#world war 1 literature

[autumnrose11]

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"He had to pull the bayonet out again, which was strange. And that wasn't an end: it was just a moment in a long line of moments, and time went on, and they went on."

I was thinking about this one line today, and how deep it is. Normal, decent people are repulsed by murder. But here ... plunging a bayonet into a stranger's body, and watching them die, and knowing you were the cause of it - it's frightening. And at this point in the story, it's become so ordinary, so normal. When it shouldn't be. It was just a moment in a long line of moments. Murder after murder after murder. What's really crushing is that the soldiers were simply ordinary. They weren't built for war. They had their own lives to live, with families, with wives they loved and children they adored. Millions of Riley Purefoys.

Time went on, and they went on. They were being dragged along for this ride despite never wanting it. Sometimes, we come across descriptions such as "time stood still" when there's something particularly striking happening. Nothing of the sort happened here. Time goes on with each death. Nothing stops, least of all the artillery. Life and death go in tandem. They've been forced to embrace indecency.

(Rambling thoughts, sorry!!)

[metamorphesque]

Facing The Facts: Resources on the Armenian Genocide

Frequently Asked Questions About Armenian Genocide

Sample Archival Documents on the Armenian Genocide: U.S. Archives

Sample Archival Documents on the Armenian Genocide: British Archives

Map of the 1915 Armenian Genocide in the Turkish Empire

Talaat Pasha's Official Orders Regarding the Armenian Massacres, March 1915-January 1916

The Massacre of the Armenians (”Ambassador Morgenthau describes the forced evacuation of one group of Armenians from their homeland to the Syrian desert.”)

American Documents

British Documents

Russian Documents

French Documents

Austrian Documents

Public Lectures

Eye Witnesses

Aurora Mardiganyan's book, "RAVISHED ARMENIA" (14-year-old girl who managed to escape)

The Turkish Woman

That is all right, but who killed hundred of thousands Armenians?

Einar af Wirsen

The Story of Anna Hedwig Bull, an Estonian Missionary of the Armenian Genocide.

"That's How It Was"

ARAB EYEWITNESS FAYEZ ALGHUSSEIN ABOUT THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

Report by an Eye-Witness, Lieutenant Sayied Ahmed Moukhtar Baas

Letters of Turkish doctors addressed to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Turkey

Martyred Armenia: Eyewitness account of the Armenian genocide by Faiz El-Ghusein a Turkish official

PHOTO COLLECTION OF ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

[cirr0stratus]

Siegfried Sassoon, counter attack

[alovelywaytospendanevening]

Sassoon and Graves in 1920.

When Robert Graves walked into C Company mess on 28 November 1915 on some errand, he noticed an unexpected book on the table. It was a copy of Post Liminium, a collection of essays by the late nineteenth-century poet Lionel Johnson. The army was not noted for its Lionel Johnson readers; a 'military text-book or a rubbish novel' were more the order of the day. Graves took a discreet look at the name on the flyleaf. A glance round the mess was enough to indicate 'Siegfried Sassoon': the tall, lanky, shy subaltern. Graves, also tall but anything but shy, quickly struck up a conversation. Both being off duty, the two were soon walking into Béthune for cream buns, busy talking poetry. Sassoon and Graves had a good deal in common. Both were conventionally unconventional public school products, trying to turn themselves into competent army officers and into the kind of poets Eddie Marsh would publish in his Georgian Poetry anthologies. Both, anxious about being insufficiently manly, had cultivated a tougher, sportier side: Sassoon through fox-hunting and cricket; Graves through boxing — he had been the school middleweight champion. Both were lonely and in love (Sassoon with David 'Tommy' Thomas, Graves with George 'Peter' Johnstone). Both were almost certainly still virgins. The friendship necessarily developed in fits and starts, and owed some of its intensity to that. Long conversations, the uninterrupted exchange of poems and confessions, were a rare luxury. Graves gave Marsh a humorous but probably not very misleading account of their difficulty 'in talking about poetry and that sort of thing': 'If I go into his mess and he wants to show me some set of verses, he says: "Afternoon Graves, have a drink… by the way, I want you to see my latest recipe for rum punch."' He also made it pretty clear to Marsh that it was not just poetry they had to be careful about discussing openly: 'I don't know what the CO would say if he heard us discussing the sort of things we do… His saying is that "there should be only one subject for conversation among subalterns off parade." I leave you to guess it.' There was obviously a secret thrill in these surreptitious exchanges, a sense that Graves and Sassoon were like two naughty schoolboys, hoodwinking their peers and those in authority.

— Harry Ricketts, Strange Meetings: The Poets of the Great War (2010)

[edwardian-girl-next-door]

"How fortunate we were who still had hope, I did not then realise; I could not know how soon the time would come when we should have no more hope, and yet be unable to die."

~ Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (1933)

[whereshadowslive]

Because one thing has become clear to me: you can cope with all the horror as long as you simply duck thinking about it – but it will kill you if you try to come to terms with it.

— Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

[newyorkthegoldenage]

Sigrid Undset, the Norwegian author of Kristin Lavransdatter and winner of the 1928 Nobel Prize for Literature, was an outspoken critic of Hitler and the Nazis from the early 1930s. When Germany occupied Norway in 1940, Undset fled to the U.S., and lived in Brooklyn Heights until the end of the war. Here she is selecting books from her library to donate to soldiers and sailors, February 1, 1942.

Photo: Associated Press

[soulmaking]

[thoughtportal]

Donald Sutherland reading from Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo

[atmokinitos]

reading all quiet on the western front at 19, seems fitting in a weird way.

[tvlipsandbread]

In the first World War they...

Who were they?Who cares anymore?

Killed four of my uncles

So I discovered one day.

There were only four on that side of the family

And all swept away in a few bad years

In a war the historians tell us now

Was fought over nothing at all.

Four uncles, as one might say

A dozen apples or seven tons of dirt

Swept away by the luck of history,

Closed off.Full stop.

Four is a lot of uncles,

A lot for lives, I should say.

Their chalk was wiped clean off the slate,

The war meant nothing at all.

War needs a lot of uncles,

And husbands, and brothers, and so on :

Someone must want to kill them,

Someone needs them dead.

Who is it, I wonder. Me?

Or is it you there, reading away,

Or a chap with a small - arms factory?

Or is it only they?

- Other People, by Chris Wallace - Crabbe

[autumnrose11]

First novel of 2023 ...

I’ve just started reading “The Lie” by Helen Dunmore, and I’m two chapters in. I’m hooked already. This is one of the books that I know close to nothing about, except that it’s set in Cornwall, during and just after the First World War. I’ve got a very bad habit of sometimes reading the background/summary of the novels I embark upon. Not this time: I’m going to take the story as it comes.

This novel appeared on my recommended reading list on Goodreads a few weeks ago. I suppose my fascination with (depressing) WW1 literature all started with my obsession with Downton (series 2 and all the soldier!Matthew feels!!!). So far, I've read Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks, My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You by Louisa Young (which I would recommend to ANYONE, it’s one of the few novels I’ve read which touched me very deeply) and Summer in February by Jonathan Smith. That last one is not really about the First World War, but it is set in 1913, in a bohemian artists’ community in Lamorna, Cornwall. I adored the novel (though not as much as MDIWTTY). I read the setting and the one-line blurb of The Lie … and that’s how I ended up getting it :D

The opening chapters are already very evocative, judging by what I’ve read so far … and I very much hope this is another of those extraordinary novels that I’m never going to forget.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Immediately after the passage of the September [1918] orders-in-council, the police began using their new authority in a series of raids aimed at getting the Reds off the streets. In Winnipeg in early October, Michael Charitinoff, a Russian Jew and former editor of the Russian-language weekly Robotchny Narod (Working People), was arrested for possession of illegal literature. Security forces had targeted Charitinoff as Lenin’s “ambassador to Western Canada,” supposedly sent to Canada with a $7,000 bankroll to foment revolution. Police magistrate Hugh John Macdonald, the sixty-eight-year-old son of Sir John A., the former prime minister, and a former Manitoba premier himself, sentenced Charitinoff to three years in prison and a $1,000 fine, though the editor won release on a technicality. Charitinoff was one of more than 200 people convicted of political offences—possessing banned literature, belonging to an illegal group, or attending illegal meetings—across the country between October 1918 and June 1919. Fines ranged up to $4,000, though most were much lower, and prison terms ran anywhere from a month to five years.

In Ontario, police stormed the offices of several of the banned organizations, seizing correspondence, books, and pamphlets, and arresting dozens of people in Toronto and other, smaller communities. Eighteen Finnish-Canadian militants were arrested in Sudbury and Sault Ste. Marie. In Brantford, the local police chief, testifying at the trial of Andra Tretjak, a young Russian immigrant found guilty of conspiracy, claimed that the town was “the headquarters of Bolshevik advocates in Canada,” the centre of a vast distribution network of seditious literature. The police enjoyed fear-mongering about alleged conspiracies; the previous summer they had uncovered a nest of Russian conspirators in Windsor, Ontario, who, they told the newspapers, were at the centre of “a continent-wide plot to overthrow lawful authority and establish a similar regime to that instituted in Russia by Trotzky and Lenine.”

In Toronto, police descended on the offices of political and ethnic organizations across the city, arresting dozens of people, all of whom were alleged to be “active Socialists and Bolsheviks.” They carted away stacks of mail, flyers, pamphlets, books, and magazines. Among the twenty-two arrestees at the headquarters of the Social Democratic Party on Queen Street West were Isaac Bainbridge, secretary of the SDP, and Alfred Manse, the circulation manager of both the Industrial Banner and the Canadian Forward, the party newspaper. Bainbridge, who was a thirty-eight-year-old stonemason and the editor of the Forward, was all too familiar with this kind of harassment. During the previous year and a half, he had been arrested three times on charges of sedition and spent a total of four months in jail for promoting ideas that were considered anti-conscription.

Detainees appeared before magistrates, several of whom took very seriously their self-appointed role as the last bastions against Bolshevism. In Stratford, Ontario, where police arrested twenty-two militants, the case of Arthur Skidmore, a machinist and a member of the local trades council, attracted the most notoriety. He was sentenced to thirty days in jail and a fine of $500 for having in his possession a copy of the Forward. Following appeals to the government from his fellow union members, he was released after twelve days. Magistrate Makins, who had sent Skidmore to jail, chided the government for overruling his decision. “Skidmore’s release is having the effect of making these men very bold and defiant,” Makins told the Toronto Daily Star. “I feel that a stand will have to be taken in the near future against just such men.” And in Toronto, Magistrate Kingsford handed out a three-year prison term in the Kingston Penitentiary to Charles Watson for distributing a variety of books and leaflets that three months before had been perfectly legal. As a large deputation from the Carpenters’ Union massed in the street outside the court in protest, Kingsford declaimed from the bench:

Free speech has always been and is the birthright of every British subject; but free speech is not license [...] Sedition will not be tolerated [...] Persons of British birth or descent above all should not forget the orderly traditions of their race. It would be a disgrace if they associated themselves with the propaganda of foreign cut-throats.

Kingsford went on in his condescending manner:

Theoretical discussions about Socialism may do no harm even if, in the hands of uneducated men, they lead to erroneous ideas of political economy. But when they are publications which advocate in so many terms, robbery, plunder, and other crimes against public order and safety, they become a menace and must be dealt with accordingly.

- Daniel Francis, Seeing Reds: the Red Scare of 1918-1919, Canada’s First War on Terror. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2011. p. 52-54.

[cirr0stratus]

thinking about frodo and sam and how their characters are near identical to stanislaus katzinsky and paul baumer and how they are both fictional men of different statuses that were created during the horrors of world war one by two people who used their incredible poetic voices to cope with the realities of warfare and how the relationship that these characters have transcends friendship and brotherhood and even romantic love because what they have is so much more important than that, it’s so much more. how there isn’t a word for the relationship that they have, and people like me are stuck thinking about these quotes and being completely normal about them

“We sit opposite one another, Kat and I, two soldiers in shabby coats, cooking a goose in the middle of the night. We don't talk much, but I believe we have a more complete communion with one another than even lovers have.

We are two men, two minute sparks of life; outside is the night and the circle of death. We sit on the edge of it crouching in danger, the grease drips from our hands, in our hearts we are close to one another, and the hour is like the room: flecked over with the lights and shadows of our feelings cast by a quiet fire. What does he know of me or I of him? formerly we should not have had a single thought in common – now we sit with a goose between us and feel in unison, are so intimate that we do not even speak.”

“you lay close to me. I'd be dearly glad to see you have a sleep. Id keep watch over you; and anyway, if you lay near, with my arm round you, no one could come pawing you without your Sam knowing it.”

“A little soldier and a clear voice, and if anyone were to caress him he would hardly understand, this soldier with the big boots and the shut heart, who marches because he is wearing big boots, and has forgotten all else but marching. Beyond the sky-line is a country with flowers, lying so still that he would like to weep. There are sights there that he has not forgotten, because he never possessed them – perplexing, yet lost to him. Are not his twenty summers there?

Is my face wet, and where am I? Kat stands before me, his gigantic, stooping shadow falls upon me, like home. He speaks gently, he smiles and goes back to the fire.

Then he says: "It's done."”

“Frodo's face was peaceful, the marks of fear and care had left it; but it looked old, old and beautiful, as if the chiselling of the shaping years was now revealed in many fine lines that had before been hidden, though the identity of the face was not changed. Not that Sam Gamgee put it that way to himself. He shook his head, as if finding words useless, and murmured: 'I love him. He's like that, and sometimes it shines through, somehow. But I love him, whether or no”

“Kat my friend, Kat with the drooping shoulders and the poor, thin moustache, Kat, whom I know as I know no other man, Kat with whom I have shared these years—it is impossible that perhaps I shall not see Kat again”

“'If you don't come back, sir, then I shan't, that's certain,' said Sam. 'Don't you leave him! they said to me. Leave him! I said. I never mean to. I am going with him, if he climbs to the Moon; and if any of those Black Riders try to stop him, they'll have Sam Gamgee to reckon with,”

[alovelywaytospendanevening]

To His Love

He's gone, and all our plans Are useless indeed. We'll walk no more on Cotswold Where the sheep feed Quietly and take no heed. His body that was so quick Is not as you Knew it, on Severn river Under the blue Driving our small boat through. You would not know him now… But still he died Nobly, so cover him over With violets of pride Purple from Severn side. Cover him, cover him soon! And with thick-set Masses of memoried flowers— Hide that red wet Thing I must somehow forget.

�� Ivor Gurney, 1917.

[edwardian-girl-next-door]

~ Wilfred Owens, "Dulce et Decorum Est"

via poetryfoundation.org

text id under cut-off

[ID/ Wilfred Owens poem, "Dulce et Decorum Est"

"Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

/end ID]