Our Journal: First World War Studies

This article considers the intelligence value of prisoners captured during the First World War. 3848 troops of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) were taken prisoner by the German Army on the Western Front between the years 1916 and 1918. Because their capture was at odds with a heroic representation of the Australian war experience in the post-war period, little has been written about their war in captivity. But historians who have written about captivity tend to dwell on the personal, subjective nature of captivity and rarely consider the benefit prisoners are to the armies that capture them. This study addresses both omissions, and looks at prisoners of war as intelligence sources through the experience of Australian troops captured by the German Army on the Western Front. This paper uses prisoner testimony and German intelligence records to demonstrate that most Australian prisoners were ‘sturdily determined’ not to reveal any information of value to the enemy, yet the German Army still managed to obtain ‘very important information’ from them. It looks at AIF counter-intelligence methods, German procedures for handling prisoners for intelligence purposes, interrogation methods, prisoner experiences, what the German Army learned from Australian prisoners, as well as examples of how the German Army used information obtained from prisoners. It also looks at two cases of Australian troops who willingly disclosed information about the AIF and its operations having deserted to the enemy.

Fathers with sons of eligible military age have not figured in social and cultural histories of the Great War. The focus of these histories has emphasized bonds between mothers and sons and has been based largely on soldiers’ letters home. Widening the range of sources beyond soldiers’ personal correspondence, this article demonstrates the array of emotional and material support offered by fathers in Australia and New Zealand to their sons during the war. This article relies largely on the military archive, rather than the personal archives in public repositories, for its evidence thereby using the military archive to illuminate civilian experience. Fathers’ tenacious connection with their sons, and advocacy on their behalf, was an attempt to mitigate the extreme physical separation experienced by families in Australasia and the disruption of their roles as protectors of and providers for their children. Evidence from sons’ requests for early repatriation as well as from sources revealing fathers’ grief demonstrates the strong bonds of affection as well as duty between fathers and their adult sons during this period. A persistent theme in the evidence is the tension between duty to one’s family and that to the empire, illuminating men’s complex and often ambivalent feelings about war and their role in it.

In 1917, Henry Wilson and members of the Arts and Crafts Movement began a campaign for the provision of handicraft training for disabled veterans. They argued that handicraft work would be an ideal form of therapy for men with disabilities and, most importantly, would lead to meaningful employment. The following year, the government appointed Wilson and some of his associates to a committee that would advise it on this subject. In this capacity, they proposed, reviewed and endorsed government funding for a number of handicraft training schemes. This article examines their activities and the reasons why their well-intentioned schemes failed. In particular, I examine George Frampton’s proposal to train disabled veterans so that they might earn a living weaving tapestries as war memorials. It is my contention that this episode further illustrates the ways in which disabled veterans were adversely affected by the post-war politics of social reconstruction. They faced a government committed to financial retrenchment after the war and encountered private groups with their own agenda. While Wilson and his associates were motivated by a genuine desire to aid men disabled by the war, their overriding ambition was to revive the handicraft tradition in Britain. Circumstances in post-World War I Britain were not conducive for this development or for significant government expenditure on their laudable, but expensive and impractical, schemes. In the end, disabled veterans in search of a ‘job fit for heroes’ were caught in the middle of the competing agendas of the state and these well-meaning members of the public.

This article provides a contextualized analysis of the representation of alcohol in British war literature published between 1915 and 1930. It examines the domestic debates surrounding alcohol pre-war, as well as the controversial history of the rum ration, before providing a taxonomy of alcohol’s representation in a range of literature in which it features significantly in both its official and unofficial forms. The literature consulted includes examples of the early popular wave of fiction, and the later wave of disillusionment literature, as it came to be known. Following this thematic examination of the representation of alcohol in war texts, the concluding discussion argues that the patterns in the representation of alcohol across this 15-year period can themselves be interpreted contextually, economically and politically, as a progressive intervention in a wider debate.

When the Spanish composer Enrique Granados died on board the Sussex in March 1916, his music was scarcely know in Britain; however, shortly after his death, his symphonic poem Dante was performed by Sir Henry Wood in the Queen’s Hall concert series. Before the end of the war, Wood brought other four Spanish to the attention of British audiences: Joaquín Turina’s La procession del Rocío, Isaac Albéniz’s ‘Catalonia’ (from Suite populaire) and ‘Nivian’s Dance’ (from Merlin), and Granados’ Three Spanish Dances. For British audiences, this was one of their first significant contacts with the music of what some critics called the Spanish musical renaissance, and reviews of the works in the musical press are characterized by an attempt to understand and make sense of what reviewers were hearing. In order to do so, most critics – with the exception of Ernest Newman – tried to understand Spanish music as a national tradition, resorting to the notions of national music developed during the past decades in Britain and exacerbated by the Germanophobia typical of the First World War period. However, what reviewers and audiences heard did not always fit within these notions. On one hand, those works which did not make use of Spanish folksong but rather reflected central European musical traditions (Dante, ‘Nivian’s dance’) had little success among audiences and were received with perplexity by reviewers. On the other, La procesión del Rocío, which made use of andalucista themes, was used to present Spanish music as part of a Latin alliance destined to counterbalance the hegemony of German music. After the end of the war, however, the increasing significance of a more internationalist perspective, together with the success of the premiere of Falla’s The Three-Cornered Hat in Britain in July 1919, opened the door to a better understanding of Falla’s, Granados’ and Albéniz’s eclecticism.