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NOSTALGIA AS AN EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE IN THE GREAT WAR*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2011

MICHAEL ROPER
MICHAEL ROPER*
Affiliation:
University of Essex
*
Department of Sociology, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Essex, CO4 3SQmrop@essex.ac.uk
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Abstract

This article is concerned with the longing for home of British soldiers during the First World War. What, it asks, can such longings reveal about the psychological impact of trench warfare? Historians have differed in the significance that they ascribe to domestic attachments. Some argue that a ‘cultural chasm’ developed between the fronts, producing anger and disillusionment among soldiers which would surface fully fledged after the war, while others assert the continuing vitality of the links with home. Evidence for both these perceptions can be found in the letters written by British soldiers to their families. The functions of nostalgia could range from reassurance or momentary relief from boredom and impersonal army routines, through flight from intolerable anxiety, to survival through the power of love. Although animated by solitude, nostalgia provided a means of communication with loved ones. Its emotional tones varied according to the soldier's age and the nature of his attachments to home. The young soldier's reminiscences of home conveyed, not just the comforting past, but the hateful present. Nostalgia, being rooted in early memories of care, could be a potent vehicle for arousing the anxieties of loved ones, especially mothers. Among married men, the desire to return to wives and children could provide a powerful motivation for survival. This analysis suggests a different and more varied account of the genesis of the ‘disillusionment story’ of the war than is put forward in some recent studies. Among men of the ‘war generation’ particularly, disillusionment was not only a post-war construction, an artefact of cultural memory, but a powerful legacy of the emotional experience of the war itself.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 54 , Issue 2 , June 2011 , pp. 421 - 451
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank the following people for giving me permission to quote from family correspondence: D. Anderton for the papers of E. H. Anderton; W. A. C. Baker for the papers of A. C. Baker; M. Brown for the papers of S. E. Brown; E. Buckeridge for the papers of E. G. Buckeridge; G. Hinson for the papers of W. C. Christopher; the Trustees of the Imperial War Museum for the papers of J. A. C. Clarke; S. Roome for the papers of T. Corless; B. Botting for the papers of H. L. Davis; D. Lynch for the papers of H. P. Jarvis; J. Keeling for the papers of A. Gibbs; W. Spray for the papers of J. W. Hickson; Leeds University Library for the papers of A. Hooper, K. Hooper and L. Hooper; D. Hubbard for the papers of A. H. Hubbard; T. Leland for the papers of H. J. C. Leland; Leeds University Library for the papers of I. McLeod; S. Brotherton for the papers of S. B. Smith; J. Timson for the papers of W. Munton; and A. Urwick for the papers of L. Urwick.

References

1 Postcard from Jack Dyson to wife, The Great War Archive, University of Oxford, www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa/document/8950, accessed on 7 Nov. 2010.

2 Postcard from Frederick Guy to mother, The Great War Archive, University of Oxford www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa/document/9486, accessed on 11 Nov. 2010.

3 Kaplan, H., ‘The psychopathology of nostalgia’, Psychoanalytic Review, 74 (1963), p. 466Google Scholar.

4 P. Castelnuovo-Tedesco, ‘Reminiscence and nostalgia: the pleasure and the pain of remembering’, in G. H. Pollock and S. I. Greenspan, eds., The course of life, vii:Completing the journey (Madison, CT, 1998), p. 108.

5 Oxford English dictionary online, third edition, July 2009; online version Nov. 2010. www.oed.com.serlib0.essex.ac.uk/Entry/128472, accessed 23 Dec. 2010.

6 See for example C. Shaw and M. Chase, eds., The imagined past: history and nostalgia (Manchester, 1989).

7 Castelnuovo-Tedesco, ‘Reminiscence and nostalgia’, p. 114.

8 The influence of social class and region on the soldier's images of home, although largely beyond the scope of this article, is clearly significant. On the former see M. Roper, The secret battle: emotional survival in the Great War (Manchester, 2009), pp. 159–203. On the latter see Keith Grieves, ‘The propinquity of place: home, landscape and soldier poets of the First World War’, in J. Meyer, ed., British popular culture and the First World War (Leiden, 2008), pp. 21–47.

9 Peter B. Boyden, Tommy Atkins' letters: the history of the British army postal service from 1795 (London, 1990), p. 28.

10 H. P. Jarvis to wife, undated but 1917, Document Collection, Imperial War Museum (hereafter IWM DC), 07/12/1.

11 In the enclosed letter to his daughter Irene, Evans underlined his expectations: ‘that naughty Postman has only bought me one letter but he is going to bring me a lot soon’. J. N. J. Evans to wife, 23 July 1917, IWM DC, 01/46/1.

12 K. Grieves, Sussex in the First World War (Lewes, 2004), p. xxiii. Charles Sargeant Jagger's 1922 Great Western memorial at Paddington station provides a striking testament to the importance of letters. A British soldier bows his head, concentrating on a letter from home, the torn envelope in his hand suggesting, as Catherine Moriarty points out, his excited haste in opening it (C. Moriarty, ‘“Though in a picture only”: portrait photography and the commemoration of the First World War’, in G. Braybon, ed., Evidence, history and the Great War (New York, NY, 2005), p. 45 n. 24.

13 E. F. Chapman to mother, 5 Feb. 1917, IWM DC, Con Shelf.

14 Jarvis to wife, 26 Feb. 1917. Moriarty notes the expansion of portrait photography during the war, which through the immediacy of the likeness, could ‘literally traverse the gap of separation’ (Moriarty, ‘“Though in a picture only”’, pp. 36–7).

15 Jarvis to wife, 26 Feb. 1917.

16 Irene Evans to J. N. J. Evans, undated.

17 This could be equally true for loved ones at home. Shortly before they were married, Eva, marchioness of Reading writes: ‘Best beloved I was so very glad to hear from you so soon, it is like having a part of you when I get a letter; something of yourself with your touch upon it.’ 12 Oct. 1916; 18 Aug. 1914. IWM DC, Con Shelf.

18 W. O. Wightman to wife, 17 May 1918, IWM DC, 01/45/1.

19 Roper, The secret battle, pp. 85–119.

20 E. Wells, Mailshot. A history of the forces postal service (London, 1987), p. 63; C. Messenger, A call-to-arms. The British Army 1914–18 (London, 2006), p. 438.

21 Rachel Duffett demonstrates the capacity of food to evoke home in ‘A war unimagined: food and the rank and file soldier of the First World War’, in Meyer, ed., Popular culture, pp. 47–71.

22 W. C. Christopher to mother, 24 Mar. 1916, IWM DC, 88/11/1; M. Webb to mother, 11 Aug. 1915, IWM DC, 90/28/1.

23 Wightman to wife, 20 May 1917.

24 P. Fussell, The Great War and modern memory (Oxford, 1975), p. 88.

25 E. Leed, No man's land: combat and identity in World War I (Cambridge, 1979), p. 189.

26 Ibid.

27 Lawrence, J., ‘Forging a peaceable kingdom: war, violence, and fear of brutalization in post-First World War Britain’, Journal of Modern History, 75, (2003), pp. 3–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 J. Bourke, Dismembering the male: men's bodies and the Great War (London, 1996), p. 22. On French correspondence, see Hanna, Martha, ‘A republic of letters: the epistolary tradition in France during World War I’, American Historical Review, 108, (2003), pp. 1338–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and M. Hanna, Your death would be mine. Paul and Marie Pireaud in the Great War (Harvard, HA, 2008). On Austrian and German correspondence see Christa Hämmerle, ‘“You let a weeping woman call you home?” Private correspondences during the First World War in Austria and Germany’, in R. Earle, ed., Epistolary selves: letters and letter-writers, 1600–1945 (Aldershot, 1999), pp. 152–82. On domesticity in the Second World War letters of General George Vasey, see J. Damousi, The labour of loss: mourning, memory and wartime bereavement in Australia (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 105–26.

29 I. Bet-El, Conscripts: lost legions of the Great War (Stroud, 2003), pp. 143–4; A. Gregory, The last Great War: British society and the First World War (Cambridge, 2008), p. 133.

30 Jack Dyson to wife.

31 S. E. Brown postcard to mother, date illegible.

32 H. J. C. Leland to Lena Leland, 8 Aug. 1917, 27 July 1917, IWM DC, 96/51/1.

33 Leland to wife, 21 Aug. 1917.

34 Leland to wife, 22 Oct. 1917.

35 A. P. Herbert, The secret battle (Thirsk, 2001).

36 Clarke, F., ‘So lonesome I could die: nostalgia and debates over emotional control in the civil war North’, Journal of Social History, 41 (2007), p. 266CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Ibid., p. 259.

38 Ibid., pp. 261, 266.

39 Watson, A., ‘Self-deception and survival: mental coping strategies on the Western Front, 1914–1918’, Journal of Contemporary History, 41 (2006), p. 262CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 J. M. Winter, The Great War and the British people (Basingstoke, 1985), pp. 82–3.

41 D. Hankey, A student in arms (London, 1917), p. 106.

42 Winter, The Great War, p. 256.

43 E. M. Remarque, All quiet on the Western Front (London, 1996), p. 88.

44 The survey, consisting of around 5,000 letters in total, was compiled by using the online catalogue search terms ‘1914–18’, ‘letter’ and ‘family’, and included only addressees who could be identified as family members. I am grateful to Ana Ljubinkovic for undertaking this research.

45 A. Hooper to mother, quoted in L. Hooper to K. Hooper, 30 Sept. 1915, Liddle Collection, University of Leeds (hereafter LC), DF066.

46 B. F. J. Chapman to mother, Wednesday (undated but 1917), IWM DC, 98/17/1.

47 T. Corless to Grandma and Aunt, 7 Oct. 1916, IWM DC, 81/13/1.

48 Webb to mother and father, 12 June 1915.

49 T. Fisher, ‘Fatherhood and the experience of working-class fathers in Britain’ (Ph.D. thesis, Edinburgh, 2006), draft ch. 4, p. 5.

50 Gregory, The last Great War, p. 94.

51 According to Chris Baker, of those not in ‘starred’ occupations, 38 per cent of single men and 54 per cent of married men chose not to attest. The Long, Long Trail, www.1914–1918.net/derbyscheme.html, accessed 2 Nov. 2010.

52 Bet-El, Conscripts, p. 12.

53 Messenger, Call-to-arms, p. 441.

54 S. B. Smith to wife, 17 May 1917, IWM DC, 07/2/1.

55 Leland to wife, 9 Sept., 24 Sept., 4 Oct., 10 Oct., 21 Oct., 14 Nov. 1917.

56 Wightman to wife, 20 May 1918.

57 Wightman to wife, 21 June 1918, 14 July 1918.

58 W. Munton to wife, 2 Apr. 1918, IWM DC, 06/92/1.

59 Quoted in Bourke, Dismembering, p. 168.

60 E. H. Anderton to mother, 12 Apr. 1915, IWM DC, 88/20/1.

61 Munton to wife, 25 Apr. 1917.

62 Wightman to wife, 17 May 1918.

63 Lady Macleod to Norman Macleod, 10 Aug. 1914, 19 June 1915, LC, DF088.

64 A. Fletcher, ‘Between the lines: First World War correspondence’, History Today, www.historytoday.com/print/2574, p. 5, accessed on 11 Oct. 2010.

65 H. L. Davis to wife, 19 June 1916, IWM DC, 01/38/1.

66 A. C. Baker to mother, 24 Jan. 1917, IWM DC, 06/62/1.

67 E. G. Buckeridge to Malcolm Buckeridge, undated; E. G. Buckeridge to Anthony Buckeridge, undated, IWM DC, 05/9/1.

68 J. N. J. Evans to Irene Evans, 19 Apr. 1917.

69 W. Owen to mother, 10 Jan. 1917, in J. Bell, ed., Wilfred Owen: selected letters (Oxford, 1985), p. 212; Fisher, ‘Fatherhood’, p. 29.

70 Kaplan, ‘Psychopathology of nostalgia’, p. 466.

71 David Werman, writing of the way nostalgia is stimulated by ‘unpleasant or painful current life situations’, interestingly gives the example of the serving soldier who ‘will spend hours talking about earlier, idealized days in civilian life’ (D. Werman, S., ‘Normal and pathological nostalgia’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 25, (1977), pp. 393–4CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed).

72 J. W. Hickson to Harry Hickson, 12 Dec. 1917, IWM DC, 06/94/1.

73 E. F. Chapman to mother, 27 Aug. 1916.

74 Ibid.

75 On the vaunting of motherhood in evangelical families, see J. Tosh, A man's place: masculinity and the middle-class home in Victorian England (New Haven, CT, 1999), pp. 113–14.

76 For examples of embroidered postcards see The Great War Archive, University of Oxford, www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa, accessed on 7 Nov. 2010. This devotional culture, however, could be the subject of soldiers' humour, as the following song demonstrates. Generally sung on the march to the Regimental tune of the Loyal North Lancashires, the words were taken from Edward Farmer's mid-nineteenth century poem, ‘The collier's dying child’: ‘I have no pain, dear mother, now,/But ho! I am so dry./Connect me to a brewery/And leave me there to die’. J. Brophy and E. Partridge, eds., The long trail: soldiers' songs and slang, 1914–1918 (London, 1965), p. 37.

77 Owen to mother, 9 Jan. 1917, in Bell, ed., Wilfred Owen. p. 209.

78 E. H. Anderton to mother, 12 Apr. 1915, IWM DC, 88/20/1.

79 F. Merivale to mother, 27 Dec. 1917, IWM DC, P471.

80 M. C. W. Charteris, A family record (London, 1932), pp. 310–12.

81 Hickson to wife, 5 Nov., 7 Nov. 1917.

82 Hickson to wife, 31 July 1916.

83 Tosh, A man's place, pp. 7, 62–3; T. Broughton and H. Rogers, ‘Introduction: the empire of the father’, in L. Broughton and H. Rogers, eds., Gender and fatherhood in the nineteenth century (Basingstoke, 2007), p. 4.

84 Davis to wife, 19 June 1916.

85 Baker to wife, 22 Sept. 1917.

86 J. N. J. Evans to Irene Evans, 3 May 1917.

87 Davis to wife, June 18 1916.

88 Hickson to wife, 3 Oct. 1917. On the writing of wills by married men see also Fisher, ‘Fatherhood’, p. 14.

89 L. Urwick to mother, postmark 18 Dec. 1914, private collection.

90 R. H. Roper memoir of Gallipoli, early 1970s, p. 32. In author's possession.

91 B. F. J. Chapman to mother, 21 June 1918.

92 E. F. Chapman to mother, 25 Feb. 1917.

93 Similarly, Grieves argues that for British soldier-poets, the memory of local landscapes functioned as an ‘emotional antidote’ to trench warfare. Nature ‘helped to avert the poet's gaze from deranged landscapes’. Grieves, ‘The propinquity of place’, pp. 22–30.

94 Quoted in S. Grayzel, Women's identities at war: gender, motherhood and politics in Britain and France during the First World War (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999), p. 14.

95 Among migrants, Leon and Rebeca Grinberg observe, the fantasy of return can act as ‘a source of secret pleasure to compensate for the persistent discomfort of uprootedness’. L. Grinberg and R. Grinberg, Psychoanalytic perspectives on migration and exile (New Haven, CT, 1989), p. 179.

96 J. D. Tomlinson to mother, 26 Apr. 1915, IWM DC, 87/51/1.

97 E. F. Chapman to mother, 15 Sept. 1916.

98 E. F. Chapman to mother, 14 Feb. 1917.

99 A. Gibbs to mother, 17 Sept. 1917, IWM DC, P317.

100 Wightman to wife, 21 June 1918, 25 June 1918.

101 Fisher, ‘Fatherhood’, p. 14.

102 Hooper to mother, quoted in L. Hooper to K. Hooper, 18 Oct. 1915.

103 Hickson to wife, 17 Oct. 1917.

104 Hickson to wife, 5 Nov. 1917; 27 Nov. 1917.

105 J. W. Brown to mother, 15 June 1915, IWM DC, 01/52/1.

106 B. F. J. Chapman to mother, 22 June 1918.

107 Remarque, All quiet, p. 42.

108 See, however, Santanu Das on the way that the earth of the Western Front both ‘enwombs and entombs’. Soldiers sought protection in mother earth, but they also feared being suffocated and buried alive (Touch and intimacy in First World War literature (Cambridge, 2005), p. 46–7). Roper points to similarly ambivalent feelings about dug-outs (Roper, The secret battle, pp. 254–6).

109 N. Gladden, Ypres 1917 (London, 1967), p. 131.

110 E. K. Smith to mother, 29 Oct., 1 Nov. 1915, Letters sent from France: service with the Artists' Rifles and the Buffs, December 1914–December 1915 (London, 1994), pp. 115–18.

111 Urwick to mother, 25 Sept. 1914.

112 Fodor, N., ‘Varieties of nostalgia’, Psychoanalytic Review, 37 (1950), p. 30Google Scholar.

113 Mountfort to mother, 16 Sept. 1915, 2 Feb. 1916.

114 ‘Fetal nostalgia’, says Nandor Fodor, ‘manifests itself in childish forms, such as an excessive fondness for sweets’ (Fodor, ‘Varieties of nostalgia’, p. 31).

115 W. R. Bion, War Memoirs, 1917–1919 (London, 1997), p. 122.

116 W. Hate to mother, 27 Aug. 1916, IWM DC, 86/51/1.

117 Webb to mother, 11 Aug. 1915.

118 R. D. Hinshelwood, A dictionary of Kleinian thought (London, 1991), pp. 179–208.

119 Quoted in M. Brown, Tommy goes to war (Stroud, 2005), p. 120.

120 Cecil Littlewood to Mary Littlewood, undated. The Great War Archive, University of Oxford, www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa/document/9479, accessed on 17 Dec. 2010.

121 Joseph Bullock to Lola Bullock, 12 Aug. 1916, The Great War Archive, University of Oxford, www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa/document/9374, accessed on 17 Dec. 2010.

122 C. G. Templer memoir, pp. 25, 29, IWM DC, 86/30/1.

123 Wightman to wife, 20 May 1918.

124 Munton to wife, 2 Apr. 1918.

125 Wightman to wife, 14 July 1918.

126 Wightman to wife, 13 Jan. 1919.

127 Wightman to wife, 19 Jan. 1919.

128 Ibid. Wightman was writing in early 1919, when, according to Clive Emsley, the disruption of demobilization had increased public toleration of marital violence (Emsley, C., ‘Violent crime in England in 1919: post-war anxieties and press narratives’, Continuity and change, 23, (2008), pp. 185–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

129 Wightman to wife, 18 Jan. 1919.

130 Hickson to wife, 21 June 1917.

131 Hickson to wife, 20 Sept. 1917, 27 Sept. 1917, 10 Oct. 1917.

132 Hickson to wife, 19 Oct. 1917.

133 S. B. Smith to wife, 24 Sept. 1915.

134 Smith to wife, 29 Oct. 1917.

135 Smith to wife, 5 Mar. 1916, 16 May 1918, 9 June 1918.

136 Smith to wife, 10 Oct. 1917.

137 Smith to wife, 3 June 1917, 23 Sept. 1917.

138 Smith to wife, 21 Mar. 1916, 8 Mar. 1917, 3 June 1917.

139 Smith to wife, 29 Oct. 1917.

140 Smith to wife, 5 Mar. 1916.

141 Smith to wife, 29 Jan. 1916.

142 Smith to wife, 3 Mar. 1916; 16 May 1918.

143 Smith to wife, 5 Mar. 1916.

144 Smith to wife, 4 Mar. 1917.

145 Smith to wife, 29 Oct. 1917, 10 Oct. 1916.

146 Smith to wife, 29 Jan. 1916.

147 On the enlistment of clerks, see Wild, J., ‘A merciful, heaven-sent release?: the clerk and the First World War in British literary culture’, Cultural and Social History, 4, (2007), pp. 73–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

148 It was at Gommecourt, as a diversion for the army's main attack at the Somme.

149 A. Hubbard to mother, 17 June 1916, IWM DC, Con Shelf.

150 Ibid.

151 Roper, The secret battle, pp. 276–81.

152 Hubbard to mother, 17 June 1916.

153 Ibid.

154 Ibid.

155 War Office, Report of the War Office Committee of Enquiry into ‘shell-shock’ (London, 2004), p. 58.

156 Ibid., p. 32.

157 J. Watson, Fighting different wars: experience, memory and the First World War in Britain (Cambridge, 2004), p. 187. Dan Todman also accords great weight to memory with his thesis that the popular view of the war as ‘tragedy and disaster’ is more a product of modern mythology than the events of the war itself (D. Todman, The Great War: myth and memory (London, 2005), p. xii).

158 J. Winter, Remembering war: the Great War between memory and history in the twentieth century (New Haven, CT, 2006), p. 115. A recent volume appraising the historiography of the First World War also reveals the ubiquity of this view. Hew Strachan observes that the war memoirs of the 1920s ‘were reflective not so much of a mood prevalent in the war itself but of the loss of direction suffered after the war’, whilst John Horne emphasizes how ‘the historian of the soldier's experience has constantly to deconstruct the soldier's own postwar accounts of that experience.’ (J. Winter ed., The legacy of the Great War: ninety years on (Columbia, MS, 2009), pp. 191, 103.

159 On reflexivity in veterans' memoirs and fiction, see Roper, M., ‘Re-remembering the soldier hero: the composure and re-composure of masculinity in memories of the Great War’, History Workshop Journal, 50, (2000), pp. 181–205CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Roper, M.‘Between manliness and masculinity: the “war generation” and the psychology of fear in Britain, 1914–1970’, Journal of British Studies, 44, (2005), pp. 343–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

160 S. Garton, ‘Longing for war: nostalgia and Australian returned soldiers after the First World War’, in T. Ashplant, G. Dawson, and M. Roper, eds., The politics of war memory and commemoration (London, 2000), pp. 222–40.