Modern archaeology is shaped by anthropology, particularly in the investigation of material culture and landscape – two aspects that dominate Great War archaeology, and that are linked by issues of memory, commemoration and imagination. Perhaps no other kind of archaeology is so deeply and poignantly anthropological as Great War archaeology, and the archaeology of twentieth-century conflict more widely. This chapter focuses on the first of these anthropological aspects of Great War archaeology – material culture – and attempts to unlock some of the meanings embedded in war objects, souvenirs, personal belongings, books, films, architecture, museums and memorials.
A distinctive feature of Great War archaeology is its focus on the living aspects of material culture, appropriately for a war that produced and left behind more artefacts (from landscapes to bullets) than any other conflict in history. Unlike other kinds of archaeology, a unique aspect of this new kind of investigation is that objects dug up on battlefields can be identical to others kept in a museum for eighty years, displayed on a living-room mantelpiece as a family heirloom, or traded on the vigorous international market for war memorabilia at militaria fairs (Isyanova 2009) and on the Internet (Fabiansson 2004: 171–2). Few if any other kinds of archaeology are so democratic in the way their artefacts are scattered around the world.
It is clear that the archaeology of the First World War goes beyond the excavation of battlezones. In Chapters 4–6, we shall explore the battlefield dimension, but in order to sensitise ourselves to the unusual nature of the conflict’s physical legacy, we must look more closely at the tales that objects can tell. To borrow an evocative phrase from anthropology, we shall explore the ‘social world of objects’ to consider how seemingly random and unpromising artefacts can open our eyes to a different view of the war and its aftermath.
Until recently, most knowledge about and interest in the First World War have been based on the many books published by military historians, or those who adopted a military history approach. These have comprehensively documented the main events of the war, pored over tactics and strategy, and put into context the global nature of the conflict. They have made impressive and acute contributions to our understading of the conduct and consequences of the war (e.g. Ferguson 1998; Gilbert 1994; Keegan 1991; Sheffield 2002; Strachan 2003; Terraine 1992). Mainly during the last decade, cultural historians have added a unique depth and breadth of knowledge and perceptive insight in work which has transcended the boundaries of their discipline and become of central interest and value to other investigators (Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker 2002; Becker 1998; Bourke 1996; Das 2005; Eksteins 1990; Fussell 1977; Leeds 1979; Mosse 1990; Winter 1995).
Given this weight of scholarship, it is hardly surprising that, until the late 1990s, virtually all radio and television coverage of the war was historical, not archaeological or anthropological. The military history (and to a lesser extent the cultural history) approach to the First World War had become a tradition – the only way to investigate and understand this most tragic and iconic of wars. The extraordinary remains that lay beneath the Western Front’s battlefields, and the equally insightful stories that were sealed within the material culture of war, were, for the most part, ignored, unsuspected or simply not recognised.
Today, as the old soldiers and their immediate families have all but passed away, not only does history become archaeology, but we enter a new realm, a world where memories and experiences of war are locked up in objects that are investigated and interpreted by those who had no part in their production or original wartime purpose. One consequence of this is that archaeologists and others often ponder on the use of items that were commonplace to the soldiers of the trenches less than a century ago. In other words, we have entered a world of objects – items that military specialists may be able to identify, but that hardly a single living person can relate to the war through their own experience. Before we can understand the new archaeology of war, we must become familiar with some of its artefacts, and attune ourselves to the different voices with which they speak.
War can be seen as the transformation of matter by the processes of damage and destruction. War creates as well as destroys. This point is both obvious and subtle, and offers many opportunities to investigate the ambiguous meanings of the artefacts of conflict and its aftermath. These objects can be small, for example a bullet or an identity disc, medium-sized, such as a tank, aeroplane or bunker, or as large as a trench system or a whole battlefield landscape. All share one thing – they are produced by human beings at war rather than by natural processes. In this way, the Western Front of the Great War of 1914–18 is as much an artefact as a Second World War V2 rocket, Blitz-damaged buildings, war memorials, wartime photographs and diaries, souvenirs and the battlefield tourism phenomenon now under way (Walter 1993). By understanding the material culture of war, we can begin to explore an artefact’s social life by investigating the changing values and attitudes attached to it by different people over time.
The objects of war represent memories, ideas and emotions for the people who created them, for those family members or museums who inherited them, and for archaeologists who excavate them. These objects recall the First World War in different ways – they are inescapably real, and can be touched, handled and sometimes smelt. They can transport us back some ninety years in an instant, and in a more personal way than any amount of books about the war that we may read. These objects are three-dimensional memories of the war, fragments of a world long gone, yet from which our modern world is built. Once we begin to appreciate these objects for their true value, we can understand more about ourselves, our families and our history, as well as about the conflict that gave birth to them, for these objects contain part of the lives of their makers and inheritors in different ways than do those from ancient Rome or Egypt. More than any other kind of archaeology, Great War archaeology is the archaeology of us. As we explore these objects, we create a personal and emotional link between the past and the present, but also between our own recent ancestors and ourselves.
We live in a world of objects, and interact every day with countless things that we, and others, make and sell, wear, use and throw away. Each of these objects, however humble or expensive, allows us to relate to (and in a sense create) the world around us. But, as time passes, ideas and fashions change, and the objects that we once cherished are discarded and forgotten, belonging, as they do, to a different time, and the way we were then. Years later, if we stumble across one of these items, we are carried back to our youth, to a different world. The objects once so desirable, then cast off, are suddenly revalued, and can become memory-objects of our lives. If this is true of everyday life, how much more so must it be with the artefacts of war, which carry within them the life and death experiences of countless young men and their families, not just between 1914 and 1918, but for the long aftermath of the twentieth century. The secret life of the material culture of the First World War lies not only in the objects themselves, but also in the experiences of everyone through whose hands they have passed.
It often seems that few items could be as humble as a war-related object, but few things are as powerful in unleashing our emotions, shaping our attitudes, and conjuring images in our imaginations. A roll of rusty barbed wire from a Great War trench, for example, can lead us to investigate the century-long cultural history of what has been called the ‘Devil’s Rope’ (Krell 2002). Equally, the study of wartime silk postcards can lead to the unfolding of intense personal recollections of the war, as well as the social relations involved in their production (Huss 2000; Tomczyszyn 2004). By understanding the material culture of the First World War – whether it has survived in a home or been excavated from a battlefield – we can gain new ways of exploring the meanings of conflict for soldiers and civilians alike, and for all those (including ourselves) who came after.
The objects of war, the artefacts of conflict, come in many shapes and sizes, and all share a fundamental relationship with the people who made, used and discarded them. Many of these items, despite their different purposes, became revalued during the war as souvenirs, obtained by purchase, exchange or opportunism. The First World War was, as many soldiers observed at the time, a ‘war of souvenirs’.
The moment we landed in France we started collecting and giving away souvenirs. For your cap-badge you obtained, perhaps, a little tricolour rose, and for your button a kiss, smile, or a wave of the hand. Then we moved up the line and started collecting sterner stuff; one carried a six-inch shell on one’s pack for a week or so, and then discarded it for something a trifle more portable. (Gwinell 1919: 45)
So common was the hunt for souvenirs that the term ‘souveneering’ became a thinly veiled euphemism for looting. The war experience was so extreme that it had the power to revalue almost any object, from a lump of chalk to a splinter of coloured glass from a stained-glass window, a fragment of shrapnel, live bullets, empty artillery-shell cases, and the military equipment and personal possessions of a dead soldier. Acquiring such items was both lucrative and dangerous: it allowed soldiers to make extra money and permitted those who were not front-line troops to acquire items that suggested they were, and around which many a tall story was spun. Such was the soldiers’ passion for collecting the miscellaneous objects of war that ‘There were times when No Man’s Land on a misty morning resembled nothing so much as Margate sands in August, only instead of happy children building castles there were men digging for [artillery-shell] nose-caps’ (Gwinell 1919: 46).
Acquiring these items could be a dangerous and gruesome undertaking. Dead soldiers lay contorted in ghastly death throes, putrefying, and covered in flies or rats, and yet the living were gripped by a strange fascination as they scavenged one corpse after another, seemingly oblivious to the dangers and nauseating sights. Photographs and diaries show just how far men had been changed by war, and how the everyday objects they sought had become worth risking their lives for. The dead lay with pockets turned inside out, stripped of socks and boots, helmets, weapons, wallets and finger rings. Even tunic buttons were cut off and sent home to families as souvenirs. And it was not only the enemy dead who were at risk. One British soldier was wounded by his own side’s shellfire, whereupon half a dozen of his comrades fought to retrieve the piece of shell that had wounded him.
Many soldiers survived artillery barrages that rained high-explosive shells on their positions, only to be killed by enemy snipers when they attempted to retrieve shell fragments and others items from No Man’s Land. The objects designed to kill them had failed at the first attempt, but succeeded at the second. So commonplace was it for a soldier to be killed or wounded while ‘souveneering’ that it could be reported almost nonchalantly. One officer who was sniped and killed while looking for souvenirs was described simply as ‘a lovely young fellow’ (Winter 1979: 62), and of another it was said, ‘Napper was found dead, bayoneted in several places; he was a great souvenir hunter’ (Dunn 1997 [1938]: 527).
Those wounded soldiers who had been evacuated from the front line to the relative safety of the rear areas were not exempt from these curious and deadly experiences – this new world of objects and meanings. The hospice at Locre near Mount Kemmel in Belgian Flanders had been converted into a wartime orphanage, and was run by nuns. On 17 July 1916, shell shrapnel crashed through the roof of a building onto a bed vacated just minutes before. Nobody was hurt, and in gratitude to God, Mother Claudia allowed soldiers to collect up the shell fragments not as personal souvenirs, but to work them into a flower vase for the chapel (Franky Bostyn, pers. comm.).
Religious feelings also were changed by the war, particularly in the way that Protestant British soldiers felt about that definitively Catholic icon, the crucifix. Newly arrived on the Western Front, British soldiers were sceptical about the crucifix’s protective powers. Typical of these initial reactions was the statement by one British soldier that ‘What I don’t like about this ’ere Bloody Europe is all these Bloody pictures of Jesus Christ an’ ’is Relatives, be’ind Bloody bits of glawss’ (Rupert Brooke, quoted in Fussell 1977: 118). Yet even hundreds of years of proud British Protestantism fell victim to the intensities of modern industrialised war, as soldiers soon began buying crucifixes and amulets from Catholic churches and local shops, and even fashioning them from the bullets they found on the battlefield.
The extent to which war changed the attitudes of these men to these religious objects can be seen from the story of Private John Scollen of 27th Battalion, 4th Tyneside Irish. On 27 June 1916, he wrote a heartbreaking letter to his wife just days before he went into battle on 1 July on the Somme. He entreats his wife to be of good heart and hopes that he can do his duty, and then adds:
Dearest wife Christina, accept this little souvenir of France, a cross made from a French bullet which I enclose for you…. GOODBYE GOODBYE and think of me in your prayers.
From your faithful soldier
Husband and father
John Scollen B Coy 27th SB NF
Goodbye my loved ones DON’T cry
I made the cross myself
(James Brazier, pers. comm.)
John Scollen died on the first day of the battle of the Somme. He evidently regarded his bullet-crucifix as an eloquent testament to his experiences, emotions, and perhaps also to a sense of impending death. This little object had lost its purely Catholic overtones and become a simple yet powerful and poignant symbol of loss for a soldier, his wife and his children. Because it had been fashioned and last touched by the still-living husband/father, the family’s handling of the crucifix would have been a direct and painful connection between the living and the dead. By sending it to his wife, Scollen was giving away an intimate part of himself, an embodiment of the time he had spent making it while thinking about his loved ones.
For British Catholic soldiers, the meanings of such miniature talismanic crosses were even more powerful, as they recalled the imagery of Christ’s sacrifice as well as their own suffering. Vincent Sabini of 18th London, 47th Division, went over the top at Messines in Belgium in 1917, and was almost immediately hit in the leg by a German bullet. After the bullet was removed, Sabini made it into a crucifix, which he wore around his neck until his death in 1981, aged 90 (Saunders 2003a: 14–16) For Sabini, this bullet-crucifix was more than a souvenir of war – it represented his survival, and was a constant reminder of the conflict in the permanent limp that he had until death. The German bullet had become a part of his life.
Equally remarkable was the fact that the crucifix was inherited and worn by his nephew Tony Spagnoly, a First World War historian and battlefield tour guide. Spagnoly would stand with his group on the spot of his uncle’s wounding, recount the story, and show the crucifix in an act that often produced an emotional response from the tour group. Here we can plainly see how a single bullet (one of millions) was transformed into a crucifix, moved through time and space, and affected generations of people for the best part of a century. The crucifixes belonging to John Scollen and Vincent Sabini were small and commonplace objects of war, but they are packed with meaning and emotion for the two soldiers who made them and the families who inherited them.
The intensity of the war affected civilians as well as soldiers in strange ways, by changing their relationships with the objects of war. As early as 1914, The War Illustrated magazine published photographs showing Belgian civilians searching for German bullets in the long grass of late summer. The caption included the prophetic comment that
Souvenir hunting has become quite an industry where the fire of battle has raged, and it is certain that the traffic in war souvenirs will flourish in the years to come when battlefields are the haunt of summer tourists. (Quoted in Lloyd 1994: 30)
These examples illustrate the way in which the First World War redefined the relationships between men and women and the objects of war. Yet these items were not just souvenirs, talismans and memory objects: many of them belonged to a much wider category of war-related objects – a phenomenon known as trench art.
The war affected the relationships between people and apparently mundane items in a host of ways. This is an important point for archaeologists to consider when they excavate battlefields, and encounter seemingly meaningless objects among the debris of industrialised war. Epitomising the strange transformations that war artefacts underwent are items known as trench art, three-dimensional objects made by soldiers, prisoners of war and civilians from the scrap of war, or from ordinary materials – such as embroidery, carved wood, and stone – made under the duress of conflict.
Trench art is an evocative but misleading name applied to a dazzling array of artefacts, for which there are as many definitions and alternative terms as there are collectors and museum curators. One useful way of defining trench art is that it is ‘any item made by soldiers, prisoners of war and civilians, from war materiel, or any other material, as long as the object and its maker are associated in time and/or in space with armed conflict or its consequences’. While trench art takes its name from the First World War, it is in fact more a concept than a collection of objects, and examples exist from many pre-1914 conflicts and later twentieth-century wars.
Trench art of the First World War and its aftermath includes obvious instances of items made from recycled war materiel such as artillery-shell cases, detonators, bullets, grenades, shrapnel, ship and aircraft parts, as well as a host of miscellaneous scrap. These items were fashioned into a variety of objects, such as matchbox covers, bullet–pens, inkwells and writing sets, cigarette-lighters, ashtrays, identity tags, letter-openers and crucifixes, and are often best preserved in extraordinary private collections (e.g. Warin 2001, 2005). The most famous and frequently encountered kind of trench art is that made from the definitive and iconic weapon of the First World War – the artillery shell (Saunders 2002c). Once the shell had been fired, the empty shell case could be picked up and transformed, more or less artistically, into a piece of trench art, either as a personal memento or, more likely, as an item to be sold or exchanged. Trench art also includes commercially made metal items that have been personalised with a name, service number, and sometimes the battlezone location where it was made. Personalised items include cigarette cases, weapons, writing materials and painted helmets.
Apart from metal, there are objects made from beads, embroidered and painted cloth, and innumerable items of carved wood, bone, stone, and such unlikely materials as army-issue biscuits (used as photograph frames). In the chalk and limestone country of the Somme and Champagne, large-scale images were produced in vast underground tunnel systems and galleries mainly by Allied soldiers. These range from simple pencil sketches of men and women to elaborate painted carvings of army insignia, patriotic (French) images of the Cockerel and Marianne, various animals, and even complete subterranean religious altars used by the Catholic French infantry before going over the top. Each of these different kinds of artefact is a trace of humanity, saying something about the person who made it, and those who bought it, inherited it or came into contact with it.
Trench-art objects could embody experiences of war that are not obvious at first glance today. For some soldiers, trench-art items could be amulets – symbols of divine protection, or of luck and relief at having survived life-and-death struggles. Some objects were sent home to sweethearts and families almost as trophies of the war, while other were made as a medium of exchange, to earn money or gain favours. Refugees who made trench art for sale to the soldiers during the war were understandably motivated by the terrible circumstances in which they found themselves. Far from being the anonymous junk of war, trench art is revealed as a rich source of information and insight into how individuals coped with their very different experiences of the war. Trench art could evoke feelings of love, hate, fear, grief and boredom, as well as display extraordinary inventiveness, and be motivated by profit.
The stories and insights that trench-art objects contain cannot be gained simply by looking at the mass of objects that were produced. Millions of items all speaking at once confuse and disorientate the archaeologist and anthropologist alike. It is only through a classification of these endlessly varied artefacts that their information can be unlocked, a process which simultaneously transforms them from the ‘junk of war’ into meaningful items that throw light on the relationships between people and objects during and after the conflict.
It is possible to identify different categories of trench art, each with its own features and associations, and sometimes also with a string of extraordinary stories attached. Trench art is best understood not by being organised by shape and function – i.e. all artillery-shell ‘vases’, or all bullet–pens – but rather by who made what, when, where and why. In this way, we can identify different types, date them, describe their processes of manufacture, track them as they move from the battlefield to the home or museum, and sometimes identify those who created them or for whom they were made.
The metal matchbox cover illustrates this point. They were made by front-line soldiers, auxiliary personnel in (safer) rear areas, prisoners of war, internees and civilians both during and after the conflict. All examples served to protect the matchbox, and thus appear the same. Yet the item meant different things (and had different values) according to who made it and where it was made. A soldier might create one simply to protect his own matches, a prisoner of war could be motivated by the desire to exchange one for food from his guards, and a refugee would be mainly interested in the money made by selling it to others. We soon realise how powerful these items were, and often remain. A war orphan would regard ‘Daddy’s shell’ in quite a different way than would a surviving soldier, a war widow, or the returning refugees who made them in vast quantities along the old Western Front and elsewhere after 1918. The brief overview that follows of how trench art can be organised into categories shows how these objects can reveal their human, spiritual and cultural meanings and associations.
Trench art made by soldiers in the front line, behind the lines, in prisoner-of-war camps or recuperating in hospitals displays the greatest variety of shape, size and decoration. Because of the many different situations in which soldiers found themselves, this category is sub-divided into 1a, 1b, 1c and 1d. Generally speaking, this category contains such items as cigarette-lighters made from bullets, matchbox covers commonly made from brass or steel scrap and often simply inscribed and decorated, ashtrays (made from cut-down artillery shells), letter-openers made from bullets and scrap metal, pens/pencils made from defused bullets and cartridges, artillery-shell cases that were simply decorated near the front lines or more elaborately shaped and decorated by service personnel behind the lines, finger rings made mainly from aluminium, steel or brass, lockets and brooches made from scrap metal and sometimes incorporating defused bullets or cartridges, bracelets and wristbands often made from the ridged copper drivebands of artillery shells, miniature tanks and aeroplanes made from scrap metals, military caps made from the base of a brass shell case, walking sticks and photograph frames, ships made from wood, carved pieces of bone, stone and chalk, beaded items, and embroidered postcards and handkerchiefs and painted textiles.
Items made by soldiers on active service between 1914 and 1918 (sub-category 1a) reflected the harsh conditions of the war. A favourite was the finger ring made by French and Belgian soldiers in the trenches, and fashioned from the aluminium fuses taken from incoming German shells or crashed Zeppelin airships. These were melted down and poured into a mould, engraved and polished, and then sold or bartered to other soldiers or sent home to loved ones.
Other soldiers, including the British, also in the front line, made and decorated trench-art ‘vases’ from artillery-shell cases. One example was made by a British soldier who purchased a paper template from a Belgian for five cigarettes and then transferred the design to a shell with a bent nail. In this way he decorated two British 18-pounder shell cases with art nouveau style female figures and flowers, inscribing one ‘Souvenir of Loos’, the other ‘Souvenir of Ypres’. When he returned home, he polished and lacquered them, keeping both on his mantelpiece for sixty years.
An unusually well-documented example was made by Sapper Stanley Pearl of the Australian 5th Field Company Engineers, and which he called a ‘Chrysanthemum Vase’. This object was a virtual three-dimensional record of some of his wartime and early Armistice-period experiences. It was, he recalled,
Made at Thy-le-Cateau from a French 75-mm shell-case and embellished with the Royal Artillery badge and a French artillery button. The shell-case was souvenired from a French battery south of Villers-Bretonneux, while the handles are 1-inch copper steampipes split down and flattened out. The latter were purloined from a German locomotive which formed part of the Armistice indemnity and were removed at night with a hacksaw in spite of a guard. (AWM 14161)
Such battlezone activities were not, of course, without their dangers, as the German stormtrooper Ernst Jünger observed: ‘Even when the men were only chipping off the copper rings from the shells to work them into paperknives or bracelets, there were incidents’ (Jünger 2003: 61). These incidents were sometimes fatal, as the wartime diary of Achiel Van Walleghem recalled:
On the farm of Cyriel Lammerant, a terrible accident has happened. Three Belgian soldiers … were working on a fusée [shell fuse], which they wanted to open to sculpture the aluminium. Unfortunately, there was still powder in [it], and while they were busy, there was at once a terrible explosion. The adjutant lost his fingers and was much injured in his face, the arm of the chief lay open in three places and the soldier was horribly injured in chest and belly. All three were transported to Poperinge hospital, where the soldier died the other day. (Van Walleghem 1965: 70–1. Translated by F. Bostyn, adapted by N.J. Saunders)
In the safer areas behind the front lines, the Royal Engineers and Belgian metalsmiths who had joined the Belgian army in 1914 made more elaborate pieces, such as shaped and fluted shell-case vases, officers’ swagger sticks artfully made from bullet cartridges fitted one inside another, and miniature biplanes produced from bullet cartridges and metal scrap. Many items were made ‘on spec’ while others were made to order, sometimes engraved with a man’s name, service number, regiment, and a date or place name.
Prisoners of war also made trench art between 1914 and 1919, when they were released (sub-category 1b). These items, however, were not produced in life-and-death circumstances, and tended to be made partly to alleviate boredom, but mainly to earn extra money, food and favours from their guards. In prisoner-of-war camps, trench-art objects were made primarily of wood, bone and textiles. Battlefield debris was usually not available, though bully-beef tins sometimes substituted for the metals of war. With different raw materials, and under different circumstances, prisoner-of-war trench art had quite different meanings than those items made by soldiers still engaged in fighting.
Apart from carved-wood items such as cigarette boxes, prisoners of war made a range of objects depending on their nationality and where they were imprisoned. Turkish prisoners, for example, made striking ‘beadwork snakes’, sometimes with lettering picked out in black beads reading ‘Turkish Prisoner 1915’. German prisoners, by contrast, made letter-openers and matchbox covers, engraved with the names and places of their imprisonment.
Another kind of trench art (sub-category 1c) was made by the wounded and maimed. Doctors sometimes arranged for recuperating soldiers to make objects as part of their physical or psychological recuperation (Reznick 2005; Saunders 2003b: 114). Depending on their injuries, the wounded made wooden picture frames and boxes, or a variety of embroideries and textiles, of which the most striking (though somewhat sentimental to modern eyes) was the embroidered heart-shaped cushion.
The final kind of soldier trench art (sub-category 1d) was made by new recruits who, too young to fight during the war, joined up after 1918 and were part of the Allied forces that occupied the German Rhineland between 1918 and 1930. Metal objects and wooden carvings were made during this time, and painted wooden plaques were a favourite, sometimes having a dated inscription, such as ‘Souvenir from Germany, December 1918–20’. These items of course were only ever souvenirs of routine military activities in a foreign land, rather than of fighting.
The wide range of mainly wartime trench art made by soldiers had a parallel in items made by civilians, although the meanings and associations were usually quite different. The First World War had a devastating effect on civilian life, through deprivation, starvation and the destruction of towns, farms and homes. Yet the conditions and debris of war also produced a thriving civilian industry in trench art and general war memorabilia, which lasted for twenty-five years from 1914 to 1939, and which forms the basis of many private collections to this day (although such artefacts are not always recognised as made by civilians).
As with category 1, category 2 can be also be sub-divided (2a, 2b and 2c). The differences between sub-categories 2a and 2b are important and poignant, yet difficult to pin down. In both cases, almost identical items could be made by the same individuals, working the same raw materials, and with the same tools and techniques. Except where an object was dated, or had an inscription which indicated that the war was over, the difference between the two sub-categories was not in their materials or shapes, but in the changing circumstances of their production and use associated with the shift from war to peace.
Sub-category 2a items were sold mainly to soldiers during the war, whereas 2b objects were sold to war widows, pilgrims and battlefield tourists between 1919 and 1939 (see next section). Sub-category 2c items were made by civilians who were living in the enemy’s country when war broke out, and were imprisoned in internee camps. This range of situations gave diverse meanings to these objects of war.
Many examples of civilian trench art can only be distinguished from soldier-made types by their dates and inscriptions. Artillery-shell vases, bullet–pens, letter-openers, metal crucifixes, wooden carvings and textiles made by civilians during the war can appear identical to those made by wartime soldiers, or civilians after the war. The easiest examples to identify are those made after 1918, and that carry such inscriptions as ‘Souvenir of the Great War 1914–1918’, or an artistic image of a postwar battlefield memorial. While the war lasted only four years, and produced a large amount of trench art, the interwar period was twenty years long, and so it is not surprising that the greatest quantity of surviving trench art belongs to the peacetime aftermath rather than to the conflict itself. The greatest quantity of apparently war-related objects was the product of civilians in peacetime – an ironic comment on the nature of war and its material legacies.
During the war, civilians made trench-art souvenirs for the captive market comprising the two contending armies (sub-category 2a). French and Belgian civilians found themselves caught on different sides of the front line, but this did not adversely affect their trench-art-making activities. Local embroideries, carved-wood items and metal objects were made and sold to all soldiers irrespective of nationality. In Liège, war widows and the wives of Belgian soldiers made toy guns, miniature bayonets, and trench-art letter-openers with characteristic crescent blades.
After the war, refugees returned home to their devastated villages and farms and continued making trench art between 1919 and 1939 (sub-category 2b). Around the Belgian town of Ypres, up to five unexploded artillery shells could be found in one square metre, and some 5,000 kilograms of shrapnel per hectare. All had to be cleared before resettlement could begin, a process that yielded vast quantities of raw materials for the making of trench-art and associated war souvenirs. Returning refugees scoured the battlefields to collect this scrap as a way of earning money for their families, who sold it on or used it to make trench-art souvenirs for the battlefield pilgrims and tourists who were arriving in ever greater numbers.
Between 1919 and 1939, it was the battlefield visitors who replaced the soldiers as a market for trench-art items. The meanings and associations of such objects for the makers and the buyers were quite different to those held during the war itself. The hidden cost of sourcing the raw materials was borne by the civilians who sent their children out into the battlefields; some children were injured or never returned. For the purchasers, however, this was an invisible tragedy, and such objects recalled only the memories of their own loved ones who never came back.
Away from the battlefields, civilians trapped in enemy territory in August 1914 were interned in special camps, where, again because of boredom, depression and the desire to make extra money for food, they too would make trench-art objects between 1914 and 1919 (sub-category 2c). These objects were not from the spoils of war and/or weaponry, but they were associated with war, and similarly represented ideas of isolation, captivity, loneliness and alienation for their makers.
The best-documented internee camps were those established on the Isle of Man, where internees (Germans, British citizens with German names, Turks and Austrians) used their time and ingenuity to make inlaid wooden boxes, furniture, and trinkets for barter and sale (Cresswell 1994: 23–7). Most famously, they recycled the bones of animals consumed in the camps to make ashtrays, brooches and countless leg-bone ‘vases’ carved with art nouveau floral designs – an interesting parallel to the decorated artillery-shell vases made by soldiers and civilians in the battlezones.
The great public interest and obsession with Great War memorabilia was not lost on commercial companies in Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Italy and elsewhere. British companies made so-called heraldic china (miniature aeroplanes, tanks and memorials) (Pugh 1972), while the French produced patriotic images (paintings and postcards) as well as trench-art look-alike metal cigarette-lighters, and the Italians created painted ceramics in the shape of artillery shells.
Many category 3 items were made from the raw, unworked and often randomly collected materials of war brought back as souvenirs by returning soldiers, and from available war-surplus materiel. The transformation of these ‘found objects’ of war into cultural items was undertaken by large and small firms. Some of these, such as the Army and Navy Store in Britain, and Francis Bannerman and Sons in the United States, advertised their services and their ready-made items. They offered to mount a piece of shrapnel or a bullet, adapt an artillery-shell case for use as an electric table lamp, clock or dinner gong, and create cutlery from bullets and shrapnel. Artillery-shell fuses and grenades were made into paperweights and inkwells, and scrap metal into writing sets and cups with elaborate handles. Some of these items were (and still are) called ‘mounted war trophies’. Considered together, these commercially made trench-art items are an easily identifiable category, even though they represent an ironic civilising of some of the war’s deadliest weapons.
These items tended to tame the experiences of war, to soften harsh memories, and to embody the ‘swords into ploughshares’ philosophy – a phrase frequently engraved on them. Many, perhaps most, of these items were to be found in homes where the men had survived and simply paid for their mementoes to be made into items suitable for the house. Their associations were quite different from trench-art souvenirs bought by bereaved widows on battlefield tours to the Somme or Belgian Flanders.
At first sight, much trench art can appear crude and uninteresting, and sometimes little more than tasteless kitsch souvenirs. As this brief overview shows, however, it is in fact rich in symbolism and irony, a powerful connection between soldiers and civilians, men and women, and between individuals and industrialised society. Trench-art objects are also a powerful link between the living and the dead in acts of commemoration, and, most recently, have been found in archaeological excavations.
The power of the artefacts of war was not limited to the conflict itself, or to those who fought in it. As civilian categories of trench art show, such objects had a long, poignant and sometimes painful afterlife for the families affected by the conflict. The war ended with the Armistice signed on 11 November 1918, but it changed the relationships between people and war-related artefacts long after the formal conclusion of hostilities. At a deeper, almost philosophical level, the scale and intensity of a war that pitched millions of frail human beings against industrial quantities of iron, steel and high explosives had highlighted difficult moral and cultural issues. What was civilisation? What was the relationship between technology and humanity? What was art? And what was an artefact?
The First World War defined the twentieth century, transforming technologies, national boundaries, and social, political and cultural attitudes. In many respects, our modern world is an artefact forged in the crucible of the Great War, and, later, modified by the Second World War, and then the cold war (and, currently, the ‘war on terror’). One way of tracking and investigating what might be called the social archaeology of Great War objects in peacetime – i.e. between 1919 and 1939 – is what I have called the ‘memory bridge’ (Saunders 2001b).
The memory bridge is one way of thinking about and understanding the effects of the artefacts of the First World War on those who lived during the interwar years. Great War objects, ideas, experiences and attitudes linked the two world wars during a period of dramatic social, economic and cultural change, forming a bridge composed of material culture, emotion and memory. In the physical and symbolic space spanned by this bridge was a world which not only shaped people’s everyday lives, but also their perceptions of the past (i.e. the First World War as the ‘war to end all wars’) and of a hoped-for future. These views became increasingly ironic as a second conflict loomed in Europe during the 1930s, tarnishing if not corroding the sacrifices made by so many families.
In Britain, the physical nature of the postwar world was everywhere apparent in different kinds of material culture that intentionally or by accident provoked commemorative feelings. The obvious and well-documented objects and attitude-shaping events – such as Sir Edwin Lutyens’s Cenotaph in London’s Whitehall, the tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey, and the grand annual Armistice Day events – were restricted mainly to those who lived in or visited the capital. More significant on an everyday basis were other artefacts and occasions that intersected the lives of the wider population.
Perhaps the most obvious, and poignant, physical aspect of everyday life was the absence on the nation’s streets of large numbers of young men, together with the inescapable presence of many damaged and impoverished men – the war-maimed. As one observer recalled,
there was a Mr Jordan who’d lost his right arm, my old man who’d been gassed, and the man at the top of the street who was so badly shell-shocked he couldn’t walk without help. And there were lots of one-armed and one-legged old sweats begging in the streets. (Jim Wolveridge, quoted in Bourke 1996: 35)
These men, broken by war, were in a very real sense also the artefacts of conflict.
Such powerful visual reminders of the war were joined by large numbers of widows, single women, fatherless children and incomplete families. Statistically, the numbers of the dead and wounded were perhaps less significant demographically than might at first appear, but nevertheless it was true that many of the social structures of pre-war British society had been greatly altered. It was undeniable that the physical and psychological features of a civilian population reduced by four years of war were an integral part of postwar social realities and interactions. In the interwar years, people were missing from the country’s byways, and the war-maimed and war-affected were ever present.
These new social conditions were played out against a changing physical background of architecture and objects that altered perceptions of space and tugged at the emotions. Vivid reminders of the war appeared in many cities, towns and villages in the form of tanks and cannon placed in central locations. Nearby, so-called street shrines were a constant reminder of the conflict. Begun during the war, these shrines associated the Christian cross with ideas of military self-sacrifice and patriotism. Flags, flowers, embroideries, photographs of the king and his generals, and of Tommies smoking in their shirtsleeves were all used in such spontaneous displays. The power of these ephemeral but highly visual examples of material culture to affect people’s attitudes and behaviour is seen by the fact that local people made and maintained these shrines, and they were widely held in respect. The shrines were often aimed especially at women, and were seen by the Anglican Church as a way of presenting the idea that the sufferings of citizens in arms were achievements of public significance (King 1998: 55).
Other physical traces of the war in peacetime civilian locations were the ‘rolls of honour’ that had also first appeared during the war. These were lists of the dead prominently displayed in public places, and could not but be a constant reminder of the human cost of the war. In the years after 1918, villages, towns and cities also erected their own war memorials to act as a focus for the Remembrance Day ceremonies on 11 November. Some memorials were grand and expensive, others of more humble proportions, and many were raised by local public funds as a sign of the community’s gratitude for and pride in the sacrifices their men (and they themselves) had made. The issues of design, location, who should be on the organising committees and who should inaugurate (and sometimes pay for) these memorials was often a focus for civic dispute (Black 2004: 135, 137; King 1998: 86–103). Nevertheless, it remains a fact that Britain’s urban and rural landscape was reshaped by this process of memorialisation.
War memorials were also closely associated with technology in a more fundamental transformation of the British landscape. In the postwar years, there was an increase in motoring and road construction. This development shaped and perpetuated memories of the war by virtue of the belief that local war memorials were expected to be of interest and accessible to the rising number of leisure motorists. This idea is well expressed by the view of Ian Hay that ‘every English highway is now one continuous memorial avenue. The cumulative effect upon the traveller’s mind is almost unendurable in its poignancy’ (quoted in King 1998: 23).
The transformation of public space into miniature commemorative landscapes by the unveiling of war memorials was further advanced by larger architectural projects. These included the founding of memorial hospitals, public halls, libraries, playing fields and, in places such as Stockport, Aberdeen and Hereford, museums that were themselves (or that combined elements of) war memorials (Kavanagh 1994: 155–6). A new kind of institution appeared, the regimental museum, large numbers of which were opened during the interwar years. The most famous of all British museums was the Imperial War Museum, which was opened on 9 June 1920 by King George V and Queen Mary at Crystal Palace in London, and acted as a national focus for the commemorative display of war-related objects (Cornish 2004; Kavanagh 1994: 155–6).
Even places of worship were not immune from the presence of the war’s material culture. At the parish church at Burgate in Suffolk was a shrine of trench-art objects made by wounded soldiers in Belgium in 1917. Artillery-shell cases were used as altarpieces, German aluminium had been recycled into several crosses, and a larger cross was fashioned by a local blacksmith after the war from the debris of a crashed 1917 aeroplane that had thoughtfully been brought back to England.
The wartime manufacture of all but the last item was made possible by B. Appleyard, the army chaplain at the casualty clearing station where the wounded men had recuperated. Appleyard scoured the Belgian and French countryside, collecting the waste metals of war from military dumps, and encouraged the men to make the items that became known as the ‘Padre’s Souvenirs’. After the war, he became rector of Burgate church, where he assembled his trench-art collection around the altar. One of Appleyard’s trench-art souvenirs invoked a very personal memory, as it had been damaged by a piece of shrapnel during a German bombing raid on the casualty clearing station’s tented encampment. Appleyard observed that if the trench-art shell had not been placed exactly where it was, then the shrapnel would have ended up in his own body (Appleyard 1929).
Postwar street life was changing rapidly, but so was the domestic landscape of the home. During and after the war, soldiers sent and brought home large quantites of battlefield souvenirs with which to decorate their living rooms and hallways. Sometimes these were unaltered mementoes of war, such as the rifles, helmets, bullets and lumps of shrapnel that they had somehow acquired. Sometimes, as we have seen, they were more elaborate souvenirs, such as trench-art shell cases, bullet–lighters, carved-wood or carved-bone implements, and a miscellany of embroidered items and scrap metal made into artefacts. These objects, saturated with the memories of conflict, now became an integral part of the world of the home – artefacts of war in the surroundings of peaceful family life (see Allison 1999, Cieraard 1999 and Radley 1994 for anthropological approaches to the study of the home).
The ability of these objects to embody and stimulate memories of the war was not confined to the men and (occasionally) women who brought them back. Auntie Mabel’s War is an account of a nurse who served with the Scottish Women’s Hospital in northern France and the Balkans during the First World War, and who brought back several decorated artillery-shell cases as souvenirs of her experiences. Some sixty years later, her niece, Mrs Turner, was asked about one of the shells – a question that released a memory sealed inside the shell case for over half a century.
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)
Great War objects in the home altered physical space, changed the emotional atmosphere, and were constant reminders of absent loved ones. A pair of decorated shells on a mantelpiece, a bullet letter-opener on a desk, or a shell dinner-gong sounded at mealtimes, was an ever-present memory-object, and only a glance away. Sometimes, such items were the only material reminders of the dead, whether sent home by a soldier who was subsequently killed, or bought by a widow on a visit to the battlefields.
The social archaeology of such objects overlaps with the anthropology of the senses in investigating these artefacts. Many of these poignant souvenirs were made of brass, a metal that tarnishes quickly. This led the bereaved wife or mother to develop a routine of cleaning and polishing that may have had a therapeutic effect. The smell of brass polish, the sound of the dinner-gong, and the feel of carved-wood photograph frames or embroidered textiles all produced sensations that added texture to the memories of these war-related objects. The sense of touch evoked a different world – a pre-war life – that heightened the sense of loss in the home. In its own peculiar way, the tragic legacy of the First World War involved a reorientation of the senses for civilians, just as it had (albeit in different circumstances) for soldiers during the war.
In and around the home during the interwar years, a wide variety of items kept alive the memories of the dead. Trench-art souvenirs, war trophies, heraldic china and campaign medals in Britain and its empire were joined by ex-voto paintings (often with a photograph and a man’s name) placed in churches and cathedrals in France, thanking saints for their intercession in saving a soldier’s life (Becker 1996: 60–1). In Germany, miniature memorial shrines to dead husbands were set up in the home, and across Europe, so-called mourning (or sweetheart) jewellery was worn by many women (Maas and Dietrich 1994).
An integral part of the memory bridge was also what might be called ‘background cultural noise’ – everyday items such as books, magazines and films about the war. Many now-famous publications, such as Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That (1928), Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War (1928) and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), and films such as Dawn Patrol (1930), Westfront 1918 (1930) and the cinematic version of Remarque’s novel (1930) contributed in equally powerful ways to the memory of, and feelings about, the war. Whatever their literary or artistic merit today, these creations were material culture that owed their inspiration to the war, and were available to all who were interested, either to challenge or to reinforce personal views of what the war had been about. They often had a powerful effect on emotions, and could shape attitudes accordingly. In the case of books, they crossed the boundary between public and private domains, existing in bookshops and libraries, from where they moved into the home to be discussed and argued about by family and friends.
A different kind of material memory was that which saw the spirit world take on physical form. For some individuals, the trauma of loss was so deeply felt that they felt drawn to believe that the dead could reappear in this world and visit the living, or, at the very least, speak to their loved ones through a medium during a seance. As Jay Winter has shown, the First World War triggered an avalanche of interest in spiritualism during the 1920s, and reached a peak – in terms of a material culture bridge between worlds – in the ‘psychic photographs’ of Mrs Ada Emma Deane (Winter 1995: 54, 75–6). These obviously altered images purported to show the faces of the dead hovering above the living at the London Armistice ceremonies during that decade. On such occasions, the individual’s willingness to believe in spirits created a need for physical proof in the form of photographs, where the invisible were made visible, and the spirits of the dead lived once again in the material world.
In this chapter, we have explored some of the unexpected and more obvious meanings of war objects, both during the conflict and afterwards. All in their own way are products of the war. Some are similar or identical to artefacts discovered during archaeological excavations of Great War sites, while others only ever existed in the postwar civilian world. Many still survive in museums, private collections, and for sale on the international market in military memorabilia. Each carries a story, a biography of itself as it travelled down through the decades from the war or the interwar years to today, passing through the hands of individuals and generations whose lives it affected in some way. Having opened the door to a different way of looking at the material culture of the First World War, it is time to explore the physical and symbolic places where such objects came from or arrived at – the landscapes of conflict.