296, 353; sound of, 50, 135; water-table, 189; and see, thirst water carriers, 220–21 (Figure 14.2); brass jugs (lotas), 311–12 (Figure 20.2) water-bearing plant, of the Chaco, 221–2 Watt, D.M., 267–8 wells, 219 Wenzel, Marian (author, Auntie Mabel’s War), 38 West Yorkshire Regiment, 314 Western Front, and tourism, 76–92 When Faith Moves Mountains (artwork), 100 ‘White Death’ (Alpine warfare), 4 ‘White Death’ (thirst in the Chaco War), 2, 213–28 Winter, Denis, 94 Winter, Jay, 365–6 Winterton, Melanie, 362, 367 women, and munitions production, 35–6; as prisoners, 289–304

Woolf, Virginia, 34 Wootton Bassett, 96–7 writing, see letters, and war-writing XM-2 (personnel detector), 5 Yad Vashem (museum of), 234 ‘Y Ravine’ (sculpture by Steve Hurst), 348 (Figure 22.2) yerba (herbal tea), see mate YMCA, see Young Men’s Christian Association Yogi-san (Japanese Second World War survivor), 124, 128–30, 133 (Figure 8.2), 134 Yorkshire Trench, 189 Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), 196, 199–200 Ypres (Belgium), xxi, 34, 37–8, 79, 83, 86–7, 183–4, 188–9, 311, 344–7, 349–52, 356–8 Yugoslavia, see Kingdom of Yugoslavia Yvy’á (Jacaratia hassleriana), see waterbearing plant of the Chaco Zonnebeke (Belgium), 81 Zorec, Anica, 259 Zygielbojm, Szmul, 232–3