Academic literature on the topic 'Somme, Battle of the the, 1916'

AbstractThe relation between war and cinema, propaganda and cinema is a most intriguing area, located at the intersection of media studies, history and film aesthetics. A truly tragic moment in human history, the First World War was also the first to be fought before film cameras. And while in the field, airborne reconnaissance became cinematic (Virilio), domestic propaganda occupied the screen of the newly emergent national cinemas, only to see its lucid message challenged and even subverted by the fast-evolving language of cinema. Part one of this paper looks at three non-fiction films, released in 1916:Battle of Somme, With Our Heroes at the Somme(Bei unseren Helden an der Somme) andBattle of Somme(La Bataille de la Somme), as paradigmatic propaganda takes on the eponymous historical battle from British, German and French points of view. Part two analyses two war-time Hollywood melodramas, David Wark Griffith’sHearts of the World(1918) and Allen Holubar’sThe Heart of Humanity(1919), and explains the longevity of the former with the powerful “text effect” of the authentic wartime footage included. Thus, while these WWI propaganda works do validate Virilio’s ideas of the integral connections between technology, war and cinema, and between cinema and propaganda, they also herald the emancipation of post-WWI film language.

Between 1914 and 1918, the British Expeditionary Force fighting in France and Flanders sustained 2.7 million battle casualties. Just over one quarter (26.1%) were never seen by the medical services. These were men who had been killed (14.2%), were missing (5.4%), or were prisoners of war (6.5%). Most of those who were missing had been killed and their bodies never recovered. Just under three-quarters of the wounded (73.9% or 1 988 969) were seen and treated by the medical services and 151 356 died.[i] The worst single day in British military history was Saturday 1 July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, when there were 57 470 casualties, of whom 20 000 were killed or died from their wounds. In nearly a quarter of a million admissions dealt with by the medical services, 58.5% of wounds were caused by high-explosive shellfire, 39% by bullets (mostly from machine guns), 2% were caused by grenades, and 0.5% from bayonets.

Following a short article regarding the collection of a specimen of Iphiclides podalirius (Linnaeus, 1758) by A. A. Tullett, in France during the Battle of the Somme in 1916, further personal and entomological data regarding Tullett and others is presented.

Men’s bodies were one of the more notable sites of conflict in Northern Ireland after the 1918 armistice. Long before the war was over, Ulstermen had become part of a public legacy of blood-sacrifice and the epic mythology of warrior manliness surrounding the 36th (Ulster) Division. The predominantly Protestant north-east of Ireland revelled in heroic language and romantic sentiment about their losses and the consequences of their sacrifice. For years after their most famous battle at the Somme on the 1st of July 1916, Unionists maintained a vibrant communal memory that pointedly excluded the achievements and sacrifices of the 16th (Irish) and 10th (Irish) Divisions, to the detriment of northern Nationalist veterans. More importantly, the ramifications of northern society’s understanding of soldiering masculinities directly led to some of the more infamous physical events of The Troubles from 1920 to 1922. These episodes included the violent shipyard expulsions in Belfast, the intimidation of shell-shocked ex-servicemen, membership in vigilante paramilitary societies, and government-mandated floggings of Catholic veterans in a society that prized service in the Great War as the greatest hallmark of modern Irish masculinity. The language of sacrifice within the public sphere, witnessed in public discourse and literally imprinted upon the bodies of those deemed unworthy and unmanly, mythologized one group of men at the expense of another, making the legacy of the Great War and the actions of and upon male bodies highly significant and influential factors in Northern Ireland for the rest of the twentieth century.

As Paul Fussell has shown, the First World War was a watershed moment for 20th century British history and culture. While the role of the 36th (Ulster) Division in the Battle of the Somme has become a part of unionist iconography in what is now Northern Ireland, the experience of southern or nationalist Irish soldiers in the war remains underrepresented. Sebastian Barry’s 2005 novel, A Long Long Way is one attempt to correct this historical imbalance. This article will examine how Barry represents the relationship between the First World War and the 1916 Easter Rising through the eyes of his politically-conflicted protagonist, Willie Dunne. While the novel at first seems to present a common war experience as a means of healing political divisions between Ireland and Britain, this solution ultimately proves untenable. By the end of the novel, Willie’s hybrid English–Irish identity makes him an outcast in both places, even as he increasingly begins to identify with the Irish nationalist cause. Unlike some of Barry’s other novels, A Long Long Way does not present a disillusioned version of the early 20th century Irish nationalism. Instead, Willie sympathizes with the rebels, and Barry ultimately argues for a more inclusive Irish national identity.

This thesis examines Protestant unionist commemorations of the Battle of the Somme in Northern Ireland during a phase in which they exhibited marked popularity and politicization. Filling a gap in the scholarship and building upon it, this thesis pays closer attention to the historical context and development of these commemorations and takes into account a broader swath of forms and locations of commemoration. It argues that, in the face of the perceived threat of Irish unification posed by the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985, unionists employed the memory of the Somme as a political tool on two different but overlapping fronts. On one front, they used it against their collective opponents, who supported or supposedly supported Irish unification. On a second front, conflicting groups within the unionist community, namely unionist politicians, Orangemen, Protestant youths, and loyalist paramilitaries, interpreted the Somme differently to satisfy their partisan agendas. Analyzing Somme commemoration at the Belfast cenotaph, in parades, and in murals, this thesis provides explanations for why the Somme was remembered differently in various mediums and locales of commemoration, with particular attention to the differing degrees and manners in which Protestant commemorators recognized the Catholic contribution in the Somme campaign.
Department of History

Holmes’s words to Watson at the end of ‘His Last Bow’ (1917) express an idea of warfare that sits uneasily with our contemporary perception of the First World War. Today we are accustomed to associate that war with the horrors of the Western Front: the battles of the Somme (1916) and Passchendaele (1917) loom large in our cultural memory as paradigms of unnecessary bloodshed and strategic incompetence. But this was not how Conan Doyle saw it – and he saw the Western Front at first hand, while both his brother, Brigadier-General Innes ‘Duff’ Doyle, and his son Kingsley were in the thick of the action. At the invitation of the War Office, Doyle toured the British, Italian and French Fronts in 1916, and the Australian Front in 1918, using his authority as Deputy Lieutenant of Surrey to don an improvised khaki uniform ‘which was something between that of a Colonel and Brigadier, with silver roses instead of stars or crowns upon the shoulder-states’.1

Central to a number of films made during or about the First World War is a thinned relationship between the living and the dead. The Battle of the Somme (1916) depicts a moment in which, from a row of soldiers going over the top, two slip back, shot. Their dying, or death, occurs between frames, an aperture through which the viewer may glimpse another dimension. J’Accuse (1919, 1938) employs soon-to-die soldiers as extras in a sequence in which the dead return. The result is a fantastical crossing between living and dead. In Pour la Paix du Monde (1926), soldiers whose faces have been maimed by war injuries are seen first in close-up, their mutilations covered by silken masks. Then they tear the masks off, allowing the viewer to see the war in its ‘true colours’. Affording the viewer these glimpses of the after-life, all three films create imaginative warps in space-time.

This chapter addresses Scottish military service during the First World War, showing how from having underperformed before the war, Scotland overperformed during the war’s first two years. Particularly striking was how many recruits came from agricultural backgrounds, although in absolute terms the big cities still contributed more men. As the Territorial Army (TA) was the principal Scottish route into the army, the battle of Loos in October 1915 had an enormous local impact: this was Scotland’s equivalent of the Somme. Every Scottish infantry regiment was represented, and both the 9th and 15th Scottish Divisions were TA Lowland Divisions. From Loos came the literary representation of the war, especially Ian Hay’s The First Hundred Thousand and John Buchan’s war poetry. The effect of the First World War, with Scottish infantry regiments raising twenty-plus battalions, was to disseminate those regimental identities much more widely across Scottish society. An enhanced Scottish identity was created, and it emerged in a military context. Overwhelmingly this identity was set within the context of the Union and the empire.

The present article aims to explore some assumptions about how complexity operates more flexible approaches to urbanism. To this end, were analyzed theoretical productions and contemporary design strategies that eschew very deterministic and generalizing logics, thus admitting the possibility of characterizing cities as a system far-from-equilibrium. After characterizing such condition, some properties inherent to the complex nature of cities were defined, without very clear outlines. An indication – or arrangement - that makes possible to understand some alternatives of acting in the city, not in an imperative way, but recognizing its indeterminacies as project tools. They are: Interactions, which operate and engender dynamics, establishing constructive relations of new realities; Becoming, as an expression of the creative force, the possibilities of multiple and mutual fecundations; and Entropy, which reveals our ability to recognize the possibilities of a system facing off unpredictability and new arrangements. Keywords: Complexity, Urban Design, Cities. O urbanista italiano Bernardo Secchi (1934-2014), em diversas ocasiões, enfatiza sua preocupação com a simplificação do funcionamento urbano própria do Movimento Moderno e levanta a necessidade sobre um novo olhar para a cidade contemporânea que, ao mesmo tempo, opera maiores níveis de abstração e de precisão (SECCHI, 2006). As questões que orientam essa pesquisa estão relacionadas às contribuições das teorias sobre Complexidade, que, assim como para as ciências exatas e biológicas, apresentam para o campo das sociais um importante ferramental para a revisão de paradigmas deterministas e que enriquece as concepções de fenômenos considerados caóticos ou aleatórios. Buscamos investigar com quais pressupostos a Complexidade opera, analisando abordagens mais flexíveis, produções teóricas e estratégias projetuais contemporâneas que escampam das lógicas muito deterministas e generalizantes, admitindo assim a possibilidade de caracterizar as cidades como um sistema que não tende ao equilíbrio. A noção de equilíbrio e a imagem da cidade-máquina e do planejamento controlador, desviaram o debate sobre as questões críticas essenciais e ajudou a manter a ilusão de um falso controle sobre a morfologia urbana e suas dinâmicas. A imagem de uma “boa” cidade – equilibrada – era, nessa ilusão, aquela que se apresentava homogênea, onde todas suas variações e diversidades pudessem ser controladas através, por exemplo, do zoneamento e da hipercodificação, ideia também refutada por Jane Jacobs em 1961. Com isso, a percepção de que o Planejamento Urbano deveria trabalhar buscando uma cidade estável e funcional começou a sobrecarregar não só sua teoria e prática, mas também a noção de que as cidades eram compreensíveis através de analogias com a ciência reducionista e as tecnologias industriais do passado. Após os anos 70, quando os objetivos do Planejamento Urbano passaram a ser refutados e as incertezas sobre as possíveis transformações teóricas e práticas que deveriam ser propostas para pensar as cidades, o mundo mudou (BATTY, 2012). O químico Ilya Prigogine, ao propor sua tese sobre estruturas dissipativas e auto-organização de sistemas longe do equilíbrio, indica os problemas relacionados ao reducionismo, abrindo possibilidades para novos níveis de descrição e análise de diversos fenômenos do universo, chama a responsabilidade da física para além de comportamentos analisados em ambientes perfeitamente controlados, estáveis e previsíveis. Anuncia assim uma “nova ciência” capaz de interpretar os comportamentos evolutivos que escorregam entre as “malhas da rede científica” e leva em conta as incertezas e diversidades da natureza e seus eventos complexos, por vezes considerados, aos olhos deterministas, transitórios e sem importância. Interessa então entender concepções teóricas que permitem possibilidades menos duras, fechadas e estáticas de percepção dos espaços e suas dinâmicas. Para tal, é preciso considerar que, em sistemas longe do equilíbrio como as cidades, sua evolução apresenta comportamentos e estados variados, de previsibilidade limitada. Como Prigogine insiste em dizer, nada mais natural, uma vez que estamos falando de um mundo real onde a “natureza apresenta-nos, de fato, a imagem da criação, da imprevisível novidade. Nosso universo seguiu um caminho de ramificações sucessivas: poderia ter seguido outros” (PRIGOGINE, 1996). Dada a impossibilidade de controlar seus desdobramentos, nos é disponível entender tal sistema através de seus “eventos e qualidades – transições de fase – resultantes de fluxos de matéria e energia que passam por eles. ” (BRISSAC, 2010). Para a análise das estratégias projetuais proposta nessa pesquisa, viu-se a necessidade de definir algumas propriedades que oferecessem bases comparativas, reconhecer indícios pela qual algo prova pertencer a categorias não estabelecidas aqui. Tal definição não pretendem ter um contorno muito claro com função de predicados para esses projetos, muito menos uma lista fechada, mas uma indicação, um certo agenciamento/ agrupamento ou um reconhecimento de como “ se relacionar com a matéria - através de suas próprias tendências e não pela imposição de uma forma preestabelecida. ” (BRISSAC, 2010). Considerando as características atribuídas aos sistemas complexos, definimos as seguintes propriedades: Interações, que operam, engendram – e são engendradas por – dinâmicas, influencias, perturbações, disputas e articulações, estabelecem relações construtivas de novas realidades, são linhas de forças que agem como combustível para trajetórias não-lineares de futuros incertos, trata-se, portanto de estratégias que entendam o projeto como síntese resultante das interações de múltiplos fatores, internos e externo; Devir, o "jorro efetivo de novidade imprevisível” (PRIGOGINE, 2009), de força criativa, o que está em vias de ser (vínculo com o futuro incerto), estratégias que, de uma forma ou de outra, tem como pressupostos a função de palco (que também faz parte do espetáculo) para possibilidades de fecundações múltiplas e mutuas, da força “comunicativa e contagiosa” – colocada por Deleuze e Guattari – que, sem códigos precedentes, constrói; e Entropia, a medida da probabilidade da ocorrência de eventos e da nossa habilidade em reconhecer possibilidades de determinado sistema face à imprevisibilidade de interações e novos arranjos resultantes, estratégias que assumem o carácter evolutivo das cidades, de configurações de “ajustes soltos” (ALLEN, 1999), menos codificada – ou de codificações muito abstratas – mas que de certa maneira apresentam condições para assimilar eventos, transformando-se, que assumem como premissa a tensão entre ordem e desordem e seu “ caráter provisório, instável e de sobreposições contínuas” (MEYER, 2003). Palavras-chave: Complexidade, Projeto Urbano, Cidades.