Our Journal: First World War Studies

With the advent of the First World War, H. H. Munro (1870–1916), eagerly enlisting at 43, attempted to patriotically simplify his selves, conscripting his authorial persona, Saki – whose fiction usually shimmers with metamorphosis and surprise – for jingoistic exhortations and denunciations of unmanly non-soldiers in ‘An Old Love’ (in the Morning Post) and four pieces for the 22nd Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers’ Fortnightly Gazette, April to June 1915. Yet this reductively pro-Empire, pro-military stance turned into a self-distancing retreat from the front lines after Lance-Sergeant Munro arrived in Northern France in late 1915. In the radically self-reflexive and self-reflective story ‘For the Duration of the War’, Saki parodies the poem from which his pseudonym-persona had sprung, pokes fun at his fiction’s dominant themes – especially Fate and savage nature – and even questions the point of literature at a time of war. And in his final two works, set near the front, Munro and/or Saki muddies the genre, removes himself far more from events (as if anticipating his death), and questions the artifice of writing itself amid his species’ ravaging of the natural landscape. In ‘The Square Egg’, Munro/Saki offers one-part essay and one-part story, with the former written at a marked remove and the latter told by an unidentified ‘Acquaintance’. In ‘Birds of the Western Front’, Munro/Saki relates a detached study of bird-life in and around the trenches, the ‘one’ of the narrative-voice no unitary, pro-England spokesman but a barely human observer of winged wild creatures. These final writings by Munro and/or Saki are both radical and transcendent, looking beyond the soldier-self and the author-self at the non-human world to offer a pointed, poignant selflessness at a time of mass European self-annihilation. There is a profound generosity through self-effacement that is not seen in any of the works by the major English writers of the war.

Key Words: Saki, H. H. Munro, literary representations of the First World War, self-detachment, anti-anthropocentrism

This study examines the captivity experiences of approximately 30,000 prisoners of war (POW) captured by the Ottoman army during the Great War. They went through a process of disempowerment and incapacitation while suffering from ill-treatment, malnutrition, poor sanitation, and appalling conditions of the camps located across the Ottoman Empire. In fact, their captivity experience was somewhat like that of the other POWs in Europe in terms of housing, labour, and leisure pursuits. Like other captors, the Ottoman government was not ready to shelter, feed, clothe, and provide medical services to large masses and sought to resolve this issue in an improvised way. While delving into the captivity experience, this study focuses on the dialectical power relationship between the POWs and the Ottoman camp administration. The Ottomans did not manage to establish an absolute power on every single detail of the lives of the captives. Thus, like the POWs detained in Russia and Germany, their fellow prisoners in the Ottoman Empire got the opportunity to cope with the constraints and hardships of the captivity partially and resist the rule of the camp prisons. The Ottoman government sought to treat the prisoners in accord with the international agreements based on liberal values even though the actual situation on the ground did not live up to the expectations of POWs and their governments. Both archival documents and memoirs of the prisoners are elucidative to contextualize their captivity experience. Such sources help us interpret the experience of captivity from history from below.

Key Words: Ottoman Empire, First World War, prisoners of war, captivity, prisoner camps

First, what happened on the frontlines of this war to the notion of the ‘great man’ or great military leader in the sense used in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century dictionaries and in military literature all the way to the early twentieth? Second, if, as it seems, the violence and duration of the fighting in this war dissolved the notion of greatness in the sense of ‘a high level of attained dignity,’ what did it mean to be a good or bad French army officer from 1914 to 1918, during what was the institution’s longest experience of war?

Key Words: Authority, obedience, French Army