Our Journal: First World War Studies

The role played by British colonial possessions during the Great War is only now starting to emerge in the last decade or so. This article aims to include Cyprus amongst those possessions that contributed enormously to the British war effort, such as India, Jamaica and the former settler colonies. Before the war Cyprus was an ‘inconsequential possession’ and during the first two years of the war it played a very minor role, when for the most part it served as a pawn to lure Greece into the war, which failed when Athens rejected the British offer to cede Cyprus to Greece in exchange for Greece coming to the military aid of Serbia in October 1915. From the summer of 1916, soon after the British and French signed the Sykes–Picot Agreement, the island became a bustling military and humanitarian base, while it also fed and fuelled the allied armies in Egypt, Macedonia and France. Its most significant contribution was undoubtedly the formation of the Cypriot Mule Corps in summer 1916. Until it was dissolved in April 1920 over 12,000 men had served at one time or another, a staggering number given the small size of the island, representing 25% of the male population aged 18–35. The contribution of the island and its people says much about imperial loyalty as well as the social fabric of a Mediterranean island emerging after centuries of Ottoman rule to the modernizing influences of British modernity. Therefore, this article does not merely aim to fill a gap in the historiography of the Great War by including the role of Cyprus and Cypriots in the story, but also endeavours to contribute to the historiography of the British Empire and its relations with the people it controlled before the advent of anti-colonial movements during the inter-war years.

Key Words: The Great War, the British Empire, role of Cyprus, colonial loyalties, military camps, refugees

This article discusses the depiction of shell shock and other impairments in British magazine fiction published during the First World War, and the implications from this for teaching and studying the literary representation of the war. The main finding is that, contrary to the post-war use of shell shock in fiction, shell shock was barely mentioned in a large sample of fiction published during the war. The data also show that the figure of the ‘damaged man’ appeared in wartime literature much earlier than has hitherto been claimed, and that during the 1914–18 period, this ‘damage’ was predominantly physical, rather than psychological. The use of shell shock in war literature published from 1914 to 1918 is examined to reflect on how the occlusion of shell shock in contemporary literary responses has importance for the way its undeniable existence throughout the war is taught using post-war fiction. The research discussed here surveys the cultural field, looking at how the fiction in a defined market sector presented all impairments, rather than looking for examples of particular representations within a pre-selected literary canon. This derives from the social model of disability, by scrutinising how society erects barriers and creates attitudes that marginalise impaired individuals.

Key Words: First World War, shell-shock, magazine fiction, impairment, Rudyard Kipling

The unmistakable devastation wrought on the battlefields of the First World War was epitomized in the Somme region of northern France in 1916. The Battle of the Somme became an infamous embodiment of death and destruction, characters which prevailed during subsequent decades. However, the process of healing – of people and landscape – has been central to the legacy of the Somme. Natural regeneration went hand-in-hand with revived agricultural livelihoods, pilgrimages to war cemeteries, and the introduction of commemorative planting to reinforce national identities and provide an atmosphere of tranquillity. The long overlooked wartime activities of Sir Arthur Hill, former Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, provide a unique baseline for examining these changes. Hill purposefully recorded the wild flora immediately after the Battle and pioneered horticultural work with the Imperial War Graves Commission. We present here a scientific and cultural analysis of the post-conflict physical and experiential botanical transformation of the Somme. We identify three distinctive components – the wild, the managed and the planted – which now form a mosaic across this land, and place the Somme in the wider context of polemobotany and the study of conflict landscapes. Plants form the principal setting and also the main adornments for remembrance on the Somme: timeless purveyors of memory. Thus, the botanical legacy of the Somme remains potent a century on.

Key Words: Botany, France, landscape, memory, plants, remembrance, war graves