Our Journal: First World War Studies

In autumn 1914, the Western Front stabilized in the middle of some of France’s most populated and industrialized regions. Large population centres, including Nancy, Reims, Arras and the coal-mining region of the Pas-de-Calais were at the heart of the most destructive war that the world had yet seen. Their civilian inhabitants endured artillery bombardments, military occupations by the British, French and German armies, and levels of material privation greater than other sections of the French population. Many fled during the exodus of 1914 and became refugees in the French interior. But others remained in their homes under fire on both sides of the lines, and thus ensured that the Western Front was both a civilian and a military space. These populations that continued to inhabit the battlefield posed significant problems for civilian and military authorities, German and Allied alike. The question of evacuation inevitably arose. This article explores how authorities on both sides of the lines confronted the prospect of civilian evacuations. On the Allied side, tensions arose between humanitarian necessity, the demands of military effectiveness, and the ‘duty’ of civilians to remain in the homes, resisting the enemy like the soldiers in the trenches. By 1918, a compromise of sorts aimed to evacuate vulnerable members of the community while maintaining an economic core in place. Policies on the German side of the lines were quite different, as the ‘duty’ of civilians to remain under fire was not a factor, while desires to maintain civilians in place to prevent Allied shelling sometimes overrode humanitarianism. In both cases, however, authorities displayed a willingness to allow civilians to remain at the front. Mass evacuation policies were largely improvised and only developed gradually, reaching their full extent from the middle of 1917. This ensured that for much of the war, the Western Front remained a combat zone populated by civilians. In discussing the development of official policies, this article demonstrates how, for the first time, the mass evacuation of civilian populations from combat zones emerged as a feature of modern warfare. In doing so, it considers what these evacuation policies tell us about the changing relationship between civilians and war in the twentieth century.

Key Words: First World War, France, Germany, civilians, evacuation, occupation,

The aim of this paper is to illustrate how the presence and the absence of Flemish bodies in the material spaces of a post-war commemoration of the First World War and the Second World War, in both state-sponsored military and in community cemeteries, have served a cultural and political agenda for nearly the past 100 years. The political views of both the kingdom of Belgium and the Flemish are articulated through the most common symbol of a war – the gravestone – marking visibility for the Flemish and a Flemish nationalist cause. The article traces the history of the formation of the cemeteries as well as chronicles the physical signs of Flemishness from 1915 during the Great War to the post-war commemoration of Second World War. In the Great War, this took the form of a modified Celtic cross, a heldenhuldezerk, a Flemish hero tombstone. The history of this grave marker is one of destruction and appropriation linked to a veneration of the dead who lay buried beneath. Although a symbol of a nationalist movement that, according to the Belgian Army, compromised the united effort against German occupation during the Great War, these gravestones were permitted to stand in the Belgian-sponsored military cemeteries created in the 1920s. This is contrast to the ways in which those veterans of the Second World War who fought for an overt Flemish nationalist cause were interred in a separate cemetery and physically marginalized in the post-war burial practices.

Key Words: Flemish, cemetery, tombstone, Belgian front, nationalism, First World War,

One of the lesser known stories of the Gallipoli campaign was the significant support provided to the Australian Imperial Force by the array of voluntary patriotic funds. Mobilized from the beginning of the war and operating both on the Home Front and in Egypt, the large support network of individuals and organizations varied from sandbag funds, the provision of recreational equipment and hostel accommodation, to foodstuffs and medical supplies. This article focuses on the Australian Red Cross, formed on the outbreak of war in August 1914 as a branch of the British Red Cross Society. Its considerable contribution as a humanitarian organization concentrating on sick and wounded soldiers in war included Wounded and Missing Bureaux. Using the records of the South Australian Red Cross Information Bureau, this article explores the beginning of this programme and its efforts to trace missing soldiers from the Gallipoli campaign for family members and friends. Through this case study analysis, we find another lens with which to examine the effects of the Gallipoli campaign on the Home Front and explore the broader social and familial effects of the war more generally.

Key Words: Australian Red Cross, First World War Home Front, voluntarism, wounded and missing, Gallipoli,