Our Journal: First World War Studies

During World War I, the Netherlands sent several ambulances to assist the medical services of the warring nations. Although acting mostly far away from the battlefields, they encountered gruesome scenes, which they described in Dutch magazines. They themselves hardly ever concluded that therefore war must be stopped, let alone stop medical aid during wartime. But some of their colleagues, first some nurses and later also some physicians, did. They were already mostly politically left-wing oriented and, certainly in the case of the nurses, pleading for suffrage. Already in 1918 this resulted in an appeal to stop medical assistance – 20 years before Cambridge professor John Ryle made a similar plea. Stopping medical aid in wartime would prevent more people from getting wounded and dying than anything that medicine could cure. The medical experiences during the war further resulted in the interwar years in the formation of some medical peace movements, initially by nurses – generally embedded in the larger, common peace movement – and later by doctors, who distanced themselves from the common peace movement because this would endanger medical neutrality. This had, however, already weakened the medical peace movement. The threat of a new war put an end to medical peace action.

Key Words: medical care, ambulances, (medical) neutrality, (medical) pacifism

This article explores several interrelated questions concerning the consequences of the First World War on German front veterans\’ perceptions of gender and sexuality: how did soldiers respond to military and civilian attempts to control male sexuality and define masculine ideals? How did soldiers perceive sexual behaviours and masculine norms as a result of the traumatic experiences of the trenches? Focusing on sexual humour in front newspapers, this article argues that ordinary soldiers sought to escape prevailing masculine expectations and coped with the stress of the trench experience through gender transgression that included a wide range of `deviant\’ behaviours, including heterosexual promiscuity, homosocial and homosexual bonds, and female mimesis. Sexual humour in front newspapers reveals that many soldiers sought more than just the absorption of `feminine\’ characteristics into their masculine image of comradeship, as scholars have highlighted. Soldiers also fantasized and experimented with escaping from war-time violence and masculine restrictions by crossing genders. Referring to front newspapers, soldiers\’ letters, and documents produced by civilians and the War Ministry, this article uses archival sources recently collected at the federal archive/military archives in Berlin and Freiburg, the Schwules Archiv (Gay Archive) in Berlin, and regional archives in Stuttgart and Munich.

Key Words: gender, masculinity, sexuality, German veterans, soldiers' newspapers, First World War

The link between modernism and the First World War is, by this time, a standard topic in the historiography of the conflict. Discussion on this topic often centres on the nature and strength of this connection with debate rising as to whether the war, as Vincent Sherry states, ‘locates the moment in which the new sensibility of English – and international – modernism comes fully into existence’ – or not (Vincent Sherry, The Great War and the Language of Modernism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, 6). Disagreement as to the war\‘s impact on literature and other aspects of Western culture is well known and the debate spawned by this disagreement is a vigorous one. One of the deepest wells of this vigour is the shifting definition and application of the term ‘modernism’ with regard to the various intellectual and artistic forms that emerged in the wartime and post-war cultural landscape. While not entering into this debate directly, this article examines elements of religious thought that attended the war years, specifically millennial expectation and theological modernism, assessing their relationships to each other and to the broader culture, especially the emergence of aesthetic modernism. These responses to the cataclysm of the war interacted in ways that contributed to and reflected the sense of rupture that is so often associated with the First World War. While often overlooked, this aspect of the religious history of the war years adds a new complexity to the debate swirling around the war and its relationship to modernism.

Key Words: aesthetic modernism, millennialism, religious modernism, Britain, prophecy

In August 1914, the Dutch government called up its citizens to enlist voluntarily in the army. This call-up failed. In 1915, the government tried to enlarge the army significantly by law. This attempt succeeded partially. At the end of the war, under threat of a leftwing revolution, the Netherlands assembled the largest voluntary force in its modern history and those volunteers stayed on after 1918. This article investigates Dutch thoughts on strengthening society to guarantee the survival of a small state. It was representatives from the liberal bourgeoisie who, from the late nineteenth century, actively propagated ideas on national strength, sometimes even of a social-Darwinist nature. The mobilization period was the test, as it were, to see how a notoriously non-military people would be prepared to act. Was the ideal of a kind of militarized citizen feasible?

Key Words: The Netherlands, militarization, voluntary service, revolutionary threat, 1918, liberals